Monday, Aug. 27, 1973
Frying Fish with The Folks at Home
When the Watergate committee recessed a fortnight ago, Senator Sam Ervin served notice on the press that he wanted peace and quiet. "I'm going down to North Carolina," he said, "and do what all those moonshiners do when the revenuers come after 'em. If I see a reporter lurkin' around, I'm gonna shoot 'im." But after the 15th call from the press one morning of his vacation, he grumbled resignedly: "It makes me sorry I didn't go to Scotland."
At least his fellow citizens in Morgantown, N.C., tried to make his life easy. "We didn't even carry a story on his reaction to the Nixon speech," said J.D. Fitz, publisher of the Morgantown News-Herald. "We didn't want to bother him. He's the same as always, and we're the same as always. Most everyone here loved Senator Sam before all this television. They still do." Sam pays a daily visit to his office, sifts through the mail, then strolls down the street greeting friends and neighbors. One afternoon he mowed the lawn in front of his one-story red brick home. Townsfolk passing by called out: "Hi, Senator Sam." Mopping his animated brow, Sam shouted back: "Hi, Harry." "Hi, Miz Huffman."
Facing re-election next year, Senator Sam has not decided whether or not to make the race. One factor in his decision will be the reaction to his Watergate performance. Favorable mail has declined from a peak of 7 to 1, to 3 to 1. (Said one critic: "Working people can't see where he's doing anything for the state by going on television and quoting the Bible.") The Senator spends his evenings spreading the wisdom of the Bible and the U.S. Constitution. He addressed some 3,000 bipartisan picnickers at the Transylvania County Trout Festival. "It's great to escape from the confusion of Washington," he said, "where some people in high places don't look where they are going and some don't go where they are looking."
Then he autographed Senator Sam T shirts. "Most of the people who came up to me say they are in favor of the investigation," he reports. "Those who are opposed write letters to the editor. It was a very nice fish fry."
Howard Baker is relaxing with his family in his home town of Huntsville, Tenn. (pop. 337), deep in the heart of Appalachia. He likes to play tennis and ride a trail bike around the mountains in the company of his 17-year-old daughter Cynthia. An avid photographer, he has been known to interrupt a tennis game to photograph a flower or a plant that has caught his eye. Last week even a weed captivated him. "The sun had caught the weed just right," a friend explained. "He'd been watching for several days to get the proper shot."
This week Baker is starting to test the political waters, which he found warm and congenial when he traveled around the state during the July 4 recess. Though most people continue to greet him affectionately, he hears of a possible cooling off. Some Tennessee liberals complain that he handled the White House higher-ups too gingerly.
"I have heard a lot of people say that he wasn't as tough on the big boys as he was on the spear carriers," says State Democratic Chairman James Sasser.
Republican Governor Winfield Dunn, on the other hand, praises Baker: "He has conducted himself with dignity in a difficult situation." Baker's first stop will be the mountains of East Tennessee, a G.O.P. stronghold since the Civil War. "I'm going there first," he says, "because that's where Nixon is God. If something's happening there, then ..."
Every morning at 4:30, Herman Talmadge rises from his bed, dons his Marine Corps coveralls and a pair of paratrooper boots, slaps on a hunting cap and goes out to fish in the pond on his 2,100-acre farm in Lovejoy, Ga. As the dawn begins to streak the sky, he returns to his antebellum home, so characteristically Southern that it was used as a backdrop in Gone With the Wind. Invigorated by his stroll, he whips up a breakfast of melon, ham and eggs.
Before most politicians have opened their eyes, he is on his way to his first appointment of the day in Atlanta. Up for re-election next year, he is busily mending fences, which are scarcely in a state of disrepair. Talmadge admits that parts of the hearings were "just as interesting as last week's funny papers," but he denies that the committee is "out to get anyone." Says he: "We're just trying to find out if a crime was committed in the White House."
Talmadge, who has been getting up to 1,200 Watergate letters a day (almost ten times the normal rate), has never been more popular in his home state.
"Hummon is the only one of those clowns who knows how to get at the truth," said a young Atlanta executive, who did not have a good word for any of the other Watergate interrogators.
Hunched over a mug of beer, an advertising man declared: "Hummon isn't the kind to get all puffed up. Why should he? He doesn't need his ego massaged like the rest of those Senators."
-Edward Gurney has been trying harder than any of his colleagues to escape Watergate. Washington has become depressing to him because it is "Watergate, Watergate, Watergate and nothing else." Much of his mail, says Gurney, criticizes the investigation for "hurting the country and the economy and the Government. They say we ought to shut the thing down. I've been saying that myself for some time."
Since reaching his home in Winter Park, Fla., Gurney has made an effort to rest his bad back, injured in World War II when he served as a tank commander in Germany. But more people than ever before approach him on the street to tell him their views on Watergate. This week he plans to seek a more remote refuge in some Caribbean island, where he intends neither to answer a telephone nor to read a newspaper. "I want to find me a tennis racket and savagely attack a tennis ball to get Watergate out of my system."
When reporters have not been bothering Senator Lowell Weicker, he has been writing about them. Before he was involved in Watergate, he started a book on the need for a shield law for the press.
All proceeds, he says, will be turned over to the Bicentennial Commission.
"Otherwise, people would say I was taking advantage of all that free publicity on television."
Last week he managed to avoid the press for half a day while he chatted with four of the convicted Watergate conspirators in the federal prison at Danbury. "I cannot say I am enthralled with the equities of the situation," he said. "Here are four men in jail, two of whom have a great deal of trouble speaking English, while hundreds go free." Could he offer them any help?
"That is what I am trying to figure out."
A liberal Republican, Weicker has been harshly criticized by conservatives for his vigorous questioning of White House aides. One out of three letters he receives tells him, in so many words, to resign from the party. Just before Weicker prepared to leave for four days of sun and tennis in Sarasota, Fla. ("I have no modesty on the tennis courts"), he was assailed by a big Republican fund raiser, Gordon Reed. Replied Weicker: "One of the reasons I am sitting on that panel is so [Reed] can continue to make comments like that without having to worry about retribution."
Returning home from his difficulties on the Watergate committee, Joseph Montoya found New Mexicans surprisingly sympathetic about criticism of his performance. It was not his fault, they said, that the press derided him for asking repetitive or irrelevant questions. He was in fast company, and it was hard to keep up under the TV pressure. On home turf, he is noted for his oratory in both Spanish or English.
As he toured small communities in the northern part of the state, Montoya was besieged for autographs. When he visited a new track called Santa Fe Downs, a race was named in his honor.
Constituents have been pouring into his offices in Albuquerque and Santa Fe.
Says he: "This instant recognition is a new experience."
The Watergate hearings were not broadcast live in Hawaii; a condensed 90-minute version was put on after the 10 p.m. news. Even so, Daniel Inouye became a local hero, as he discovered when he returned home. "It gets to be a little embarrassing," says he. Of the 2,000 letters he receives each day, 85% support the hearings in general and his performance in particular. Attorney John J. Wilson could not have done him a bigger favor than to call him a "little Jap." Since one-third of Hawaii's population is of Japanese origin, the state was indignant. There was even a boomlet for Inouye for President. A reader wrote the Honolulu Advertiser: "Inouye certainly has everything a President should have except a right arm."
Despite a steady schedule of speeches, dinners and handshakes, Inouye took time out to celebrate his parents' 50th wedding anniversary. As an almost obligatory ritual, he managed to get to the beach, where he acquired a Hawaiian suntan. He returns to the mainland this week. "For the first time in a long while," he says, "people are able to better understand government. Watergate is a wonderful educational process, but a painful one."
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