A Long and Winding Odyssey

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When Bork was appointed by Richard Nixon as Solicitor General in 1973, the Indiana Law Review article prompted widespread fears that the office was about to be hopelessly politicized. After only five weeks on the job, he was called to the White House by Nixon Aide Alexander Haig and asked to run the President's Watergate defense. After some indecision, Bork ultimately maneuvered his way out, in part because Nixon refused to let him listen to the White House tapes. Three months later came the Saturday Night Massacre. Bork's name became a household word overnight when, as acting Attorney General, he fired Watergate Prosecutor Archibald Cox after Attorney General Elliot Richardson and his deputy, William Ruckelshaus, refused to do so. At his judicial confirmation hearings nine years later, Bork said he acted to prevent chaos at the Justice Department and moved quickly to assure continuation of the independent probe. That seemed to settle the matter. But in recent weeks, some Massacre witnesses have quarreled with portions of his sworn story and suggested Bork was in fact acting to help Nixon defy a lawful court order for his tapes.

Ironically, the remainder of Bork's four-year tenure at Justice could prove his biggest asset. Career and political appointees alike credit Bork with helping to restore morale at the shaken department. Despite antibusing sentiment in both the Nixon and Ford administrations, for example, Bork pointedly refused to oppose a controversial Boston school-desegregation order. "He was the epitome of an open-minded, principled lawyer," says A. Raymond Randolph, then a Bork aide, "the exact opposite of a rigid ideologue."

When President Ford was defeated, Bork briefly considered a Washington law practice but ultimately decided to return to Yale. The move was a financial success, but unsatisfying nonetheless. He published his book, The Antitrust Paradox, ten years in the making, debunking the antitrust notion that bigness was badness in corporate America. Businessmen flocked to his New Haven office, willing to pay $250 an hour for his counsel on antitrust and Justice Department matters. His income soared into six figures, and he quickly paid off a small debt left over from his children's schooling and began to build his net worth.

But his law school relationships had soured. Bickel had died while Bork was in Washington. Professors muttered that Bork's onetime freewheeling search for intellectual theories had been replaced by commercial pursuits. Bork, who usually stayed above academic politics, became involved in a losing 1978 campaign against a proposal to forbid law firms that discriminated against homosexuals from recruiting at Yale. "Contrary to assertions made, homosexuality is obviously not an unchangeable condition like race or gender," he wrote.