Christopher Cox
Charles Christopher Cox is an American attorney and politician who served as chair of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, a 17-year Republican member of the United States House of Representatives, and member of the White House staff in the Reagan Administration. Prior to his Washington service he was a practicing attorney, teacher, and entrepreneur. Following his retirement from government in 2009, he returned to law practice and currently serves as a director, trustee, and advisor to several for-profit and nonprofit organizations.
Early life and education
Cox was born in St. Paul, Minnesota. After graduating from Saint Thomas Academy in Mendota Heights, Minnesota in 1970, Cox earned a Bachelor of Arts degree the University of Southern California in 1973, following an accelerated three-year course. He was also a member of Delta Tau Delta fraternity. In 1977, he earned both an MBA from Harvard Business School and a J.D. from Harvard Law School, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review.Career
From 1977 to 1978, he served as law clerk to Judge Herbert Choy of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.In October 1978, Cox was paralyzed from the waist down following a serious off-road Jeep accident in the rainforest on the Hawaiian island of Molokai. He eventually regained the ability to walk but wore a harness of steel bars and leather straps for six months. He still has two metal screws in his back, and according to a 2005 Fortune magazine profile, “has been in pain every day for the past 27 years.” Since he can't sit for extended periods of time, he has a special desk that allows him to work while standing.
As a contestant on the NBC-TV game show Password Plus, Cox won more than $5,000 over multiple appearances. According to a re-broadcast of Password Plus on the cable network GSN, Cox appeared in 1980 and won $5,400 cash.
From 1977 to 1986, Cox was first an associate and then partner with the international law firm of Latham & Watkins. At the time of his retirement in 1986 he was the Partner in Charge of the Corporate Department in the Orange County office, and served as a member of the firm's national management. In 1982–83, Cox took a leave of absence from Latham & Watkins to teach federal income tax at Harvard Business School.
In 1984, Cox co-founded Context Corporation, which produced daily English reproductions of the leading Soviet state-controlled newspaper, Pravda. The publication was used chiefly by U.S. universities and U.S. government agencies, and was eventually distributed to customers in 26 countries around the world. The company had no connection to the Soviet government.
White House
During the second term of Ronald Reagan from 1986 to 1988, Cox served as senior associate counsel to the president. His duties included advising on the nomination of three Supreme Court justices, the establishment of the Brady Commission following the 1987 market crash, and the drafting of legislative reform proposals for the federal budget process.In 1986, following Chief Justice Warren Burger's confidential message to President Reagan that he planned to step down from the bench, White House Counsel Peter Wallison tasked a small team including Cox with thoroughly researching the opinions and judicial philosophies of the leading candidates for the next Supreme Court nomination. The effort focused on judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals who had a substantial record of decisions. After narrowing the field to five or six, the search quickly settled on Judge Antonin Scalia of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, a recommendation the president accepted.
As a part of his White House responsibilities, Cox also reviewed the FBI files of nominees for presidential appointments.
When Howard Baker took over for Donald Regan as chief of staff in 1987, bringing with him Arthur B. Culvahouse Jr. as counsel to the president, First Lady Nancy Reagan specifically asked Culvahouse to keep Cox on the White House staff. According to Culvahouse, she and the East Wing staff "liked Chris a lot... He is a very good lawyer," and his willingness to give up his partnership in a prestigious law firm to join the White House staff only a year before had made an impression. As senior associate counsel under Culvahouse, Cox became deeply involved in market issues and securities issues including then-pending congressional proposals for legislation on insider trading, greenmail, junk bonds, golden parachutes and golden handcuffs, tender offers, and takeovers.
His work on the White House response to the 1987 stock market crash included the formation of the Presidential Task Force on Market Mechanisms and the recruitment of Harvard Business School professor Robert Glauber, who had been Cox's department chairman during his stint on the faculty there, as its executive director. The Commission provided the definitive autopsy on what happened to the markets on Black Monday, October 19, 1987, and its aftermath. Coincidentally, eight months prior to the crash, Chief of Staff Howard Baker had asked Cox to write a detailed memo describing the emergency powers that the President might exercise in a market crisis. That landed Cox in an emergency meeting in the chief of staff's office on Black Monday, from which Baker called then-NYSE Chairman John Phelan to urge him to drop his plan to shut down the New York Stock Exchange.
At the time, some conservatives were pushing for a constitutional convention to advance a balanced budget amendment, and Cox conducted research on the question. He represented the White House at hearings on the advisability of releasing John Hinckley from St. Elizabeth's Hospital following Hinckley's attempted assassination of President Reagan, and led the vetting and research effort that resulted in Northwestern Law School Dean David Ruder being recommended to the president as SEC Chairman in 1987.
A former soccer player at USC, as a White House counsel Cox worked with the United States Soccer Federation on its proposal to bring the World Cup to the United States in 1994. “He was a key. Everybody in the damned government had their fingers in this,” said Eddie Mahe, who ran the U.S. Soccer Federation's 1986 campaign to bring the event to the United States. “Without him, I don’t know that it would have survived.” According to the Los Angeles Times, soccer's governing body was requiring waivers of federal laws and regulations from virtually every agency of the federal government, and in "record time, Cox prepared an executive order directing the agencies to fall in line. Reagan signed it." On July 5, 1988, the U.S. won the selection bid. In appreciation, the U.S. team presented Cox with the first jersey to be signed by all 22 members.
U.S. House of Representatives
Cox was elected to Congress in 1988 from what was then California's 40th congressional district. He was re-elected eight more times from this Orange County-based district, which was renumbered as the 47th District in 1993 and the 48th District in 2003.Early in his congressional career, Cox befriended two anti-Communists in Hungary and Lithuania who had been prisoners of conscience and who later became presidents of their countries after the end of Soviet domination. Cox met Árpád Göncz in 1989, and when Cox was later married, he spent part of his honeymoon in Hungary with then-President Göncz and his wife Mária Zsuzsanna Göntér. Cox met Dr. Vytautas Landsbergis, a professor at the Conservatory of Music in Vilnius, in 1989, well before the successful reestablishment of Lithuanian independence. The night Landsbergis was elected President of Lithuania, he embraced Cox on the tarmac at the airport in Vilnius after the Soviet Union had held Cox in East Berlin for a prolonged period. In May 1998, Cox was presented with the Order of the Lithuanian Grand Duke Gediminas, the highest honor the Republic of Lithuania can give to a living noncitizen.
In 1989, Polish President Lech Wałęsa joined Cox in a Washington, DC ceremony marking the enactment of Cox's legislation establishing the Polish-American Enterprise Fund. Together with the Baltic-American Enterprise Fund, the Hungarian-American Enterprise Fund, and seven other enterprise funds in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the Cox legislation, incorporated in the Support Eastern European Democracy Act, matched U.S. foreign aid with venture capital in the newly free countries of the former Warsaw Pact. Cox has some fluency in the Russian language.
In 1994, Cox was appointed by President Clinton to the Bipartisan Commission on Entitlement and Tax Reform, which in 1995 published a unanimous report warning that the nation cannot continue to allow entitlement programs to consume a rapidly increasing share of the federal budget.
Among Cox's notable legislative successes as a Representative was the Internet Tax Freedom Act, a 1998 law prohibiting federal, state, and local government taxation of Internet access and banning Internet-only levies such as email taxes, bit taxes, and bandwidth taxes. With U.S. Rep. Barney Frank as his chief co-sponsor, Cox authored legislation in 1997 to privatize the National Helium Reserve, which was then $1.4 billion in debt to taxpayers. As of 2004, this was the third-largest privatization in U.S. history, surpassing the value of the 1988 Conrail privatization. Cox also wrote the only law that was enacted over President Bill Clinton's veto, the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, aimed at protecting investors from fraudulent and extortionate lawsuits.
For 10 of his 17 years in the Congress, from 1995 to 2005, Cox served in the House Majority Leadership as Chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee, the fifth-ranking elected leadership position. He was Chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, and also Chairman of the Select Committee on U.S. National Security that produced the Cox Report, an indictment of Chinese espionage and of security failures at several U.S. national laboratories.
When Congress established the Bipartisan Study Group on Enhancing Multilateral Export Controls through federal legislation in 1999, Cox was tapped as co-chairman. The group published a unanimous report in 2001 recommending wholesale modernization of U.S. export controls. Cox also served as Chairman of the Select Committee on Homeland Security ; Chairman of the Task Force on Capital Markets; and Chairman of the Task Force on Budget Process Reform.
In the spring of 2001, then-Representative Cox was considered by President George W. Bush for a federal appellate judgeship on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Cox withdrew his name from consideration before a nomination could be made because one of his home state Democratic Senators, Barbara Boxer, objected to him due to his perceived conservatism. The seat that Cox had been considered for was eventually filled by Bush nominee Carlos Bea.