Video: 'The Final Report: Watergate (National Geographic)' (Feb. 7, 1973, at 15:32)

(Wednesday, February 7, 1973; during the Watergate scandal) — The U.S. Senate voted today, 70 to 0, to undertake a full?scale investigation of the Watergate bugging case and of reported efforts to sabotage the campaigns of Democratic Presidential candidates last spring.

Senator Sam J. Ervin Jr. introduced the resolution to set up a seven?man select committee to look into the extent of illegal, improper, or unethical activities in the campaign.

The inquiry will be by far the broadest yet into the bug$ing and alleged political, sabotage operations that have been linked by news reports to members of President Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign.

Although none of the Senate committee’s four Democratic and three Republican members have yet been named, it is certain that Ervin, a North Caroline Democrat, will be asked by the Senate Democratic leadership to act as chairman.

The only Republican Senators who, from their remarks on the floor, seemed eager to join the select committee were Howard H. Baker Jr. of Tennessee and Ted Stevens of Alaska.

Although all Republican Senators present today voted for the resolution, and although many of them proclaimed in the debate on the measure that they wanted to get to the bottom of the Watergate case, there were sometimes bitter charges, that Ervin and the Democrats were trying to the use the investigation for partisan political purposes.

The Republicans offered three amendments, all unsuccessful, to make their representation on the committee equal to that of the Democrats and to broaden the scope of the hearings to include the 1964 and 1968 Presidential elections.

Video: 'WATERGATE AFFAIR BBC DOKUMENTATION 1994'

However, Ervin offered to amend his resolution to increase the committee’s total membership from five Senators to seven. He also agreed to a request by Senator John G. Tower of Texas, chairman of the Senate Republican Policy Committee, to Include a provision giving the minority members the use of one?third of the committee’s professional staff.

The Ervin resolution directs the committee to examine not only all aspects of the Watergate bugging, including who planned and paid for it but also the extent of the sort of political sabotage activities that have been attributed to Donald H. Segretti, a young California lawyer with reputed White House connections.

Although Segretti appeared before the Federal grand jury that investigated the Watergate case, he has not been publicly connected to the break?in and bugging of the Democratic headquarters in Washington, for which two men have been convicted and five have pleaded guilty.

It has been reported, however, that he is under congressional subpoena, and one source said today that he would almost certainly be called before the Ervin committee.

The Senate hearings, for which no starting date has yet been set, will reach other questions left unanswered by the criminal trial, including whether any campaign?related funds were used for any illicit operations.

At one point in the debate today, Tower said that he feared “the evil that would result from setting a precedent here” by allowing the major party in the Senate to dominate a committee looking into activities connected to the opposing party.

But Ervin recited a long list of previous select and special committees of the Senate on which the majority party had been given greater representation, including that one that investigated the activities of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, Republican of Wisconsin, in the nineteen?fifties.

Ervin said that he would “dislike to be the chairman” of a committee that did not have the power “to make the decisions it has to make,” and he repeated his pledge of yesterday that, if chosen as its chairman, he would “act with the total neutrality of the impartial judge.”

The U.S. Senate voted 77-0 today to form a special committee to investigate the Watergate bugging incident and other allegations of GOP political espionage against Democrats in 1972.

to investigate a break-in at the Democratic National Headquarters in Washington’s Watergate complex