For this week's cover story, TIME Congressional Correspondent Neil MacNeil filed more than 100 pages of background on House Majority Leader Thomas (Tip') O'Neill, whom he has known for almost 15 years. But for the story there was still plenty for MacNeil to learn. He spent nine days in Boston and Cambridge, talking with O'Neill's wife, children, sister, friends and aides. Early one morning he accompanied the Congressman on one of his "ethnic walks" as he stopped and chatted with the shopkeepers through whom he keeps in touch with his district. "O'Neill doesn't pull any punches," says MacNeil. "When you ask him a question, he gives you a straight answer."

To evaluate the current mood of the House on the difficult question of impeachment, MacNeil spent nearly ten days on Capitol Hill, talking not only with House leaders but also with dozens of rank-and-file Congressmen of both parties. After he had put his material together, he checked some last-minute details with O'Neill and learned a bit of bad news: despite his diet, the Massachusetts Congressman confessed, he gained two pounds during the time he had spent lunching and dining with MacNeil.

A student of Congress since his days as a Harvard undergraduate and author of a book about the House of Representatives (Forge of Democracy, 1963), MacNeil covered Capitol Hill for United Press for eight years before joining TIME in 1958. To supplement his reporting, MacNeil reread accounts of the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson in his personal congressional library of 6,000 volumes -- no fewer than 65 of them deal with impeachment -- that he has painstakingly collected over the years. "But there is no substitute for eyeball-to-eyeball discussion," he says. "If you try to guess what's going on in Congress while you sit at your desk, youll always be wrong." Several years ago, following his no-guess philosophy to the limit for a cover story on the late Everett Dirksen, MacNeil asked the Illinois Senator to empty his pockets to see if it was true that they were always full of odds and ends. MacNeil's idea paid off:

the rumor was true, and an accounting of the contents of Dirksen's pockets duly appeared in the pages of TIME.

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