"... impeachment is going to hit this

Congress " So spoke Democratic

Majority Leader Thomas P. (Tip)

O Neill in January of 1973. He was

addressing Speaker of the House Carl

Albert.

O Neill, an enormous figure of a man

who comes from the wrong section of

Cambridge, Massachusetts, wasn t

indulging in partisan prophecy; he was

speaking, rather, from years of hard

political experience, about a nasty busi-

ness which he felt tg be inevitable.

In the spring of 1974 Jimmy Breslin

went to Washington to observe at first

hand the inching along of the cumber-

some process. Breslin did not, however,

spend his time in court and committee

rooms. He preferred to work the offices on

and near Capitol Hill, to talk informallv

with the congressmen, the lawyers--and

their aides--who were laboriously putting

together the mountain of paper that was

to bury Richard Nixon: he even visited

Allenwood Prison in the "businesslike"

hills of Pennsylvania.

Those names and faces which became

so familiar to us in a two-dimensional way

last summer are now clad in flesh and

sweat. As are dozens of men and women

who never saw a television camera but

who were equally dedicated to keeping

the resolution of a dirty affair clean.

Woven in among his often telling,

sometimes devastating stories of the great

and near-great is Breslin s theory about

the illusion of power, that strange admix-

ture of mirrors and blue smoke: if the