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Why, so late in his career, has the Senate turned to Sam Ervin to carry its banner in so many battles? Reports TIME'S congressional correspondent Neil MacNeil: "Sam Ervin has been called 'the last of the founding fathers' —and in a way it is true. For more than a dozen years, he has chaired hearing after hearing on constitutional rights and the erosion of the separation of powers. Those hearings were conducted in all but empty committee rooms. This was his vineyard, and he worked it alone. Now the Congress has at long last taken alarm. It has decided that it needs a constitutionalist—a man of great legal knowledge and judicial temperament—and in discovering that fact, it has discovered Sam Ervin."
Ervin is no brashly partisan Democrat seeking publicity by challenging the Republican President. Basically a shy if mirthful man, he has spent 19 years in the Senate without attracting much national attention. His press conference last week was only the third one that he has called in all of those years. In many ways, despite his party affiliation, he is Nixon's kind of Senator. He is probably even more tightfisted and fiscally conservative than the President. In interpreting the Constitution, he fully meets Nixon's standard of a "strict constructionist." Nixon recently called him "a great constitutional lawyer." No one is more eager than Ervin to go along with a central theme of Nixon's second inaugural address: "We have lived too long with the consequences of attempting to gather all power and responsibility in Washington."
It is precisely because he feels that his beloved Constitution is being trampled upon by the President in an unprecedented power grab that Ervin is leading the effort in Congress to regain its rights. He considers the Nixon Administration "the most oppressive" that he has known, not only in its arrogance toward Congress but in its snooping on individuals, its extension of police powers and its harassing of newsmen. Ervin sees all such activity as violating the Constitution, which he calls "the finest thing to come out of the mind of man."
Thirst. Throughout Ervin's long career he has distrusted what he calls "the insatiable thirst for power of well-meaning men." As he sees it, "the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men of all ages who mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters. The Constitution was written primarily to keep the Government from being masters of the American people."
Self-effacing and good-natured, although never a backslapper, Ervin was chosen by Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield to head the select committee because, Mansfield explained: "Sam is the only man we could have picked on either side who would have the respect of the Senate as a whole." Moreover, Ervin does not now have—and never has had—higher political ambitions. It is ironic that liberals, in particular, see Ervin as a heroic figure. Not too many years ago they were gnashing their teeth at his skillful, legal arguments against civil rights laws.