Government official and Watergate Scandal figure. A member of the Nixon and Reagan presidential administrations, he was the 1st and 5th administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. His education at Princeton University was interrupted by a two-year-stint in the U.S. Army, after which he resumed his studies and graduated cum laude in 1957. He then earned a law degree from Harvard University in 1960. He worked as a lawyer and Indiana deputy attorney general before he was elected to the Indiana House of Representatives in 1966. He unsuccessfully vied for the U.S. Senate as a Republican in 1968, but soon after joined the civil division of the Nixon administration's Justice Department. In 1970, after President Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency to enforce the Clean Air Act, he appointed Ruckelshaus as the EPA's inaugural administrator. Viewed as a strong and effective leader, under his tenure the EPA banned the harmful pesticide DDT and enacted policies that led to stricter car emissions regulations and local level anti-pollution legislation. Ruckelshaus left the EPA in April 1973 and served as acting director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation before he became U.S. deputy attorney general that July. The Nixon White House was embroiled in the Watergate Scandal at the time, and Ruckelshaus became a central figure in one of its seminal moments. After Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox requested unrestricted access to Oval Office tape recordings from the period around the Watergate Complex burglary, President Nixon declined to cooperate and ordered Cox's firing. Attorney General Elliot Richardson refused to comply with the president's request and resigned. That same evening, Chief of Staff Alexander Haig went down the chain of command and telephoned Deputy AG Ruckelshaus to fire Cox. Ruckelshaus also refused the order and resigned. These near simultaneous departures on Saturday, October 20, 1973, comprised what was dubbed "the Saturday Night Massacre." Ruckelshaus returned to government work a decade later, when President Ronald Reagan asked him to once again lead the EPA. The agency had been significantly weakened by its fourth administrator, Anne Gorsuch Burford, and Ruckelshaus restored its image and power. He left the EPA again in 1985. Three decades later, in November 2015, President Barack Obama awarded Ruckelshaus the Presidential Medal of Freedom -- the United States' highest civilian honor.