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had urged him to do all he could do to get even with the people who were supporting my position. This was a real battle.

So at one point were you fairly certain that you would have to go to jail, or how did you think about that?

The best answer I can give you is I never thought about it. It never loomed up in my thinking. I think Ruth got a little concerned about whether they really would put me behind bars. One of my lawyers said, “You can always recant just before they lock the door,” which insulted me because if I was going to throw in the towel, I wouldn't have gone through all the hell I went through. And by that time I was stubborn and locked in cement and would have gone all the way to the end. But it would have been a mess.

It was the first time, I believe, John Mitchell told me -- it was the first time in, I think, forty- five years that the House had reneged on a major committee vote to cite somebody for contempt of Congress.

Amazing.

They didn't renege on -- they didn't say that I was okay -- or that CBS was okay. It was tantamount to that. But what they did was they remanded the vote to the committee for reconsideration and threw it back to the committee for further study. Well, the boat had sailed by that time and so the committee never got back into it. But it was a glorious victory for the First Amendment as far as television was concerned. The toughest test in my experience that television news ever faced on the Hill.