Sam Ervin

Sam Ervin (1896-1985), United States senator who became a national figure while presiding over the televised hearings of the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities when it was investigating the Watergate scandal in 1973. During the hearings, President Richard M. Nixon (1969-1974) was implicated in efforts to cover up White House involvement in the 1972 break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C.

Samuel James Ervin, Jr., was born in Morganton, North Carolina, and earned a bachelor's degree from the University of North Carolina in 1917. While serving as an infantryman in World War I (1914-1918), he was wounded twice and decorated with a Purple Heart. After earning a law degree from Harvard University in 1922, he returned to Morganton to practice law. He served three terms in the North Carolina state Assembly in the 1920s and early 1930s. He was a judge in a county court from 1935 to 1937 and in the North Carolina Supreme Court from 1948 to 1954. Ervin, a Democrat, served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1946 to 1947 and was named to replace a U.S. senator from North Carolina who died in office in 1954. In his first year in office, Ervin served on the Senate select committees that approved the censure of Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy (1947-1957). Ervin was reelected to the Senate three times, serving until his retirement in 1974.

In early 1973 Ervin agreed to preside over the hearings of the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities that was investigating the Watergate affair. His strong ethical convictions and expertise as a constitutional scholar made him highly effective in soliciting testimony. The committee was the forum for a number of revelations, including testimony by former presidential counsel John Dean that implicated Nixon in the Watergate cover-up and disclosed the existence of a White House 'enemies' list. Testimony by presidential aide Alexander Butterfield revealed the existence of a secret taping system in the White House that had recorded various conversations documenting Nixon administration involvement in the break-in and subsequent cover-up efforts. Additional revelations and later investigations further demonstrated that Nixon had been a party to the cover-up. Facing impeachment proceedings in the U.S. Congress, Nixon resigned from the presidency on August 9, 1974. In April 1996, after more than two decades of bitter court battles that continued beyond Nixon's death in 1994, attorneys for the estate of the former president agreed to a slow but steady release of more than 3000 hours of secret Nixon White House tapes that had been kept in the National Archives and never made available to the public.

Ervin retired from the Senate in late 1974 and returned to Morganton, North Carolina, to practice law and write The Whole Truth (1980) and Preserving the Constitution (1985). He died in Winston-Salem, North Carolina on April 23, 1985. He was 88 years old.