Word: ervin
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Nixon seemed to have one advantage in the tumultuous tapes controversy. Surprisingly, he had been able, only hours before the appeals-court order became effective, to persuade two of the Senate's most prestigious Watergate investigators, Senate Select Committee Chairman Sam Ervin and the committee's Republican vice chairman, Howard Baker, to go along with his scheme. But both men insisted that their concurrence was narrowly based on the committee's interest in getting any evidence at all of what the tapes contain and was meant to be totally unrelated to the court struggle...
...Ervin, moreover, protested that he had been misled into believing that the committee would get full transcripts of the tapes, not edited summaries. The White House placated him by assuring him that he would get verbatim transcripts, though that was not what Nixon announced. It was all very confusing, and just how the full membership of the seven-man committee would regard the plan in view of the upheaval on the criminal side of the Watergate investigation was not yet clear...
...what is on the tapes, indicated some reservations. He insisted that he had never been told that Cox was so adamantly opposed to the scheme or that it would have any devastating effects on the criminal prosecution. Stennis had in fact agreed to audit the tapes only after Ervin and Baker had agreed to the plan. There were strong signs that Nixon had craftily attempted to use the three Senators in order to achieve his priority goal: to frustrate judicial attempts to pry loose those tapes...
...more times by Haig and Buzhardt. But he later said that he had not been told that Cox was objecting to the entire plan; he knew only that Cox had not yet accepted it. Stennis insisted that he would not agree either unless the Senate Watergate committee's Ervin and Baker also approved. Since the Ervin committee's suit for the tapes had been thrown out of court by Sirica (on the narrow ground that the committee had not demonstrated a legal standing to bring the suit), Stennis thought the Nixon offer might be the best the Senate...
DOWN YOUR HEAD, SAM ERVIN, and adds the enticing puff: "How the chairman of the Watergate Committee was lured, not by a White House ploy but by his own ego, into buffoonery." The trivial incident merely involves Ervin being snookered by show-biz types into making à commercial recording of his-favorite quotations and anecdotes à la the late Senator Everett Dirksen. Whatever the wisdom of Ervin's performance, it hardly seems to rate the breathless treatment New Times gives...