Sam Dash, 79; Chief Counsel in Senate Panel’s Watergate Probe

Sam Dash, the former chief Watergate counsel who became a household name in the 1970s for his penetrating interrogations about President Nixon’s secret taping system, died Saturday of congestive heart failure, his family said.

Dash, who cultivated a reputation for independence and as an ardent advocate for legal ethics, was 79. He died early Saturday at the Washington Hospital Center, according to members of his family.

Dash had taught constitutional law and legal ethics at Georgetown University Law Center until January. After that, he “went to the hospital and never came back,” said son-in-law David Molyneaux.

As the lead lawyer on Sen. Sam Ervin’s Select Committee on Watergate, Dash became known across the country during the committee’s televised hearings.

During a pivotal moment in the 1973 proceedings, Dash pressed White House aide Alexander Butterfield over who knew about a secret taping system in the Oval Office.

“The president ... ,” Butterfield replied. The existence of the tapes led to Nixon’s resignation in August 1974.

A lifelong Democrat, Dash again made headlines in 1994 when he agreed to serve as ethics advisor to independent counsel Kenneth Starr in the Whitewater investigation of President Clinton.

But he resigned four years later, saying Starr “unlawfully intruded” by aggressively advocating that Clinton be impeached. Dash, in fact, had helped draft the independent counsel law that Congress passed as part of the post-Watergate reforms aimed at ensuring impartial investigations of certain activities in the executive branch.

“As a prosecutor, your job is to seek justice, not just to convict. Other lawyers feel this way too, but it is an absolute mission with me,” Dash said in explaining his criticism of Starr.

A lawyer for more than half a century, Dash had recently expressed concern about threats to individual freedoms that he believed were posed by the Bush administration’s fight against terrorism.

In a book on the 4th Amendment, scheduled to be released next month, Dash complains about “the Bush administration’s increasing intrusions on the privacy rights of American citizens in the post-Sept. 11 world,” according to Molyneaux, citing a quote on the book’s cover.

A native of Camden, N.J., Dash was an Army Air Forces officer during World War II and graduated from Harvard Law School.

He served as district attorney of Philadelphia in the 1950s and later turned to private law practice. In the 1970s, he helped U.S. Chief Justice Warren Burger devise the American Bar Assn.’s ethical standards for prosecutors and criminal defense lawyers.

Dash is survived by his wife, Sara, of Chevy Chase, Md.; and daughters Judi Dash of Beachwood, Ohio, and Rachel Dash of Charleston, W.Va.