January 1, 2000

Elliot Richardson Dies at 79; Stood Up to Nixon and Resigned

By NEIL A. LEWIS

lliot L. Richardson, the archetype of the cultivated New England Brahmin who served in an astonishingly broad range of high public positions, and who was best known for his refusal during Watergate to obey President Richard M. Nixon's order to fire a special prosecutor, died Friday in his native Massachusetts. He was 79.

	The Associated Press
	A June 1998 file photo showing former U.S. Attorney General Elliot L. Richardson, who died Friday, Dec. 31.

Richardson died at the Massachusetts General Hospital from complications after a cerebral hemorrhage, his son Michael reported.

Richardson, who was descended from some of Boston's earliest settlers, was sometimes referred to by friends as "the former everything" because of the great variety of positions he held both in Massachusetts and in the federal government.

He served as attorney general and U.S. attorney in Massachusetts, was second-in-command at the State Department and held four cabinet positions, more than anyone else in history. He also served as ambassador to Britain, negotiated the worldwide treaty on the Law of the Sea and was the chief representative of the United Nations in monitoring Nicaraguan elections in 1990, among other assignments.

But it was Richardson's stand during Watergate when he was Nixon's attorney general that was widely lauded as a special moment of integrity and rectitude that secured him a place in the nation's history. Nixon ordered Richardson to fire Archibald M. Cox, the special Watergate prosecutor, but Richardson chose to resign instead.

After Richardson resigned, his second-in-command, William D. Ruckelshaus was fired after similarly refusing to fire Cox. Those events, on Saturday, Oct. 20, 1973, became known as the Saturday Night Massacre.

Robert H. Bork, who was then the solicitor general and thus the Justice Department's highest-ranking remaining official, accepted the assignment and fired Cox. Bork's behavior was a source of criticism in 1987 when the Senate refused to confirm his nomination to the Supreme Court.

The orders to fire Cox came as Nixon struggled to limit the investigation that stemmed from the June 17, 1972, break-in at the Democratic Party's headquarters at the Watergate complex.

In his 1996 book, "Reflections of a Moderate," Richardson recalled that he came to see events clearly in the midst of that tension-drenched time.

"The more I thought about it," he wrote, "the clearer it seemed to me that public confidence in the investigation would depend on its being independent not only in fact, but in appearance."

In 1976, he recalled in an article in The Atlantic Monthly, that he came to realize he was in a "peculiar no-man's land between the special prosecutor and the president." He eventually decided he was being exploited by Nixon to get rid of Cox, who was determined to obtain tape-recordings made surreptitiously in the White House.

Richardson recalled in the article how he went home and discussed the events with his wife, Anne.

"It was clear that I could not carry out the instruction," he wrote and his wife joked that he would be carried out of the Justice Department in a mahogany coffin.

Richardson also ruminated on the cause of Nixon's failings in the Watergate scandal, attributing it in part to his refusal to stop dwelling on his political enemies.

"The second ingredient of Watergate, an amoral alacrity to do the president's bidding, was traceable less to flaws in his own political character (although it was reinforced by them) than to the political and cultural evolution of 20th century America."

He lamented that the character of the president's men was not uniquely evil but merely an extension of the increasingly common values of "get-ahead, go-along organization men who take on the coloration and the value system of whatever organization" they belong to.

Richardson wrote that he never understood how Nixon and his advisers could have assumed that he would fire Cox, who had objected to having limits placed on his ability to subpoena White House materials.

He could only have dismissed Cox for "extraordinary impropriety," he said, and Cox's position was "not only defensible but right."

After his resignation, Richardson was surprised and embarrassed to find himself called a modern-day Sir Thomas More. But if he wore that description modestly, it also made him sought after as a moral arbiter.

His role as the chief monitor when Nicaragua voted out the Sandinista government gave that election credibility. When he publicly declared that he thought Edwin Meese III, a fellow Republican, unfit to become attorney general, it carried great weight. Last year, he urged the House to censure President Clinton but not impeach him.

After hearing of Richardson's death, Clinton said that Richardson "put the nation's interests first even when the personal cost was very high."

Elliot Lee Richardson was born in Boston on July 20, 1920, the son of a prominent doctor who was professor of medicine at the Harvard Medical School. He once told friends that he spent his years at Harvard College mostly drawing cartoons for the Lampoon, the comedy magazine. But he graduated near the top of his class and enrolled in Harvard Law School.

He studied there only a short time before enlisting in the Army to serve in World War II. As a first lieutenant, he landed in Normandy on D-Day with the 4th Infantry Division. In the ensuing months he earned a Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts.