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To check on the mood of the reassembling Congressmen, O'Neill was prowling the floor, the Speaker's lobby. cloakrooms, back offices, even the gym.
In all, he talked to more than 200 of the 431 Representatives. He detected that some Republicans who had been considering impeachment before the holidays were drawing back. "Their leaders are talking to them about their sense of loyalty," he said.
On the other hand, O'Neill's sensitive antenna picked up a slight change in attitude by some Southerners, who had formed a solid bloc against impeachment before the holidays. The main cause apparently was the call for the President's resignation two weeks ago by Arkansas' Wilbur Mills, who is not only one of the most powerful men on the Hill but also the chairman of the committee that is examining Nixon's tax returns. Reports O'Neill: "The Southerners came back wanting to see the evidence. If the evidence comes out that the President has lied or obstructed justice, that's going to solve the whole thing."
History Repeated? O'Neill also believes that more and more Republicans, caught in the crosscurrents of the impeachment process, will in the end go along with the recommendations of the Judiciary Committee—provided that they are fairly drawn on the basis of available evidence. The Republicans could then argue that they were only doing the honorable and intelligent thing: endorsing the views of the men and women who had studied the issue the hardest and turning the matter over to the Senate for final judgment as the Constitution provides. On quite another level, they could also argue that not to vote impeachment would play into the hands of those Democrats who would like to see the Republican Party still snarled in Nixon's problems come the November elections. Predicts O'Neill: "There's going to have to be an awful lot of arm twisting to hold them in line."
At his last estimate, O'Neill calculated that some 50 of the 188 Republicans were leaning toward impeachment, a solid start toward gaining the kind of bipartisan support that the House leadership has been hoping to achieve should impeachment seem warranted. Holding these and winning over others may well depend as much upon how the evidence is handled by the Democrats as the evidence itself. And O'Neill, as he well knows, cannot afford to make a mistake in the days ahead. Privately, he believes that in the end the process will not run full course, that at some point Nixon will "step aside for the good of country." But perhaps, barring new evidence, only when the President recognizes that the process otherwise will indeed run its full course.
The day of Gerald Ford's swearing in as Vice President, O'Neill was stopped by a friend in mid-dash to the ceremony. Asked why the urgency, O'Neill replied: "This is a historic event. The founding fathers never had this in mind. You may not see it happen again —for four or five months."