This Day in Presidential History (Senate Acquits Andrew Johnson in Impeachment Trial)

May 28, 1868—Two months after it began, the trial of President Andrew Johnson formally concluded with the U.S. Senate deciding narrowly not to remove him from office.

In a prior post, I discussed the circumstances leading up to the House vote to impeach Johnson. Now, as promised, I’d like to consider how he escaped removal by the Senate—and the precedents this vote set for the later impeachment proceedings against Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton.

In all likelihood, high school and college students will be able to tell you that Radical Republicans were out for revenge against Johnson for his mild Reconstruction policy; that he survived by a single vote short of the necessary two-thirds required to convict in the Senate, with key support provided by seven moderate Republicans; and that the last undecided Republican, Edmund G. Ross, looking “down into my open grave” before his vote, essentially committed political suicide, as he never again won electoral office.

The actual story is more complicated than this, as most history tends to be. The version with which most people are familiar was first propounded by historians who viewed Reconstruction as a “tragic period” in American history of rapine and revenge against a South prostrated by its huge losses in the Civil War, then filtered in a less politically correct—and more dramatic—fashion by (then-Senator) John F. Kennedy in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Profiles in Courage (1956).

To be fair to this school of thought, there were problems with the impeachment case against the President—the counts were not very specific; the Senate prosecutors sought to include anything that could tarnish the President’s image, even if it was tangential to the major issues at hand (e.g., Johnson’s drunkenness at his inauguration as Vice-President); and at least some of these prosecutors (e.g., Benjamin Butler) had keen political self-interest in pursuing the President’s removal.

However, Rutgers historian David Greenberg has called into question JFK’s heroic depiction of Ross, noting that the young senator had reasons of his own for voting for acquittal, such as a patronage fight he was waging within his home state of Kansas.

More than 100 years later, when Richard Nixon’s involvement with Watergate came to light, the precedent set by the Johnson impeachment trial was that the phrase “other high crimes and misdemeanors” could not involve simply policy disagreements, but rather grave offenses against the federal government.

Nixon resigned, of course, before he could be formally removed by the Senate, but he possessed enough sense of political mathematics to realize his days were numbered.

Besides the seriousness of his crimes and the host of political enemies he had made during his tenure in office, two other conditions unique to that time, I believe, sped his removal from office:

a) an atrocious economic environment, including an energy crisis, that convinced the public that his inability to concentrate on the tasks for which he was elected meant he could no longer be useful in office; and

b) bipartisan cooperation between two moderate groups on the House Judiciary Committee—moderate Northern and Midwestern Republicans and conservative Southern Democrats – that provided lopsided votes on the obstruction of justice (27-11) and abuse of power (28-10) counts. (The third count, on contempt of Congress, for defying the panel’s request for materials, passed by a closer 21-17 party-line vote.)

Even Clinton defenders at his Senate trial admitted he had lied under oath concerning his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. Moreover, as Peter Baker’s account of the proceedings, The Breach, indicates, several Senators who eventually voted in his favor, such as Fritz Hollings, Russ Feingold, and Patsy Murray had hoped initially that he’d do the country (and the Democrats) a favor by resigning.

But Clinton's poll numbers, strengthened by a still-buoyant economy and the absence of military conflict, convinced lawmakers that it was not the will of the people that he should be removed. Moreover, the two factions that held the fulcrum of power in the spring and summer of ’74 against Nixon—the moderate Republicans and conservative Democrats—had, over time, withered to numerical insignificance in their parties, leaving it easier for the proceedings to be seen as partisan. (Capitol Hill Republicans fed this perception by pushing hard for impeachment rather than censure of the President.)

A third factor might also be mentioned here: What George Stephanapoulos termed the Clinton White House’s “Ellen Rometsch strategy” of dampening opposition to impeachment with the veiled threat of leaking lawmakers’ own sexual peccadilloes. (The name, if it sounds unfamiliar, is to an East German girlfriend of President Kennedy’s implicated in espionage. Robert Kennedy instigated her rapid deportment, as well as J. Edgar Hoover’s subsequent warning to Capitol Hill lawmakers not to look further into this matter as it would open up others’ sexual secrets.)