Word: ervin
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Backstage for the Ervin committee means the other side of the street. While the hearings take place in the Senate's colonnaded Caucus Room, across First Street the staff labors in quarters that resemble a hastily established World War II recruiting office. A huge workroom has been thrown together in the ground-floor auditorium of the Dirksen Office Building, with makeshift cubicles, stenographers' desks and photocopying machines scattered about. Newsmen and everyone else unconnected with the committee are barred from the room except for specific purposes...
...cameras and generally keeping the hearings running along smoothly. The staff consists of 15 lawyers and 6 investigators, as well as secretaries, stenographers and messengers. Most of them were hired by and are ultimately responsible to Chief Counsel Dash, a criminal lawyer turned professor who was picked by Ervin to be chief counsel. Early on, Dash divided the committee's franchise into three main areas of investigation: the Watergate break-in and its coverup, the other dirty campaign tricks of 1972 and illegal campaign funding. Accordingly, he set up three sections, each with a top lawyer in charge...
...maintained impressive security. Scrap paper is shredded, typewriter ribbons are cut up, tapes are locked away for the night. Until three weeks ago, when all but one of the documents in the Dean collection were declassified by the committee, only Dash, Thompson and the seven Senators on the Ervin committee were allowed access to them, and they had to read the papers in the presence of a guard, who ensured that they took no notes...
There has been little partisan dissension among the staff, mostly because of the cooperative example set by Ervin and Baker. Though staff members are occasionally disappointed with the way a witness is questioned, and often make suggestions of their own, they all must finally defer to the Senators. Staff work is demanding. Senior lawyers interview prospective witnesses, and junior lawyers help out with such questioning when they are not doubling as investigators. Dash, Thompson and Deputy Counsel Rufus Edmisten, who doubles as Ervin's right-hand man on the staff, spend little time on the Washington social scene...
With the hearings now in their most crucial phase, the Ervin committee-set up by unanimous Senate vote last February-shows every sign of bursting its seams. Three weeks ago the Senate doubled the committee's budget to $1,000,000, and Dash has already said that its deadline of Feb. 28, 1974, may have to be extended...