Impeachment
An American History
Four experts on the American presidency examine the first 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…
Jon Meacham is a Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer. The author of the New York Times bestsellers Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House, Franklin and Winston, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush, and The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels, he is a distinguished visiting professor at Vanderbilt University, a contributing writer for The New York Times Book Review, and a fellow of the Society of American Historians. Meacham lives in Nashville and in Sewanee with his wife and children.
Peter Baker is the Chief White House Correspondent for The New York Times and a regular panelist on Washington Week on PBS. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Breach, about Bill Clinton’s impeachment, and, with his wife, Susan Glasser, of Kremlin Rising, about Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Timothy Naftali, the author or co-author of five books on presidential and international history, is a clinical associate professor of public service and of history at NYU. From 2007 to 2011, he was the founding director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum and curator of its Watergate Gallery.
Jeffrey A. Engel is Associate Professor of History and Director of Presidential History Projects at Southern Methodist University.