Robert E. Herzstein, who successfully sued on behalf of historians and journalists to prevent former President Richard M. Nixon from removing and even destroying his White House papers and tapes after his resignation, died on Thursday at his home in Washington. He was 83.
His daughter, Emily Herzstein, said the cause was heart disease resulting from scarlet fever, which he had contracted as a teenager.
Mr. Herzstein served as an under secretary of commerce during the Carter administration; became a consummate international trade lawyer for private corporations and governments; and promoted public justice, human rights and conflict resolution through several civic groups.
But his role in the Nixon case may be his greatest historical legacy. As a lawyer at Arnold & Porter, he was lead counsel in 1974 for a number of historians, political scientists and reporters who maintained that despite an agreement he had struck with the government, Nixon could not take possession of records created while he was in the White House.
Their legal challenge set in motion a chain of events that led to the National Archives’ taking stewardship of the presidential papers and tapes, and to further revelations about the Watergate scandal and other backstage views of the Nixon administration.
Mr. Herzstein was credited with taking the initiative in challenging the deal that Nixon had made with the General Services Administration. It empowered Nixon, who had been pardoned by President Gerald R. Ford, to take his White House papers with him to his home in California.
“It struck me as pretty insulting,” Mr. Herzstein said of the arrangement.
He insisted that the records belonged to the government, and that most of them should be publicly available under the Freedom of Information Act. Acting pro bono, he and several associates obtained a restraining order from a federal judge on behalf of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the American Political Science Association, the American Historical Association and other groups that he had enlisted to join the suit.
Their challenge encouraged Congress to pass legislation revoking the agreement with the General Services Administration and requiring government archivists to seize and preserve the White House records, amounting to 42 million pages of documents and 880 recordings. They were to return to Nixon only material deemed private.
Reversing itself, the Justice Department defended the new law and sided with the historians and reporters.
Nixon sued, but in 1977 the Supreme Court upheld the law’s constitutionality.
“We lifted the issue above the noise level,” Mr. Herzstein said.
Robert Erwin Herzstein was born in Denver on Feb. 26, 1931, the son of Sigmund Herzstein and Estelle Ruth Borwick. He grew up in New Mexico, where a great-uncle had settled in the late 19th century and become a rancher and merchant. He graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School, where he met Priscilla Holmes, whom he married. She died in 2010.
Besides his daughter Emily, he is survived by another daughter, Jessica Herzstein; a son, Robert; and two granddaughters.
In addition to Arnold & Porter, Mr. Herzstein practiced at the firms Shearman & Sterling and Miller & Chevalier and played prominent roles in a number of civic groups, including Partners for Democratic Change, the International Human Rights Law Group and the Appleseed Foundation.
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