About this item
Four experts on the American presidency examine the three times impeachment has been invoked - against Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton - and explain what it means today.Impeachment is a double-edged sword. Though it was designed to check tyrants, Thomas Jefferson also called impeachment "the most formidable weapon for the purpose of a dominant faction that was ever contrived." On the one hand, it nullifies the will of voters, the basic foundation of all representative democracies. On the other, its absence from the Constitution would leave the country vulnerable to despotic leadership. It is rarely used, and with good reason. Only three times has a president's conduct led to such political disarray as to warrant his potential removal from office, transforming a political crisis into a constitutional one. None has yet succeeded. Andrew Johnson was impeached in 1868 for failing to kowtow to congressional leaders - and, in a large sense, for failing to be Abraham Lincoln - yet survived his Senate trial. Richard Nixon resigned in August 1974 after the House Judiciary Committee approved three articles of impeachment against him for lying, obstructing justice, and employing his executive power for personal and political gain. Bill Clinton had an affair with a White House intern, but in 1999 he faced trial in the Senate less for that prurient act than for lying under oath about it. In the first book to consider these three presidents alone - and the one thing they have in common - Jeffrey A. Engel, Jon Meacham, Timothy Naftali, and Peter Baker explain that the basis and process of impeachment is more political than legal. The Constitution states that the president "shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors," leaving room for historical precedent and the temperament of the time to weigh heavily on each case. This book reveals the complicated motives behind each impeachment - never entirely limited to the question of a president's guilt - and the risks to all sides. Each case depended on factors beyond the president's behavior: his relationship with Congress, the polarization of the moment, and the power and resilience of the office itself. This is a realist view of impeachment that looks to history for clues about its potential use in the future.
About the Author
Jeffrey A. Engel is founding director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University. He has taught at Yale University, the University of Pennsylvania, Haverford College, and before joining SMU's faculty in 2012 taught history and public policy at Texas A&M University while serving as the Verlin and Howard Kruse '52 Founders Professor and Director of Programming for the Scowcroft Institute of International Affairs. A Senior Fellow of the Norwegian Nobel Institute and graduate of Cornell University, he additionally studied at St. Catherine's College, Oxford University, and received his Ph.D. in American history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Engel has authored or edited ten books on American foreign policy, including Cold War at 30,000 Feet: The Anglo-American Fight for Aviation Supremacy (Harvard University Press, 2007) , which received the Paul Birdsall Prize from the American Historical Association; Local Consequences of the Global Cold War (Stanford University Press and the Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2008) ; The China Diary of George H.W. Bush: The Making of a Global President (Princeton University Press, 2008) ; The Fall of the Berlin Wall: The Revolutionary Legacy of 1989 (Oxford University Press, 2009) ; with Joseph R. Cerami, Rethinking Leadership and "Whole of Government" National Security Reform (Strategic Studies Institute, 2010) ; Into the Desert: Reflections on the Gulf War (Oxford University Press, 2012) ; and, with Andrew Preston and Mark Lawrence, America in the World: A History in Documents from the War with Spain to the War on Terror (Princeton University Press, 2014) ; with Thomas J. Knock, When Life Strikes the Presidency: Scandal, Death, and Illness in the White House (Oxford University Press, 2017) ; and When the World Seemed New: George H.W. Bush and the End of the Cold War (Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt, 2017. A frequent media contributor on historical and current events, his scholarly and popular articles have appeared in such journals as Diplomatic History; Diplomacy & Statecraft; Project Syndicate; Perspectives on History; Enterprise & Society; The International Journal; Air & Space Magazine, The Dallas Morning News; and The Los Angeles Times.
He is currently writing Seeking Monsters to Destroy: How America Goes to War, From Jefferson to Obama (Oxford University Press, forthcoming) .
Contact: jaengel@smu.edu
