THE CONGRESS: The Fateful Vote to Impeach

• Share

Wherefore Richard M. Nixon, by such conduct, warrants impeachment and trial, and removal from office.

After four garrulous days, the talking stopped. The room was silent, and so, in a sense, was a watching nation. One by one, the strained and solemn faces of the 38 members of the House Judiciary Committee were focused on by the television cameras. One by one, their names were called. One by one, they cast the most momentous vote of their political lives, or of any representative of the American people in a century.

Mr. Railsback. Aye. Mr. Fish. Aye. Mr. Hogan. Aye. Mr. Butler. Aye. Mr. Cohen. Aye. Mr. Froehlich. Aye.

Thus six Republican Congressmen joined all 21 Democrats to recommend that the House of Representatives impeach Richard M. Nixon and seek his removal from the presidency through a Senate trial. And thus the Judiciary Committee climaxed seven months of agonizing inquiry into the conduct of Richard Nixon as President by approving an article of impeachment that charges he violated both his oath to protect the Constitution and his duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. The first of at least two articles to be considered, the article alleges that he committed multiple acts designed to obstruct justice in his attempt to conceal the origins of the June 1972 wiretap-burglary of Democratic National Headquarters and "other unlawful covert activities" carried out by those responsible for that crime (see text on page 12).

By that historic roll-call vote, the article of impeachment was adopted, 27 to 11, by the committee at 7:07 p.m. on a warm Saturday night in Room 2141 of Washington's Rayburn Office Building. Richard Nixon became only the second President to stand so accused by a committee of Congress. The impressive bipartisan nature of the vote increased the probability that the full House of Representatives will also vote to impeach.

The impeachment action came at the end of a week in which the President's chances of completing his second term in office fell to their lowest point since the Watergate scandal first threatened his political survival. Earlier in the week, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that Nixon had no authority to withhold tape recordings of his White House conversations from Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski (see page 20). The ruling raised the possibility that more evidence damaging to the President may become available.

The degree of bipartisanship in the Judiciary Committee vote was larger than had been expected, and it effectively rebutted the increasingly shrill claims from White House officials that the impeachment inquiry was a highly partisan "witch hunt" and that the committee amounted to "a kangaroo court." The range of Republican support for impeachment, embracing the Midwest's Harold Froehlich and Tom Railsback, the South's M. Caldwell Butler, the East's Hamilton Fish and New England's William Cohen, may well influence wavering Republicans when the full House acts on the committee's recommendation. The influential roles played in the committee's decision to impeach by its articulate Southern Democrats, Alabama's Walter Flowers, South Carolina's James Mann and Arkansas' Ray Thornton may also swing other Southern Congressmen against the President.

Although the