Word: dashes
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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...
More than three years after his national spotlight faded, Samuel Dash, the chief counsel for the Watergate Committee, has come out with his version of the story called, appropriately, Chief Counsel. Although subtitled "Inside the Ervin Committee--The Untold Story of Watergate," Chief Counsel actually reveals precious little new information about the break-in, the cover-up, the associated dirty tricks, or anything substantive about the process of the Senate committee's investigation. What the book does provide is a large chunk of new Watergate trivia; gossip--and often nothing more--about individual senators on the committee and Dash...
Most personal narratives have their heroes and villains, and Chief Counsel is no exception. The hero, of course, is Dash himself, although Committee Chairman Sam J. Ervin of North Carolina takes nearly equal billing. The villain is principally Senator Howard Baker, the Republican from Tennessee, who served as vice chairman. Another villain, interestingly, is Archibald Cox '34, Williston Professor of Law, with whom Dash tangled during his short-lived role as the Watergate special prosecutor. It soon becomes clear that anyone who impeded the investigation that Dash envisioned comes under fire in Chief Counsel, and this predictability of Dash...
...opening chapters, Dash portrays himself as a reluctant warrior: a mild-mannered law professor who when asked by Ervin to act merely as a legal consultant to the committee is certainly honored to serve. The "who, me?" modesty that comes with Dash's added responsibility is quickly replaced by self-confidence as he tells his wife, Sara, an often-referred-to figure, "'I think I can. I know I can,' I said with a sense of exhilaration."' Later in the book, Dash tells of an article in Rolling Stone that was critical of his investigation and quoted an unnamed staff...
...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...