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Worse-Than-Useless Historians

By Stephan Thernstrom
Posted Monday, Dec. 14, 1998, at 11:25 AM ET

Dear Abby:

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Ah yes, 1974 does seem like yesterday, and I'm struck by the fact that inadvertently the historians-for-Clinton are elevating the reputation of Nixon. This, they say, is totally different from Watergate; the President's crimes don't rise to the level of Nixon's. So Nixon set the minimum standard for impeachable action? I always thought his behavior was way over the line--that any one of the charges against him would have sufficed. Not so outrageous a president, after all?

Altogether, as you suggest, the professoriate has not shone with glory in this sorry affair. That statement signed by some 400 "historians"--many of them not really historians at all--was disgraceful. Its central claim that the Constitution "explicitly" reserves impeachment for "high crimes and misdemeanors in the exercise of executive power" is simply a lie. Article 2, Section 4 refers to "Treason, Bribery, and other high Crimes and Misdemeanors" as the grounds for impeachment, without any qualification at all about "the exercise of executive power." Nor do any other sources from the period establish a solid consensus on that alleged restriction.

Moreover, if they suddenly want to join forces with Justice Scalia and lobby for always sticking with the original meaning of the Constitution, I wish they would at least quote the sources honestly.

Then there is Sean Wilentz's priceless LA Times op-ed, "High Crimes: It Depends Upon How You Define 'Murder'." Aaron Burr killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel, he points out, and no one even proposed impeaching him for it. So?

Wilentz fails to mention an excruciatingly obvious reason why Burr was not threatened by impeachment; his party controlled three-quarters of the seats in both houses of Congress. It is surely no accident that the only chief executives in American history who came close to being impeached--Johnson, Nixon, and Clinton--faced Congresses controlled by the opposing party, which of course is not the normal state of affairs.

In Andrew Johnson's case, the partisan balance in Congress was precisely the opposite of that in Burr's day; Republicans had majorities of three to one in both houses. (By the way, it is not true that all historians today deplore the impeachment of Andrew Johnson. The argument that the Radical Republicans were a lynch mob was part of a racist historical tradition that viewed Reconstruction as a great mistake.)

Would Nixon have been driven from office if his party controlled Congress? Most Republicans turned on him when his crimes were exposed, but the investigation that revealed what he had done likely would not have been pursued by a Republican Congress. If impeachment must be bipartisan from the beginning to be legitimate, it will never happen.

Of course it must be bipartisan by the end, since the Constitution demands a two-thirds majority in the Senate.

Steve