The number 218 came up on the electronic voting board in the House of Representatives. It was 1.20 p.m. on Saturday. President William Jefferson Clinton had just become the second American president to be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanours.
The last time this had happened in this chamber in the US Capitol was February 24th, 1868, while a snowstorm raged outside and Mark Twain was reporting events.
I don't know if there was an Irish person witnessing that historic moment 130 years ago. But for this correspondent watching this time from the press gallery, there was a feeling of anti-climax and even sadness at this latest and profoundly serious development in the Monica Lewinsky saga.
Here is a president who, incidentally, has worked hard for peace in Ireland, now facing the disgrace of a trial in the Senate arising from a sexual affair with a White House intern. What a humiliation for a man who is steeped in the history of his country and had such high hopes for his own presidency.
The Speaker-elect, Bob Livingston, had earlier stunned the chamber by announcing that he was turning his back on this prestigious post because of his past extra-marital affairs. He was brought down by Larry Flynt, publisher of a pornographic magazine Hustler, who had offered one million dollars for proof of an adulterous affair with a member of Congress.
What a week this has been in Washington. People fumble for adjectives like "surreal" and "incredible", and then throw them away as inadequate to begin describing a week that has left the capital in shock as the impeachment process collided with the launching of a high-tech bombing war on Iraq.
One minute Bill Clinton was wriggling to find a way out of the impeachment trap closing in on him. The next minute he was ordering a devastating aerial bombardment on a country thousands of miles away. It became "splitscreen America" as the country's TV screens showed the impeachment wranglings on Capitol Hill alongside green nightscope pictures of cruise missiles exploding in a Baghdad where the traffic lights were still working.
And it was as if a bomb exploded in the crowded chamber on Saturday when Bob Livingston called on President Clinton to resign and then announced that he was withdrawing as speaker-elect and leaving politics altogether. Some Republicans, steeled to impeach the president, wept at the sudden fall of their leader before he could lead them.
Democrats who had first yelled at Livingston to resign himself then appealed to him to stay when they realised this was going to increase pressure on the president to follow suit.
The president, on the telephone to a friend, Terence McAuliffe, exclaimed, "What is happening? This is terrible for the country." He sent his press secretary out to tell reporters that he wanted Mr Livingston to reconsider.
Hillary Clinton had come to Capitol Hill a few hours earlier to give the demoralised Democrats a pep-talk and thank them for their failed efforts to head off the pending humiliation of her husband. Now Mr Livingston's challenge to the president to follow his example and resign was putting him in more peril. A poll that morning showed that 40 per cent of Americans believed the president should resign if impeached.
Before the voting in the House began, the Democrats staged a mass walk-out and streamed down the steps of the Capitol to the cheers of Clinton supporters. But the Congressmen immediately turned back to register their votes.
As the voting ended, the media rushed to the speaker's lobby to interview members. Mr Peter King, the Republican who tried to rescue the president from impeachment by crossing party lines, was downcast. Now they had "a damaged president" and this was not exactly good news for the Irish peace process, he said.
Mr Barney Frank, a Democrat expert on the minutiae of the Starr report, was telling reporters that the voting down of two of the four articles of impeachment helped the president in the Senate trial. The perjury article had been boiled down to: "What did the president touch and when did he touch it?"
The result of the first impeachment vote was brought by aides to Mr Clinton in the study off the Oval Office. As the debate began, he was with his spiritual adviser, the Rev Tony Campolo, who found him "very upbeat and confident that things will work out".
When the voting was over, the Republican leaders crossed the Capitol Building to present the articles of impeachment to Senate officials.
The Democrats piled into buses and headed for the White House to comfort their wounded president and his wife. The two emerged with arms linked into the Rose Garden, where the Democrats were clustered around the podium.
Mr Clinton pledged to stay in office "until the last hour of my last day of my term". He never mentioned the word "impeach ment".
Through the windows of the Oval Office, the zoom lens of the TV cameras caught a glimpse of the president hugging his personal secretary, Ms Betty Currie, who had helped to arrange his fatal encounters with Ms Monica Lewinsky.
Two hours later, the president was back on nation-wide television as commander-in-chief to announce that Operation Desert Fox was mission accomplished.
The bombs might have stopped falling over Baghdad but in the US Senate two articles of impeachment are ticking away into 1999. The president of the United States is in more peril now than President Saddam Hussein. Even if they get defused, William Jefferson Clinton is now forever in the history books as the first elected president of the United States to be impeached.
And all over Monica.