THE jowls jiggled. The eyebrows rolled up and down in waves. The forehead seemed seized by spasms. Yet the lips continuously courted a smile, suggesting an inner bemusement. The words tumbled out disarmingly, softened by the gentle Southern tones and the folksy idiom. But they conveyed a sense of moral outrage.
"Divine right went out with the American Revolution and doesn't belong to White House aides," the speaker said. "What meat do they eat that makes them grow so great? I am not willing to elevate them to a position above the great mass of the American people. I don't think we have any such thing as royalty or nobility that exempts them. I'm not going to let anybody come down at night like Nicodemus* and whisper something in my ear that no one else can hear. That is not Executive privilege. It is Executive poppycock."
With those words, typically skittering from Shakespeare to the Bible, North Carolina's Democratic Senator Sam J. Ervin Jr. was stepping up the rapidly accelerating tempo in a showdown over secrecy between the U.S. Senate and President Nixon. If the President will not allow his aides to testify publicly and under oath before the Select Senate Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, Ervin vows, he will seek to have them arrested.
That threat is not an idle one. Ervin, 76, is chairman of the select committee that is investigating attempts to interfere with last year's presidential campaign. That includes the break-in and wiretapping of Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington's Watergate complex last June. In defying Sam Ervin on this matter, the President is in collision with the most formidable Senator that this proud body could choose to lead its cause. Charming yet fearless, Ervin is the Senate's foremost authority on the Constitution, a former state supreme court justice and one of the few legislators who prefer the hard work of personal research in quiet libraries to the hurly-burly of cloakroom arm-twisting. He has, in a sense, spent much of his career preparing for precisely this kind of fight.
The Ervin committee, which has full subpoena powers, also has solid legal grounds for contending that White House officials cannot spurn any such subpoenas. Since he hopes to begin televised hearings in about two weeks, the issue is reaching a climax. It could easily lead to the most fascinating Capitol Hill TV drama since the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954.
Mess. The stakes go far beyond whatever may be discovered about Watergate. Already, the adverse implications of that affair have undermined the credibility of Richard Nixon as a leader devoted to rigid standards of old-fashioned morality, to a stern and equal application of law, to an open and accountable Administration. Until the Watergate mess is cleared up, Nixon's closest political and official associates —and the President himself—will be operating under the handicap of a widespread and bipartisan suspicion that they have something sinister to hide.