Watergate Committee Chief Counsel Samuel Dash Dies

Samuel Dash, 79, the chief counsel of the Senate Watergate Committee whose televised interrogation into the secret audiotaping system at the White House ultimately led to President Richard M. Nixon's resignation, died of multiple organ failure May 29 at Washington Hospital Center.

Mr. Dash spent months doggedly questioning Nixon administration officials before White House aide Alexander Butterfield testified in July 1973 that there was an extensive taping system that captured executive office discussions about the break-in at the Democratic national headquarters. Mr. Dash asked him who knew about it. Butterfield replied: "The president . . ." Nixon resigned a year later.

Mr. Dash's 53-year legal career touched some of the most important moments in American, and sometimes world, politics. He dramatically resigned in 1998 after four years as the ethics counselor to independent prosecutor Kenneth W. Starr, charging that Starr became an "aggressive advocate" of impeaching President Clinton. He said Starr exceeded the independent counsel's mandate, which was part of a statute that he helped draft.

As the first American allowed to interview the imprisoned Nelson Mandela, Mr. Dash wrote a magazine article about him and mediated discussions that helped free the future president of South Africa. He wrote a book that influenced Supreme Court decisions on electronic surveillance, and he advised governments on investigations into human rights cases in Northern Ireland, Puerto Rico and Chile.

But Mr. Dash probably will always be associated with the investigation that led to Nixon's resignation.

Mr. Dash was offered the Watergate committee job by Sen. Sam Ervin (D-N.C.), who promised him independence and the ability to hire his own staff. He became so well known as a result of the televised Watergate hearings that he often was mistaken for a senator, and he said he could not buy socks without clerks asking for his autograph. Opponents came to describe him as a prima donna.

It took months after Butterfield's revelation to get the Nixon tapes released, but it wasn't until 1981 that Mr. Dash dropped by the National Archives to listen to them.

"I didn't want to go over there just by myself," Mr. Dash told a Washington Post reporter. But when Georgetown University faculty colleagues went to listen to the tapes, he went along and said he was glad he had. "There's quite a difference between reading the cold print in the transcripts and actually hearing the voices and intonation -- the conspiratorial tone of voice."

It was a point of pride for Mr. Dash that, as a result of Watergate, all accredited law schools require a course in professional responsibility.

In the 1970s, he helped Chief Justice Warren E. Burger devise the American Bar Association's ethical standards for prosecutors and criminal defense lawyers.

While on the Starr commission, he helped persuade White House intern Monica Lewinsky to testify. But his relationship with Starr was thorny; Mr. Dash's liberal supporters had been shocked when he agreed to take on the job, and he threatened to quit five times before he finally did on Nov. 20, 1998.

It was his timing and style as much as the fact of his resignation that was dramatic; it came the day after Starr testified for 12 hours before the House Judiciary Committee, and it came in a stinging two-page letter that charged Starr with "abuse of your office" for exceeding his mandate to report to Congress any impeachable offenses he had discovered.