Impeachments: Trump, Nixon, Clinton, and Johnson

When just the other day I heard for the first time the name of Edmund G. Ross mentioned in media coverage of the Trump impeachment hearings, I realized the time had come to do my part in spreading a little of what I've come to learn recently about who Ross was, how he once had been remembered, and how now still newer perspectives have arrived. (Buckle your revisionist seat-belts.)

Something I'd read a couple of months back suggested that, for understanding historical comparisons, the impeachment of Andrew Johnson (beginning in 1868) was a lot more instructive, and significant, in comparison with Trump's, than either the near-impeachment of Richard Nixon (forestalled by his resignation, in 1974); or especially when compared to the impeachment of Bill Clinton (in 1998).

Good news for the curious, a new book on the topic has just come out, called The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson, and the Dream of a Just Nation, by historian and biographer Brenda Wineapple. It's a fascinating tale, and there are at least two items of this incredible story you've got to hear.

First is this: conventionally, everyone was once told that Johnson's impeachment was all about his ability as President to fire Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, a Lincoln appointee. Congress had passed certain laws preventing this, and the case partially revolved around the extent and nature of executive privilege. Of the 11 articles of impeachment the House brought against Johnson, the first eight dealt with this issue. They were, however, only the catalyst of that impeachment.

Also very much on the table was the entire policy approach that Johnson took toward Reconstruction. Very much in character as a Democratic politician of those times, he was an avowed white supremacist, fundamentally opposed to allowing blacks to participate in the legal, political and civic life of American society, wanting only for them what might be called non-slavery.

At the same time, he advocated that white Southerners should enjoy immediate and practically condition-free re-entry into all aspects of participation in the affairs of the nation. Furthermore, in those terrifying times when the first Ku Klux Klan was rising and testing its strength and its reach, he resisted assigning officers to the South who were willing to defend both black and white Republicans, despite repeated news of massacres, where certain northern troops were either unable or unwilling to interpose themselves between white southerners and those they wished to kill.

Edmund Ross is item #2. He was at first a Republican US Senator from Kansas, later a Democrat. History has been kind to Ross, helped by historian and former president himself (1961-63) John F. Kennedy, who - as Wineapple describes - "applauded the 'courage' of senators voting against impeachment, ostensibly putting interest of country above career and politics." In Kennedy's most famous book, Profiles in Courage (published in 1956, mostly ghost-written by his speech-writer Ted Sorenson), the claim is made that not a single one [of the Senators voting to acquit Johnson] escaped the terrible torture of vicious criticism engendered by their vote.

Historians more recently have rebutted this claim, and one, David O. Stewart, claimed flatly it was a myth: None was a victim of post-impeachment retribution. Indeed, their careers were not wildly different from those of the 35 senators who voted to convict Johnson. Wineapple adds: Kennedy soft-pedaled the fact that Ross may have been bribed to acquit Johnson - or if he wasn't exactly bribed, he successfully importuned Johnson for favors, perks and position shortly after his apparently courageous vote. Having switched the way he'd said he'd planned to vote at virtually the last second, Ross's vote became the one that saved Johnson from the 2/3 needed to convict and remove him from office.

What would Kennedy's interest be in making Ross look like a good guy?

Partly I wonder if it's simply the expected position of a politician, especially one soon to be president himself, arguing in favor of those, like Ross, who function to uphold the status-quo, regardless of principles of justice, or the work toward an"American dream" that works for everyone.

But I think it also has something to do with what historian and author James Loewen has talked about: how our understanding of American history doesn't allow much room for "bad guys". Even historical figures who can be argued to have done "bad" things -- like, for example, advocating for continued enslavement of human beings -- need (in our American approach to our own history) to be held up as good guys, lest our students and our children become tainted with the suspicion that, heavens! Sometimes people we have looked up to did things that were after all not so nice. It's one of the prices we pay for thinking of ourselves as exceptional, as so different from, and better than, every other nation, and every other people on the planet.

As Loewen points out, when the typical American high school history textbook comes, for example, to the Lincoln-Douglas debates, its authors will often spend precious paragraphs detailing the trivial: what the two men wore, what Lincoln's voice sounded like in comparison with Douglas' rhetorical style, etc. Often omitted completely from their report is the subject of the debates: slavery,* and  related issues, like whether blacks would be allowed legal and political rights equal to those of whites.

Soon enough we'll see how many of our contemporary senators will be willing to vote in the best interests of the country over paritsan party politics, and which ones will vote to remind this president (and warn those who are to follow), that our country was explicitly founded on the rejection of monarchy. Not reining in the many abuses of this current president will surely lead us closer to tyranny, and further away from the our cherished, but much abused, system of one-person, one-vote.

If you enjoyed this article, you may also enjoy Trump's Not Richard Nixon. He's Andrew Johnson: Betrayal, paranoia, cowardice. We've been here before, by Tim Murphy: in Mother Jones (Jan./Feb. 2020)


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* ~ Tell anyone claiming that the Civil War was fought over "states' rights" to have a look at any of the southern states' own proclamations at the time explaining their reasons for secession: the proof is at the beginning of every one of them.