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Peter W. Rodino Dies at 96; Led House Inquiry on Nixon

Correction Appended

Peter W. Rodino Jr., an obscure congressman from the streets of Newark who impressed the nation by the dignity, fairness and firmness he showed as chairman of the impeachment hearings that induced Richard M. Nixon to resign as president, died yesterday at his home in West Orange, N.J.. He was 95.

The cause was congestive heart failure, said Christine Bland, a spokeswoman for Seton Hall University School of Law, where he was a professor emeritus and continued to lecture until February.

To his colleagues on Capitol Hill, Mr. Rodino was a symbol of possibility -- a reminder that events can conspire to choose one United States representative out of 435 and lift him to glory. To the end of his life, Mr. Rodino wondered, "Why me?"

On Oct. 20, 1973 -- 16 months and three days after five men with ties to the White House were arrested for breaking into the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington -- President Nixon had Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor investigating the Watergate scandal, fired after Mr. Cox had subpoenaed secret presidential tapes.

In what became known as "the Saturday Night Massacre," the president ordered Elliot L. Richardson, his attorney general, to fire Mr. Cox, but Mr. Richardson resigned rather than carry out the instruction. When William D. Ruckelshaus, who was Mr. Richardson's deputy at the Justice Department, was given the same command, he, too, resigned.

Robert H. Bork was then named acting attorney general, and he carried out the president's wishes.

Mr. Rodino, a 64-year-old representative from New Jersey with a voice like Gene Kelly's, had been chairman of the House Judiciary Committee for only nine months. For 26 years, he had been a stalwart of the Essex County Democratic organization, an unassuming congressman who had quietly won 13 consecutive elections, thriving in a constituency in Newark that had gone from being an Italian and Portuguese enclave to one in which black residents had gained the balance of power.

He had compiled a liberal voting record, and pushed hard for civil rights and immigration reform. But he was hardly known outside his district, and his elevation as chairman had resulted not from merit but from congressional seniority rules. His best-known piece of legislation was the bill that had made Columbus Day a national holiday.

When Congress reconvened after the Veterans Day weekend that followed the "massacre," the word "impeachment" was being uttered with the utmost seriousness.

In the fall of 1973, the country was sharply divided over President Nixon's role in the scandals. It was by no means certain that anyone in Washington could steer an impeachment inquiry safely past the hazards of partisan politics. Grave doubts were raised over Mr. Rodino's qualifications, even within his own party.

Carl Albert, the Democratic speaker of the House, suggested that instead of Mr. Rodino's Judiciary Committee, the House should form a select, high-powered committee of prominent members to take up the impeachment inquiry.

Mr. Rodino flatly opposed that idea, and Thomas P. O'Neill, the Democratic majority leader, gave him his support, though he, too, was not free of doubt.

For his part, Mr. Rodino had anxieties of his own. "My God," he blurted out before the hearings began, "I haven't even questioned anyone on direct examination in 30 years." He acknowledged that "I lie awake at nights," and he spoke repeatedly of his "awesome responsibility."

But he never backed down, and when Mr. O'Neill tried to pressure him into moving more quickly at the start, Mr. Rodino held firm.

As the country was soon to learn, Mr. Rodino's way meant great patience, caution, enormous energy, and fairness above all. In his first major decision he chose as the committee's special counsel John Doar, the former civil rights troubleshooter for the Justice Department who 10 years earlier had nudged Gov. George Wallace out of a schoolhouse door where he had been blocking the enrollment of black students in Alabama.

They formed a powerful team: Mr. Rodino, a short, streetwise Democrat, a child of immigrants who had gone to law school at night, and Mr. Doar, a rangy, laconic Republican from Wisconsin who had gone to Princeton and served two presidents, Eisenhower and Kennedy. They soon hired 105 staff members, among them a 26-year-old lawyer named Hillary Rodham.

Mr. Rodino set a brutal tempo, rising at 6:30 in the morning and working until 2 in the morning. By February, exhaustion forced him into Bethesda Naval Hospital for six days.

He pored over the already enormous Watergate record. Three times over he read a history of the impeachment and trial of Andrew Johnson, and he studied the writings of Edmund Burke, the 18th-century English conservative who had urged that any process of impeachment should rest "not upon the niceties of a narrow jurisprudence, but upon the enlarged and solid principles of state morality."

On May 9, 1974, when the hearings began, he was ready. Including the chairman, there were 21 Democrats and 17 Republicans on the committee. From the beginning, Mr. Rodino recalled, he had seen his role as teacher, negotiator, leader and symbol. He urged the members to refrain from grandstanding, but only rarely did he gavel anyone into silence.

"I know we're sometimes weak-kneed, and sometimes political," he said of the committee. "But I really believe this is an instance when we can demonstrate that the system does work."

On July 24, as the nation gathered around television sets to watch the committee's final deliberations, the critical question was whether enough Republican members would favor impeachment to parry the White House's charges of partisanship.

The first article of impeachment charged President Nixon with forms of obstructing justice by including such acts as making false statements, withholding evidence, condoning the counseling of witnesses, approving payments to witnesses, and trying to misuse the Central Intelligence Agency. It was passed by a bipartisan vote of 27 to 11, with six Republicans favoring impeachment.

A second article, recommending impeachment for abuse of power, specified such charges as attempting to initiate tax audits for political purposes, ordering and misusing secret wiretaps, and permitting the operation of a White House unit engaged in covert and unlawful activities. It was approved by a bipartisan vote of 28 to 10, with seven Republicans joining in the majority.

A third article, charging that the president had sought to impede due process by refusing to comply with subpoenas from the committee that sought tapes of White House conversations, was approved, but only on party lines. Two other articles, one charging the president with usurping the war powers of Congress by secretly bombing Cambodia, and the other questioning his claims of tax deductions and compensation for maintenance of his private estates, were both defeated by 26-12 margins. Mr. Rodino voted yes on all but the article involving tax and expense claims.

Three days after the voting ended, on Aug. 5, President Nixon admitted that more than two years earlier, on June 17, 1972, he had ordered a halt in an F.B.I. investigation of the break-in of Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate and that he had kept this secret from investigating bodies, his own counsel and the public. Though he said these facts did not justify the extreme step of impeachment, the disclosure led the 10 Republican members of Mr. Rodino's committee who had voted against the first three recommendations for impeachment to announce that they would reverse themselves, in effect making the decision to move toward impeachment unanimous.

After being advised of this, President Nixon, on the evening of Aug 8, 1974, told a television audience of some 130 million people that he was resigning effective the next day.

"It has been an ordeal -- for President Nixon and for all our people," Mr. Rodino said in a statement. "I know it was necessary. I believe our laws and our system will be stronger for it. I hope we will all be better for it. These past months have been the most solemn of our lives."

In the weeks that followed, the nation found a folk hero in Mr. Rodino. "He's enhanced the stature of Congress when we were at a low ebb," Mr. O'Neill said. "It's magnificent how he has risen to the challenge." As a result of Mr. Nixon's resignation, the House's inquiry was ended after 10 months. Later in August, Mr. Rodino's committee issued its final impeachment report, providing the official record on which Mr. Nixon, had he not resigned, would have been put on trial in the Senate. The report was accepted, 412 to 3, by the House, which commended the committee's work.

Mr. Rodino was to head the committee for 12 more years, until he retired from Congress in 1988.

Pellegrino Rodino Jr. was born in a tenement in the Little Italy section of Newark on June 7, 1909. At some point his name was anglicized and enlarged into Peter Wallace Rodino. His father was a carpenter who came to America from Italy as a 16-year-old. His mother died when he was 4. As an aspiring writer and poet, he would describe his fiercely ethnic neighborhood in an unpublished novel called "Drift Street."

As a child he would go to the park to practice oratory with pebbles in his mouth, like Demosthenes, in an effort to overturn the effects of diphtheria that left him with a raspy voice.

He went to Barringer High School and the University of Newark, which later became part of Rutgers, and then studied at night at the Newark Law School to become a lawyer. He married Marianna Stango, whom he had known in high school.

Mr. Rodino joined a law firm in Newark and ran unsuccessfully for the New Jersey Assembly in 1940. Shortly before Pearl Harbor, he enlisted in the Army and served in North Africa and Italy, where he received a battlefield promotion to captain and was awarded the Bronze Star.

As a returning war hero in 1946, he ran for Congress in the 10th District but lost to the powerful Republican incumbent, Fred Hartley Jr. But the ethnic mix of the district was changing, with more Italian-Americans. In 1948, Mr. Rodino won and began his 40-year career in the House.

Mr. Rodino was a prime sponsor and floor manager of the Civil Rights Act of 1966 and wrote sections of its Fair Employment Practices Amendment. As chairman of the judiciary committee, he wrote the Voting Rights Extension Act of 1982. In 1988, Mr. Rodino announced that he would not seek a 21st term.

After he retired, he became a professor at Seton Hall's law school, where a chair and a library were endowed in his name.

Mr. Rodino, whose first wife died, is survived by his second wife, the former Joy Judelson; two children, Margaret Stanziale and Peter W. Rodino III; three grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

Mr. Rodino saw Richard Nixon only once after Watergate. He was flying from Newark to Washington and was told that the seat he customarily reserved, 2B, was occupied. When he boarded the plane, he noticed that the former president was in it. "I didn't say a word to him, but I figured it was fair." Mr. Rodino said. "I mean, I had taken his seat, so he took mine."

Correction: June 2, 2005, Thursday An obituary on May 8 about Peter W. Rodino Jr., the former Democratic representative from New Jersey who headed the House hearings on impeaching Richard M. Nixon, misstated the date on which Nixon had ordered an aide to halt an F.B.I. investigation of the break-in at Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate. It was June 23, 1972. (June 17 was the date of the break-in.)

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section 1, Page 30 of the National edition with the headline: Former Representative Peter W. Rodino Jr. Dies at 95; Led House Watergate Inquiry. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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