The next bit, as our car passed through the New England countryside, moved me as an English major, a native of New Jersey and the grandson of immigrants. Childhood diphtheria left Rodino with a pronounced speech defect that he worked to correct by, in his quoted words, “reciting Shakespeare through a mouth full of marbles.”

Mythology does build around politicians. “Born in a log cabin” used to be the label for that. When I told a friend that Nixon financed his first campaign with poker winnings, accumulated on the Navy ship that brought him home from World War II, keeping the cash hidden in his footlocker, my friend wisely said: “That footlocker is Nixon’s log cabin.”

But even if those therapeutic Shakespeare recitations, the marbles, the “menial jobs” are 37 percent fabricated, it is a fabrication I revere: far more heroic, to me, than any number of log cabins or foot lockers.

And the next information is not myth, but fact: During World War II, Rodino was an appeals agent for the Newark Draft Board. That position exempted him from the draft, but in 1941 he enlisted in the Army and was stationed in North Africa, and later in Italy.

After the war, as a representative, he was re-elected by a large margin even in the strongly Republican political environment of 1952, when Dwight Eisenhower carried Rodino’s Newark district.

At this point, my feelings for what I was reading merged with my memory of those long-ago televised Judiciary Committee hearings on impeachment. As chairman, Rodino seemed “unlikely” — a frequently applied adjective that may have implied something about the name ending in a vowel and the New Jersey accent.

On July 24, 1974, the opening day of the committee debate on the articles of impeachment, amid the subpoena process for the Watergate tapes, Rodino said, with the eloquence of plain speech: “We have deliberated. We have been patient. We have been fair. Now the American people, the House of Representatives and the Constitution and the whole history of our republic demand that we make up our minds.” Six of the committee’s Republicans eventually joined the Democratic majority in passing three of the five articles of impeachment. After the vote, Rodino later said, he phoned his wife and wept, for our country.