It’s interesting that we’ve brought up Graham and Hatch here.
I’m currently re-reading both All The President’s Men and the excellent (and nowhere near as famous) sequel, a book called The Final Days, which essentially picks up the Nixon story at the resignation of Haldeman and Ehrlichman in 1973 and runs through things to his resignation.
The big revelations in the Watergate scandal that happened outside the Post’s reporting happened in Sam Ervin’s Senate committee hearings. And so it’s worth revisiting what made the Ervin Committee so able to do such in-depth work.
First off, realize that Democrats had control of the Senate, so this 7-senator committee featured four Democrats and three Republicans. But…don’t think of them as split along party lines by conservatives and liberals.
Ervin, for one, was a conservative southern Democrat (from North Carolina), who is as complex an individual as modern history has ever produced. Sam loved his slow country drawl. He loved his folky expressions. And if you wanted to call Sam a racist, it’s hard to not say that he was one: he vigorously opposed the Brown v Board of Education decision by SCOTUS. He was in favor of immigration quotas. But…he was also a staunch defender of civil liberties and the language of his opposition to Brown and other civil rights decisions seems based largely on a mistrust of Federal Government as much as anything. Oh, and Sam’s slooooow drawl and bumpkin-like affectations? Yeah, Sam Ervin graduated from Harvard Law, passing the bar before he’d graduated.
Two other towering figures on the committee were…Republicans. One was a mainstream, old-school conservative, Howard Baker. Baker was a non-Goldwater Republican. He was one of those legit, small-government, laissez faire conservatives, sort of somewhere between GW Bush and Jack Kemp on the conservative spectrum. Baker had been a Nixon ally early on (in fact, Nixon asked Baker to accept a nomination to the Supreme Court), but Baker was always something of an iconoclast, a guy who put ideology above party and everything else. It made him popular in Tennessee and popular with colleagues, but probably blunted his chances of getting to the White House himself.
The other guy was Bernie Sanders before there was Bernie Sanders, a Republican named Lowell Weicker from Connecticut. Weicker was one of the last of a dying breed: the progressive Republican (one ranking of liberals and conservatives in the Senate in the late 1980s ranked Weicker as 20 points more liberal than the other Senator from Connecticut, Chris Dodd who was a Democrat). Weicker cut an imposing figure at 6’6" and in the committee hearings was notable for being the toughest questioner of White House employees and cabinet members. In fact, it was Weicker who first called on Nixon to resign.
So. That’s the historical comparison. It’ll be tough in the current climate for anything of real meaning to proceed on a political front, even as things seem to be racing along on a legal front with FBI investigations and Mueller’s special counsel workshop. With that said, should the Democrats wrest control of the House, things start to get a whole lot more interesting, and very fast.
