If you want a glimpse of Congress far livelier than those humdrum debates on C-Span, this book is for you.

            Many years ago, Marshall Lynam, then a young Texas newspaperman, accepted a job with his local Congressman and went to Washington.  For the next 27 years, he worked in high-pressure staff positions on Capitol Hill, somehow retaining not only his sanity but his superb sense of humor.

            With the passing years his boss, Congressman Jim Wright, steadily climbed the leadership ladder.  When Wright achieved the most powerful legislative office on earth as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Lynam stood at his right hand as his Chief of Staff, just as he had every step of the way.

            In nearly three decades as a Congressional staffer, this tall, balding former reporter witnessed and was often thrust into many of the gritty dramas, accidental comedies and significant bits of history that are constantly being played out under the Capitol dome. 

            Now, in this funny and insightful book, Stories I Never Told the Speaker, Lynam puts on paper for the first time many of the interesting and hilarious tales from the days when life on Capitol Hill was no less hectic but far more convivial than today.  

            He tells, for example, about one of his best friends, a would-be Texas hog farmer, who succeeded in hiding two pigs under his desk in the Capitol.  This same friend, incidentally, once stepped in single-handedly to keep Washington bureaucrats from using American foreign aid money to build a brewery in Turkey.

            Many of these stories involve Lynam personally.  There was his dilemma, for instance, in arranging for a bunch of old curmudgeons from the Kremlin to visit a rip-roaring Texas honkytonk--preferably without being punched in the mouth by good ol’ boys full of American patriotism and Lone Star beer.   

            Then too there are the amusing episodes involving such unlikely subjects as Ted Kennedy’s shoes, lettuce cigarettes, the great Washington elephant hunt, the four-engined bomber which the United States Air Force bought for 20 cents and, of course, Lyndon Johnson’s problems with the telephone.

            Here, too, are eyewitness accounts of matters of real historical substance.  You’ll be with Lynam as he describes Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s world-shaking pilgrimmage to Jerusalem--an event which laid the groundwork for the peace treaty which exists even today between Egypt and Israel.

            You will be taken also to the Soviet Union in 1987, as the free world wrestles with the question of whether Mikhail Gorbachev is for real.  Lynam flies to Moscow to make advance preparations for the arrival of Speaker Jim Wright with the highest-ranking Congressional delegation ever to visit the USSR.  And then comes Gorbachev’s stunning invitation for Speaker Wright to make a television speech carried all across the sprawling 11 time zones of the Soviet Union.

            From this book it will be clear that Marshall Lynam loved the House.  In his final chapter, he will tell you the story of a man who loved it even more than he.