Wife of Watergate prosecutor dies at 93

SOUTH BROOKSVILE – Phyllis Ames Cox, widow of Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor fired by President Nixon for refusing to curtail his Watergate investigation, died Tuesday after a long illness, a family friend and former press aide to her husband said. She was 93.

Mrs. Cox died at her home, said Jim Doyle, the former aide.

Mrs. Cox lived in Wayland, Mass., for more than 50 years before she and her husband retired to the Maine farm where they had spent their summers.

According to Ken Gormley, author of “Archibald Cox: Conscience of a Nation,” Phyllis Ames met her husband-to-be after a Harvard football game in 1935. When he developed a serious eye condition that forced him to give up the editorship of the law review, she read law books to him. They married in 1937, three days after his final exam from Harvard Law School.

While living in Massachusetts, Mrs. Cox helped establish the first 4-H club for horses in America.

By the time Archibald Cox was appointed U.S. solicitor general in the Kennedy administration, the family consisted of three children, three horses, one dog, 12 hens and two cats. Mrs. Cox told a reporter she had no time to be interviewed because she was “busily feeding the livestock” but, she said, she considered the animals “absolutely essential to the family” and thus the Coxes would be looking for a farm to rent near Washington, D.C.

Archibald Cox died in 2004 at age 92.

In May 1973, Cox was asked to head the special prosecution force investigating charges Republican Party operatives had broken into the Democratic campaign headquarters at the Watergate Hotel before the 1972 presidential election.

Nixon ordered Cox fired in October 1973 for his continued efforts to obtain tape recordings made at the White House, important evidence in the investigation of the Watergate break-in and cover-up.

The day before, Nixon had refused to comply with a federal appeals court order to surrender the tapes, declined to appeal to the Supreme Court and ordered Cox to drop the case. But Cox vowed to continue, saying pulling back would violate his promise to the Senate.

The firing shook the nation and became known as “The Saturday Night Massacre.”

Attorney General Elliot Richardson and his deputy, William Ruckelshaus, both refused to carry out Nixon’s orders to fire Cox, resigning instead. Then-Solicitor General Robert Bork, who would 14 years later lose a Supreme Court bid after a strenuous debate over his legal theories, handled the job of firing Cox.

At his firing, Cox issued a one-sentence statement: “Whether ours shall be a government of laws and not of men is now for Congress and ultimately the American people.”

Mrs. Cox is survived by her three children, Phyllis, Sarah and Archibald Jr.; and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

The funeral will be private at the Coxes’ residence, Brookway Farm. A memorial service is being planned for late spring at the Unitarian Church in Wayland, where the Coxes were married.