Turn on cable news and he’s there, a Sherlock Holmes-type figure with a Concord connection, searching to see if the president of the United States has done something wrong.
And 45 years ago, the same could be said about another Concord-connected super sleuth, also one of the great bloodhounds in American history, also sniffing around to find dirt on the leader of the free world.
There is common ground everywhere you look. Bob Mueller and Archibald Cox were both named special counsel to uncover corruption at the highest levels of government. Their unassuming, modest behavior earned them respect, and their foundation for the future was built right here, at St. Paul’s School.
Cox, Class of 1930, went after President Richard Nixon and got fired in 1973 for his trouble.
Mueller, Class of 1962, is looking into President Donald Trump and his associates. Reports of his impending dismissal flood the media like Stormy nights these days.
Our inside sources – Cox’s son, Archie Cox Jr., Class of ’58, and Mueller’s classmate, Haven Pell, Class of ’64 – gave us a hint about two people whom the school love to promote, especially after the recent stream of sex scandals helped tarnish St. Paul’s reputation.
“We’ve been talking a lot about both Archie and Robert and their service to the nation in the context of serving something larger than a political party,” beamed Mike Hirshfeld, the school’s rector. “Our kids are talking about how the world needs more people like them.”
Start with the elder Cox. His son is president of the St. Paul’s School Board of Trustees and a big-league investor who lives in Washington, D.C.
Reached by email before a phone interview, he referred to himself as “Archie,” which set the tone for a comfortable conversation with a man whose M.B.A. from Harvard and whose father’s legendary history-book status could have made for an intimidating interview.
That was not the case.
Cox’s father was hired as special prosecutor in May of 1973 to oversee the criminal investigation of the Watergate burglary the year before. And by time he had subpoenaed Nixon’s secretly recorded tapes to see what the president knew and when he knew it, Nixon had had enough.
Cox Sr. was indirectly fired by Nixon in October of ’73, which became known as the Saturday Night Massacre and fueled a public-relations nightmare for the president, later leading to his part in a cover-up, impeachment proceedings and his resignation in August of 1974. No president had resigned before and none have since.
(Mueller’s work may change that; stay tuned).
Cox Jr. was 33 when his father got the boot.
“I knew about the tapes they had at the time,” said the 78-year-old Cox, whose father died in 2004. “He kept pursuing them, and in talking to him before the Saturday Night Massacre, he wanted to pursue the investigation where ever it led.”
Cox Jr. said his father worried that buried secrets would spoil the integrity of the Oval Office, telling me, “His biggest concern was that the outcome could in some way adversely affect the institution of the presidency, but that didn’t stop him from going there.”
Cox Jr. said his father was thrust into an early leadership role. He was the oldest of seven children, a newly minted graduate of St. Paul’s at the time of his father’s death.
Later, he’d stroll around the lower pond at St. Paul’s, behind the chapel, a pitstop from his home in Boston to his mother’s place in Vermont. “It was good for his mental health,” Archie Jr. told me. “He found it relaxing.”
Cox Sr. returned to his alma mater the year after Nixon fired him. He was treated like a hero by students, receiving a standing ovation for refusing to back down when the evidence against Nixon began to move down a dark path.
His down-to-earth approach and sense of justice came roaring through when he commented on why Nixon eventually caved and turned over the secret tapes.
“What forced the president’s complete reversal,” Cox Sr. said, according to the Monitor, “was unquestionably the demonstration of the will of the people that the laws should be complied with, should bind the highest official as well as the lowest person.”
This integrity, Haven Pell told me, was part of Mueller’s DNA as well.
Pell graduated from St. Paul’s in 1964, two years after Mueller, who’s been appointed special counsel to investigate links between the Russian government and the Trump Administration during the 2016 campaign.
Reached by phone during a two-month, solo ski trip through Wyoming, Montana and Colorado, the 72-year-old free spirit, a retired investment manager, was a quote machine, telling me that Mueller served as his role model while both played soccer at St. Paul’s.
“He was my first soccer captain,” Pell said. “I’m 15 and the new kid and here is one of the first older guys I knew. Fifteen-year-olds are not the most capable people in the world, and you have a leader who does not make you feel bad and treats you like a teammate. At the time, this was a guy who was a straight shooter.”
Pell said that while other students were shameless self promoters, pushing hard – annoyingly hard, in fact – to move their names out front, Mueller’s leadership skills and talent appeared effortless and certainly not forced.
“He did not have to make too much of an effort,” said Pell. “He kind of flowed like a stream through life. I have no idea what was going on in his head. Maybe it was harder than it looked for him.”
Today, Mueller is a silent man, never tipping his hand on what he may or may not have on Trump, never speaking to the media, never really changing his expression.
“Never smiling, his mouth is always shut and his eyes are never moving toward the camera,” Pell noticed. “It’s the image of someone who has a job to do, and good for him.”
And he’s doing it well, according to Pell. The talk about a conflict of interest, a biased investigation, a witch hunt merely to bring this president down?
Baloney, Pell says.
“Some would like a little less of Bob Mueller,” Pell said. “I want more of Bob Mueller. It would be great to have a permanent prosecutor to go after political thugs. No industry is more in need of that kind of regulation than politics.”
That process forced Nixon to resign in disgrace after a St. Paul’s bloodhound doggedly pursued the truth.
Mueller, meanwhile, is still sniffing.
Cox Jr. said don’t expect anything soon, telling me, “I’m all for getting at the facts in Mueller’s investigation. That’s the important thing. I think people get impatient in situations like this, and you need to let the investigation go where it goes.”
Cox Jr. said he watched the Stormy Daniels interview last Sunday. He wondered about the $130,000 the porn star received from Trump’s attorney in return for her silence about an alleged affair, wondered if that might get Trump in hot water as a dirty campaign contribution.
He stopped speculating right there, telling me, “It gets into the legal realm that I’m not capable of answering.”
Pell was more of a loose cannon. He wrote columns online for six years “about the stupidity of Washington,” and his disdain for the behind-the-scenes dishonesty of government was obvious when he said, “Politicians can deceive you because they have more information and they convince you this is in your best interest, but it’s not; it’s in their best interest.”
Two graduates of St. Paul’s set out to right this wrong. One is still working.
“Here we are,” Pell said, “with two people in the same place after coming from the same place.”