Johnson, Nixon, Clinton, Trump

Historians by their nature are less partisan about the events they study than were the pundits who commented on the same events when they were current events. Historians are less susceptible to the seductions of political rhetoric and the pressures of public opinion. They devote intense attention to fine details, especially those previously unknown to the public record, and to assembling those details into broad explanations of history.

So although Donald Trump will escape removal from office by rage-tweeting the solidification of his popular and Congressional base of support, the judgment of historians will be more detached. Historians will be more concerned with facts.

President Trump is our third president to be impeached. Neither of the previous two, Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, were removed from office, and Trump won’t be removed either. Many commentators have slightly misstated this fact, saying that the impeachment process has never led to the removal from office of an American president. But in fact, Richard Nixon was removed by the impeachment process: faced with certainty as clear as certainty in politics can be, that he would be impeached and removed from office, Nixon resigned, just days before the House of Representatives would have voted overwhelmingly to impeach him. Trump is thus not the third, but the fourth president to be subjected to the formal impeachment process.

Presidential impeachment has always been dominated by partisanship. In all four instances, the White House and the impeaching House of Representatives were controlled by opposing parties. In all of our history, no House majority has seriously tried to impeach a president of the same party.

In the previous three cases, the Senate was controlled by the same party that controlled the House. This is the first presidential impeachment in which the Senate is controlled by the president’s party. The Senate failed to remove Johnson from office by one vote, because 10 of 45 Senate Republicans joined all nine Democrats opposing removal. Clinton’s removal failed to gain even a majority, because 10 Republicans joined all 45 Democrats in opposing removal on one article of impeachment, and five Republicans joined the Democrats in opposing removal on the other article. Nixon’s resignation came when it became clear that a majority of Senate Republicans would join most Democrats in voting for removal, leaving maybe 15 senators in Nixon’s corner.

But historians look beyond the partisanship of impeachment. The House of Representatives approved 11 articles of impeachment against Andrew Johnson, all essentially coming down to Johnson’s defiance of the Tenure of Office Act, which prohibited the president from removing any Senate-confirmed official without Senate approval. (The Act was later repealed, and still later found to be unconstitutional.)

Historians don’t argue so much about the facts of Johnson’s impeachment as about the interpretation of those facts. At his Senate trial, Johnson’s defense was not allowed to present evidence that Johnson fired Secretary of War Edwin Stanton in order to create a test case for the courts to decide the constitutionality of the Tenure of Office Act. That fact, and the amply documented hostility between the Reconstruction Era Congress and the accommodationist president, support the argument that the impeachment effort was partisan vindictiveness.

Whatever their motivations, Johnson’s dismissal of Stanton was legal and valid, and Congress’s attempt to prohibit Johnson’s actions was unconstitutional and invalid. Historians today might impeach Johnson for his racism and his sustained opposition to the Reconstruction goal of racial equality in the vanquished Confederacy – but not for his dismissal of Stanton.

Clinton’s impeachment is perhaps too recent to have moved completely from the realm of partisanship to the realm of history. But once again, the facts are little disputed: Clinton committed criminal perjury and obstruction of justice regarding his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Although Democrats at the time regarded Clinton’s actions as wrong and deserving punishment, the Democratic consensus was that Clinton’s actions did not constitute impeachable high crimes and misdemeanors. More recently, some Democrats have begun to say that Clinton’s affair itself, with a White House intern beginning when she was 21 years old, was impeachable. I think the central historical question of the Clinton case will be whether egregious but essentially private, non-criminal wrongdoing (taking sexual advantage of a subordinate employee), or wrongdoing (perjury and obstruction of justice) that is criminal but poses no threat to the constitutional order, should be impeachable.

Historians largely agree about both the facts and the interpretation of the facts underlying the Nixon impeachment. Beginning just days after the Watergate burglary, Nixon directed an aggressive cover-up campaign, leading to charges of obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and contempt of Congress.

The impeachment charges against Trump most resemble the charges against Nixon. The Watergate scandal was often characterized by Nixon partisans as a “third-rate burglary,” which surely it was. But the burglary was also part of a broader campaign of “dirty tricks” to take the strongest candidates out of the Democratic primaries and ensure Nixon’s re-election. For instance: Nixon re-election campaign operatives orchestrated the embarrassment of Edmund Muskie, a heavyweight candidate for the Democratic nomination, with forged letters falsely suggesting that Muskie had used a derogatory term for French-Canadians, a prominent voting bloc in the New Hampshire primary. They also forged letters falsely charging Henry Jackson and Hubert Humphrey, two other Democratic heavyweights, with sexual misconduct.

The Watergate burglary itself was actually the second Nixon campaign break-in at the Watergate complex. The first break-in was to install listening devices in the offices of the Democratic National Committee; the devices didn’t work, and the second break-in was to replace them. There was of course no legitimate law enforcement purpose for the listening devices – there was no court-issued warrant, and the devices weren’t installed by law enforcement personnel but by personnel hired by Nixon’s re-election campaign.

In its broadest terms, the Watergate scandal was about subversion of the 1972 presidential election to insure Nixon’s victory. And sure enough, neither Humphrey nor Jackson nor Muskie won the 1972 Democratic nomination. George McGovern won the nomination, and his far-left politics took Democrats down to one of the most spectacular defeats in American presidential election history. We can never know how the election would have turned out had it not been subverted, but we certainly know how it turned out after it was subverted.

Historians will know that Donald Trump similarly tried to use Ukraine to subvert the 2020 presidential election, to ensure his own re-election. Historians will not be diverted by partisan rhetoric about quid pro quo, about whether military aid to Ukraine was withheld or merely “paused,” or about whether the Ukrainian president felt “pressured” by Trump or even knew that the aid was on hold. History will know that Trump asked the president of Ukraine to open an investigation into Democratic heavyweight Joe Biden and his son, despite the fact that neither Biden had violated any law, either Ukrainian or American.

And therefore history will know that Trump illegally tried to use a foreign government to advance his re-election campaign. History will say that Trump tried to steal the 2020 election, and he got caught. Partisan Democrats in the House impeached him for his high crimes and misdemeanors, but partisan Republicans acquitted him in the Senate.