Updated 2:07 p.m.
There’s a new home for a famous piece of Washington legal history: the original subpoena served on President Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal.
Rufus Edmisten, who as a Senate Watergate Committee staff attorney took the document to the White House, has donated that and other documents to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Wilson Special Collections Library, the university announced Tuesday.
Edmisten served the subpoena for Watergate tapes on July 23, 1973, when he was deputy chief counsel to the Watergate Committee chaired by Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina. He had worked for Ervin for 10 years at that point.
In a 1992 interview during a Watergate reunion, Edmisten described the encounter this way:
“I delivered the subpoena on Richard Nixon. Well the myth was that he wouldn’t take it from me. Well, frankly, I never saw him. They wouldn’t let me near him. … I got through about five doors. I gave it to Leonard Garment. He was one of his many counsels, and Professor Charles Alan Wright, and I also left him a Constitution. I said, ‘I think you need it.’ ”
In a phone interview today, Edmisten said he had no idea he had the document until recently, when his wife was going through an old box kept in the closet labeled "Washington Years Papers."
"I thought I had turned it in to the committee," Edmisten said. "My wife actually found it, and walked in and said, "Is this what I think it is?"
Edmisten said he determined the right place for the subpeona was with a collection of Sam Ervin's papers at the library.
Edmisten will mark the donation of his papers with a public talk at UNC on September 20. The library will display the subpoena from Edmisten’s papers as well as Nixon’s letter of refusal from Ervin’s papers.
Edmisten graduated from UNC in 1963 and later from George Washington University Law School. After his years on Ervin’s staff, he returned to North Carolina. He was elected the state’s attorney general in 1974 and was secretary of state from 1988 to 1996, and now is a partner at Edmisten, Webb & Moore in Raleigh.
Nixon's visit to China 40 years ago ‘changed the world’ and received universal acclaim. Yet he was the first president ever to resign in office. Was Watergate any worse or out of character with the actions of Presidents before and after? The recent doubts, about the veracity of the book and film “All the President’s Men” are not the only problems. We also now know that selected information pertaining to the Watergate arrests were kept from the public. Why the secrecy? If we are to get at the truth we must have answers to the following questions and an open mind:
Why were the culprits arrested at the THIRD attempt to break into Watergate? Some of the details are franky bizarre - at the first attempt the culprits ate at a table booked using a letter head of a company with one of Cubans as director; at the second attempt the culprits march in through the front door and signed the Watergate visitor’s book. Why did the $100 dollar bills found on the culprits have consecutive serial numbers? Why were Howard Hunt’s details in the address books of TWO of the four arrested Cubans? Was Watergate a setup with evidence pointing to the Nixon White House? What crucial information was leaked illegally by the member of the grand jury to Carl Bernstein? Once a meme that there was ‘wrong doing’ at the Nixon White House had taken root, only the very foolhardy would dare to question its premise. Why would Nixon pass the FEC Act if he was such a bad egg? Why would Nixon order the Watergate raid when he was already 26 points ahead of Senator McGovern?
Did Nixon resign to protect family bible to defend? Is there another possibility that has never been investigated or suspected? Why was the press out to hound and crucify him when other guilty presidents were ‘let off’?
Read about all these in ‘Watergate - The Political Assassination’, ISBN 9780956911940. Dors my hypothesis have any merit?
Nixon’s sacrificial resignation was to preserve the Freedom of the Press and to prevent the country from splitting. Read “The Six Crisis” to find out more about the man.
Posted by: Renechang | August 16, 2012 at 06:09 AM