Rethinking JFK's Edmund G. Ross

In the entire history of the United States only three presidents have been impeached by the House of Representatives: Andrew Johnson in 1868, Bill Clinton in 1998, and Donald Trump in 2019. In all three cases, the United States Senate failed to muster the 2/3 majority necessary to remove the President from office. President Richard Nixon resigned the presidency in 1974 when his allies in the Congress warned him that he probably would not be acquitted in a Senate trial. 

Why is it so difficult to impeach and remove a President from office? The most obvious reason is that the Constitutional standard of "high crimes and misdemeanors" for conviction is difficult to define with any precision. Moreover, the requirement of a 2/3 majority vote to convict in the Senate (67 out of 100 senators) means that a significant number Senators from the POTUS's own party have to vote against him. That's not likely, and any President facing that situation would probably take the Nixon route and resign before facing the public humiliation of a guilty verdict. 

From a media influence perspective, I think a major reason for the rarity of impeachment and near impossibility of removal is the way the failed removal of President Andrew Johnson is typically framed. John F. Kennedy's Pulitzer Prize winning book from 1956 (actually ghost written by his speech writer Theodore Sorenson), Profiles in Courage, identified Kanas Republican Senator Edmund G. Ross' deciding vote to acquit Johnson as one of the great acts of political courage and integrity in the history of the nation. The Kennedy/Sorenson narrative, of a principled Ross risking his political future to stand against the hyperpartisan "Radical Republican" House impeachment managers and Senators, became the dominant way of thinking about impeachment in mainstream pundit circles. As Senator John F. Kennedy himself put it in a 1957 speech delivered at the University of Kansas: 

In 1956 JFK won the Pulitzer Prize for Profiles in Courage. Ghost written by speech writer Ted Sorenson, the book weaved a narrative of Edmund G. Ross and the impeachment of Andrew Johnson that became dominant in popular media.

"Of all the acts of courage described in my book, Ross' was the bravest of them all. When he rose on the Senate Floor to cast the vote that saved Andrew Johnson from impeachment conviction, he knew he was destroying a promising political career. As he later described it: 'I almost literally looked down into my own open grave. Friendships, position, fortune, everything that makes life desirable to an ambitious man were about to be swept away by the breath of my mouth, perhaps forever.' Tragic to say, Edmund Ross was not exaggerating the fury which would fall upon him for his determined position. And yet, he was equally correct when he wrote to his wife shortly after the trial: 'Millions of men cursing me today will bless me tomorrow for having saved the country from the greatest peril through which it has ever passed, though none but God can ever know the struggle it has cost me.'"

Ross and Kennedy had it all wrong. The vote to acquit Johnson hardly saved the country from peril. In fact, Ross' vote reinforced the peril the country was already in, and helped guarantee literally another 100 years of misery for African-Americans who by 1868 were already being brutally denied their human and civil rights that were supposed to follow emancipation. Johnson's constitutionally dubious executive actions taken to reconstruct the union after the Civil War were lenient to the point of virtually reintroducing slavery in the southern states. Southern "Black Codes," which received no opposition from Johnson, effectively denied Blacks any meaningful political and economic rights. Racist laws were so deeply entrenched that not even the passage of the 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution were enough to provide a remedy. 

Republican Senator Edmund G. Ross of Kansas (1826-1907) cast one of the most consequential votes in the history of the Congress when he joined six other Republicans to acquit Andrew Johnson. The final vote was 35-19 to convict Johnson, one short of the required 2/3 needed. 

House and Senate Republicans in 1868 opposed Johnson not only on the grounds that he abused the powers of his office in a way that allowed for a reintroduction of slavery by other names, but also because they found his conduct unbecoming of what should be expected of a Chief Executive. In 1866 Johnson went on a "Swing Around the Circle" tour of northeastern and midwestern states. At various stops he compared himself to Jesus Christ, called for the hanging of political opponents, and provoked riots. He accused the Republican Congress, which was trying to guarantee voting rights for Blacks, of trying to disenfranchise Whites and provoke African-Americans to take up arms. The New York Herald, up to the tour one of Johnson's major supporters, turned against him: "It is mortifying to see a man occupying the lofty position of President of the United States descend from that position and join issue with those who are draggling their garments in the muddy gutters of political vituperation." 

Famous cartoonist Thomas Nast lampooned Johnson's "Swing Around the Circle" tour. Note the halo around Johnson's head in the center illustration--a reference to Johnson's habit of comparing himself to Jesus Christ.

By a vote of 126-47, the House of Representatives passed eleven articles of impeachment. Historically most of the attention has been given to Article I, which condemned Johnson for violating the Tenure of Office Act, legislation which required the president to seek Congressional approval in order to remove a cabinet officer. Congress passed the Tenure of Office Act in 1867 in large part to shield Cabinet officers in disagreement with Johnson's reconstruction policies from being fired.  When Johnson tried to remove Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, a supporter of Radical Republican policy, he was in violation of the Act. (Note: The Tenure of Office Act was declared unconstitutional in 1926, contributing to the expansion of powers in the executive branch that, in my humble opinion, has been detrimental to the principle of checks and balances. The Trump administration shows us in a disturbing way how easy it is for a president to remove voices of even mild dissent in the cabinet, thus making independent action in cabinet departments almost impossible.). 

For me, impeachment article X by itself should have been enough to remove Johnson. By the way he carried out his responsibilities, the President had made a mockery of his office. Article X said that Johnson's behavior was "indecent and unbecoming in the office of the Chief Magistrate" and brought the office of the President of the United States into "contempt, ridicule, and disgrace." 

In this satire of the Swing Around the Circle tour, Johnson is pictured on the left as traveling in a child's carriage. On the right, he is held up by Secretary of State William Seward--a suggestion that Johnson at times was too drunk to stand on his own.

I get that "indecency" along with contempt, ridicule, and disgrace are subjective charges that don't rise to the level of "high crimes and misdemeanors" without providing substantial context and explanation. But for anyone who actually takes the time to examine the context, it becomes immediately clear that Andrew Johnson was a buffoon who had no business occupying the office of the presidency at any time, and especially not at a time when newly freed slaves were literally in a life and death struggle to make good on the promise of emancipation. Reading Kennedy/Sorenson and other pundits, you would think that the Radical Republicans in Congress were mere partisans who elevated policy differences to crimes in order to remove the main check on their ability to pursue their own vision of reconstruction. 

In fact, the Radical Republicans were trying to stop a crime already in progress--the crime of reintroducing slavery into the south. President Andrew Johnson was an active accomplice in that crime. To say that he was involved in a mere policy difference with the Republican Congress is absurd. Imagine being involved in a chess game, and when you take a rest room break your opponent removes your knights, bishops, and rooks from the board and when called out refuses to put them back. When asked to defend himself, he says, "well I guess we just have different opinions on how to play chess." Clearly he has no respect for the rules, cheated and deceived, and thus forfeits the privilege of playing.  

Failure to remove Johnson on the grounds of his bringing the office into contempt, ridicule, and disgrace has made it next to impossible to uphold that standard for any other President. Bill Clinton in 1999 engaged in behavior that even then would have been difficult for any CEO or mid-level manager to survive if the behavior had been revealed. More recently Al Franken was pressured to leave the Senate for less. Yet President Clinton's loudest defenders at the time were feminist movement leaders and allies acting on the rationale that providing interference for a boorish and exploitative Democrat is preferable to handing political victories to a Republican party hostile to their entire agenda. Hindsight is always 20/20, but it's becoming clearer that the mental gymnastics required to defend Clinton probably set the feminist movement in general, and women in the workplace in particular, back twenty years. One has to wonder where we would be right now if, after Monica Lewinsky's name had been released in 1998, someone had tweeted, "If you've ever been taken advantage of by your boss at work, write 'metoo' as a response to this tweet." My guess is that Harvey Weinstein and the more than 260 other big shots accused of sexual misconduct since 2017 would have faced a reckoning much sooner. 

Bill Clinton survived impeachment in part because of the support of the feminist movement. One wonders if the #metoo movement might have happened sooner were it not for the decision to provide cover for a powerful man as long as he has the right positions on policy issues.

And what about President Donald Trump? Without exaggeration, every single day of his presidency has brought the office into contempt, ridicule, and disgrace. The lies, the social media bullying and nonsense, the gaslighting, the inability to empathize with victims of the pandemic, incompetence. Some on social media have speculated that the President's shameful behavior at the first presidential "debate" this year may have been designed to provoke Joe Biden--a man who has been open about his struggles with verbal stuttering--into a potentially embarrassing stutter episode. It's virtually impossible to prove such an allegation, but the fact that a huge majority of Americans would not even be surprised if they found out it was true should tell us something. My guess is that in the future historians will look back on Mr. Trump's idiotic and incoherent phone call with the Ukraine premier and say, "out of all the things they could have impeached him for, they chose that?" 

Perhaps because I work with young people, of the  thousands of horrific tweets in Donald Trump's feed, the one that strikes me as most revolting is his 2019 mockery and bullying of teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg. What  kind of man uses a global platform of millions to mock a teen girl whose only goal is to save the planet for her generation? Answer: A man who has no business occupying the White House.

In 1956 John F. Kennedy and his ghost writer Ted Sorenson produced a narrative of the impeachment proceedings of 1868 that gave the titles of principled and courageous to a man--Republican Senator Edmund G. Ross--whose actions were neither clearly principled nor courageous. Author David O. Stewart goes as far as to claim Ross' vote to acquit Johnson was rooted in a corrupt deal. But even if we accept JFK's claim that Ross' motives were sincere, the long term consequence of his act was to reduce Congressional calling out of unacceptable presidential behavior to partisan sniping. Andrew Johnson, like Bill Clinton to a lesser, and Donald Trump to a greater extent much later, abused the powers of his office in a manner that the peoples' representatives are obligated to hold to account. Whether because of corruption, naivete, or caving in to pressure, Ross succeeded in making the impeachment and removal process--a process already difficult due to the rules outlined in the Constitution--into something almost meaningless.