Good morning, it's Friday, May 17, the day the Black-Eyed Susan Stakes is run at Baltimore's historic Pimlico Race Course. If you're not a horseracing fan, the Black-Eyed Susan is comparable to the Kentucky Oaks – both races feature the best 3-year fillies in the country and are run on the days before the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness Stakes, two weeks apart.
This time of year, thoroughbred afficionados recall their favorite Preakness. Mine is the stirring 1989 race between Sunday Silence and Easy Goer. The story line that year had everything: Easy Goer was the regally bred colt who'd won everything in the East. Sunday Silence was the ungainly looking black horse with crooked back legs who raced in California and had nearly died twice before he turned 3 – once from a virus and the other time when his van flipped over.
He was sold for only $50,000 as a yearling and won only one race as a 2-year-old.
But Sunday Silence was a tough horse, as he showed in the 1989 Kentucky Derby, banging into horses at the start of the race and pulling away from Easy Goer in the stretch. This set up the Preakness, with the two Hall of Fame jockeys named Pat at the helm: Pat Valenzuela riding Sunday Silence and Pat Day aboard Easy Goer. Adding to the moment: The announcer for the 1989 Preakness was Trevor Denman, the greatest race-caller who ever lived.
If you never saw that amazing race, or have forgotten it, here's a video. I won't spoil the ending, but I will say that I had the exacta and the winner.
Those old enough to remember the 1973 Preakness, however, will tell you they still get chills watching replays of the great Secretariat pass the entire field on the backstretch like he was some kind of locomotive. But this is RealClearPolitics, not RealClearHorseRacing; it's also the day of the week that I provide quotations meant to be inspiring or educational. Today's pearls of wisdom come from Sen. Samuel J. Ervin, the North Carolina Democrat who presided over the televised Watergate hearings that helped end Richard Nixon's presidency. Those hearings began on this date in 1973, two days before Secretariat's Preakness.
Sam Ervin's legacy hasn't entirely survived our nation's latest reckoning on the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. He was a "state's rights" man at a time when Southern Democrats were still using the Constitution as a crutch to deny civil rights to black Americans. In my view, the establishment was too forgiving of Ervin then, and its judgment may be too harsh today. Some Southern Democrats who defended the status quo were simply racists; others showed a lack of vision and gumption.
Courage was not Sam Ervin's problem, and he had the Purple Heart from World War I to prove it. He also challenged Sen. Joe McCarthy only months after arriving in the Senate. And when it came to the Constitution, Ervin's relationship with that document wasn't fleeting or transactional: He was considered the Senate's most authoritative Constitutional scholar, which is why Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield tapped him to head the Senate Select Committee to Investigate Campaign Practices (then, and forever, known as the Senate Watergate Committee).
Americans who didn't know much about Ervin became mesmerized by his encyclopedic knowledge of the law and his folksy quips, delivered in a deep drawl.
He also matched wits, and bested, Nixon's most steely political operatives.
At one point in the hearing while the committee delved into the break-in of Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office, Ervin made a pointed observation to White House aide John Ehrlichman:
Ervin: But the foreign intelligence activities was not – had nothing to do with the ... the opinion of Ellsberg's psychiatrist about his intellectual or emotional or psychological state.
Ehrlichman: How do you know that, Mr. Chairman?
Ervin: Because I can understand the English language! It's my mother tongue!
The word "Ehrlich" in German means honest. But what emerged from Watergate was that Nixon and his team put other goals – loyalty, winning – ahead of honesty. This offended Sam Ervin, who pointed out at various times in his career that lying is a sin, and that he was not the first person to say so.
More than 40 years ago, and after he had retired, Ervin expounded on that idea in an interview with Henry Mitchell of the Washington Post. It sounds contemporary, and if you replace the word "Nixon" with any number of presidents, enduring.
"I don't think the truth was all that important to President Nixon … and he relied on executive privilege to keep the tapes fully under his control," he said. "Executive privilege was never designed to shield criminal behavior, however."
And that is our quote of the week.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.
