The Bishop in the West Wing

"See to it, Blackwood," says the Cardinal Archbishop of Chicago, and Blackie Ryan, the Cardinal's auxiliary bishop, doesn't exactly jump (he never jumps), rather he moseys down to Washington, D.C., where one of his friends, Jack Patrick McGurn, called "Machine Gun McGurn" by the media, has surprisingly just been elected president and needs his help.

Blackie's first confrontation is with Washington bureaucracy; the powers that be don't want to give Blackie a pass to wander in and out of the ...