Not Quite Just a Country Lawyer

By KURT ANDERSEN

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.