Backstage with the Ervin Panel

The seven members of the Senate Select Committee on Campaign Activities are the permanent panelists of the country's most engrossing daytime show. But Chief Counsel Samuel Dash, Minority Counsel Fred Thompson and the unseen staff members working for them off-camera are the producers, directors, stage managers and prop men without whom the spectacle would not go on.

Backstage for the Ervin committee means the other side of the street. While the hearings take place in the Senate's colonnaded Caucus Room, across First Street the staff labors in quarters that resemble a hastily established World War II recruiting office. A huge workroom has been thrown together in the ground-floor auditorium of the Dirksen Office Building, with makeshift cubicles, stenographers' desks and photocopying machines scattered about. Newsmen and everyone else unconnected with the committee are barred from the room except for specific purposes.

No fewer than 65 staff members have been working long hours lining up witnesses, culling and correlating testimony, investigating leads, feeding questions to the Senators before the cameras and generally keeping the hearings running along smoothly. The staff consists of 15 lawyers and 6 investigators, as well as secretaries, stenographers and messengers. Most of them were hired by and are ultimately responsible to Chief Counsel Dash, a criminal lawyer turned professor who was picked by Ervin to be chief counsel. Early on, Dash divided the committee's franchise into three main areas of investigation: the Watergate break-in and its coverup, the other dirty campaign tricks of 1972 and illegal campaign funding. Accordingly, he set up three sections, each with a top lawyer in charge.

A large part of the staff's time has been consumed in identifying and screening potential witnesses. Although only 20 witnesses have appeared before the committee in the televised public hearings thus far, more than 100 others have been questioned informally or under oath behind closed doors, usually in an auditorium office or in Dash's or Thompson's office. The Senators rarely sit in on these preliminary sessions, either because of the press of other Senate business or because they know that a summary of what has been learned will be distributed to them later. Dash, 48, takes the lead in such questioning, with a large assist from Thompson, 30, a respected former Government prosecutor from Nashville who was placed on the committee by Vice Chairman Howard Baker, for whom he served as a campaign manager in 1972.

In prehearing questioning, Democrat Dash goes after the main threads of the conspiracy in classic prosecutor's fashion. Republican Thompson frequently explores lines of defense for the Administration. For a time, Thompson pursued the theory that one or more of the Watergate conspirators had been a double agent working for the Democrats--until he realized that the theory did not hold up.

When each closed-door interrogation is over, Dash works up his own summary of the witness's testimony for the guidance of committee members. In addition, he occasionally prepares memos giving biographical information, summaries of past statements and suggested questions. Thompson sometimes does his own resumes of prehearing testimony for the Republicans on the committee; these are then distributed to all members. But the Senators follow very much their own leads once the cameras start to roll. Aside from a planned order of questioning, usually based on seniority, there is almost no coordination between them. As a result, many questions are repeated, and others are ignored altogether.

Despite the number of leaks from the hearings, the committee staff has maintained impressive security. Scrap paper is shredded, typewriter ribbons are cut up, tapes are locked away for the night. Until three weeks ago, when all but one of the documents in the Dean collection were declassified by the committee, only Dash, Thompson and the seven Senators on the Ervin committee were allowed access to them, and they had to read the papers in the presence of a guard, who ensured that they took no notes.

There has been little partisan dissension among the staff, mostly because of the cooperative example set by Ervin and Baker. Though staff members are occasionally disappointed with the way a witness is questioned, and often make suggestions of their own, they all must finally defer to the Senators. Staff work is demanding. Senior lawyers interview prospective witnesses, and junior lawyers help out with such questioning when they are not doubling as investigators. Dash, Thompson and Deputy Counsel Rufus Edmisten, who doubles as Ervin's right-hand man on the staff, spend little time on the Washington social scene but find wherever they go that people are full of questions--which they must nearly always refuse to answer. Ervin has imposed no hard and fast gag rule, but, says Edmisten, "he expects us to act with discretion."

With the hearings now in their most crucial phase, the Ervin committee--set up by unanimous Senate vote last February--shows every sign of bursting its seams. Three weeks ago the Senate doubled the committee's budget to $1,000,000, and Dash has already said that its deadline of Feb. 28, 1974, may have to be extended.

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