TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/85/85capmil.4

Text File | 1992-09-25 | 3.9 KB | 74 lines

                P                                                              May 6, 1985

Not Quite Just a Country Lawyer

Samuel J. Ervin Jr.:  1896-1985


The Watergate ordeal cast up a score of minor and major
villains, from third-rate burglars to reprobate White House
movers and shakers. But for every two Watergate wrongdoers, the
affair also produced a Watergate hero. No one was more
celebrated or more fondly regarded than North Carolina's Sam
Ervin. Democratic chairman of the Senate Select Committee on
Presidential Campaign Activities. "We could wind this up pretty
soon if everyone would tell what he knows," drawled Ervin, as
the hearings got under way twelve years ago, "but if we continue
to play hide-and-seek, then it could take a while."  It did, and
as his committee unraveled cold-blooded conspiracies on live
television day after day, self-consciously Southern Senator Sam,
by turns puckish and preachy, helped reassure Americans that
there were still people in Washington with moral bearings
solidly fixed. He retired from politics soon afterward and
spent the past decade down home in Morganton, making forays out
to lecture and to film an American Express commercial. Ervin,
88, died in North Carolina last week of respiratory failure
brought on by a combination of ailments.

Born in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, Ervin was the
son of a relentlessly upright lawyer.  Young Sam was funny, and
popular. An upperclassman at the University of North Carolina
when Thomas Wolfe arrived at Chapel Hill, Ervin was the sort
Wolfe later wrote about, the BMOCs who "talked--always they
talked, under the trees, against the ivied walls, assembled in
their rooms...with a large, easy fluency about God, the Devil,
and philosophy, the girls, politics."

World War I suspended the blithe jabber. Ervin was wounded
twice during his 18 months in France, then earned a postwar
degree from Harvard Law School, forever beggaring his
self-description as "just a country lawyer."  But he did move
straight back home to marry his childhood sweetheart and, as a
state legislator, helped defeat a proposed ban on the teaching
of evolution. Said Ervin at the time: "The monkeys in the
jungle will be pleased to know that the North Carolina
legislature has absolved them from any responsibility for
humanity."  Despite his own robust Presbyterianism, he was an
absolute church-and-state separatist.

Ervin, a judge in North Carolina for 14 years, arrived on the
Hill in 1954. In his first major Senate speech, he castigated
the maverick Wisconsin Republican, Joseph McCarthy. Although
his civil libertarianism and antipathy to Richard Nixon would
again endear him to liberals in the 1970s, Ervin was profoundly
conservative. He was a diehard supporter of the Viet Nam War,
anti-ERA and an unswerving opponent of civil rights laws.
According to Ervin's strictly states- rights' reading of the
Constitution, the document ought to forbid federal civil rights
intervention, as well as the no-knock search warrants and
sweeping Executive privilege sought by Nixon.

Ervin's consistent conservatism made him acceptable to Senators
of both parties when the Watergate committee was created. The
country, eager for some displays of frankness and humanity, was
cheered as the commonsensical Claghorn scolded and probed
weaselly White House witnesses. His indignation provoked, his
jowls wagging, Ervin offered up biblical allusions and down-home
anecdotes, chortling and then fuming. "I think that Watergate
is the greatest tragedy this country has ever suffered," he
said. "I used to think that the Civil War was our country's
greatest tragedy, but I do remember some redeeming features in
the Civil War...some spirit of sacrifice and heroism displayed
on both sides. I see no redeeming features in Watergate."
None?  He was forgetting about the clear-sighted, right-minded,
good-hearted leadership of Senator Sam Ervin.

--By Kurt Anderson