Law: The Other Investigator

"I am caught up on the great bulk of it, but I ask myself: Will one man ever be caught up on all the details?" The speaker is Harvard Law Professor Archibald Cox, the Watergate special prosecutor summoned by the Nixon Administration to clean its own house. For nearly two months now, in a heavily guarded office at 1425 K Street, he has been sifting the paper mountains of testimony and reports. As Cox, 61, looks ahead, he recalls that the Teapot Dome investigation took six years, and adds, "I rather expect to spend the rest of my working life in this role."

Cox now has 18 lawyers and 17 other staff members to help him. For the present, he has divided his investigation into five segments, he told TIME Correspondent Hays Gorey in his first interview since taking office. He expects the total to expand and the categories to shift, but the current breakdown is: 1) Watergate itself, from the bugging and break-in to the coverup, 2) the "dirty tricks" that revolved around Political Saboteur Donald Segretti, 3) contributions to the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, including possible extortionary and other illegal methods of fund raising, 4) operations of "the plumbers," from the raid on the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist to the tapping of newsmen's phones, and 5) the question of the International Telephone & Telegraph Corp. campaign donations just when the Administration was settling its antitrust suit against the conglomerate. Reports that Cox is also looking into the financing of the Western White House at San Clemente have been denied, but he has not ruled out the subject for future inquiry. In fact, the special prosecutor has clearly taken on the task of investigating just about anything he chooses.

No Dismay. With the resignation two weeks ago of the three original Watergate prosecutors−Assistant U.S. Attorneys Earl J. Silbert, Seymour Glanzer and Donald E. Campbell−Cox is now totally on his own. He made that stingingly clear when word leaked out last week that the trio's final report recommended indictments of H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, John Mitchell and John Dean. The leak was a "gross breach of professional ethics," said Cox, adding that if he found a member of his staff responsible, that individual would be "immediately dismissed."

The lawyers on Cox's staff now are almost all graduates of the Kennedy Administration. That stands to reason, since Cox, a Democrat, was John Kennedy's and Lyndon Johnson's Solicitor General from 1961 to 1965 (before that he had served in both the Justice and Labor Departments under Franklin Roosevelt). But White House officials have voiced no loud dismay about the Kennedy hue of Cox's staff. "We needed a symbol of independence," says one. "We can hardly complain when he doesn't hire Nixon Republicans."