In October 1973, America was transfixed by a battle of wills between President Richard Nixon and a 61-year-old law professor. Archibald Cox was serving in a new post - Special Prosecutor - to investigate the Watergate break-in. Quietly but resolutely he asked the White House to release tapes of important conversations. Facing a Supreme Court deadline, Nixon ordered Cox to be fired. The top two officials of the Justice Department resigned in protest.

Overnight, public opinion swung against Nixon and turned Cox into an American hero.

Ken Gormley's gripping biography shows how that confrontation was a natural result of the principles, hard as New England granite, which guided Archibald Cox through life. In his distinguished and dramatic career, Cox had clerked for the legendary judge Learned Hand, carpooled into Washington with Harold Ickes during World War II, and chaired Harry Truman's Wage Stabilization Board.

On the Harvard faculty he was the nation's foremost expert in labor law, and he became the top academic adviser to the handsome young senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy.

After President Kennedy named him Solicitor General of the United States, the professor grew into the leading Supreme Court lawyer of the century. Through extensive interviews, the author illuminates Cox's crucial role in the debates within Bobby Kennedy's Justice Department over how to handle integration sit-ins, voting rights, and other constitutional questions.

Cox's quietly growing reputation led to the two biggest challenges of his career. The first was his little-known responsibility for handling Vietnam-era protests at Harvard, fully told here for the first time. The second came after men linked to the White House broke into Democratic Partly headquarters in the Watergate Hotel.

Using newly released documents, Gormley reveals how badly leaks had compromised the Justice Department investigation of this break-in and how the White House planned to edit its tape transcripts. In gripping detail he describes the constitutional tug-of-war over those recordings and the dramatic Saturday press conference when Archibald Cox roused the conscience of an nation.