RIP twice

They were not quite of the same generation, being 13 years apart in age, but they will always be linked in some fashion by the events in whose course they participated. First:

Archibald Cox, 92, the Harvard law professor and special prosecutor whose refusal to accept White House limits on his investigation of the Watergate break-in and coverup helped bring about the 1974 resignation of President Richard M. Nixon, died yesterday at his home in Brooksville, Maine. ...

In October 1973, Cox precipitated what would become known as the "Saturday night massacre." He did this by insisting on unrestricted access to tape recordings of presidential conversations in the Oval Office during the period immediately after five men with links to Nixon's Committee to Re-elect the President had been arrested in the June 1972 break-in at the Watergate headquarters of the Democratic National Committee.

An angry Nixon demanded Cox's firing. But Attorney General Elliot Richardson, who had recruited Cox as the Watergate special prosecutor, refused to carry out the president's order. He resigned, as did his deputy, William D. Ruckelshaus. Robert H. Bork, who as solicitor general was the third-ranking officer of the Justice Department, dismissed Cox.

Almost overnight, from Capitol Hill and in the national media, came the sounds of protest and dismay. ...

In the House of Representatives, members introduced 22 bills calling for the impeachment of the president or an investigation into impeachment proceedings. More than a million telegrams demanding impeachment poured into congressional offices.

It's amazing how far a few simple acts of integrity can sometimes carry events and a measure of how far we've fallen that actions such as those by Richardson and Ruckelshaus, surprising then, are utterly unthinkable now, when ideology trumps integrity at every turn.

And second:

Samuel Dash, 79, the chief counsel of the Senate Watergate Committee whose televised interrogation into the secret audiotaping system at the White House ultimately led to President Richard M. Nixon's resignation, died of multiple organ failure May 29 at Washington Hospital Center.

Dash was a long-time advocate for legal ethics who in 1951, while still a teaching fellow, conducted an undercover investigation into corruption at the Municipal Court of Chicago. He investigated human rights abuses in Northern Ireland, Puerto Rico, and Chile. His 1959 book The Eavesdroppers is credited with helping put legal limits on electronic surveillance. A new book, The Intruders, due out next month, "deals with the violations of individual rights and the Patriot Act," according to Judi Dash, a daughter. And he was planning a third, The Interrogators, on the rights of witnesses.

His last official act was in 1998 when he resigned, loudly and publicly, as ethics counselor to Ken Starr, charging him with becoming an "aggressive advocate" of impeachment and exceeding his authority. It's probably something of the measure of the man that people were surprised that he took the job - but not surprised that (or at how) he left it.