Edition: U.S. / Global


Published: January 1, 2000

Elliot L. Richardson, the archetype of the cultivated New England Brahmin who served in an astonishingly broad range of high public positions, and who was best known for his refusal during Watergate to obey President Richard M. Nixon's order to fire a special prosecutor, died yesterday in his native Massachusetts. He was 79.

Mr. Richardson died at the Massachusetts General Hospital from complications after a cerebral hemorrhage, his son Michael reported.

Mr. Richardson, who was descended from some of Boston's earliest settlers, was sometimes referred to by friends as ''the former everything'' because of the great variety of positions he held both in Massachusetts and in the federal government. He served as attorney general and United States attorney in Massachusetts, was second-in-command at the State Department and held four cabinet positions, more than anyone else in history. He also served as ambassador to Britain, negotiated the worldwide treaty on the Law of the Sea and was the chief representative of the United Nations in monitoring Nicaraguan elections in 1990, among other assignments.

But it was Mr. Richardson's stand during Watergate when he was Richard M. Nixon's attorney general that was widely lauded as a special moment of integrity and rectitude that secured him a place in the nation's history. President Nixon ordered Mr. Richardson to fire Archibald M. Cox, the special Watergate prosecutor, but Mr. Richardson chose to resign instead.

After Mr. Richardson resigned, his second-in-command, William D. Ruckelshaus was fired after similarly refusing to fire Mr. Cox. Those events, on Saturday, Oct. 20, 1973, became known as the Saturday Night Massacre.

Robert H. Bork, who was then the solicitor general and thus the Justice Department's highest-ranking remaining official, accepted the assignment and fired Mr. Cox. Mr. Bork's behavior was a source of criticism in 1987 when the Senate refused to confirm his nomination to the Supreme Court.

The orders to fire Mr. Cox came as President Nixon struggled to limit the investigation that stemmed from the June 17, 1972, break-in at the Democratic Party's headquarters at the Watergate complex.

In his 1996 book, ''Reflections of a Moderate,'' Mr. Richardson recalled that he came to see events clearly in the midst of that tension-drenched time.

''The more I thought about it,'' he wrote, ''the clearer it seemed to me that public confidence in the investigation would depend on its being independent not only in fact, but in appearance.''

In 1976, he recalled in an article in the Atlantic Monthly that he came to realize he was in a ''peculiar no-man's land between the special prosecutor and the president.'' He eventually decided he was being exploited by Mr. Nixon to get rid of Mr. Cox, who was determined to obtain tape-recordings made surreptitiously in the White House.

Mr. Richardson recalled in the article how he went home and discussed the events with his wife, Anne.

''It was clear that I could not carry out the instruction,'' he wrote and his wife joked that he would be carried out of the Justice Department in a mahogany coffin.

Mr. Richardson also ruminated on the cause of Mr. Nixon's failings in the Watergate scandal, attributing it in part to his refusal to stop dwelling on his political enemies.

''The second ingredient of Watergate, an amoral alacrity to do the president's bidding, was traceable less to flaws in his own political character (although it was reinforced by them) than to the political and cultural evolution of twentieth century America.''

He lamented that the character of the president's men was not uniquely evil but merely an extension of the increasingly common values of ''get-ahead, go-along organization men who take on the coloration and the value system of whatever organization'' they belong to.

Mr. Richardson wrote that he never understood how Mr. Nixon and his advisers could have assumed that he would fire Mr. Cox, who had objected to having limits placed on his ability to subpoena White House materials.

He could only have dismissed Mr. Cox for ''extraordinary impropriety,'' he said, and Mr. Cox's position was ''not only defensible but right.''

After his resignation, Mr. Richardson was surprised and embarrassed to find himself called a modern-day Sir Thomas More. But if he wore that description modestly, it also made him sought after as a moral arbiter.

His role as the chief monitor when Nicaragua voted out the Sandinista government gave that election credibility. When he publicly declared that he thought Edwin Meese III, a fellow Republican, unfit to become attorney general, it carried great weight. Last year, he urged the House to censure President Clinton but not impeach him.

After hearing of Mr. Richardson's death, President Clinton said that Mr. Richardson ''put the nation's interests first even when the personal cost was very high.''

Elliot Lee Richardson was born in Boston on July 20, 1920, the son of a prominent doctor who was professor of medicine at the Harvard Medical School. He once told friends that he spent his years at Harvard College mostly drawing cartoons for the Lampoon, the comedy magazine. But he graduated near the top of his class and enrolled in Harvard Law School.