Culture War or Archibald Cox

Culture War?: The Myth of a Polarized America

Author: Morris P Fiorina

Part of the "Great Questions in Politics" series, Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America combines polling data with a compelling narrative to debunk commonly-believed myths about American politics–particularly the claim that Americans are deeply divided in their fundamental political views. This second edition of Culture War? features a new chapter that demonstrates how the elections of 2004 reinforce the book’s argument that Americans are no more divided now than they were in the past. In addition, the text has been updated throughout to reflect data from the 2004 elections.

Table of Contents:

Ch. 1	Culture war?	1
Ch. 2	If America is not polarized, why do so many Americans think it is?	11
Ch. 3	A 50:50 nation? : red and blue state people are not that different	33
Ch. 4	A 50:50 nation? : beyond the red and blue states	57
Ch. 5	A closer look at abortion	79
Ch. 6	A closer look at homosexuality	109
Ch. 7	Have electoral cleavages shifted?	127
Ch. 8	The 2004 election and beyond	145
Ch. 9	Reconciling micro and macro	165
Ch. 10	How did it come to this and where do we go from here?	187

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Archibald Cox: Conscience of a Nation

Author: Ken Gormley

By October 1973 special prosecutor Archibald Cox was tracing the Watergate cover-up to the Oval Office. President Nixon demanded that he stop. In the “Saturday Night Massacre” two heads of the Justice Department quit before Nixon found a subordinate (Robert Bork) willing to fire Cox. Immediately public opinion swung against the president and turned Cox into a hero—seemingly Washington’s last honest man.Cox’s life was distinguished well before that Saturday night. He had been a clerk for the legendary judge Learned Hand, a distinguished professor at Harvard Law School, and the Solicitor General, arguing many Supreme Court cases. He exemplified what we want lawyers to be. At its core Archibald Cox is the story of a Yankee who went to Washington but refused to leave his principles behind.

Kirkus Reviews

The jurist who gave Richard Nixon fits receives his due in a satisfying biography.

Gormley (Law/Duquesne Univ.) approaches Cox as an exponent of a particularly tough, independent-minded, Yankee kind of approach to the law. Born in 1912, Cox came of age in a time when the legal profession was nearly universally respected and when whole lineages devoted themselves to the practice of law (Gormley notes that Cox's great-grandfather William Maxwell Evarts defended Andrew Johnson when impeachment proceedings were undertaken against him in 1868). After clerking for the eminent federal judge Learned Hand, Cox became a government labor lawyer, then a Harvard professor, and then entered politics somewhat reluctantly as a speechwriter for presidential candidate John Kennedy. Despite his solid résumé, Cox was seemingly unprepared for the scrutiny that would attach to his work as the government's special prosecutor in the Watergate investigation of 1973. Gormley examines Nixon's charge that Cox was a politically motivated hit man who, with his staff, "bored like termites through the whole executive branch," noting that Cox was in fact something of a legal conservative who criticized such rulings as Roe v. Wade and who found the whole business of turning up evidence against a sitting president personally distasteful. Gormley gives a careful account of the events leading up to Cox's dismissal at Nixon's orders; the man who fired him was a federal judge named Robert Bork, whose role as hatchet man would come back to haunt him more than a decade later as a nominee for the Supreme Court.

Students of the Watergate years will find a few other gems in Gormley's pages, including an admission from Nixon's chief of staff Alexander Haig that the president "could well be guilty." Otherwise, this well-written biography will be of most interest to students of law in the public interest.