Once upon a time, Congress ceded the questioning at epic, televised hearings to adept questioners. In 1973, Sam Dash was enlisted from the Georgetown law faculty to be chief counsel for the Senate Watergate Committee. He was a model cross-examiner: methodical, measured and meticulous, scripting out the proceeding, as he recalled it, “like a detective story.” It was Dash who drew out Alexander Butterfield, a presidential aide, to acknowledge that President Nixon knew about the audiotaping system in the Oval Office.
Editor’s note: the taping system was revealed in response to questions posed by minority counsel Donald Sanders. The questions were suggested by John Dean’s testimony that he thought he was being taped in the Oval Office.
Minority Counsel Fred Thompson examined Mr. Butterfield in the public session.
Part of Dash’s repertoire was an embrace of technology. He and his aides summarized every relevant document they could find—correspondence, government report, newspaper article—and put the summaries on a mainframe computer at the Library of Congress that was searchable by word. They had created a forebear to Google. When Dash was cross-examining former Attorney General John Mitchell, he kept getting “Well, I don’t remember” as an answer. So Dash, in real-time, called the computer people, who found the evidence Mitchell knew more. Within 10 minutes, they’d brought a printout to Dash in the hearing room.
“Show it to the witness,” Dash commanded.
“Oh, well, yes, yes, I do remember,” the witness admitted.
I have described my own support role in the above events in Zelig and Wallowing in Watergate
The primary function that I and several others performed was to read deposition and public testimony, review documents and dictate into hand-held tape machines summaries of the reviewed materials.
Every night, a (huge) computer in the Library of Congress ran an updated and comprehensive printout of the summaries for use by the committee in cross-checking witness testimony and preparing for the examination of future witnesses.
The computer run took all night. It being 1973, the males were assigned to the all-night duty and the females were excused.
It was actually quite exciting traveling through tunnels from the bowels of the LOC to the Senate in the company of armed guards taking the printout back to the Committee.
The people that I worked with were mostly behind the scenes. We rarely got to attend the hearings and become reality stars of the day.
To my memory I attended the hearings on two occasions.
When John Dean’s prepared statement was the world’s most closely held secret, it was given in its entirety to me to summarize for the computer analysis. Being one of a handful of people who had the statement in advance was an incredible thrill.
And an early test of my ability to adhere to the duty of confidentiality.
As a reward, I was allowed to attend the hearing and sit behind the Committee during Mr. Dean’s reading of the statement. If you look closely at photos taken when he is sworn in, I swear that one of the long-hairs in the back is me.
The second occasion I will never forget. After lunch one day, a colleague and I were approached by a staff attorney named Marc Lackritz. Marc told us that we had done good work and should take in the afternoon hearing.
July 13, 1973
Alexander Butterfield.
The next day that colleague and I were taken off the computer-dictation gig and assigned to do the legal research in aid of the Committee’s efforts to subpoena the Nixon tapes.