Tar Heel Statesman

...once suggested that Ervin was a “tertium quid” redux, resembling those mavericks of the Federal period who consented to no party collar...

...As a young state legislator in 1925 he had played a key role in sparing North Carolina the embarrassment of an anti-evolution “monkey law...

...But he probably also would be pleased...

...What sense could the usual stereotypes make of that...

...was a fi gure of infi nite variety, seldom stale, as amusing as serious, as scholarly as witty...

...Chairman...

...In truth, Sam Ervin was a revenant from vanished ages of American statecraft, when the Constitution mattered more and stereotypes less...

...He approached constitutional issues with a literalism and zeal whose closest analogue is the more literate varieties of Biblical fundamentalism...

...I can’t remember whether I carried a sign, but I did join the chant...

...I marched in Ervin’s support with a small throng down Franklin Street...

...If you objected to them you could count on a friendly, measured letter to the editor in response...

...My native state of North Carolina has too seldom given a good account of itself in national politics...

...and the footnotes confi rm that the author has contracted this condescending illusion from a celebrated book by Prof...

...It has been my experience,” Ervin observed privately, “that the madam of a whorehouse is very seldom a virgin...

...How do you know that, Mr...

...His comment on the Poole Bill (as the Tar Heel variant was called) was that it “absolved the monkeys” of responsibility for human mischief...

...Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr...

...They were wrong in all respects...

...As a former state Supreme Court justice, Ervin was immediately recruited for the Senate’s belated and timid crackdown on its rogue demagogue, Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin...

...himself...

...The McCarthy censure work bracketed at one end a Senate career that ended with nice symmetry two decades later in his chairmanship of the Watergate committee...

...Whatever one thought of his causes, he played the great game of politics earnestly, and for keeps...

...John Ehrlichman, the powerful and cocky White House counselor, felt the edge of Ervin’s wit when he challenged the senator one day over “inherent” presidential powers...

...Karl Campbell ventures a homelier analogy, “the last of the Founding Fathers,” a label he traces to the columnist James J. Kilpatrick...

...On the other hand, he supported as militantly those personal liberties explicitly guaranteed by the Bill of Rights: strict separation of church and state, due process, speedy trial, reasonable bailment, and the like...

...There was a moment of stunned silence in the Senate caucus room, then an uproar of laughter and applause...

...But a signifi cant fl aw must be noted...

...Professor Campbell argues, correctly I believe, that Ervin’s labors as chairman of two important Senate subcommittees— on constitutional rights and on the separation of powers—were a rehearsal for the Watergate moment...

...To a signifi cant degree, the imagined puzzle lay not in the man or his views but in the shopworn media mindsets with which we struggle to confront political nonconformity...

...When in the spring of 1973 Ervin was enlisted as chairman of the Senate select committee on presidential campaign practices, soon universally known as the Watergate committee, Nixon’s White House henchmen breathed a sigh of relief...

...He was an “originalist” before originalism was cool, and that explained his often fi erce reaction to judge-made law: for instance, Supreme Court decisions such as Miranda and Mallory that expanded the procedural rights of accused criminals...

...Chafe is an able and diligent historian, but this now-canonical interpretation of the Greensboro example (and inferences from it regarding North Carolina as a whole) misconceives a civic ethos, and consequently that of Sam Ervin Jr...

...William Chafe about the Greensboro response to the challenges of the civil rights era: Civility and Civil Rights...

...One imagines that the senator, who retired soon after the Watergate hearings that made him an icon and who died (at age 88) in 1985, would chuckle at the conceit and defl ect the honor with a mountain story...

...It trivializes the give-and-take of political confl ict as, in essence, an exercise in the higher public relations...

...Edwin M. Yoder Jr., an editor and columnist in North Carolina and Washington for almost half-a-century, is the author, most recently, of a novel, Lions at Lamb House, about Sigmund Freud and Henry James...

...His closest look-alike in these matters was Justice Hugo Black, who in his latter years on the Supreme Court carried a tattered copy of the Constitution in his pocket and issued such delphic pronouncements as “no law [in the First Amendment’s prefatory clause] means no law...

...In any case, the executive excesses of the 1960s and ’70s set the stage for a whiggish reaction, and Sam Ervin was nothing if not a small-w whig, a determined apostle of legislative supremacy...

...If one grasped this essential distinction between the provisions of the Bill of Rights, and their occasionally fanciful expansion by judges, it was rarely diffi cult to guess where Ervin would come down...

...Someone called him “solicitor general for the legislative branch...

...Wasn’t this constitutional purist, who fretted over personal privacy and esoteric separation-of-powers issues, also among the obstructive foes of all civil rights bills and most measures of social reform...

...Ervin was not a partisan fi gure, but we know now that he didn’t buy the White House line that Nixon himself was uninvolved in the criminal follies...

...Ehrlichman demanded, aggressively jutting his chin...

...As an observer of the Sam Ervin saga from the perspective of North Carolina newspaper offi ces over almost two decades, I learned that when one differed with him (for instance, over civil rights bills), his views, however retrograde in appearance, were never mean, capricious, or irrational...

...This was the fi rst act in a quartercentury political show that made me a Sam Ervin addict...

...As a professor of mine remarked at the time, “Joe was fi nished when Sam hung those Tar Heel mountain stories on him...

...Because,” came the response, “I can understand the English language...

...What was too little appreciated in his hour of fame was that Ervin’s libertarianism had a long, colorful history...

...It was high political theater, and a transformative moment...

...But at bottom the theory is patronizing and misleading...

...The theory becomes a leitmotif in this book, constantly reiterated...

...The author has adopted the theory that, as an exemplar of North Carolina civility, Sam Ervin was erecting a fa?ade, prompted less by conviction than by the urge to preserve the state’s reputation for moderacy...

...Sam Ervin, Last of the Founding Fathers is a scholarly and readable book, and a plausible reading of this protean, colorful, and monumental fi gure...

...Like Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, Sam J. Ervin Jr...

...It is my mother tongue...

...That counterforce has faltered, of late, for want of any legislator of comparable stature and learning to sustain it...

...One day in a subcommittee hearing on the District crime bill, he admonished Attorney General John Mitchell, Nixon’s advance man, that it was hard enough to establish what happened in the past, let alone to predict the future...

...He was that, exactly...

...Few Americans who were alive and alert in 1973 can have forgotten the stranger-than-fiction phantasmagoria that was the beginning of the end of Richard Nixon’s presidency...

...He soon became the Watkins select committee’s fl oor spokesman and star quarterback in the censure showdown, and the result for McCarthy was fatal...

...Issues of executive overreach had festered and Ervin’s hearings on personal privacy (notably the Army’s irregular surveillance of private citizens) and the dodgy use of impoundment as an ideological weapon became the groundwork for a signifi cant counterattack...

...But with the 1954 appointment of a little-known jurist to the unexpired Senate term of Clyde R. Hoey, it hit the jackpot...

...Throughout his two Senate decades, Ervin was an enigma to many who heard the words but not the music...

...That creed made him a dogged foe of the Nixon administration’s experiments with personal liberty in the District of Columbia, such as the “preventive detention” of accused criminals...

...There is something in this, as in all academic theories...

...They thought they were up against a blowhard partisan fuddy-duddy...

...It gives me satisfaction to report, moreover, that my fi rst and only participation in a public demonstration was in a “Joe must go” rally in Chapel Hill, where I was then a sophomore...