Documenting a Ford Administration Legacy

Feb 6

It has been 25 years since the death of Elliot Richardson (1920-1999), ambassador to Great Britain and Secretary of Commerce under President Gerald R. Ford.

Richardson holds two unique records in American government: the only person to head four cabinet departments1, serving at Health, Education and Welfare; Defense; Justice; and Commerce, and another as the only person to serve as U.S. attorney, state attorney general, and U.S. attorney general.2

There is still no full-length biography of Richardson. Sadly, Washington, D.C. attorney Donald A. Carr died in 2013 before completing his magnum opus about Richardson. Fortunately, we have important insights from his concise biographies of Richardson in the Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives (2002) and the Yale Biographical Dictionary of American Law (2009).

Prior to Watergate, publications focused on the variety of state and federal posts Richardson held and his excellent administrative skills (by age 37 he became assistant secretary at HEW under President Dwight Eisenhower, with a four-month stint as acting secretary). Since Watergate, the focus has been on his principled resignation as attorney general when he refused to fire Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox. What became known as the Saturday Night Massacre is remembered more than his simultaneous investigation of both President Richard Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew, averting a constitutional crisis by securing Agnew’s resignation prior to Nixon’s resignation.

Two Watergate accounts provide a wealth of biographical information: Richard M. Cohen and Jules Witcover’s A Heartbeat Away: The Investigation and Resignation of Vice President Spiro T. Agnew (1974) and Ken Gormley’s Archibald Cox: Conscience of a Nation, with a foreword by Richardson (1997).

Two other works provide a wider context of Richardson’s life. Geoffrey Kabaservice, The Guardians: Kingman Brewster, His Circle, and the Rise of the Liberal Establishment (2004), features Richardson, McGeorge Bundy, John Lindsay, Cyrus Vance and Paul Moore, Jr., as confidants of the Yale University president. Michael Koncewicz, They Said No to Nixon: Republicans Who Stood Up to the President’s Abuses of Power (2018), includes Richardson, Caspar Weinberger, and George Shultz, among others.

Meanwhile, samples of two specialized studies include a chapter by Alex Spelling in The Embassy in Grosvenor Square: American Ambassadors to the United Kingdom, 1938-2008 (2012) by Alison R. Holmes and J. Simon Rofe, and a 33-page booklet covering Richardson’s tenure as secretary of Defense, The Decline of Détente: Elliot Richardson, James Schlesinger and Donald Rumsfeld, 1973-1977 by Walter S. Poole, (Special Study 7, in the Cold War Foreign Policy Series, Department of Defense, 2015).

And then there are Richardson’s three books [The Creative Balance: Government, Politics, and the Individual in America’s Third Century (1976), The Uses and Limitations of Law (1982), and Reflections of a Radical Moderate (1996), as well as dozens of op-eds, book chapters/forewords, and articles on government, politics, law, and diplomacy.

Richardson’s voice and passion for politics come alive in his oral histories.3 In the Ford Library interview, Richardson regrets not having advised Ford on using “discretion to decline prosecution,” establishing guilt but avoiding a pardon. The C-Span coverage of Richardson supporting Robert Bork’s Supreme Court nomination is informative,4 as are Richardson’s Senate confirmation hearings.

My own efforts include the monograph Elliot Richardson: The Virtue of Politics, a Council for Excellence in Government online publication (2000, revised 2023). That was followed by “The Mentors of Elliot Richardson” in The Massachusetts Historical Review (2006), featuring Richardson’s uncle Henry Shattuck, Senator Leverett Saltonstall, Judge Learned Hand, and Justice Felix Frankfurter.5 In 2017, I edited the monograph Selected Speeches of Elliot Richardson (updated 2020).

There is a vast amount of archival information. Richardson’s papers are at the Library of Congress. The 114-page finding aid (revised 2024) is online referencing 369,000 items in 1,055 containers. The four-page essay “Elliot L. Richardson Papers,” appeared in the Library of Congress’ Acquisitions Manuscript Division 1992 publication (1993). From 2000 to 2023, the Richardson collection has been among the top 150 of the most heavily used collections in the Manuscript Division (and there are more than 12,000 collections).6 Of course, the presidential libraries of Eisenhower, Johnson, Nixon (including the tapes), Ford, Carter, and George H. W. Bush document Richardson’s service during those administrations.

Recent scholarship includes Rachel Maddow and Michael Yarvitz, Bag Man, 2020 (based on the podcast about the Agnew investigation); Garrett Graff, Watergate: A New History (2022), with five references to Richardson’s famous doodles; and two likely definitive biographies: Brad Snyder on Felix Frankfurter, Democratic Justice (2022), and Richard Norton Smith on Gerald Ford, An Ordinary Man (2023). While we wait for a full-length biography of Richardson, his career and life are well-documented, with a variety of sources for both the general reader and researcher.

Vivek Viswanathan reflects in his 2009 Harvard thesis, that Richardson’s resume “is enough reason for scholars of history and government to examine his life, if only to wonder how one individual managed to serve with distinction in so many roles.”7

Notes:

1 George Shultz headed three cabinet departments (Labor and Treasury under Nixon, and State under Reagan), along with one cabinet-level post under Nixon when serving as the first director of the Office of Management and Budget, a part of the Executive Office.

2 Richardson’s opening statement, Hearing Before the Committee on the Judiciary (regarding President Bill Clinton), U.S. House of Representatives, Dec. 1, 1998, p. 75.

3 Columbia [University] Center for Oral History, Peter A. Corning, 57 pp., May 4, 1967; LBJ Presidential Library, Joe B. Frantz, 10 pp., Jan. 31, 1974; Nixon Project Oral Histories, Frederick J. Graboske, 24 pp., May 31, 1988; Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, Alan James, 18 pp., May 30, 1996; Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library Richard L. Holzhausen, 15 pp., April 25, 1997; and Yale University’s United Nations Oral History Series, James Sutterlin, 22 pp., Oct. 7, 1997.

4 https://www.c-span.org/video/?10187-1/bork-nomination-day-11-part-2 dated Sept. 29, 1987. Many Watergate accounts fail to mention that after Bork, third in line at Justice as solicitor general, became acting attorney general and fired Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, he too was going to resign like Richardson and William Ruckelshaus, but Richardson and Ruckelshaus persuaded Bork to remain at Justice [Richardson, The Creative Balance, p. 45].

5 Richardson himself was a mentor, too, especially to the three lieutenants who worked at his side throughout his cabinet posts: Jonathan Moore, Richard Darman, and J. T. Smith.

6 Ryan M. Reft, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, e-mail to the author, July 31, 2024.

7 Crafting the Law of the Sea: Elliot Richardson and the Search for Order on the Oceans, 1977-1980, p. 6, (2009), winner of the Harvard’s 2009 John Dunlop Undergraduate Thesis Prize in Business and Government.

Illustration by Howard Brodie courtesy of Library of Congress: Elliot Richardson and Archibald Cox before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, May 22, 1973. Thanks to Bruce Brodie for permission to publish his father’s artwork.

Tom Vance, a 1994 Gerald R. Ford Foundation travel grant recipient, holds a BS and MA in history from Western Michigan University. Thanks to Dave Dempsey, author of William G. Milliken: Michigan’s Passionate Moderate, for suggesting improvements to the draft.

Image: Elliot Richardson before Senate Judiciary" drawn in 1973 by Howard Brodie

Discussion Questions:
What can students of political science and history learn from Elliot Richardson's career?

Who are the Elliot Richardson's of today?

While Richardson is remembered for his appointed posts, he valued his time in elective office. What advice do you think he would give today to potential candidates for local, state or federal office?