Finding the Perfect Prober

"I don't have the slightest doubt that I will be independent."

Nor do most people who know Archibald Cox, the wry, close-cropped Harvard law professor and former U.S.

Solicitor General who was named last week as special U.S. prosecutor in the Watergate case. His sense of independence is crucial, for he confronts the task of not only conducting a thorough investigation but also convincing an increasingly skeptical public that he has done just that.

Cox, 61, who accepted the post after three of Elliot Richardson's first four choices declined, was offered the assignment just after ending a speech at Berkeley on the importance of faith in government. Said he later: "How could I refuse the job, having made a speech like that?" He seems an excellent nominee. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School, a distinguished member of the Eastern Establishment which sometimes makes Nixon uneasy. More important, he is widely respected as what Ted Kennedy termed "a man of brilliance, judgment and sensitivity." He is also a Democrat, which will help create that aura of independence.

A veteran of service with the World War II National Defense Mediation Board, Cox left Government to join the Harvard faculty in 1945. He is a specialist in labor legislation and was a member of John F. Kennedy's brain trust in the campaign against Richard Nixon. Kennedy appointed him Solicitor General in 1961; he resigned in 1965 to return to Harvard. Among his law-school pupils in the '40s: Elliot Richardson and Ervin Committee Counsel Samuel Dash.

The return to academia did not take Cox out of public life. In 1968 he headed a panel investigating the causes of the student riots at Columbia University. A year later, he was engaged in trying to mediate similar disturbances at Harvard. "He's always trying to find the middle ground so everyone gets some mud on his face," says one colleague.

A former varsity squash player who relaxes by retreating to his farm in Maine with his wife Phyllis, the imperious Cox is not one of Harvard's best-loved professors. But he is respected.

Cox has little experience as a prosecutor himself, but he plans to rely heavily on a hand-picked assistant during the Watergate investigation. He has left no doubt that he will keep complete charge of the case. He talked with Richardson before accepting the job and presented several suggestions for redefining it; many of these suggestions have been incorporated into the guidelines that Richardson drafted to assure the probe's independence. Cox, who has been encouraged to maintain offices outside the Justice Department, will appoint his own staff and plans to make public reports on the progress of the investigation. "A prosecutor does not normally take his findings before the public," says Cox, "but in this case the public is looking for the special prosecutor to do a rather difficult thing."

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