It was a Thursday in July 1973, and President Richard Nixon took two steps that would have enormous impact on his presidency and on history. First he refused an order sought by Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox to explain why he wouldn’t turn over a pile of presidential tapes. Then he told the Watergate Committee’s chief counsel, Sam Dash, that he wouldn’t turn over other presidential documents related to the gravest constitutional crisis ever. It was not a good day’s work.

History later transformed both Cox and Dash from mere lawyers into legends. The two men are remembered for their independence, their integrity and their indomitable will. They are remembered, moreover, as the heroes of Watergate, and Nixon is, still, remembered as the villain, and no amount of revisionism in the past third of a century has changed that view so much as a millimeter.

That’s why the two men’s deaths, on the very same day late last week, seemed so poignant. They didn’t work together; Cox was an executive branch appointee, Dash a legislative. But they were tied in life and, in one of those odd coincidences that linked John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who also passed away on the same day, they are now tied in death.

l
The beginning of the 20th century was controlled by engineers; it was engineers who built the Panama Canal and the great manufacturing base of the nation, and it was as the Great Engineer that Herbert Hoover, until 1929 one of the greatest heroes of his age, won the presidency. The middle of the century was controlled by physicists, who built the bomb that bought the peace in 1945 and that brought the world into a fearful arms race in the Cold War in the years that followed.

But the last third of the century belonged to the lawyers, who enforced the civil-rights legislation, transformed the country into a litigation nation and who engaged in titanic constitutional struggles that threatened two presidents, Nixon and Bill Clinton.

And of the lawyers none stand taller than Archibald Cox and Sam Dash. They understood the law, revered the law, followed the law wherever it led. They saw the law as a standard, and they saw it as a tool. They were intolerant of those who bent the law to their own ends, who corrupted the law for their own means, who used the law for their own shield. For them, to paraphrase Douglas MacArthur, life was the law, the law, the law.

Which was why Richard Nixon found himself in so much trouble shortly after his landslide re-election in 1972. Nixon is often remembered as an angler, but he isn’t remembered as a man who (like Bill Clinton, for example) could talk himself out of any mess. But until 1973 he was. He talked himself out of his slush-fund mess with the Checkers speech in 1952; he talked himself out of untold domestic messes in the early days of his presidency; he talked himself out of diplomatic messes around the world.

But he couldn’t talk himself out of Watergate, and the reasons, along with a country lawyer named Sam Ervin and a stubborn jurist named John J. Sirica, were Cox and Dash. They met every Nixon maneuver, every Nixon threat, every Nixon effort to claim high privilege in the face of what Cox and Dash believed was the highest obligation — the law.

The two men were legal scholars; Cox taught at Harvard, Dash at Georgetown. But they were not fusty scholars. They knew that in the bruising world of public legal battles, legal battles were fought in public. It sounds like a tautology. It is instead an insight.

For a look inside their signature insight, listen to what Dash said in a 1998 conversation with the District of Columbia Bar Report — and here is another eerie coincidence — about the 1973 firing of Archibald Cox: “When special prosecutor Archibald Cox was fired by Richard Nixon, the public saw it in context of the (Watergate) hearings. This was not an uninformed public; they knew why Cox was fired — to stop him from exposing Nixon. This was the ‘Saturday Night Massacre.’ An uproar followed. Millions of people wrote to the White House and Congress. It was that public pressure that gave the House Judiciary Committee the courage to impeach. They would never have done it without the outrage of their constituents.”

That moment — Nixon’s firing of Cox — was the hinge of Watergate. But it was a creaky hinge. Atty. Gen. Elliot L. Richardson refused the order to dismiss Cox. He resigned. William D. Ruckelshaus, the next in line, refused to do it. He was fired. The task fell to the solicitor general, a man whose name, a decade later, would become a contentious verb. He was Robert H. Bork. (His explanation: Someone had to do it.)

Cox, himself a former solicitor general, later became chairman of Common Cause, the self-styled citizens’ lobby that used a key lesson from Watergate — the notion that money was the oxygen of politics — to transform the way candidates run for office and the way Americans view their politicians. Dash spent a brief period on the independent prosecutor investigation that led to the impeachment of President Clinton, helped persuade Monica Lewinsky to testify, but resigned with a blistering letter charging Kenneth L. Starr with exceeding his legislative mandate.

Dash was remembered as the man who asked a question that led to the most sensational disclosure in the Watergate investigation — the news that the president had taped his own conversations. Cox is remembered as the man who would not take no for an answer — even from a sitting president who appointed him. The man who asked the question and the man who would not take no for an answer died on the same day. It is fitting because, for so long, they fought the same fight. They fought it not for glory, nor for celebrity, nor even for money, but for us.

David Shribman is a columnist for Universal Press Syndicate.