What's Right.

Capers, Tapers, &c.

'W ell, I'm just a simple country lawyer . . ."

For Americans above a certain age, that one phrase can conjure up a season of political memories. Thirty years ago this summer, Sen. Sam Ervin took the gavel of a congressional committee to investigate the growing Watergate scandal. The committee's proceedings from May 17, 1973, until August 7, 1973, were the most-watched political drama of the 1970s. By some counts, as many as 85 percent of U.S. households tuned in to some portion of the hearings.

Then again, the hearings were almost impossible to avoid. Each of the three commercial networks took turns broadcasting five hours of committee coverage per day; PBS rebroadcast the footage each night. Ervin's cornpone accent -- Howard Baker's earnest performance of his role as inquisitorial sidekick -- the whisperings of committee counsel Sam Dash -- were as ubiquitous that summer as Archie Bunker's grimaces.

Americans understandably do not care to relive Watergate -- the 30th anniversary of the break-in at the Democratic National Committee on the night of June 17, 1972, received relatively little media attention. But the anniversary of the hearings deserves attention: Much more than the original burglary, the investigation marked a new epoch in American political life.

All these years later, Richard Nixon remains a demon figure in American history, the symbol of villainy and corruption. Yet the remarkable fact about him is that he did almost nothing that one or the other of his predecessors had not done before him.

Did he wiretap his political opponents? So almost certainly did Lyndon Johnson in 1964 and 1968.