Word: ervin
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While Saxbe is scathingly critical of Nixon's handling of the Watergate investigation, his views are not especially at variance with those of the White House. He has criticized the Ervin committee hearings for putting on an unnecessarily flamboyant show and charged that Cox "was more interested in a lawsuit" than in pursuing the Watergate investigation. "There are certain affairs of the President that neither Congress nor the courts can invade," says Saxbe. "There is a power to impeach the President, but it was not contemplated in the Constitution that the President can be horsed around the courts...
...bitter side effects of Watergate has been to reinforce people's distrust of all politicians. That distrust was hardly dampened last week when charges of corruption were raised against-of all people-one of the investigators. Edward J. Gurney, Republican member of the Ervin committee, acknowledged in a terse statement that the Justice Department was looking into allegations that he had received more than $300,000 in unreported contributions in 1971 and 1972, mostly from builders seeking influence with the Federal Housing Administration...
Quick to hop on the Watergate wagon, Columbia Records corralled the Senate select committee chairman to make a record for them called Senator Sam at Home. Result: a coup running over with homilies. Bloviating through 77 years of memories, Sam Ervin laces his bourbon with saccharin and recites his favorite lyrics-Grow Tall My Son and Through the Years. Moving to sterner stuff (our national anthem, the First Amendment and Rudyard Kipling's ode to the governing class: "If you can keep your head when all about you/ Are losing theirs"), Uncle Sam then opines that the King James...
Much of the Ervin committee testimony is used as the factual basis for a highly readable chronology, but without tedious reliance on long quotations. The writers hold to a minimum all of those cluttering qualifications that blurred the news reports as the affair originally unfolded. The crafty evasions of John Ehrlichman, the astounding forgetfulness of Bob Haldeman, the dogged denials of John Mitchell are generally tucked between parentheses. The authors clearly consider them nearly irrelevant and feel that the truth might be better served by not reading the parenthetical matter-as indeed it would...
...final chapter, picking up fragments of testimony and Ervin committee detail not covered in the earlier narrative, is rushed and superficial. Gambling, the authors even wrote that the conspiracy trial of John Mitchell and Maurice Stans opened in New York City; in fact it was postponed. Watergate is an unfinished story. This book, however, bears brisk witness to an important fact: it is far too early to forget or forgive. · Ed Magnuson