Book Review Archibald Cox. Conscience of a Nanon. Kenneth Gormley. Addison-wesley. 1997. 439 Pp. $30.00
| Publication year | 2021 |
| Pages | 238 |
72 CBJ 238. BOOK REVIEW Archibald Cox. CONSCIENCE OF A NANON. Kenneth Gormley. Addison-Wesley. 1997. 439 pp. $30.00
When Fanny Cox set up housekeeping with her new husband during the Taft administration, she faced the daunting task of enhancing a family heritage that included Frances Perkins, FDR's labor secretary and the first female cabinet member in history; Max Perkins, the iconic Scribner editor, who nursed Hemingway and Fitzgerald to greatness; and William Maxwell Evarts, who defended President Andrew Johnson during his impeachment trial.
Her mission's success is the subject of Archibald Cox: Conscience of a Nation. This first book by Ken Gormley, Duquesne University law professor, is at once scholarly (101 pages of endnotes) and engaging, no small feat considering that while Archibald Cox's persona would lead us readily to entrust him with our wallets, his straight laced stiffness would disincline us from inhabiting a desert island with him.
But any good biographer sets his subject in the context of his time, and Cox's were uncommonly exciting times, from Roosevelt's New Deal to Kennedy's New Frontier, from the wrenching trauma of Vietnam to Watergate's Saturday Night Massacre. So if Cox didn't swim naked with JFK in the White House pool, a la Ben Bradlee, or play poker with FDR, his very presence at the vortex of events that changed America makes for enriching, if not riveting, reading.
Young Archie Cox grew up in Plainfield, NJ., the son and namesake of a prominent but not particularly noteworthy lawyer. The oldest of seven children, he was an indifferent student at St. Paul's School in the days when lineage was as important as grades in gaining admission to Harvard. It couldn't have hurt to have in his folder a letter of recommendation from U.S. Court of Appeals judge Learned Hand.
"It was vaguely understood by these young men, but perfectly understood by their parents," writes Gormley, "that if one was born into a traditional WASP family, attended a good prep school like Groton or St. Paul's; gained admission
to Harvard, Yale or Princeton; married the right kind of girl (one from the same background); and kept one's nose relatively clean, one was destined to become a 'big success' in life." Yet had...
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