SAM DASH, the dogged Watergate Senate Committee’s chief counsel and scourge of Richard Nixon, effectively sealed the end of the Nixon presidency by unearthing the secret taping system in the Oval Office.
To the millions who tuned in to the televised Watergate hearings, he was the man in thick-rimmed spectacles seated immediately to the left of the committee chairman, Senator Sam Ervin, whispering in Ervin’s ear. His grilling of White House aides caused Nixon to remark that he would never agree to meet “that son-of-a-bitch Sam Dash”.
After long questioning of the White House aide Alexander Butterfield about the taping system, Dash asked him who in the White House knew about it. When Butterfield blurted out “The President”, there was an audible gasp as people realised that in hundreds of conversations relating to the Watergate scandal, Nixon had been bugging himself. A year later the President was forced to resign.
One of the aspects of Watergate that most shocked Dash was the so-called “Saturday night massacre”, towards the end of 1973, when Nixon sacked the Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox over his demands that Nixon hand over the tapes. This led to the resignation of both the Attorney-General and his deputy. Dash saw this as the ultimate obstruction of justice, that a President tried to annul a criminal investigation aimed at himself.
In 1974 Dash and Senator Ervin together proposed a new law, under which a special investigator would be appointed by the judiciary and no future president could control the investigation of himself or his aides. It was passed into law by Congress four years later.
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Dash was a first-generation immigrant, one of six children of poor Jewish Russian parents, and helped out with a paper round when he was only seven. He was born in 1925 in Campden, New Jersey, and brought up in Philadelphia.
He joined the US Army Air Force at 18 and was a lieutenant bombardier navigator in Italy during the Second World War. He received a law degree from Harvard in 1950, became a trial lawyer, held various teaching posts and became the Philadelphia district attorney, the youngest ever in a large American city.
His 53-year legal career included several important moments in American and world politics, and he was once described by the Watergate investigative journalist Bob Woodward as one of the “legendary self-important egos of Washington”.
In the 1990s Dash was involved in the impeachment of another President, when he became ethics counsellor to the independent prosecutor Kenneth Starr who was investigating the Whitewater affair and Bill Clinton’s relations with the White House intern Monica Lewinsky. He helped to persuade Lewinsky to testify about her sexual relations with the President, but fell out with Starr, charging him with exceeding his mandate and becoming an “aggressive advocate” of impeaching Clinton.
In 1972 he had been one of three lawyers sent by the International League for Human Rights to investigate Lord Widgery’s conduct of the Bloody Sunday inquiry in Northern Ireland. His report challenging Widgery’s conclusions was one of the things that persuaded Parliament to award compensation to the families of the dead and wounded. Twenty-five years later, it also influenced the decision to reopen the inquiry.
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In 1985, visiting South Africa to speak at a conference, he became the first American to interview Nelson Mandela in prison, and was involved in the mediation efforts with the authorities that eventually led to his release.
In an article in 1998 Dash said he wanted law students to be proud of their profession. “Learn to say no in situations where saying no can be difficult, where it could mean getting fired. Say no anyway, because it could lead you to greater opportunities,” he wrote.
Dash was a long-term advocate of privacy rights, and a book of his to be published later this month is entitled The Intruders: Unreasonable Searches and Seizures from King John to John Ashcroft.
Samuel Dash is survived by his wife, Sara, whom he married in 1947, and their two daughters.
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Samuel Dash, lawyer, was born on February 27, 1925. He died on May 29, 2004, aged 79.