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| THE LONG VIEW | |
 January 7, 1999 
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NewsHour regulars presidential historians Doris Kearns Goodwin, Michael Beschloss, and author/journalist Haynes Johnson are joined by Buckner Melton, a constitutional historian, to discuss the historic significance of the Senate trial of the President.
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JIM LEHRER: Some historical perspective on this day and to Elizabeth Farnsworth in San Francisco. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: For those observations on this historic day we turn to NewsHour regulars presidential historians Doris Kearns Goodwin and Michael Beschloss and journalist/author Haynes Johnson. Joining them tonight is Buck Melton, a constitutional historian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He's the author of The First Impeachment. |
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| The word rose to the meaning... Historic | ||||||||||||||||||||
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ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Haynes Johnson, what were your reactions watching the trial begin in the Senate today?
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Doris, what were your thoughts? DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: Well, I guess I felt a certain sense of sorrow
that this great spectacle, the majesty of the moment, which is very
rare in our democratic system when you have the House, the managers
coming before the Senate, when you have the chief justice arriving,
those moments are captured in the State of the Union messages, in the
joint sessions of Congress. But here all that splendor, that pageantry,
that ritual was attached to an impeachment of the president. I kept
thinking of other such moments when Congress was called into joint session
for the Voting Rights Act by Lyndon Johnson, and after he gave his speech,
congressmen and senators were crying from happiness over the idea that
finally black Americans would be given the right to vote. I kept thinking
of a joint session when FDR called the Congress into session after the
attack on |
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| Watching history in the making. | ||||||||||||||||||||
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ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Michael Beschloss, your reaction. MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: Well, you know, Elizabeth, usually one of the benefits
of being an historian is that we're thinking about events that occurred
a long time ago, and we know how the story turned out. So I guess I've
got a little bit of the occupational hazard. As I was watching all this
today, I wondered what someone might think 50 years from now looking
back at a videotape of this event, and I think that person will ask
a couple of questions. One will be obviously, was the president convicted,
and how will Bill Clinton be seen by an American 50 years from now?
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Buck Melton, listening to what the senators just said as they grope their way towards dealing with this process, are they having trouble partly because the Constitution and history don't offer much of a guide? BUCK MELTON: I think that's exactly the case. Even the guidelines that
the Constitution and the Senate rules do offer are very vague because
these rules and even the constitutional procedural requirements are
ultimately in the |
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| The full weight of history | ||||||||||||||||||||
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ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Mr. Melton, what would you think, as somebody who's been studying impeachment, when you saw Chief Justice Rehnquist take the oath and then deliver the oath of impartiality? BUCK MELTON: I have to agree with the other opinions that have been expressed. Once every 10 years, perhaps once every generation, perhaps even once in a lifetime comes a moment when one feels the full weight of history bearing down on one, and I think this was exactly such a moment. People think of history as names and dates about the passage of time. It's really about the things that link generations, and suddenly it was like we were watching the very beginning of federal impeachment all over again, 200 years ago this very week, and the two centuries in-between evaporate, and we find ourselves facing new questions that we've never faced before, and that's where we are. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Michael - Beschloss - the chief justice administered the oath of impartiality and it was kind of a signal, wasn't it, to the senators, that they step into a new role here, they're not what they used to be?
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Haynes, it really is - I think Trent Lott called it today a quasi-judicial political proceeding, but political is still in there, isn't it?
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| What does it mean to preside? | ||||||||||||||||||||
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ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Buck Melton, what does history tell us and the Constitution about what will happen next? For example, what is the chief justice's role?
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Doris, do you have anything to add to that, looking back at history, what we do know about what will happen next? DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: Well, I think the most important thing we can know is that there will be a lot of talk, a lot of words. It's interesting -
DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: But they can - yes, but they'll be submitting a lot of questions; they'll be talking outside the chambers, as we saw tonight. We wondered about that. Would they feel honor bound as impartial jurors not to speak? But there's an interesting moment that Rehnquist writes about in his grand inquest where Congressman James Garfield says we are drowning in words because of this insane need to public speak among the part of our senators, and he said, I bet if even the people who want to convict Andrew Johnson the most were given a choice between conviction and silence on their part, versus acquittal - and the unlimited opportunity to talk - they would choose talk because they need to talk. I think we're going to hear words, we're going to see a lot of written questions. The process will be a verbal one as we go along. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And Michael Beschloss, in just the few minutes we have left, what do you see in the past that says what we will have happen in these next weeks? MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: Well, one thing I think you'll see is that we can
absolutely not now what we'll be saying about this even 60 days from
now. We're at the beginning ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: All right. Thank you all four very much. |
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HAYNES
JOHNSON: Elizabeth, the most over-used word in Washington, particularly
among the press but also politicians, is historic, the historic event,
the historic challenge, the historic moment. Today the word rose to
the meaning of what it should be it was historic. You couldn't watch
that slow movement from the House chamber down that corridor through
the rotunda, through the statuary hall, past the statues of Lincoln
and Lee and Grant, and on all of these great figures of our history,
past the paintings of the Declaration of Independence, moving to that
small, much more intimate chamber of the senate, much different in tone
and feeling, and there you had something - you realized you were watching
something no one alive has witnessed, there were no television cameras
130 years ago, and on the - up there in that chamber there was a bust
above it of Andrew Johnson, who was then the - Vice President Johnson
before he became president and realized that he was tried in that very
same chamber in wholly different circumstances today, and when the door
opened after that long pause, and you saw the chief justice marching
down there, with his high mocado robes, the slash, the gold marks, the
lord high executioner - I mean, I felt chills. This was to me one of
the great - great in the sense of momentous things I witnessed.
Pearl
Harbor, and somehow those moments, which pushed our country forward
in positive ways, contrasted to this, made the gorgeousness of the rug,
the splendor of those robes, and the whole meaning of history sad for
me. I guess the other thing I just kept thinking was I never expected
this moment to happen and tried to figure out why were all of our predictions
so wrong, and I think partly was underestimating the power of an aroused
minority who starting a process makes it very difficult to stop and
perhaps overestimating the political skills of our legendary president,
who may not be as formidable a political leader as we thought, never
having been able in this last year to bring some sort of accommodation
with the moderates that might have made this trial unnecessary. So all
in all an historic day but not the kind that one is excited about being
part of.
Will he be seen as someone who was unfairly accused and a good person,
or will he be seen as someone who was unfit for office and found out
by the process? Another thing will be whether this turns into a carnival.
A lot of young children who are watching this both today and the next
number of weeks are going to get their very big view of what the American
government works like. If this turns into something unseemly, that's
going to affect a generation of Americans or more for a long time. And
the other thing I was asking myself, is, is this going to be seen as
the first of a beginning of a number of impeachments perhaps in the
next half century? One of the big worries about Andrew Johnson was that
if he was impeached and removed from office, this would be a big temptation
for Congresses who didn't like presidents' policies to try to sort of
yank that chain around their necks, at least impeach them, perhaps remove
them, and you'd see a continuous set of votes of no confidence. I'd
love to know 50 years from now whether we'll look back and we'll see
more of these. 
end
in the hands of the Senate to interpret, so even though there are very
few guidelines, the Senate can make what it will of those guidelines.
It's perfectly free to amend or overrule its own rules. It's perfectly
free to decide exactly the meaning of the oath they took today and what
that means. They can turn to history, of course. We've had several impeachments
in the past. But we have only had a few impeachments and every impeachment
is somewhat different. We've only had one presidential impeachment in
the past. Several people in the Senate chamber played a role in Watergate;
several people in that chamber have played a role in judicial impeachments;
but no one alive has ever lived through an actual presidential impeachment.
And I think you're seeing a lot of people feeling their way. We came
to the end of the script as of today, and now what happens is anyone's
guess. 
MICHAEL
BESCHLOSS: That's exactly right. He was saying you're no longer just
a senator but you're also taking another oath on top of the one that
you have just taken to begin your term of office in the case of the
senators who just began a new term, and you know, the other thing is
this, we have heard so much over the last year about this idea that
you can't have a president impeached or convicted because of public
opinion. And one thing that occurred to me is that there is a very big
difference between what's happening now in the Andrew Johnson impeachment
in 1868 in one particular way, and that is that in those days the senators
who were ruling on his case had some idea of what the people thought
of his trial and what they thought of the Johnson case. But nowadays
they're going to know instantaneously - they're going to see poll numbers
day after day. If there are witnesses, they're going to see Americans
reacting against or in favor of some of the witnesses that they see,
and sometimes in surprising ways. Oliver North, before the Iran-Contra
Committee had sort of a craze for a few days. People were surprised
in some cases that they actually liked what they heard. So this is very
unpredictable. And I think what that oath suggested to senators is yes,
be aware of what public opinion is thinking, but don't be guided too
much by it. 
HAYNES
JOHNSON: Of course. We can't separate the politics from the legislative
process. It's always there, it's bound to be there, and it should be
there. It is a political decision in which individuals are going to
differ, argue. You know, the Senate and the House have all this comity
supposedly and all these kind words - The Honorable, distinguished,
sir, and so forth. The reason they say that is because beneath that
veneer of politeness lies hatred and passion and bitterness which at
times erupts into even a caning before the Civil War of one southern
congressman caning a northern abolitionist, showing the kinds of problems
that exist. It's not going to go away, nor should it go away, the kind
of issues that divide us. That's where we are right now. I wanted to
make one point. Doris said it's a sad moment. It is for the country.
Michael said something else earlier, though, that this is a moment where
I think he's exactly right; an entire generation of Americans is going
to get their history about our system from what they're going to be
watching in the next few days. 
BUCK
MELTON: That's a very good question. Once again, the Constitution only
says that the chief justice shall preside, and the big question becomes,
what does it mean to preside? We've only got one precedent for that
when Chief Justice Chase presided over the impeachment of Andrew Johnson.
Theoretically, he could make absolutely binding rulings, but that's
not the way that it played out in the Johnson case. On a couple of occasions
Chief Justice Chase would make a statement about what he believed should
take place, about the Senate's role as a court of impeachment. And the
Senate would implicitly overrule him by ignoring what he had recommended.
A few times he would make evidentiary rules, and the Senate, by majority
vote, would overrule him, and hear whatever evidence that it wanted
to hear. So once again, it's very much up to the senators and not so
much to the chief justice. 
ELIZABETH
FARNSWORTH: Even though the senators can't ask questions, right, they
have to submit them in writing to the chief justice?