Word: dashing
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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...
...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...
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...
McCord, of course, is viewed throughout as one witness who started the avalanche of disclosures with his letter to Judge John J. Sirica and his subsequent testimony to the committee. With both Dean and McCord, Dash had to work slowly and cautiously, but because they finally cooperated, Dash treats them kindly in this book...