The Man with the Judicious Gavel

"You not only have to be fair--you have to give the appearance of fairness," Chairman Peter Rodino said of his job, and it often seemed to be an impossible task during the long and wearisome months as he led his unwieldy 38-member Judiciary Committee down the path toward impeachment articles. But last week, as the committee inched toward its bipartisan vote of 27-11 against the President, the silver-haired chairman with the husky voice was praised for his fairness by House G.O.P. Leader John Rhodes as well as by House Democratic Leader Thomas P. ("Tip") O'Neill Jr. Said O'Neill of Rodino: "It's magnificent how he has risen to the challenge."

When the impeachment proceedings began, Rodino was a little-known Congressman from Newark, a typical big-city liberal, who had learned during his 25 years on the Hill how the House operates --how to get along by going along--but whose leadership had never been tested.

Says Tip O'Neill: "He was a flame under a bushel basket."

The son of an Italian immigrant worker, Rodino was raised in the fiercely ethnic Little Italy section of Newark, in a neighborhood so rough that he recalls shootings in the streets. Rodino wrote an unpublished novel about his upbringing entitled Drift Street. At one time, Rodino had hopes of becoming a poet--he still loves to recite Shakespeare, Byron, Shelley and Keats--but he diligently worked his way through the University of Newark Law School.

After serving as an Army captain during World War II, Rodino was first elected to Congress in 1948. As a Congressman, he concentrated on ethnic issues.

When the inexorable elevator of seniority made him chairman of the Judiciary Committee in 1973, Rodino was perhaps best known as the man who had made Columbus Day a national holiday.

With this kind of background, Rodino failed to inspire the confidence of the House's Democratic leaders when impeachment became a possibility a year ago, a scant seven months after he had become Judiciary chairman. Speaker Carl Albert pointedly suggested to Rodino that, instead of giving the matter to the Judiciary Committee, the House should perhaps set up a special select body to conduct the inquiry. Rodino flatly refused to go along, and Albert gave way. (Later, the Speaker was to bless that decision: if a special committee had been set up, the Republicans could have stacked their membership with die-hard Nixon supporters, thus eliminating any chance of a bipartisan vote.) Rodino did not relish the job of conducting the impeachment inquiry. He has had a friendly relationship with Nixon over the years and, he says, "I'd rather find the good in people than the bad."

But to get ready, Rodino quietly assigned Jerome Zeifman, chief of the Judiciary staff, and two of his assistants to study the process and precedents. Rodino, who in 1973 had dropped his Newark law practice, which had always cut into his time in Washington, began boning up on how the delegates to the Constitutional Convention had viewed impeachment.

Rodino also studied the seminal writings of Edmund Burke, the 18th century conservative sage, who argued that impeachment should rest "not upon the niceties of a narrow jurisprudence, but upon the enlarged and solid principles of state morality." Three times the chairman read Historian Michael Les Benedict's 1973 book entitled The Impeachment and Trial of Andrew Johnson. Rodino was frank enough to admit his awe at his onrushing responsibilities. "I lie awake at nights," he once admitted. "I just hope I'll be able to live up to them."

Promised an unlimited budget by Speaker Albert, Rodino began assembling a separate impeachment staff--which was to grow to 105, nearly half of them lawyers--and started looking for a chief counsel. To avoid any charge of partisanship, Rodino wanted an outsider and a Republican. For two months, while the Democratic leadership squirmed at the delay, Rodino consulted deans of law schools, judges, bar-association officials and leading attorneys before choosing John Doar in December.

They made an odd couple--the voluble politician from the streets of Newark and the taciturn Princeton man who worked on civil rights in the Justice Department under Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy. But the two men worked closely with growing mutual respect.

From the start, Rodino recognized the danger that the inquiry would blow up in the hands of the Democrats if the nation perceived it to be a partisan vendetta against the President. Even so, Rodino was charged with partisanship himself early on, when he gaveled through decisions on party-line votes to give himself sole subpoena powers. Later, Rodino gave up that right and got strong bipartisan support for the eight subpoenas for presidential tapes, all of which Nixon refused to honor.

Assiduously, Rodino backed off on other matters. Against the advice of Doar, Rodino decided in fairness to allow Presidential Counsel James St. Clair not only to attend the sessions but to question witnesses and to call all six of the witnesses he wanted. And all the while, the chairman was urging the Democratic firebrands to stop calling for impeachment.

"I told them that the ultimate judgment was going to be the people's and our performance was going to be so judged," says Rodino. The members went along with Rodino, although not always happily.

Snapped Detroit's John Conyers: "I just want to make sure he's not too damn fair."

Rodino's work load was horrendous.

Week after week, the committee met in closed session at 9:30 a.m. every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. "All right, Mr. Doar," Rodino would say, "let's begin." The morning session ended at 12:15; the afternoon meeting went from 2 until 5. But those were only the formal sessions. Rodino was at his desk every morning at 8 and often was still there after midnight, sometimes conferring with his staff as late as 3 a.m. When he got a chance, he relaxed by playing paddle ball on the congressional courts or by listening to opera records--Tosca is his favorite --hi the apartment he maintains near the Capitol. Weekends he spent in Newark with his wife Marianna, who had been a high school girl friend. (The Rodinos have two children--Peter, a law student at Seton Hall University, and Margaret, the wife of a Newark judge.) The pace was too fast. In February Rodino landed in Bethesda Naval Medical Center for a few days. He feared heart trouble, but the diagnosis was simple exhaustion. "If I had to do it over," Rodino quipped, "maybe I'd have worked harder to be a poet."

As the inquiry went on, Rodino found himself confronted by an insoluble dilemma: the need to be fast as well as thorough. In closed sessions, Doar droned on and on, presenting the evidence that eventually filled 36 black loose-leaf binders--7,200 pages in all. By last month the whole inquiry was in danger of falling apart. The country was nodding off. "The committee is drowning in a sea of material," complained one ranking Republican Congressman who was ready to vote for impeachment. The Democratic leaders in the House pressured Rodino to get on with it. "Peter," said one top-ranking Democrat, "the honeymoon is over."

Doar drove himself until his face was gray to prepare his final brief, and Rodino steered his faction-torn committee to last week's climactic and bipartisan vote--the goal he had been striving for so diligently all along. Through it all--the proddings from his own leaders and the cries from the White House that he was conducting a "kangaroo court"--Rodino had kept his cool. As his colleagues acknowledged, by and large Chairman Rodino could say, with justification, "We have deliberated, we have been patient, we have been fair."

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