The Ghosts Of Impeachment Past

Of the three presidents who have been subjected to the ordeal of impeachment, Bill Clinton is the only one to confront that crisis at a time when the country at large is relatively free of political strife and turmoil.

That was hardly the case with Andrew Johnson and Richard Nixon, the other two presidents who were threatened with removal from office by an act of Congress. Both men occupied the White House during a period of national trauma and tragedy, and the impeachment proceedings against them were a direct result of larger, cataclysmic forces that had engulfed the country.

Johnson was a political maverick. A Democrat from Tennessee, he was firmly opposed to secession and when the Civil War broke out in 1861, he was the only Southern senator who did not leave the federal government and join the Confederacy. In fact, during the early years of the war he served as governor of that part of Tennessee occupied by Union forces.

In an effort to expand his narrow Republican base when he ran for re-election in 1864, Lincoln reached out to Southern Unionists and War Democrats for support. Since no one from this faction had stronger credentials than Johnson, he was viewed as an ideal running mate for the new coalition Lincoln was trying to build.

Like Lincoln, Johnson believed that a lenient policy of postwar Reconstruction was the best way to heal the terrible wounds that Americans had inflicted on each other during the long and bitter conflict. As Lincoln put it so memorably in his Second Inaugural Address: "With malice toward none, with charity for all."

But a little more than a month after that speech, Lincoln was assassinated, and Johnson had to assume the burden of guiding the country through the difficult process of Reconstruction.

In taking on that challenge, the new president had neither Lincoln's towering stature nor his shrewd political savvy, and he soon ran afoul of the so-called Radical Republicans in Congress, who advocated much more severe measures in dealing with the conquered states.

As early as 1866, when Johnson vetoed a Civil Rights bill that would have given full citizenship and the vote to the recently freed slaves while denying that right to many Southern whites, his Republican foes began to look for a way to impeach him.

Under the law of succession at the time, if Johnson were removed from office, the next president would have been one of the Radical Republicans: Ben Wade of Ohio, the president pro tempore of the Senate. In other words, the mve to drive Johnson from the White House was a classic political power play.

In 1867, Congress passed the Tenure of Office Act, which gave the Senate the right to approve or reject the dismissal of all presidential appointees. In drafting that law, the Radical Republicans set a trap for Johnson - and he soon fell into it.

To challenge the Tenure of Office Act, which he regarded as blatantly unconstitutional, Johnson fired his Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, who was closely allied to the Radical Republicans. But instead of initiating a Supreme Court case on the question, which had been his intention, Johnson gave the Radical Republicans the ammunition they needed to launch impeachment proceedings against him.

In March 1868, Johnson became the first president to be impeached. The vote in the House was 126 to 47, and with that the battleground shifted to Johnson's trial in the Senate.

At the time there were 42 Republicans in the Senate and only 12 Democrats. If the vote had been strictly along party lines (as had been the case in the House), there would have been more than enough to meet the two-thirds majority needed to convict the president. But when push came to shove, seven Republicans joined with the Democrats, and Johnson was acquitted by the perilous margin of one vote.

It was later disclosed that just enough Republicans had secretly pledged to vote for acquittal because they believed that to remove a president over what were essentially policy disagreements and political power moves would set a dangerous precedent for the future.

The impeachment proceedings against Richard Nixon also took place against the background of a controversial war that deeply divided the American people - the conflict in Vietnam.

When Nixon became president in 1969, the escalating war in Vietnam had been raging for nearly a decade, and by then it had become so unpopular that angry antiwar demonstrations had become a frequent occurrence on American streets and campuses.

Those protests, in fact, helped to persuade President Lyndon Johnson that he had lost his mandate, and his decision not to seek a second term in the White House was a key factor in Nixon's election in 1968.

But when the new president failed in his efforts to bring a speedy end to the U.S. mission in Vietnam, the antiwar movement turned its fury on him, and it wasn't long before Nixon felt besieged by all the turmoil the continuing war provoked across the country.

In response to the rising tide of protest, the White House launched a counter-campaign against its critics. One of Nixon's prime targets was the national media, which he blamed for fomenting the antiwar fervor that was now threatening to engulf his presidency just as it earlier had engulfed Johnson's.

A critical moment occurred in June 1971 when the Pentagon Papers - classified documents tracing the step-by-step decisions that led America into the Vietnam quagmire - were leaked to the New York Times.

Nixn and his top deputies were furious, and in reaction to the publication of the Pentagon Papers, the president approved the formation of a Special Investigations Unit. Its mission was to prevent and plug leaks that might be damaging to the White House.

The members of this task force were the infamous "Plumbers" who, in time, would go on to burglarize Democratic campaign offices in Washington and commit other crimes that fell under the rubric of Watergate. And when Nixon made the fateful decision to take part in the cover-up of these crimes, he put his presidency squarely on the road to destruction.

The articles of impeachment against him were drafted in late July 1974, and a few days later a delegation of Republican leaders on Capitol Hill visited the White House. There, in somber tones, they managed to persuade Nixon that he not only would be impeached on the House floor but that he faced certain conviction in the Senate trial that would follow the House action.

So, rather than go through that ordeal, he became the first president in American history to resign from office.

Thus, for both Andrew Johnson and Richard Nixon, impeachment was driven by the winds of terrible wars, and by the disruptive social and political consequences of those wars.

The move to impeach Clinton, by way of contrast, comes at a time when the nation is at peace and enjoying the fruits of a robust prosperity, an economic boom that, in strength and duration, is unparalleled in American history.

Perhaps that is why a solid majority of Americans continue to give his presidency a high approval rating, and to reiterate, over and over again, that they want Clinton to remain in office until his second term comes to its formal conclusion on January 20th, 2001.

By Gary Paul Gates ©1998 CBS Worldwide Corp. All rights reserved