Mirrors and Blue Smoke

"I DON'T LIKE to be played for a sucker." Tip O'Neill, House Majority Leader, didn't like it at all when he discovered that Nixon and Agnew had been lying not only to the American people, but to other old-time politicians like O'Neill himself. Jimmy Breslin didn't like it much either, and he went down to O'Neill's office in Washington this past summer to get a new angle on Watergate, an already overworked subject. How the Good Guys Finally Won is all about deceit, politics, and how the truth will out.

In D.C. that summer there were Good Guys and Bad Guys. The good ones were those who, Breslin says approvingly, knew how to manipulate what he calls "the mirrors and blue smoke." O'Neill, and politicians like him, knew how to make men see in the mirrors and blue smoke of politics exactly what he wanted them to see. When politicians like Nixon began to lose control of these instruments of power, they were able to see in the mirror only what they wanted to see. They could no longer make others see it, too, and the mantle of power fell from their shoulders. In the end:

Nixon had not the political power of a city councilman. He sat in the Oval Office, but he might as well have been in City Hall in Dayton.

Breslin's hero of the impeachment summer is Tip O'Neill, Leon Jaworski and John Sirica don't enthrall him. Breslin has no taste for the intricate semantic entanglements of lawyers, and prefers the nitty-gritty politician, where he feels all action originates. His interpretation of some of the events of late last summer is an inverted version of most newspaper analyses. While most editorials agreed that the lining up of votes against Nixon in Congress was due to the unanimous Supreme Court decision, Breslin maintains that the 8-0 vote was based on the justices' knowledge that the Congress was behind them. The Congress, in other words, was more influential in the proceedings than the court: the politician counts for more than the judge.

Because of his belief in the superior power of the politician, Breslin revels in the fact that his hero, O'Neill, never went to law school. Breslin is looking for the single man who shapes history, the man who gets to the front, finds the essential difficulties, and starts the gears turning toward their solution. And he picked O'Neill as that man for the summer of 1974, because as early as January 1973, before anyone else. O'Neill was predicting that "impeachment is going to hit this Congress," and because he made other politicians on both sides of the aisle believe it.

WITH O'NEILL for a hero, Breslin had the opportunity to see what went on in the House, as well as within the Judiciary Committee. On the floor of the House, and in the corridors and cloakrooms, there was lot of wrangling over who should chair the Judiciary Committee. Many Congressmen who thought that the position was going to get a lot of publicity didn't want to give the place to Rodino, who was at that point an unknown from New Jersey. But O'Neill, who knew, as always, more than he showed, managed to convince the vying Congressmen that the position was unimportant:

It would be a wonderful thing to give peter Rodino a chance to finally get a little television exposure. Let people see what a great guy he is. After all these years of being on the bottom, nobody knowing him, wouldn't it be nice to give him his little chance.

Breslin also gets information from O'Neill's office that has not appeared elsewhere in print. When Jeb Magruder went to prison in Allentown, Pennsylvania, he had a special chore set out for him. One of Allenwood's better-known prisoners is Cornelius Gallagher, a former New Jersey congressman with Mafia connections. Gallagher and Magruder became tennis partners (Allenwood has tennis courts) until Gallagher discovered that Magruder's task was to find out from him whether Rodino had any skeletons in his closet. Gallagher remained silent, although he realized subsequently that he was going to do maximum time unless he would give Magruder some dirt on Rodino. But there simply wasn't any.

Although Breslin concentrates on the Congressional side of the impeachment summer, and on O'Neill more particularly, he never hesitates to give credit where it is due. He praises John Doar for his efficient and methodical work as counsel to the Judiciary Committee, even though he doesn't find Doar personally as attractive as O'Neill, and even Doar is a lawyer. Rodino, along with the rest of the Judiciary Committee, is not eclipsed by Breslin's concentration on O'Neill. Breslin respects their effort, and describes in detail their persistence, coordination and sheer stamina. Rodino worked so hard that when at one point the workload of the committee became almost unbearable, "girls coming to a Xerox machine in the Rayburn Building at two in the morning found Peter Rodino, in shirtsleeves, running the machine himself."

BRESLIN'S IDEALIZATION of O'Neill as the intrepid initiator of the pre-impeachment proceedings is a bit misleading, and ignores other important factors in the course of events of '73-'74. O'Neill has a great capacity for understanding the movement of politics, and for tapping the current of public opinion. As House Majority Leader, he was indubitably a major force in organizing the House votes against Nixon. But any other Majority Leader would probably have been equally effective, and Breslin presents no clearcut evidence that O'Neill had anything more to do with Nixon's demise than other more publicized figures--Jaworski, or Sirica. O'Neill is really just an above average hack politician, risen to a position of power through a certain measure of talent, political knowhow, and luck. But because Breslin identifies so heavily with O'Neill (they are both Irish, fat, and aggressive), he tends to make O'Neill seem a more important force last summer than he actually was. O'Neill was doing nothing more than the ordinary politician does all the time: going with, and perhaps gently influencing, the mainstream of his colleagues' opinions. Unlike those Republicans on the Judiciary Committee who voted for impeachment. O'Neill had nothing to lose. He was in the right place at the right time.

Certainly Breslin is not an objective reporter, and he doesn't pretend to be. He is as vicious to the Bad Guys as he is sympathetic to the Good. He describes Mardian as the type of man who "in the prize-fighting business, they used to call a mutt." And as he is about to begin the story, Breslin gets a little maudlin:

If we are going to talk about the end of Watergate, why don't we take a walk away from the convicts and step into the shafts of sunlight provided by some of the people who are for their country, rather than against it.

Breslin even gets to the point where he is describing the paunchy, vociferous, cigar-smoking O'Neill as "a lovely spring rain of a man."

It turns out that for all of his hard-talking, pulling-no-punches image, Jimmy Breslin is a bit of a sappy patriot. He gets some good, sentimental Irish teardrops in his eyes when he thinks of how the United States pulled thgough Watergate and came out stable and stronger than ever. In his castigation of the Bad Guys and his adulation of the Good, Breslin expresses what a lot of Americans who never thought of themselves as particularly patriotic felt in the heat of last summer's battle. His identification with O'Neill is nearly complete, and he respects the emotion which causes O'Neill, no matter how many times he passes the lit dome of the Capitol, to "get a feeling right here," in his massive gut. O'Neill goes on to say that "it stands for stability. You see that dome up there, you know that nobody is going to let anything bad happen. You die before you let this country down."