Word: counseled
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Throughout most of Chief Counsel, Dash's principal adversary seems not to be Nixon or the White House, but Baker. In essence, Dash accuses Baker of serving as a tool of the White House while trying to maintain a facade of non-partisanship and professing a desire to get to the truth. Baker, he says, wanted to keep the public hearings short and start them early, before Dash felt ready to go before the television cameras with his evidence. Dash also suspects that Baker was behind Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott's move to postpone John Dean's testimony...
...that Dash has to say about Baker is bad, however. When the members of the committee, along with Dash and other counsel, gathered in Ervin's small, dark paneled Capitol office to await a phone call from the president, the atmosphere was tense. Ervin and Baker, says Dash, traded country-lawyer stories to entertain the others. When Talmadge jokingly asked if they should all stand up when the phone rang, Baker betrayed a slightly different character in his reply. "I suppose we should, and then all sing 'Bail to the Chief,'" Baker said...
Dean and James W. McCord become two heroes in Chief Counsel, apparently because they cooperated with Dash and provided evidence crucial to the success of the hearings. Dean, for example, talked secretly to Senator Lowell Weicker of Connecticut and persuaded him that his testimony was explosive, thereby pushing Weicker into voting with the Democrats to grant Dean immunity from prosecution. Dash needed Weicker's vote to form a two-thirds majority on that question and others, so the chief counsel was grateful to Dean for his testimony and his political astuteness...
More than anything else, the issue of the tapes illustrates the irony that pervades the last few chapters of Chief Counsel. On the whole, the latter half of the book becomes more interesting as Dash describes the witness' actual testimony before the committee, which still stands as the most exciting part of the affair. But despite its interest, most of the material is not new. What is new, and a bit touching, is the committee staff's feeling of impotence during the summer of 1974. By then. the House impeachment hearings had its turn on television and the House members...
...Chief Counsel suffers mainly from Dash's perspective. While the chief counsel was on top of most of the investigation, Dash's personal narrative shows that he wasn't intimately involved in all of it. Although his descriptions of the early interviews with McCord, Dean and the committee members are interesting, Dash can't tell us what the first Butterfield interview was like because he simply wasn't there...