In Sunday’s Washington Post, obituary writer Bart Barnes gets a rare shot at the front page to celebrate the life of Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox, perhaps to recycle the newspaper’s usual self-serving historical take on the villainy of Watergate. Read once again how the heroes who brought Richard Nixon down were not to be questioned for their ideological motivations, unless you wanted to be known as paranoid. Barnes offered a wistful rerun of the so-called “Saturday Night Massacre,” when the special prosecutor was fired and liberals were wildly talking about “coup d’etat.” From a pro-Cox biography, Barnes quotes Elliott Richardson – who resigned rather than fire Cox – declaring that “Nixon’s most damaging misjudgment was his underestimation of Cox’s ability to communicate the strength of his integrity.” Well, it’s a lot easier to communicate your integrity when the media love you and boost you.

But it you have a copy of the Chris Matthews book “Kennedy and Nixon” (to be precise, pages 326-328), you get a different picture, one that makes you wonder how many barns of hay a Republican James Carville type could have made out of this partisan prosecutor: a Muskie candidate for delegate to the 1972 Democratic convention. A solicitor general under JFK. A chief of speechwriting for Kennedy’s presidential campaign. After describing the stunned reaction of Nixon aides and their gallows humor, Matthews added:

“Cox’s swearing-in ceremony was no laughing matter. Among the invited guests were Ethel Kennedy, widow of the man the new prosecutor had once served, and Ted Kennedy…As Cox filled his staff with veterans of Bob Kennedy’s Justice Department and of his 1968 presidential candidacy, the worst fears were confirmed. Of the eleven senior counsels Cox hired, seven had been associated with either Jack, Bobby, or Teddy. The Watergate prosecution was going to be a Kennedy operation.”

Even Cox himself thought the press (including the Post) was buttering up his side of the Watergate divide. In Victor Lasky’s “It Didn’t Start with Watergate” (page 355), we learn Cox said: “Indeed, they’ve treated me much better than I deserve.”