From a New York Times story by David Leonhardt headlined “Affirmative Action’s Fate Hinges on Its Past”:

As Archibald Cox sat in a remote office at Harvard Law School in 1977, he made a fateful decision. Cox was the former Watergate prosecutor who had been hired to defend universities’ use of affirmative action before the Supreme Court, and he was searching for a winning argument. He decided that the solution might involve the idea of diversity.