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Part of Nixon's strategy is to deny any hope of that prayer's being answered. He invited Speaker of the House Carl Albert to breakfast with him at the White House and declared flatly: "I'm not going to resign. I'm going to serve out my term." In his chat with Rhodes, the President reported what Senator Barry Gold water had told him: "Barry was in here the other day and he said to me, 'Resignation? Anybody who had the guts to support me in 1964 has more guts than to resign from this job.' "
Adding that message to those from the voters, the House has no choice but reluctantly, warily to continue to move down the impeachment road. It is a dangerous road not only for Congressmen but for the nation as well. Whatever the outcome for Nixon, millions of Americans are going to be at the very least dissatisfied and unhappy. And if the process is not seen to be orderly, just and reasonably nonpartisan, the effect could divide the nation and embitter U.S. politics for years to come.
The man who is charged with guaranteeing the probity of the impeachment steps in the House is hardly a household name. Congressman Tip O'Neill, the majority leader, has always preferred to work behind the scenes during his 21 years on the Hill. Although he is now beginning to play more of a public role in this affair, O'Neill intends to continue to do most of his work out of sight in the weeks ahead.
How the question of impeaching the President reaches the floor of the House this session, when, in what form and with what support, are all his duties. They are the sort best executed in the back offices and cloakrooms of the House, where the bargains are struck, the power sharded and melded, where persuasion can take root. It is a process that O'Neill knows well. "I have an ability to read the sense of the House," he says frankly. "I've never had a problem that I could not put the thing together."
O'Neill is a gregarious, backslapping, poker-playing Boston Irish politician out of a renowned tradition (see box), a great, shaggy bear of a man (6 ft. 2 in., 268 lbs.) who is equally at home bellowing Irish ditties or talking history with Harvard professors.
Bone and Steel. O'Neill's role as the political architect of what he hopes to keep an essentially unpolitical effort is an odd one. On any other issue, his job as party floor leader is to be the cutting edge of the Democratic program in the House. But he is keenly aware that the validity of the impeachment process would be destroyed by partisanship, by permitting Nixon's charge that it is a Democratic effort to undo the Nixon mandate of 1972 to become true—or even seem to be true. He is determined that the issue of Nixon's guilt or innocence of presidential wrongdoing shall, so far as possible, be the only issue.
Though he has said that Nixon should resign, he insists that he has not made up his mind on impeachment. Says he: "I'm still taking the position that I'm a grand juror. I want the Judiciary Committee to report, and then I'll study the report and make my own decision. This is a matter for every man's conscience. I'd never try to persuade anybody to vote one way or the other on this. The best interest of the country must come first."