We Cannot Run Away

By Hugh Sidey

He grew up in Ames, Iowa, hero-worshipping Presidents of the U.S. He studied history at the University of Iowa and admired the achievements of Franklin Roosevelt, developed deep respect for honest, gutsy Harry Truman. He earned a law degree at the University of California, never dreaming that he would sit in judgment on an American President.

Edward Mezvinsky, 37, is the junior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee. The Congressman from Iowa's First District is consumed by his impeachment job. It has awed him, fascinated him, humbled him. It rules his life physically, emotionally and intellectually.

He is up at 5 or 6 a.m. on hearing days, fighting for solitude so he can think. He reads the newspapers and staff memos with his orange juice and waffles. He used to have time to jog or play tennis. Now he runs up the four flights of stairs to his office in the Longworth Office Building. In the hour before the hearings start, he collects thoughts from his staff, plows through the volumes of evidence. He trots back down the stairs, enters the hearing room by a side door to avoid the press. He settles in his end seat. Now and then he kiddingly tells Rodino that he is so far away the chairman can't see him. But he does not get lost or bored.

Mezvinsky listens to every word, watches every character. He had trouble at first identifying the voices on the tapes. Now he can pick Nixon's and other voices out of the tangles. He is fascinated that the President becomes starkly coherent when he is angry, at other times lapses into mushy talk. John Dean has a voice that cuts through like a buzz saw --evenly, consistently. Haldeman and Ehrlichman talk of people as if they were numbers, totally expendable. Mezvinsky strains to pick up a strand of concern for the national interest among these men. They talk about saving themselves, each other, about "modified limited hangout," about p.r. "But they never mention what is best for the country," he says. He gets a chuckle out of the fact that Nixon may give a man a hard verbal rap, later give him a new job or great praise.

Mezvinsky takes notes. Sometimes he comes away with 20 or 25 pages of legal tablet scratched up with questions, observations. He jots down mood, assessments of committee members, observes that some of his colleagues fall asleep. A few days ago, he penned himself questions about White House Lawyer James St. Clair. How long should a defense attorney talk before he damages his case? How visible should he be?

He hadn't liked the idea of St. Clair at first and he'd said so publicly. But he has noted that St. Clair has human dimensions. He wrote how the lawyer looked when he rose, stretched, walked around and talked to committee members.

The first-term Congressman has found that he goes through cycles of depression, then rises again with humor and a basic faith in the system. Sometimes the hearings go on into the night. At the dinner break he gets into a car with an aide and they put the windows down and drive through mellow Washington nights talking about it all, stop for Colonel Sanders chicken and root beer, hurry back to the hearing. When it is over, Mezvinsky rushes away from reporters and home to be alone with his ideas. His sleep is fitful. Often he will awake with an idea, get out of bed and write it down.

His Iowa heritage weighs on him. It is a curious fact that several lowans played important roles in the impeachment and acquittal of Andrew Johnson more than 100 years ago. Mezvinsky read about Iowa's Senator James Grimes, a bitter foe of Andrew Johnson, who became convinced that the Johnson trial was unfair. Grimes was compared to Benedict Arnold, Aaron Burr, Jefferson Davis. The abuse and threats heaped on Grimes helped bring on a stroke that felled him two days before the vote. Yet the paralyzed Senator had himself carried to the floor, struggled to his feet, and called out firmly, "Not guilty."

Mezvinsky ponders it all in his cramped office. Sometimes the outside world intrudes and it shocks him. He went to his daughter's fifth-grade class to talk, and the first question was "Should the President be impeached?" The 150 kids broke into cheers. The reaction made his stomach knot up. Out in Iowa a while back, a 70-year-old lady looked him in the eye and said, "I'm glad I don't have long to live because there really isn't much to live for." That stunned him. "You see how far it has gone," he says. "I feel for the President, I'm two people. There is the side of me that says try to be calm and objective. There is the side of me that is in pursuit of the facts, the truth."

Last week Mezvinsky sat on the House floor and watched a Flag Day display, listened to the Army band and chorus salute the nation. "I found myself feeling sad. I didn't want to. But that flag had been tarnished."

Mezvinsky knows the issue may be with him the rest of his life. "There is an eerie quality to it all," he says. "This is no carnival. We are moving into the crunch." It got very serious last week, far more than the rest of us know. At the Kennedy Center last Tuesday night, watching All the King's Men, based on the story of Huey Long, corruption of public officials and impeachment proceedings, he wondered to himself if this was what politics always came to--the loss of ethics and moral fiber.

He read 1984 back in high school, and when the committee was going over the material on how the White House tried to use the Internal Revenue Service to strike back at political enemies, Mezvinsky was deeply distressed. The image of Big Brother would not go away.

He is intrigued by the coincidence of time. As Jeb Magruder marched off to jail, Mezvinsky was listening to the tapes of how those crimes were conceived and executed. The past had become the present.

But then it moved on and there was no time for him to pause. Mezvinsky was back in the hearing room making his notes, stealing stray thoughts. "We are all humans in this. We are all on trial. John Doar and Albert Jenner are good men, doing a good job under fire. The chairman has grown immensely in these weeks. We have to understand the strategy being used by the White House. We must understand better our own role. We cannot run away from this now. It is on us."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.