It was the summer of 1973, and one show on television had a death grip on the nation’s curiosity.
Democrats and Republicans alike were doing their best to get at the truth about the scandals that all fit under the umbrella known as Watergate.
Nine years after the Civil Rights Act passed Congress, Sam Ervin chaired the Senate hearings that were truly the beginning of the end for Richard Nixon. America fell in love with him for his smooth Southern smile that summer, but he downplayed his own role by calling himself just a “country lawyer.”
Ervin is a classic example of how great men can have major flaws. Ervin represented North Carolina in the Senate for 20 years, and he voted against every Civil Rights bill that came before Congress.
So did all the other senators from the old Confederacy with the exception of Ralph Yarborough, the last liberal senator from Texas.
Some of them were vicious racists, but Ervin wasn’t. His opposition to equal rights for African-Americans was based on his belief that the Founding Fathers never intended black people to have equal rights. That must also have left him conflicted about equal rights for women as well.
But he stood tall in the summer of ’73, back in the day when Democrats, Dixiecrats and Republicans could still work together for what was right. That all started changing in 1980, with Ronald Reagan, the Religious Right, Newt Gingrich and two generations of conservatives who saw winning as the only important thing.
America started suffering when we lost the Sam Ervins among us.