The Impossibility of Impeachment

Polling outfits routinely ask historians and political scientists to rate the presidents from worst to best. It’s an inherently frustrating exercise. Does “greatness” depend on what a chief executive accomplished or instead on his ability to bend Congress to his will and influence his successors? How should we evaluate a president like Lyndon Johnson, who signed such momentous—and durable—laws as those ensuring civil rights and launching Medicare, but who also sent hundreds of thousands of Americans to kill countless numbers of Vietnamese in a civil war that was none of our business? A scholar’s rating depends, in large part, on a judgment of what a president should have done as well as what he did. Evaluating those choices is a more meaningful enterprise than using political history to dash off a click-happy list of likes and dislikes.


No occupant of the White House made terrible choices more consistently than Andrew Johnson. A century and a half later, his performance in the White House should appall anyone but a hardened racist. Weeks after Lincoln’s murder in April 1865, the newly inaugurated President Johnson began to treat former leaders of the South as if they were men of honor and standing, rather than traitors who had fought and lost a devastating war to preserve slavery. That spring and summer, Johnson pardoned thousands of former Confederate officers and politicians and appointed three of them to be governors of their states. He flatly refused to consider granting citizenship or the vote to any of the millions of people newly freed from bondage. Johnson’s policy arguably helped incite the white mobs who murdered scores of black men and women in Memphis and New Orleans in 1866. The president’s response to the massacres in Louisiana was to blame whites who supported black suffrage. “Every drop of blood that was shed is upon their skirts,” he snarled, “and they are responsible for it.”
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