Robert H Bork

Bork stepped in to fire the Watergate prosecutor at Richard Nixon's behest and failed in his 1980s nomination to the Supreme Court. Bork was accused of being a partisan hatchet man for Nixon when, as the third-ranking official at the Justice Department he fired Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox in the Saturday Night Massacre of 1973. Attorney General Elliot Richardson resigned rather than fire Cox. The next in line, William Ruckel shaus, refused to fire Cox and was himself fired. He was a federal judge on the nation's most prestigious appellate panel, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, from 1982 until 1988, when he resigned in the wake of the bitter Supreme Court nomination fight. Earlier, Bork had been a private attorney, Yale Law School professor and a Republican political appointee. At Yale, two of his constitutional law students were Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham. Nixon named Bork as solicitor general, the administration's advocate before the Supreme Court, in January, 1973. After a stint in the Marines guarding supply lines in China at the end of World War II, he went to the University of Chicago. By the early 1950s, while he attended the University of Chicago law school, he became impressed with market-oriented conservatism and had moved permanently to the right. Out of law school, Mr. Bork was hired by the prestigious Chicago firm of Kirkland and Ellis, where he spent eight years before taking a job teaching antitrust law at Yale in 1962. The Borks packed up their three children, Robert Jr., Charles and Ellen, and moved to New Haven. Bork served as acting attorney general after Richardson's resignation, then returned to the solicitor general' s job until 1977, far outlasting the Nixon administration.