Peter Rodino was from New Jersey, a Lawyer, a War Hero, before becoming one of
the most respected Italian Americans to ever serve in Congress, for 40 years, most notably serving as Chair of the Judiciary Committee at the Nixon Impeachment.
Rodino's biography from the United States Congress is at the end.
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RODINO SPEAKS

The Hill
The Newspaper for and About Congress lbert Albert Eisele
Wednesday,
April 21, 2004

Next month marks the 30th anniversary of the beginning of the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment hearings that helped drive Richard Nixon from the White House, and the man who presided over those hearings is still preaching the importance of fairness, nonpartisanship and the rule of law in American society.

Former Rep. Peter Rodino (D-N.J.), now 94 years old and almost blind, is sharing the lessons he drew from his experience with a new generation of future lawyers at Seton Hall University School of Law in Newark, N.J., according to Legal Times’s Tony Mauro. His article in the April 5 issue makes interesting reading at a time when members of the Sept. 11 commission are being accused of excessive partisanship. Ironically, the panel is headed by another New Jersey politician, former Gov. Thomas Kean, a Republican.

I don’t normally like to rely on other people’s reporting, but I thought Mauro’s excellent article was worth recounting here as an example of how much we really don’t really know about history-making events until long after most of the principal figures are gone or, more often these days, until they write their memoirs or talk to Bob Woodward.

But Rodino, who turned down “astronomical sums” for his memoirs after Nixon resigned in the face of certain impeachment, said he’s telling his story now while he still can. “I’m not working for the plaudits. I have served my time and my purpose. My time now is for teaching.”

Rodino was chairman of the Judiciary Committee when it began public hearings on Nixon’s involvement in the Watergate burglary cover up May 9, 1974. Determined to avoid a partisan spectacle, he refused to make public an audiotape of Nixon’s slur against Italian-Americans and conducted the inquiry behind closed doors for six weeks while strictly forbidding any leaks.

He also moved quickly to rein in partisan Democrats such as future Speaker Tip O’Neill (D-Mass.). When O’Neill, whom Rodino called “Tippy,” urged him to appoint a Democrat as special counsel, Rodino said, he listened quietly and then said, “‘Tippy, are you done?’ … I looked at him and said, ‘Tippy, go f--- yourself.’ He didn’t say another word.”

Rodino said he didn’t know until the day he announced his appointment that his choice for special counsel, John Doar, was an Eisenhower Republican (whose staff hires included a young Yale Law School graduate named Hillary Rodham Clinton).

As the hearings progressed, Rodino was stunned to learn the cover-up ordered by Nixon was only “the tip of the iceberg” in an effort to conceal “not only the break-in but the fact that Nixon and his team had conducted themselves in such a manner as to not only abuse the power of the presidency [but] abuse justice in so doing.”

The burden of leading the investigation that led to Nixon’s resignation (“He knew the jig was up”) weighed so heavily on Rodino, who venerated the office of the president regardless of who held it, that after the committee voted for the first article of impeachment, he called his wife at home and broke down sobbing.

In 1998, when the House began impeachment proceedings against President Clinton, Rodino refused to comment until then-Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) cited the Watergate precedent. Rodino wrote in The New York Times that, unlike Watergate, “the House chose to taint the process from the start with a destructive partisanship.”

Sadly, Rodino, who retired in 1989 after 40 years in Congress, now feels Clinton’s impeachment marked the end of the nonpartisan spirit he fought to impose 30 years ago.
RODINO, Peter Wallace, Jr. (1909-) Biographical Information
http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/
biodisplay.pl?index=R000374
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RODINO, Peter Wallace, Jr., 1909- a Representative from New Jersey; born in Newark, Essex County, N.J., June 7, 1909; attended the McKinley Grammar School and Barringer High School; graduated from the University of Newark and from the New Jersey Law School in 1937; was admitted to the bar in 1938 and commenced the practice of law in Newark; teacher, public speaking and citizenship classes, Y.M.C.A. and Federation of Clubs, Newark, N.J., 1930-1932; managing editor of the Jersey Review in 1934 and 1935; enlisted in the United States Army March 10, 1941, and served with the First Armored Division in North Africa and Italy and on military missions with the Italian Army; discharged as a captain in April 1946; awarded Bronze Star for military operations, War Cross, and Knight of Order of Crown from Italy; unsuccessful candidate in 1946 to the Eightieth Congress; elected as a Democrat to the Eighty-first and to the nineteen succeeding Congresses (January 3, 1949-January 3, 1989); chairman, Committee on the Judiciary (Ninety-third through One Hundredth Congresses); was not a candidate for renomination in 1988 to the One Hundred First Congress; visiting professor, Seton Hall University Law School; is a resident of Newark, N.J.