"Nixon had sent in people to seal off the attorney general's office, and my father couldn't get his papers out," Henry Richardson says. "His secretary had to work out a code name so he could get his documents."

Reviewing the Law

After a long life of working with the law, Richardson says it is fundamental to the American system.

"[The American system] is a government in which literally, absolutely literally, every ounce of its power was delegated to it by the people," he says. "There is an inseparable identity of the role of law and the essentials of the American system."

And, for Richardson, the practice of law is "the most important political process" that can be performed.

"Every time you affirm the dignity and the rights of individual citizens as the central base of the whole structure [through the practice of law], then you are spelling out the ways in which individual rights are affirmed and protected," he says.

And Richardson's affinity for the law has taken him far.

But he cautions that graduates should make decisions based on their own merits, and not for the sake of where those choices may get them next.

"I have worked over 26 full-time jobs, including nine presidential appointments and two elective offices," he says, "and I never at any point thought of what I was doing as for the sake of what I might be doing next."

The Early Years

Richardson made his mark at Harvard early on in his career, graduating cum laude from both the College and the Law School, where he was president of the Harvard Law Review.

At HLS, he encountered a professor whom he would meet again--Cox, now Loeb University professor emeritus.

"I always liked him; I admired him as a student and later as another lawyer and a friend," Cox says. "He is a very warm person."

When Cox was Watergate special prosecutor, Cox says Richardson's attitude towards him was fair.

"He was never overbearing about [questioning me] or exerting any kind of pressure that I thought was improper, but he had to carry out the White House's orders," Cox says.