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The Parade Before the Ervin Committee
Throughout much of the summer, the nation's attention shifted from courtroom to caucus room as the familiar Watergate names turned into unforgettable images on America's television screens. This was television's greatest contribution yet to public understanding of a historic and confusing event —and the Watergate intrigue in all its ramifications was surely one of the most complex and convoluted stories in American political history. More than all of the news accounts, more than the proceedings in Judge Sirica's courtroom, the Senate Watergate hearings dramatized the issues and personalities, permitting millions of Americans to make up their own minds about whom to believe and whom to doubt.
Some of the once faceless Nixon operatives ruefully admitted their own guilty roles in the several Watergate conspiracies. Others unconvincingly denied any participation by themselves or anyone at the White House. But only the relatively powerless John Dean, tainted but nevertheless courageous in his turncoat testimony, made grave accusations of the President's participation in the coverup. His chilling tale, conveyed in a lifeless baritone, was sharply denied by such far more influential and shrewd Nixon intimates as H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman and John Mitchell.
Nixon stood on his earlier claims that he had known nothing of the wiretapping in advance, never approved clemency for the defendants, was unaware of payoffs to them and played no part in the conspiracy to conceal. Then, dramatically, a means to break the testimonial impasse was revealed: Alexander Butterfield, a former White House aide (now head of the F.A.A.), told the Ervin committee that most of the President's White House meetings and telephone calls had been secretly recorded. The Senate committee and Prosecutor Cox promptly issued subpoenas for key tapes.
That brought Judge Sirica back on center stage and in an unfamiliar and challenging role. In 16 years on the federal bench, Sirica had handled a wide gamut of criminal trials and civil suits, including highly complex antitrust cases. But now he was being asked to rule on an unprecedented claim by the Executive Branch that a President is immune from subpoenas because the courts have no power to enforce any order against him; that only the impeachment process of Congress can touch him. Moreover, argued Nixon's legal consultant, University of Texas Law Professor Charles Alan Wright, Nixon's tapes were protected by the unwritten doctrine of Executive privilege. Only the President had the power to decide which of his documents were so privileged or which might also endanger national security if made public. At issue, contended Wright, was "nothing less than the continued existence of the presidency as a functioning institution."
Sirica did not agree. In an opinion praised by some legal scholars as unexpectedly erudite, he wrote that he was "extremely reluctant to