Word: ervine
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...week the subpoenas and presidential refusals arced across Washington like shellfire. Watergate, for so long a kind of inchoate guerrilla war, had developed clear and momentous battle lines. Richard Nixon took his stand behind a barricade of Executive privilege. Neither Sam Ervin's Senate committee nor Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox would get the key White House tapes and documents they were demanding for their investigations of Watergate. At issue, the President declared, is "the independence of the three branches of our Government ... the very heart of our constitutional system." Sam Ervin had a different definition of the question: "Whether...
Quite beyond the specific constitutional issue, Nixon's tenure has increasingly been marked by an extraordinary assertion of presidential powers. John Ehrlichman told the Ervin committee that the President can do almost anything in the name of national security, including committing burglaries. John Mitchell testified blandly that he would have done anything to get Nixon reelected. Such arrogations were piled upon Nixon's massive impoundment of funds appropriated by Congress and upon his claims to the right to make war by fiat, and concealment of how he was conducting that war. It was not perhaps one-man rule...
...something to hide. For Nixon, this is the bitterest part of the struggle; no matter what high principles he invokes, the separation of powers argument will seem to many only a self-serving excuse to hide the truth. In one astonishingly disingenuous passage in a letter to Sam Ervin, Nixon wrote: "I personally listened to a number of [the tapes]. The tapes are entirely consistent with what I know to be the truth. However, as in any verbatim recording of informal conversations, they contain comments that persons with different perspectives and motivations would inevitably interpret in different ways." Snorted Ervin...
...Ervin committee first asked for presidential documents four weeks ago, and Nixon refused them. Then came White House Aide Alexander Butterfield's revelation that Nixon had equipped the White House with a taping system to record the President's telephone conversations and meetings. Some of those recordings, especially those involving John Ehrlichman, John Dean and John Mitchell, would clearly contain important Watergate evidence. The committee therefore sent yet another request to the President, asking him to yield not only written documents but the "relevant" tapes as well...
...business." He presented the committee's two subpoenas. Garment laboriously read the documents, then passed them to Wright, who also read them. Finally, as Edmisten and the others shook hands to go, Wright asked: "You don't happen to have one of those paperback Constitutions that Sam Ervin uses all the time, do you?" He was referring to the blue-covered Constitutions that Ervin passes out to constituents. Edmisten pulled a copy-out of his hip pocket and handed it over. Said Wright jokingly: "It's been alleged we need one around here...