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And I think Manny agreed with me and he didn't agree with me. He and I had had a turbulent history. Earlier I was on the stand for five solid days in an investigation he was conducting as the lead witness against an attack he had on the networks. And I stood up against him and we came out of it with, I think, a different kind of respect for each other than we had going in. When he called me in I knew that it wasn't a member of Congress flexing his muscles. I knew that this was a friendly call.

I believe it was after that call that Staggers got word to me that he wanted to see me alone in his office. And I only tell this incident because it's a measure of how far things had gone. Staggers sent word that he wanted to see me at noon, I believe, and didn't want me to have my lawyer, didn't want me to have any other congressman with me.

And he said to me that if I could just show him the tape privately, some of the tape, so that he could tell the committee that he had seen it and it was perfectly all right, that we hadn't cheated, so to speak -- The charge was, of course, that we had not used the tape that the military thought was good and -- it was a hatchet job. And that it wasn't fair. And we could say it was fair but obviously they didn't believe us. They wanted to see it.

So Staggers said, “If you'll just let me see some of it, so that I can tell my friends on the Committee that I've seen it and I think it's okay, I can promise you that we'll forget about this whole thing.”

Now, by this time, it was blown completely out of all proportion. My wife would go to her grocery store in the neighborhood, up on 92nd Street, and people in the store would come over and say, “We think your husband's doing the right thing, but we just hope he doesn't