Gerhard Gesell

U.S. District Court Judge Gerhard A. Gesell, who presided over some of the most pivotal political cases of the 1970s and 1980s. Judge Gesell, who died in 1993, ruled against the Nixon administration’s effort to stop The Washington Post and The New York Times from publishing the Pentagon Papers about America’s involvement in Vietnam. He presided over several Watergate trials, ruling that President Richard M. Nixon’s office tape recordings were in the public domain because they had already been played in court, and that Nixon’s firing of Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox was illegal.