Watching her patient come out of a coma, the nurse asked a traditional question: "Do you know where you are?" Congressman Wayne Hays nodded. "Where?" she persisted. Slowly, stretching out the word, he replied: "Barnes ... ville." Hays had survived an excessive dose of sleeping pills, mind undamaged, and would keep his place at the center of a congressional scandal that grew still more lurid last week.
Whether Hays had purposefully tried to end his life—and his agony —was not immediately clear. Richard Phillips, Hays' family physician and friend, had prescribed Dalmane, a standard "hypnotic agent" or soporific, because the besieged Congressman was understandably tense. Hays also had been eating little and was suffering from diverticulitis, an intestinal ailment.
His Ohio constituents had just renominated him for a 15th House term —the margin over a feeble opponent was much smaller than usual—but Hays' Democratic colleagues gave him a resounding vote of no confidence. They stripped him permanently of the chairmanship of his party's Congressional Campaign Committee, and were ready to dislodge him from his other place of power, the House Administration Committee.
Suicide Talk. After swallowing that defeat, Hays returned to his lavishly furnished farmhouse in Belmont County, Ohio, late Wednesday night and took an undetermined amount of Dalmane. The next morning his wife Pat could not rouse him. He was rushed to an intensive care unit by ambulance. At first, Phillips insisted that the weakened Hays, who is 65, had merely overreacted to a Dalmane pill. After the patient was out of danger, the doctor had another reading: "There is no question that he overdosed, but to say whether it was accidental or purposeful at this time would be pure speculation." Associates both in Ohio and on Capitol Hill said that Hays had been despondent. His wife's cold anger over his hanky-panky particularly shook him. He talked about committing suicide if his legal and political troubles worsened.
Worsen they did. The ripples of Elizabeth Ray's profitable true-confessions caper continued to spread. The FBI, TIME discovered last week, had landed a current version of Watergate's Deep Throat. This anonymous source, who might be tagged Jack the Tipper, has taken to calling the FBI three to four times a day. In tones of outrage, Jack has demonstrated pinpoint knowledge about some of Capitol Hill's darker corners. Investigators believe that he may be a member of Congress or a legislative aide. "Whoever he is," says one official involved in the inquiry, "he's delivering the goods."
For instance, Jack put the FBI on the trail of another young woman who worked for Hays a few years ago. Interviewed by FBI agents, she said that she got on the congressional payroll only after consenting to have sex with Hays several times a week. She quit when Hays suggested lunchtime copulation on his desk top. This source has also told investigators that Hays and other members of Congress cooperated in putting potentially embarrassing employees on each other's staffs. The clear implication: a few lawmakers were engaged in mutual back scratching to cover up payroll padding.