Peter Rodino: As chairman of the US house judiciary committee, Peter Rodino, who has died aged 95, presided over the 1974 impeachment proceedings against President Richard Nixon, who was accused of illegally trying to cover up the burglary of the Democrats' Watergate election headquarters.
Rodino's impeccable conduct of the highly charged hearings brought this little-known Democrat congressman from New Jersey a respectable niche in America's political pantheon.
The overwhelming demand for the president's impeachment came in October 1973, in the wake of his infamous Saturday night massacre. Nixon ordered the dismissal of Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor investigating the Watergate break-in, after Cox subpoenaed secret tapes of the president's Oval Office conversations, which the White House refused to hand over.
The US attorney general refused to carry out the presidential order to sack Cox, and was himself fired. His deputy then refused, and was also sacked. Finally, an acting attorney general was sworn in, and the deed was done. By the following day, the House of Representatives registered 22 impeachment motions, and the speaker proposed selecting a special committee of leading congressmen to consider the charges.
Rodino, a stickler for procedure, argued that his judiciary committee already existed to deal with the issue, and he was supported by the powerful Democrat majority leader, Tip O'Neill.
As it turned out, Rodino's shrewdest move was to recruit a Republican lawyer, John Doar, to head the investigation - the two men reinforced each other's belief that it was vital for public confidence to eschew partisanship, maintain a strictly judicious approach, and build a mountain of irrefutable evidence.
When the hearings opened in May 1974, the committee had 21 Democrat and 17 Republican members. It was a potentially explosive political mix, but Rodino managed to sustain a calm and judicial air, courteously reining in attempts to score party points. Riveted by the daily television coverage, Americans quickly signalled their approval of Rodino's slow but inexorable assembly of the evidence, a factor which undoubtedly played a significant part in the outcome.
Committee members had to vote on five articles of impeachment, and there was a wide expectation that there would be a straight party split.
That happened on two of the lesser counts, but a majority of the Republican members came out in support of the three main charges - obstructing justice, abuse of power and withholding evidence. It was a clear response to the pile of carefully assembled evidence and the discipline that Rodino had imposed on the hearings.
The vote was dramatically justified three days later when a new federal disclosure order revealed the existence of a recording of a key conversation in the Oval Office on June 23rd, 1973, six days after the Watergate break-in. It showed that Nixon had ordered the CIA to obstruct all the investigations being carried out by the FBI, a multiple breach of his oath of office. Dissident Republicans on Rodino's committee immediately switched their votes to make the impeachment recommendation unanimous, and Nixon became the first US president to be forced out of office.
Rodino took no pleasure in the outcome; he said later that he had been praying that his committee would be able to exonerate Nixon. He was, however, outraged by President Gerald Ford's decision to issue a blanket pardon to his predecessor. "When I heard that I almost went bananas," Rodino said in 1992. "Ford had just misread the whole thing."
The son of an immigrant Italian carpenter, Rodino grew up in a poor district of Newark, New Jersey. In the classic tradition of second-generation US immigrants, he pulled himself up by his bootstraps. To help recover his speech, badly affected by a childhood bout of diphtheria, he spent hours reciting Shakespeare through a mouth full of marbles. As an adult, he endured 10 years of menial jobs while studying at night for a law degree.
When he achieved it, at the age of 28, he joined a local law firm and became immersed in politics, running unsuccessfully for the New Jersey state assembly. He served in north Africa and Italy during the second World War, and was demobilised as a captain.
After the war, he renewed his political ambitions, securing a congressional seat in 1948. He was subsequently re-elected for 19 terms, during which he showed a steady dedication to civil rights reform. He became one of the main congressional sponsors of President Lyndon Johnson's landmark legislation of 1966, and finally retired in 1988.
Rodino's first wife, Marianna, died in 1980. He is survived by his second wife, Joy, and by a son and daughter.
Peter Wallace Rodino, born June 7th, 1909; died May 7th, 2005