Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 24, 1994 TAG: 9404240200
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: B8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
He almost put a Radford native on the U.S. Supreme Court.
And he thrust two other Roanokers into the harsh national spotlight of Watergate.
Perhaps more so than any other president, Nixon touched the lives - and careers - of political figures from Western Virginia.
Richard Poff was a 29-year-old lawyer from Radford when he was swept into Congress on the coattails of the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket in the presidential election of 1952 - the first time in this century that a Republican had represented the 6th District.
Poff soon found himself part of the House Republican leadership, meeting with then-Vice President Nixon on a weekly basis.
"He was always very intense about matters of state," remembers Poff, who held onto the congressional seat for two decades.
"He was terribly businesslike. He had very little time for other concerns. If he ever attended a play in Washington or went to the theater, I don't remember it."
Nixon may have been single-mindedly focused on politics, but he wasn't closed-minded. "I sometimes disagreed, violently, and he appreciated that," Poff says. "It never did offend him for someone to disagree."
In time, Poff and Nixon became friends, although Poff recalls a certain formality to their friendship.
To the folks back home, Poff was always "Dick." But not to Nixon. "He never called me `Dick,' or `Congressman.' It was always just `Richard.' I called him `Mr. President.' "
Yet the moment Poff remembers most came one time when Nixon let down his guard. The president was visiting the U.S. Capitol when he made an unannounced detour to stop by Poff's office. "One of my secretaries almost fainted," Poff recalls, when the president walked in. Nixon pulled up a chair and spent a good chunk of the afternoon talking politics.
Poff's friendship with Nixon might have won him a seat on the Supreme Court.
In 1971, when Nixon went hunting for a Southerner to put on the court as part of his "Southern strategy," Poff's name was on the White House's short list of candidates.
But Poff sent word that he didn't want to be considered - he later explained that he didn't want to go through the public ordeal of a confirmation hearing. Instead, a year later he resigned from Congress to accept a lower-profile seat on the Virginia Supreme Court.
The governor who appointed Poff was Linwood Holton, a Roanoke lawyer who had gained a reputation as Nixon's closest political ally in Virginia.
Considered washed up after his twin defeats in the 1960 presidential campaign and the 1962 California governor's race, Nixon sought to re-establish himself by stumping for local Republican candidates across the country.
In 1965, he came to Virginia to campaign on behalf of Holton's uphill race for governor. Holton lost that year, but the two men stayed in touch. Come the 1968 presidential campaign, Holton was Nixon's chief cheerleader in Virginia.
The following year, when Holton made a second try for the governorship, the new president returned the favor - and personally campaigned for Holton in the Old Dominion.
When Holton won, he not only became Virginia's first Republican governor since Reconstruction,he was living proof that Nixon's emphasis on expanding the GOP's toehold in what had been the Democrats' "Solid South" was working.
Ironically, the two Roanokers whose names - and careers - are most entwined with Nixon's are the ones who knew him the least.
Caldwell Butler, who succeeded Poff in the 6th District's congressional seat, was a freshman when the House Judiciary Committee on which he served had to confront the Watergate scandal - and take up the debate over impeachment of the president.
Another Roanoker, former commonwealth's attorney Sam Garrison, was the committee's deputy Republican counsel - and later its chief GOP counsel.
In time, both men put aside party loyalty and concluded that Nixon should be impeached.
"I said flat-out, I don't think there was room for doubt that for a time the president had been a member of a criminal conspiracy," Garrison recalls.
Garrison gave his unpleasant advice to fellow Republicans in private; Butler cast his vote for impeachment on national television - a decision that won him both widespread acclaim and enmity.
"I'm stuck with it," reminisces Butler, now practicing law in Roanoke. "I was in Congress 10 years. I felt I worked hard and did a good job, but this is the thing people recall."
Butler says he's content to have his name forever linked with Nixon's. "I came through feeling good. This was a constitutional crisis that validated the process. I'm not uncomfortable being associated with that."
Two decades after that "impeachment summer" of 1974, though, the intense emotions Nixon provoked still linger.
"He's got his proponents," Butler says. "There's a lot of 'em around that don't believe he should have been forced out of office. They don't forget."
They no longer bring it up, Butler says. Nevertheless, "you sense it. . . . There are still people around who feel it was an injustice."
But the real injustice, Butler believes, is the way the scandal that forced Nixon's resignation overshadows his foreign policy accomplishments.
"It'll be a long time before he's remembered as one of the great presidents and that's unfortunate," Butler says.
So how did Nixon let Watergate happen? What insights did Butler glean from his vantage point on the impeachment committee?
Twenty years later, he's still unsure. "It's a tragedy. We're still wondering just how it happened."
But Garrison - who's since switched sides and is now a leader in Roanoke's Democratic Party - thinks he has a clue.
"Nixon was often portrayed as friendless, as a loner," he says. "What I find interesting is that his downfall was precipitated by doing a rather ordinary human thing. He succumbed to the impulse to protect one of his friends."
After all, Garrison points out, there was never any credible evidence that Nixon knew in advance about the break-in at Democratic headquarters.
But one of his friends - John Mitchell, his re-election chairman - had known.
"It appeared more than any other single factor that Nixon's involvement in the cover-up was motivated by his desire to protect John Mitchell," Garrison says.
"That's not to suggest this motive should be applauded, but it just showed a side of Nixon that was rather ordinary. People take up for their friends even when they do wrong, and presidents can't do that."
by CNB