Good morning, it’s Monday, May 17, 2021. Forty-eight years ago today, the American people were riveted by a spectacle that would result in the end of a presidency. With North Carolina Democrat Samuel J. Ervin Jr. presiding and Tennessee Republican Howard H. Baker Jr. serving as co-chairman, the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities commenced its much-anticipated public hearings. Sam Ervin’s record on race relations wouldn’t fully pass muster today: 76 years old at the time of the Watergate hearings, he was a product of his time in a segregated South. But Ervin had served his country nobly in World War I and had the combat citations and Purple Heart to prove it. He had been among the leaders in the 1954 Senate move to censure Joseph McCarthy.