How History Will Judge Him

The republic has survived what is perhaps the weirdest episode in our political history. Many of us tuned out before the surreal drama came to its predestined end. Yet the impeachment of Bill Clinton was not a dream; it actually happened, and its reverberations will echo well into the future. The song is over, but the melody--a discordant one in this case--lingers on.

What will historians make of it? Predicting the verdict of generations to come is always risky. But of one outcome we can be reasonably certain. The first thing future textbooks will say about Bill Clinton is that he is the only elected President ever to be impeached. (Andrew Johnson was not elected. Richard Nixon resigned to avoid impeachment.) This simple, singular fact will overpower other things for which Clinton might take credit: half a dozen years of unexampled prosperity; a balanced budget; a capture of the political middle from the Republicans; and persistent efforts to stop the killing in Northern Ireland, the Middle East, Bosnia and Kosovo.

For a President uncommonly sensitive about his place in history, this must be a staggering blow. There are some who fear that Clinton is getting off, as they say, scot-free. Scot-free? He is already a man hopelessly damaged in the eyes of his wife, his daughter, his friends, his supporters and the nation itself, as well as in the judgment of history. However much he may pride himself on supernatural skills as an escape artist, he can never escape the stain of presidential misbehavior and personal betrayal.

His actions may in addition have weakened the office confided to his care. One notes certain parallels with the impeachment 131 years ago of Andrew Johnson. Each President was vulnerable: Johnson because of wretched public actions, Clinton because of wretched private ones. In each case the Senate, after due deliberation, refused to lower the bar to conviction--a bar raised high by the framers in order to confine impeachment to "great and dangerous offenses" and "attempts to subvert the Constitution." In each case the Senate thereby saved the constitutional separation of powers by declining to make impeachment so easy that, as James Madison had warned at the Constitutional Convention, the presidential term would be "equivalent to a tenure during the pleasure of the Senate."

Yet the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, even though it failed, left a wounded presidency. Congress became, in the words of a promising young political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, "the central and predominant power of the system": Woodrow Wilson went on to call his influential 1885 book Congressional Government. Presidential leadership languished in the more than 30 years between Lincoln's assassination in 1865 and the (accidental) accession of Theodore Roosevelt to the White House in 1901. These years of a diminished presidency led James Bryce to write the famous chapter in The American Commonwealth (1888) titled "Why Great Men Are Not Chosen Presidents."

Could this happen again? Congressional government made little difference when the U.S. was a bit player on the world stage. But the very nature of the problems facing 21st century American Presidents calls for strong executive leadership. One must hope that such leadership will be forthcoming, but it will have to overcome obstacles thrown in its path by post-Watergate legislation and fortified by the Clinton impeachment.