Even among the most elite lawyers, to be named Solicitor General of the United States—the attorney responsible for representing the American people before the Supreme Court—would be a career’s pinnacle. So would be performing the duties of U.S. Attorney General, often described as the nation’s top law enforcement official and, historically, the president’s principal legal advisor. To play a leading role in cases of unprecedented significance—the criminal investigation of a president, the indictment of a vice president, the meddling of the federal courts in a hot war—would place a lawyer on the same airy par.

Now imagine a lawyer enmeshed in each of these critical roles, over a period of mere weeks, in a nation rupturing over the political and cultural upheaval of the early 1970s.

Actually, no need to imagine it. Robert H. Bork not only lived these interesting times but, in his last great service to the nation, also produced a memoir of historical significance to explain them. Saving Justice: Watergate, the Saturday Night Massacre, and Other Adventures of a Solicitor General was posthumously published by Encounter Books shortly after Judge Bork died on December 19, 2012.

In 1968, when he first came to the attention of Richard M. Nixon, Bork was already a prominent member of the profession—a Yale law professor who had enjoyed a successful tenure in private practice and was in the midst of writing The Antitrust Paradox, which eventually became the gold standard in that complex field. At