Four experts on the American presidency review the only three impeachment cases from history--against Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton--and explore its power and meaning for today.
Trump plays only a minor role in Jeffrey A. Engel, Jon Meacham, Timothy Naftali, and Peter Baker's examination of presidential removal, Impeachment: An American History. Yet his presence looms over every sentence. The book breaks no new ground – that's not its purpose – but it reminds readers, from the perspective of 2018, what the nation's three prior flirtations with mid-term forced retirement entailed ... Impeachment reminds us that the most important question when that happens will not be whether Donald Trump's administration falls apart. It will be whether the rest of us hold our republic together.
Four scholars plumb the meaning and mechanics of presidential impeachments past—and, possibly, future—in this illuminating historical study ... Well researched, thoughtful, and engagingly written, this is one of the best of the current books mulling this suddenly fraught question.
With the quite real possibility of Trump being impeached in the not-so-distant future, it’s instructive to consider the history of impeachment in this country. As Jeffrey Engel notes, in the new book Impeachment: An American History, 'the time is ripe to renew our understanding of the thing that binds even divided Americans most – our shared past.' ... Jon Meacham does a fine job discussing the fascinating and highly complex case against Andrew Johnson...and Timothy Naftali’s essay on Nixon reads like a page-turner, even though we know how it all turned out.
