Impeachment: Strictly Personal

The GOP-controlled House of Representatives hurtled toward impeachment last week, despite the American public’s indifference to President Bill Clinton’s wrongdoing and widespread approval of his conduct in office. Infuriated by the president’s continuing evasions and disgusted by his reprehensible behavior, many House Republicans seem to genuinely despise the president. They believe him unfit for public office and find his enduring popularity both exasperating and unfathomable.

To be sure, Clinton is not the first U.S. president to outrage the nation’s political elite while retaining the confidence and approbation of the public. Over the past two centuries, a half-dozen presidents have aroused not just ordinary political antagonism, but deep-seated, personal hatred from colleagues in Washington. Repeatedly, opposition leaders on Capitol Hill, national opinion makers, even the presidents’ own party leaders have found chief executives not merely misguided or wrongheaded, but personally unfit to govern. Clinton, however, is the first to push Congress to the brink of impeachment over what amounts largely to personal distaste. On Friday afternoon, even as Clinton offered an abject apology, designed expressly to soften the personal offense felt by House Republicans, the Judiciary Committee approved the first article of impeachment against him.

An earlier uncouth Southerner, Andrew Jackson, excited a comparable visceral enmity in his political rivals. Opponents denounced this hero of the common man as “King Andrew the First,” a threat to the country’s moral fiber who, according to one handbill, “has placed himself above the laws, as he has shown by his contempt for our judges.” Viewing himself as a tribune of the people, the republic’s only nationally elected official, Jackson infuriated Washington’s political insiders. Over the uproar of congressional leaders, Old Hickory transformed the Cabinet, turning what had been a counsel of ministers, each enjoying job security and an independent base of power, into a loyal, disciplined cadre of lieutenants whom he could and did remove at will. Worse yet, the unrefined Tennessean, himself married in dubious circumstances to a woman whom opponents denounced as the “American Jezebel” and a “convicted adulteress,” stunned Washington society by his staunch defense of Peggy Eaton, a lady of sullied reputation he called “as chaste as a virgin” and installed as official White House hostess.

Jackson’s political rivals and social betters thought his passionate, violent nature a genuine danger to the republic, defects of character that should have disqualified him from high office. Senate critics even succeeded in adopting a resolution of censure in 1834 for his infuriating attack on the Bank of the United States. But like the White House today, Jackson’s supporters defended the president against these assaults on his privacy and honor. Jackson’s all-too-human qualities--the temperament that had led him as a young man to dueling and military adventurism and as president to heavy-handed treatment of Congress and the Cabinet--only enhanced his standing with voters.

After the Civil War, Ulysses S. Grant also incited the rage of his opponents, including many in his own Republican Party. Denounced as a crook, a drunkard and a fool, Grant and his top aides became saddled with scandals, one involving improper payments to the vice president, Schuyler Colfax. Corruption charges even touched the president’s personal secretary, who in return for protecting an illegal whiskey ring from IRS inspectors, received a shirt with diamond studs and the occasional services of a prostitute. Rivals blamed Grant’s character, chastising him, in Henry Adams’s words, for unleashing a “reign of Western mediocrity.” In 1872, disgruntled Republicans bolted the GOP and joined with Democrats in a campaign against Grant. But like the Gingrich Republicans of 1998, the opposition so misread the national mood and its leadership appeared so erratic that Grant won reelection by a wide margin.

In this century, Harry S. Truman also became an object of disdain in official Washington. In today’s era of mealy-mouthed politicians, plain-talkin’ Truman may enjoy a sterling reputation. But in the 1940s, Americans were not comparing Truman with Clinton or George Bush; they contrasted him with Franklin D. Roosevelt, the majestic, aristocratic statesman who had guided the nation out of the Great Depression and led the Allies to victory in World War II. In Roosevelt’s shadow, Washington pundits saw Truman as a grubby machine politician: unprepared, undignified, unpresidential. Truman, one contemporary moaned, had brought in a bunch of “big-bellied, good-natured guys who know a lot of dirty jokes, spent as little time in their offices as possible, saw Washington as a chance to make useful contacts and were anxious to get what they could for themselves.” The Truman era, the political elite complained, was the era of the moocher par excellence.

Even Truman’s own party leadership treated him with disrespect. Many leading Democrats, including Roosevelt’s sons, asked the “accidental president” to step aside. The Republicans piled on the personal attacks. “Would you like a Truman beer?” the president’s opponents jibed. “You know, the one with no head.” Nearly every pundit, pollster and pol believed the much-derided Truman, unable even to hold his fracturing party together, would lose the 1948 election. The chattering classes just could not fathom Truman’s burgeoning popularity with the voters: The polls predicted Truman’s defeat, the Chicago Tribune screamed it in a headline, on election night, political analysts like CBS’s H.V. Kaltenborn refused to credit returns favoring Truman.

But no modern chief executive so infuriated opponents on Capitol Hill and critics in the media as much as Ronald Reagan. Reagan made constant gaffes and intellectual lapses, joked about bombing the Soviets, even consulted an astrologer. Despite these failings and the Iran-Contra scandals of his second term, the “Teflon president” bewildered his critics with his seemingly unflappable charm and his unwavering popularity.

Leading Democrats never understood his appeal; they always viewed Reagan as a lightweight (if not senile) and his public performances as corny, reckless and embarrassing. In 1984, opponents assumed that Reagan was vulnerable to defeat. In the run up to the election, party leaders like Sen. Gary Hart and former Vice President Walter F. Mondale believed any Democratic nominee could defeat so unqualified a national leader. But Reagan’s “Morning in America” campaign handed Mondale one of the worst defeats in U.S. political history.

Like the Republicans with Truman and the Democrats with Reagan, Clinton’s rapport with the American people befuddles the GOP leadership on Capitol Hill. In a futile attempt to provoke public outrage, Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.) subjected Americans to a nationally televised parade of fallen women, witnesses who had lied under oath about their sexual activity and suffered grievous consequences.

Yet, the current assault on Clinton differs from previous personal and political vendettas against sitting presidents--differs in the intensity of his opponents’ hatred, in the tenacity of their efforts to oust him, in their unwillingness to heed the nation’s will. Congress eventually repealed its censure of Jackson, Grant and Truman served out their terms despite unease with “the mess in Washington,” Reagan remained the “Great Communicator.” Today, in outraged defiance of public opinion, Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee have propelled the impeachment issue into the full House. Republicans appear determined to punish him even if the battle-weary nation wants no part of it.

Twenty years of ethics hearings and independent counsels--investigations of drinking and sex, book purchases and video rentals, illicit drugs and illegal nannies--have institutionalized the politics of personal assault. Today’s partisans oust their opponents through legal proceedings rather than elections. Their disgust and disdain for Clinton may even remove a sitting president and tarnish the constitutional system.