the exercise of an undoubted power vested in him by the Constitution,” performing “a strictly executive duty.”24
Eventually, the Senate voted on three of the House’s charges, only to fall one vote short of the two-thirds needed for conviction in each case. Seven Republicans joined all the minority Democrats in voting for Johnson’s acquittal. “I knew he’d be acquitted; I knew it,” declared Johnson’s wife, Eliza, unsurprisingly his staunchest supporter.25
Yet defecting Republicans who saved Johnson’s presidency may have been informed less by a quest for justice than by the rules of presidential succession at the time that would have elevated the controversial President Pro-Tem of the Senate, Benjamin Wade of Ohio, to the presidency. The outspoken Senator had earned the nickname of “Bluff” and alienated many fellow Republicans with his radical views on Reconstruction and his support for paper money and protective tariffs. James Garfield, then a member of Congress, privately wrote that conservative Republicans feared “the Presidency of Ben Wade, a man of violent passions, extreme opinions, and narrow views.”26
A WARNING FOR TRUMP
Johnson’s acquittal may have pleased his wife, but it resolved none of the momentous issues debated at the trial. Johnson narrowly escaped removal, but a healthy majority of senators still had voted for his conviction. Although the Johnson precedent did not define the grounds for impeachment or disinfect the process from policy and politics, it showed how an impeachment and trial could benefit the nation. After his impeachment, Johnson tamed his invective and moderated his opposition to Republican Reconstruction. He served out quietly his last nine months in office without renewing his conflicts with Congress.27
To this day, impeachment remains subject only to the judgments of Congress. Too liberal use of impeachment could diminish the standing of Congress or unleash a chain reaction of uncontrolled partisan warfare. But too much restraint threatens to allow corruption and abuse to fester in the most powerful office in the world.
Andrew Johnson’s New York Times obituary contains a warning for Donald Trump. The Times observed that “Undoubtedly the greatest misfortune that ever befell Andrew Johnson was the assassination of President Lincoln.” Johnson’s fatal flaw, it said, was that “he was always headstrong and ‘sure he was right’ even in his errors.” The chapters to come will intimately acquaint you with Trump’s arrogance and errors. Don’t be fooled by the shifting decisions, policies, and pronouncements of a fast-moving presidency. May this be your guide to Trump’s many vulnerabilities to the ultimate sanction of restraint on a president, and your foundation for building a case for his impeachment.28
The Resignation of Richard Nixon: A Warning to Donald Trump
____________
This is the operative statement. The others are inoperative.
—Richard Nixon press secretary Ron Ziegler, April 17, 1973
You’re saying it’s a falsehood. And they’re giving—Sean Spicer, our press secretary—gave alternative facts.
—Donald Trump senior advisor Kellyanne Conway, January 22, 2017
In a retrospective on the Nixon scandals forty years after the Watergate break-in, Woodward and Bernstein conceded that “Nixon was far worse than we thought.” Even early in his presidency, Donald Trump exhibits the same tendencies that led Nixon to violate the most basic standards of morality and threaten the foundations of our democracy. Both Nixon and Trump exhibited a determination to never quit, to win at all costs, to attack and never back down, and to flout conventional rules and restraints. But as ambitious and headstrong as they were, they also shared a compulsion to deflect blame, and they were riddled with insecurities. They exploited the resentments of white working class Americans and split the world into enemies and loyalists. In the first month of his presidency, Trump talked more about “enemies” than any other president in history. Neither man allowed the law, the truth, the free press, or the potential for collateral damage to others to impede their personal agendas. They cared little about ideology but very much about adulation and power. They had little use for checks and balances and stretched the reach of presidential authority to its outer limits. They obsessed over secrecy and thirsted for control without dissent.
The establishments in New York and Washington and at the elite universities viewed the two men with distaste throughout their long careers. In turn, these professed populists scorned a cultural elite of mainstream journalists, Hollywood celebrities, revered politicians, and Ivy League professors. When first elected president, Nixon had commanded his aides, “No one in Ivy League schools to be hired for a year—we need balance—trustworthy ones are the dumb ones.” But “trustworthy” to whose benefit? Certainly not to the American people, who’ve put their welfare in the hands of that government meant to represent their—and not its own—best interests. So far, with few exceptions, Donald Trump has avoided Ivy League professors for cabinet or top staff positions in his administration.1
Long after he resigned the presidency, Richard Nixon confessed to an intense admiration of Donald Trump. To the magnate in 1987, he wrote: “Whenever you decide to run for office you will be a winner!” Trump proclaimed that he would hang Nixon’s “amazing” letter in the Oval Office.2
In 1974, two years after winning a landslide reelection victory, Nixon avoided near certain impeachment and removal by becoming the only American president to resign the office. Nixon’s story is the cautionary tale for Donald Trump.
WATERGATE: A CANCER ON THE PRESIDENCY
In 1972, Richard Nixon brilliantly orchestrated his reelection campaign, but he still feared that leaks of such illegal acts as a covert bombing war in Cambodia and the wiretapping of reporters and administration officials could sink his reelection and even lead to his impeachment. In 1971, he established in the White House a covert unit known as the Plumbers to plug leaks. Members of the unit doubled as dirty tricks specialists who would conduct the Watergate break-in and the burglary of the office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, the man who had leaked the Defense Department’s secret history of the Vietnam War known as the “Pentagon Papers.” “You can’t let the Jew steal that stuff and get away with it,” Nixon told his chief of staff, H. R. “Bob” Haldeman. “People don’t trust these Eastern establishment people. He’s Harvard. He’s a Jew. You know, and he’s an arrogant intellectual.”3
In his campaign, Nixon set a model for Donald Trump by targeting the forgotten Americans: the so-called “Silent Majority, of white voters of modest means and education, ignored and scorned by Washington’s elite.” This Silent Majority of Americans believed that “as individuals they have lost control of a complicated and impersonal society which oppresses them with high taxes, spiraling inflation and enforced integration while rewarding the very poor and very rich.” Nixon would woo the Silent Majority with the “old values of patriotism, hard work, morality, and respect for law and order.”4
As for minorities, Nixon said that the administration would “pay attention” to blacks, “keep some around [to] avoid Goldwater problem.” Earlier he had said, “I have the greatest affection for them, but I know they ain’t gonna make it for five hundred years.” As for Jews, they
