LETTERS FROM HOME: A SHORT HISTORY OF ANOTHER PRESIDENT'S IMPEACHABLE OFFENSES

Feb. 4, 1999

Dear Julie,

For anyone who lived through the Watergate hearings, the impeachment proceedings in Washington, D.C., feel vaguely like deja vu redux -- this time without the heroes.

I had just graduated from college in 1973 and was spending a month with friends in St. Petersburg, Fla. We sandwiched the hearings between the beach and bar-hopping. Unlike the current paid political announcements, they made riveting TV.

Maybe it's partly because Henry Hyde is no bushy-browed, Constitution-spouting Sam Ervin. Maybe.

There has been no John Dean telling of "a cancer on the presidency," no prim Mo Dean behind her husband in every picture. No bipartisan heroes like Howard Baker framing the crucial questions: What did the president know and when did he know it?

For that moment in time, in 1973, politics resembled a great American movie, a spectacle of power hunger in a league with "Citizen Kane."

Surely the same forces are at work now as were the last time the nation went through this agony, I reason. I asked a much more learned person, local historian Dr. Frank Nickell.

Sure enough, the parallels are astounding. Both Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton grew up in poverty and had meteoric rises to the presidency. Johnson held almost every elective office you can think of.

Both were Southern Democrats, Johnson the only Southern congressman who remained in the Union when war broke out.

Convinced he was going to lose the election in 1864, Lincoln dumped his own vice president and picked Johnson as a running mate. When Lincoln was assassinated five weeks after starting his second term, the Republican Party championing the war to eradicate slavery suddenly found itself in a government headed by a Southern president.

"It was the irony of all ironies. No one could have written this," Nickell said.

The Republicans wanted to destroy the South. Johnson wanted to see it resurrected as it was before the war.

"He had traditional Southern values that blacks were inferior," Nickell said. "He was probably the most racist president I hope we ever have."

Johnson opposed Congress' passage of the 14th Amendment, which for the first time defined American citizenship and reshaped the country. "Federal government was now involved in civil liberties and equality," Nickell said.

The two views of Reconstruction could not co-exist.

Like Clinton's, Johnson's enemies pursued him from the start, investigating his bank account and his affairs. One legislator insisted he was involved in Lincoln's assassination and claimed 18 pages missing from John Wilkes Booth's diary implicated Johnson.

A few of Clinton's enemies have gone so far as to accuse him of murder as well. "They were after him from the beginning," Nickell said. "I remember seeing a bumper sticker saying `Impeach Clinton' before he was inaugurated."

Back then, the House of Representatives voted for impeachment before deciding on the charges.

As soon as Johnson was impeached, reporters rushed to the Senators to ask them how they planned to vote. "Every Senator except for one said they knew how they were going to vote before they heard the evidence," Nickell said.

With 10 counts against him, Johnson survived removal from office by one vote in a trial that lasted from February until May.

"Seven Republicans voted not to remove him because they said it was such a traumatic thing it should not happen," Nickell said.

Johnson had promised some of them patronage and jobs.

He was not his party's nominee in the next election, but he ran again for other posts and was re-elected to the Senate in 1874. When he walked to his old desk, he received the longest ovation in that body's history, a tribute to his loyalty and principles.

No matter what happens in the coming days, you can almost imagine Bill Clinton attempting his own comeback. Now that would be worth watching.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.