A Stand-Up Texan for a Tough Task

The lawyer from Houston had barely accepted the job when he was asked if he wished it had never been offered to him. "Yes," quickly replied Leon Jaworski, 68, the man named last week to succeed Archibald Cox as the special prosecutor charged with getting to the bottom of the Watergate morass once and for all. "It's a terrible job," Jaworski's wife said when she heard the news. "I just feel sorry for him."

No one could blame the Jaworskis for having reservations about the new post. Last May, Jaworski had said he was not interested in the job when he, among others, was sounded out by the Administration before Cox was named. "I did not feel at the time that the independence was there," he explains. "But now I'm not prohibited from taking any action I feel should be taken."

In fact, Jaworski is getting no more freedom of action than Cox was originally promised, although he did receive stronger safeguards of job security. If necessary, Jaworski can go to court to get tapes or other presidential materials; it was the President's efforts to deny Cox this right that led to Cox's firing. That guarantee was spelled out by Acting Attorney General Robert H. Bork. He also put on public record the White House's capitulation to the demands of the Republican Senate leadership: the President gave up his right to fire the special prosecutor on his own, an authority that not even Cox had disputed. If some unresolvable dispute should arise, the President, before dismissing Jaworski, would have to get the approval of a "substantial majority" of eight congressional leaders, four from each party--the Speaker and the minority leader in the House, the majority and minority leader in the Senate, and the Democratic chairman and the ranking Republican member of the Judiciary Committee in each of the two chambers.

But this elaborate procedure will never be used, or so Bork insists. "There can't be another firing," Bork told TIME last week. "Let's face it. The political realities won't allow it."

Bork admitted that his first choice for the job had fallen through. Still, Bork said, he was delighted to have been able to persuade Jaworski to take on the chore, which was presented, in the new prosecutor's words, as a "call to duty."

"We needed someone who was known to the bar and the public, someone with lots of prosecutorial experience," says Bork. After reviewing the Texan's performance as a prosecutor, his reputation as a man of integrity and a "feisty guy," the Acting Attorney General concluded that Jaworski was an excellent choice for the job.

Unpopular Cases. The son of a Polish-born minister who served in Waco's First Evangelical Free Church, Jaworski was just 19 when he got his law degree from Baylor University. He went on to a spectacular career as a courtroom practitioner known for his tough but ethical cross-examinations. After World War II, Colonel Jaworski led the prosecution of the U.S. Army's war-crimes trials (the forerunners of those at Nuremberg). In civilian life, he often took on unpopular cases in the South, including the defense of a black who had murdered a white couple. At the request of Attorney General Robert Kennedy, Jaworski prosecuted Mississippi's Governor Ross Barnett for preventing James H. Meredith from entering the state's university in Oxford. That time the police had to guard his house, and a banker sent him a note saying: "I hope your daughter has a nigger baby."

Jaworski rose to become a modest millionaire by Texas standards, the president of the American Bar Association and the senior partner of the Houston law firm that in size and influence is second only to John Connally's. A lifelong Texas Democrat--although he supported Nixon in 1972--Jaworski reigns in Houston as the apotheosis of Establishment power. In 1948, Jaworski helped defend Lyndon Johnson against charges of fraud in the wake of the 87-vote victory that first sent him to the Senate. In 1960, he defended his friend against suits that sought to prevent him from running simultaneously for Vice President and Senator. Johnson put Jaworski on five presidential commissions.

No Reservations. Jaworski gets high marks from lawyers who know him. Although President Chesterfield Smith of the American Bar Association would prefer a completely independent prosecutor, he says of Jaworski: "It's a fabulous appointment. I have absolutely no reservations about his competency and integrity. He's a stand-up guy. If he's shoved, he will shove back."

Jaworskl expects to get into some shoving matches. "I'd be the most surprised man alive if there were not pressures from all kinds of sources. But if I didn't think I could handle that I wouldn't have accepted the job." Only last spring Jaworski made a speech saying that the main lesson of Watergate was that "regardless of power and position, no man is above the law."

The new special prosecutor is eager to come to grips with his job. "The American people are entitled to have some answers without waiting forever," says Jaworski, "and I intend to get those answers."

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