In the long, hot summer of 1974, three prominent Republican members of Congress - including a living right-wing icon - traveled down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House. They were Senator Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania, Congressman John Rhodes of Arizona, and his state's white-haired senior Senator, one Barry Goldwater. The GOP trio was Republican and conservative to the core: Scott served three decades in Congress, Goldwater is one of the patron saints of the conservative movement, and Rhodes was John McCain's political godfather.
The Republican eminences brought a tough message for their Republican president, Richard M. Nixon: it was time to go.
Until that moment, Nixon had clung to the last hopes of his Presidency. With support on the Republican side in congress - even among conservatives, even among hard-core cold warriors and anti-elites - waning, Nixon new the time to abandon hope had come.
We are nearing that time in the sad, anti-American, anti-military, anti-war-on-terrorism scandal slowly draining the remaining blood from the careers of Karl Rove and Scooter Libby.
Because as much as Democrats dream of a perp-walk for Rove, it's really the long walk to the White House that will tell the tale in the Rove case.
Who will take that trip? Will it be McCain and Chuck Hagel? Hmmm. Not sure they'd be allowed past the gates. My money is on the tough old militarist John Warner, a young Republican Senator when Hugh Scott went down from the Hill to see Nixon, and the seasoned chairman of the Armed Services Committee. Maybe he'll take young Lindsay Graham with him, or maybe James Inhofe will make the trip. Perhaps it will be a coalition of Republicans and centrist Democrats.
In any case, it's coming. The damage that Rove has done to the confidence of American clandestine operatives worldwide - who now must believe the executive branch is willing to play politics with their lives - is too great. A few determined Senators can hold up Bush's entire second term agenda; and Congress holds the purse-strings on the war.
Is Karl Rove worth eternal calumny in the history books? Not to President Bush, I'd wager, and that's why when the Republicans come calling, he will listen. And Karl Rove will go.