Paul Ryan tip: When John Boehner smokes, the meeting’s gone bad

Once Speaker John Boehner puts flame to cigarette, Rep. Paul Ryan knows: The meeting is not going well, he said.

“If it’s a good meeting, he might go without one,” Mr. Ryan, 44, wrote in his new book, “The Way Forward: Renewing the American Idea,” about Mr. Boehner’s well-known cigarette smoking habit. “If things are tense or frustrating, he’ll start about halfway through.”

And when talks are really tense, as they were during the October legislative gathering to discuss the partial government shutdown?

“On [that] night,” Mr. Ryan remembered, Bloomberg Businessweek reported. “he was already smoking when we got there.”

Mr. Ryan’s 260-page book is a memoir and a political rally call, and recounts in part the Wisconsin lawmaker’s journey on Capitol Hill.