Archibald Cox served as a U.S. Department of Justice special prosecutor in charge of investigating President Richard M. Nixon's role in the Watergate scandal. During his brief tenure in this position in 1973, Cox began to build a case that Nixon was intimately involved in the scandal. Nixon's firing of Cox that year set in motion a chain of events that led to Nixon's resignation in August of 1974.

Cox was born on May 17, 1912, in Plainfield, New Jersey. The great-great grandson of former U.S. attorney general William A. Evarts, Cox graduated from Harvard Law School in 1937. Cox returned to the school in 1946 to teach, after clerking for the legendary federal judge Learned Hand and trying private practice. He developed expertise in labor law and became involved in arbitrating major disputes between large companies and labor unions. This work led to Cox's appointment in 1952 to manage the Wage Stabilization...