M. Caldwell Butler, a Key Vote Against Nixon

Mr. Butler in 1973 led a group of schoolchildren to hand Nixon a letter thanking him for ending the Vietnam War, and he and his wife had been the president’s guests in the White House family quarters. 

His party’s initial response to the investigation of a possible presidential cover-up of the break-in at the Democratic Party’s headquarters in the Watergate complex in June 1972 had been dismissive.

But by the steamy summer of 1974, mounting evidence — including secretly made tapes of Oval Office conversations acquired by subpoena — prompted seven Republicans and three conservative Southern Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee to waver in their support of Nixon. They self-effacingly called themselves “the unholy alliance.”

 From his seat on the committee, Mr. Butler on July 25, 1974, dramatically announced that he would vote for impeachment — a statement that many treated as a bellwether. “For years we Republicans have campaigned against corruption and misconduct,” he said. “But Watergate is our shame.”

Mary McGrory, the syndicated columnist, called Mr. Butler’s words “the single most fiery and liberating sentence spoken” during the Watergate investigations. “He was the first Republican to slash the comforting myth that somebody else, of unknown party origin, was to blame,” she wrote.

Most of Mr. Butler’s views during his 10 years in Congress mirrored those of his conservative constituency, and he fought to prohibit an extension of the Voting Rights Act on the ground that its restrictions were no longer needed in Virginia — a position the Supreme Court accepted this year. But he favored programs to help the poor obtain legal representation and a woman’s right to have an abortion, stands many considered liberal.

Manley Caldwell Butler, a gangly, quick-witted man, was born in Roanoke, Va., on June 2, 1925. He was descended from John Marshall, the Supreme Court justice, and served on the board of the John Marshall Foundation. One of his great-grandfathers was James Alexander Walker, a Virginian whom Stonewall Jackson, the Confederate general, promoted to brigadier general from his deathbed. 

In Congress, Mr. Butler helped win legislation restoring Gen. Robert E. Lee’s American citizenship, which Lee had lost when he joined the rebelling states. “If Robert E. Lee is not worthy of being a United States citizen, then who is?” Mr. Butler said in an interview with The New York Times.

I can think of many others, myself.

Mr. Butler’s caustic wit showed in a 1982 hearing of a House subcommittee looking into the legal corporation. He attacked President Ronald Reagan’s appointees to the corporation’s board for charging the government consulting fees.

“I’m a Republican and we bring in these Republicans to take charge of this corporation in an effort to reform it,” he said, “and it sounds an awful lot like the first thing they do was to go and put all four feet and a snout in the trough.”

Amen.