1stC: The
Watergate period in American history, particularly the 
impeachment process, had a
number of
lasting impacts on our political institutions. I'd like our panelists to reflect on whether they see
something comparable resulting from the Clinton impeachment. Hoff: The
first thing to
remember about Watergate and its aftermath was the dominance in Congress at that time of the
Democratic party. There were a number of rather hastily passed pieces of legislation coming out of
the Democratic Congress related to Watergate: campaign finance reform, primary reform, the Independent Counsel Act, the War Powers Act, the Federal Election Commission, and later on the Ethics Act--all kinds of legislation
designed to reform the democratic process and increase participation, especially voting. What's ironic
about all of this is that since that time, voting on the part of the American people has
decreased. Many of these reforms coming out of Watergate have had unintended negative
consequences. (Congress attempted through the War Powers Act, for example, to control the actions
of presidents in going to war, or committing our troops without Congressional approval. It has had
absolutely no impact on the activities of presidents since then to get us involved in military
interventions.) So I don't see, given the fact that Congress is so much more closely divided (and that
the Republicans are so divided even though they dominate Congress), the same kind of attempts at
reform as after Watergate. Congress is simply too paralyzed, and has been for some time, to take on
that kind of significant legislation.
Pious: I agree, and I think it will go even further though the other way: If you
look at Watergate, you see a president who resigns in disgrace, public opinion having deserted him,
his own party having deserted him, the Democrats solidifying, Republicans fragmenting. You get
legislation before, during, and after and extending all the way to 1978, that you might say
consolidates the lessons (so-called) learned about Watergate. Now the legislation may not have
worked, but it's consonant with the idea of a president who has done various 
things that are wrong, and now by
legislation we'll fix it up. What you're getting with the Clinton caper is the reverse: a president who
has won the battle of public opinion, who has united his own party for instrumental purposes. None
of them gives a damn about Clinton himself, but they see the symbolic impact of an attack on Clinton
as being an attack on themselves, so they've united around him. You see the Republicans in complete
disarray, and what you see in the sort of interstices of Congressional committees now are attempts to,
pardon the expression, clean up after the elephants. It gives you a sense--very much unlike the
Johnson impeachment or the Nixon resignation, but a little bit like Reagan in Iran-Contra--that the ebb and flow seem to be
going the other way. The president gets in trouble; the president slips the noose and, having done
that, manages with his Congressional allies to take away some of the parts of the game that have
made it so difficult for him. So in that sense I think it's the opposite of Watergate, not even neutral.
Foner: Another way of looking at this is not so much in terms of Congressional
legislation, although that's important, but maybe some other enduring consequences. Historians don't
like to predict the future; I don't know if political scientists do or not--
Pious:
Recreationally.
Foner: --because almost everything that's interesting in history is a big surprise
when it first happens. But I might predict a couple of consequences, and I'm happy to be proved
wrong down the road, if that's the way it is. First of all, I think this will actually exacerbate the
long-running war within the Republican party, which goes back to the '60s, anyway. Remember
Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller at the convention in
1964? I would not be at all surprised to see a kind of internal debate within the Republican
party, sort of like the
"Who lost China?" debate in the late '40s, but this time it's "Who lost impeachment?" I don't see
a peace treaty in the Republican party any time soon, and I think the impeachment process may have
actually exacerbated that.
Second of all, it's a cliché, but I think true, that the whole Nixon episode provoked a kind of
cynicism about politicians and fed into a long period (which we're still in) in which politicians are
held in rather low esteem. I think that despite having slipped the noose, Clinton's behavior has further
increased the sense that really politicians are not the kind of people one would like to have over for
dinner. They may serve some function in this political process, but do people really want to become
president now? Is that your ideal?
I got a personal taste of
this at home. My 11-year-old daughter, who was much younger when Clinton was first elected,
actually sat down and wrote a letter to President Clinton saying, "I wish you would do something
about the plight of the homeless." And she got back a letter signed by Bill Clinton, which said it was
very nice that young people have an interest in politics and government and everything, and this was
framed on her wall. Just the other day she was rearranging her room and said, "Let's get rid of this. I
don't really want it around here anymore." I feel that's unfortunate, actually. In a democratic system,
I think we have to hope that there are some elected officials whom people can actually look up to and
have some confidence in.
Pious: When we were going down to Washington this past spring after all this
scandal broke, my daughter and my son were very scared; they said, "Isn't it true that the president
hurts people?" That's a legacy that makes you chill in your bones, when you think about it.
Hail to the Celebrity-in-Chief
21stC: I'd like to pick up on that
theme of the presidency as distinct from the one president. It may be possible that the presidency is
being fused with the entertainment industry in surprising ways: the president as celebrity. That role is
no longer protected. I wonder if perhaps no significant detail about any president could be kept secret
as Woodrow Wilson's stroke was, or FDR's paralysis. What comments would you have about the
pressures on the office, the president becoming a different kind of cultural figure? We don't revere
them. We put them in the tabloids now.
Pious: John Travolta in 1981 or 1982 in some Hollywood magazine was asked
what he thought of Reagan as an actor. And he said, "I could do a better job. I'd do what Reagan
does every day. I'm better at it and I get paid more." It's a no-win game for presidents to try to
become media figures. They look ridiculous. Clinton, 50-year-old guy, is thinking of becoming some
kind of Harrison Ford. It's absurd. Harrison Ford does it ten times better 
and gets paid more. It's like the
guys my age who go down to the Village in their leather jackets. They look absurd. Or go play
basketball on 6th Street. And the young guys always say something which is absolutely true: "The old
guys hold you. The old guys bump you. The old guys foul you." Why? Because they don't have the
speed to keep up.
A president is a politician and should act like a
politician. It's not supposed to be entertaining. It's not supposed to be telegenic. It's not supposed to
be the movies. If you want that, you go to the movies. They're better at it.
Hoff: There
has been a personalization of the presidency since Kennedy, really. In the early 1960s, families were
brought into campaigns; that's just increased--and increased the action on the part of the media to
investigate private life. It gets down to such a ludicrous level that Clinton could get away with
explaining on MTV what kind of underwear he wore, without much criticism at all. Instead of an
imperial presidency, we have the intimate presidency. I'm not sure we're going to be able to back
away from that easily, partly because of a dysfunction in our political system that we're not facing up
to: Fewer and fewer people are voting. In the last mid-term election, fewer people voted than ever
before in the last 50 years. In the '96 election, 49 percent of 49 percent of the eligible voters voted for
Bill Clinton, which meant that he got about 24 percent of the eligible-voter vote. It's almost as though
we're touting our system abroad, but we're actively participating in it less and less. The participatory
democracy of the '60s looks dead, and that reinforces another aspect of this popular presidency,
which we've seen since Reagan--and it's really why Reagan escaped any serious
investigation for the Iran-Contra affair, which was a much worse violation of the Constitution
than Watergate--and that is this whole idea that Americans don't need to vote to be represented.
What do they need to do? It seems that they need to be polled. We're governing by polls and focus
groups. Now that's a two-edged sword. It can allow a president to a degree, in times of crisis, to
manipulate public opinion and maintain his own popularity, when in fact he's doing things that
perhaps popular opinion should question rather than condone. It almost turns the president into a
kind of cheerleader, a revivalist, a talk-show host, to maintain this kind of popularity at the expense
of policy--and at the expense, I think, of far-sightedness and governance. Yet we're stuck with that,
because Clinton has been so incredibly successful with it. I think his successor in office, unless there
is serious campaign reform, is going to have to do the same thing.
Pious: I see the
collapse of the political party as a real functioning element in our government, whether this is cause
or effect of the degradation of the presidency, or both. It's not that long ago that the president was
assumed to be the head of a party, and you voted for the president not only because he was
personable, but because he represented that party. Nowadays, it's almost unknown for presidents or
other candidates to even mention their parties. Now with the parties in disarray, with the position as
leader of the party gone for the president, it exacerbates this point that Joan made about the president
just being an individual, and individual popularity being far more important. Clinton doesn't say, I'm
now going to implement the Democratic platform on x, y, or z. He looks
at the polls, as you said, and says, "What is popular?" Maybe that's democratic, but it's democratic in
a very peculiar sort of way.
Comparative scandalology
21stC: I'd like to
rewind a bit to a comment that Dr. Hoff made comparing Iran-Contra and Watergate, and tie this in
perhaps to the question of presidential gravitas. You had mentioned at one point, I believe, that
Iran-Contra was worse than Watergate. Were we hearing you accurately, or was it "worse than
Monica-gate"?
Hoff: Well, Monica-gate doesn't even compare, if you're talking about
constitutionality. I think the Reagan situation with Iran-Contra presaged this: You can't impeach a
popular president, and I'm not sure that's good for the future of democracy. But if you look at the
shadow government created
during the Iran-Contra affair out of the National Security Council with Poindexter, Oliver North, Bill
Casey, and the rest of them, it was not properly investigated. It also showed the limits of so-called
investigative reporting, which was so touted coming out of Watergate. Investigative reporters
couldn't do a damn thing against Reagan, because you can stonewall successfully if you are popular.
You're going to have more rats deserting the ship if you're unpopular. Consequently, there was no
way that investigative reporting even got near the issue on Iran-Contra. I think Reagan walked away
from an issue that he should never have.
Pious: I wouldn't want to weigh Watergate against Iran-Contra. I think
Watergate, though, was serious. The break-in was a third-rate burglary, the tip of the iceberg; there
was a lot more going on. I think Nixon got one thing right on the Watergate tapes. These are
compiled by Stanley Kutler. I've been listening to them. Nixon said, "It wasn't a close election. [If it
had] been a close election and we had stolen it because of Watergate: well, that would have been one
thing. You know, we're winning anyway. So what's the big deal?" So in that sense it wasn't all that
serious, because he didn't actually steal an election. The American democracy had decided in its
infinite wisdom to give him a second term. All right. But there were an awful lot of things going on
which involved the institutional presidency and also the CIA, the FBI, even the Secret Service.
There's some wonderful tapes where Ted Kennedy has just asked for Secret Service protection, and
Nixon says, "Well, we're going to give him Secret Service protection, and it's going to be 24-hour
protection, you know what I mean? Hey, hey, hey." And Haldemann says, "Yeah, yeah, 24 hours.
We're not going to get away from him at all. We're going to follow him"--and Nixon then says,
"Yeah, and when we get him on that, then we'll bring him in and ask him about
Chappaquiddick." You listen to this stuff, and it really makes you want to throw up. Joan is
right that Iran-Contra was more serious, because Iran-Contra involved the hijacking of American
foreign policy and Congressional appropriations powers, and creating a kind of parallel Central
Intelligence Agency funded by private sources. The comparison with Watergate is Nixon kept saying,
"How could these people be so stupid? Who are they?" Each time, he kind of wakes up and says, "My
God, they did what?" And he can't believe the things that people were doing. You get into
Iran-Contra and it makes the Watergate guys look like summa cum laude from an Ivy
League university. Ollie--or, as I refer to him, Ali North--selling arms to the Iranians. It just boggles
your mind when you think that clowns like that would be able to run things. But I'm willing to have a
real debate on the seriousness of Watergate.
Foner: I will not try to weigh the two. I'm a 19th-century historian. The
impeachment of the 19th century was also over a fairly serious issue, although it never quite came
before the Senate, which suggests that impeachment isn't necessarily the right mechanism for dealing
with problems like this. Andrew Johnson was impeached over violating a fairly minor act of
Congress, whereas his real crime was trying to deprive 4 million American citizens
of all their rights--the black
Americans--which certainly is a fairly serious problem in a democracy. But that was somehow never
brought before the Senate for impeachment.
Hoff: Another thing that sometimes isn't mentioned is that these three
impeachment processes we've gone through are all inherently partisan. The American public this
time around was misled into believing that somehow this one wasn't going to be partisan. What
happened in '74 was partisan as well, and of course the Johnson one in the 1860s was even more
partisan. Really, impeachment processes are virtual political assassinations of the given president.
Regardless of whether you are supporting him or not supporting him, they are attempts to get at this
particular president for whatever reason, good or bad, that might prevail at the time.
I also think
they were
diversions from real issues. In the 1860s we couldn't figure out Radical Republicanism or
Reconstruction. In the 1970s we couldn't figure out what to do in the wake of the end of the war in
Vietnam and a lot of other issues that we had domestically to face, and now we're here in the
post-Cold War period, not knowing what to do at home and especially abroad. Sometimes, then,
presidents make mistakes. Obviously they have to do something so that you can attempt to get them
in this fashion. But after they make the mistake, I think impeachment proceedings function as a
cover-up sometimes, or a diversion from facing real problems by the Congress.
The warp
and woof of foreign policy
21stC: It's often been observed that foreign policy reflects domestic politics, and
partisan events at home can have a great deal to do with how we define our national interest abroad.
Presidential decisions to take action overseas may involve these domestic variables, and I wonder
whether the current president's reactions to developments in Iraq or Kosovo are consistent with
precedents from previous Presidencies. Do we have a domestically embattled president wagging the dog, as the phrase now goes, or are
presidents always embattled, and the actions of this president might not differ so much from his
predecessors'?
Pious: I think there's a similarity and a difference. Nixon near the end in '73-'74
was looking to wag his tongue. In other words, he was looking to go to summit meetings,
conclude arms control agreements, etc. The critique is made that Nixon perhaps gave too much of
the store away; I think that's somewhat unfair, and by and large the agreements were reasonable and
in our national interest, but they involved summitry and diplomacy. With Clinton, for whatever
reason--and you can take either the "wag the dog" scenario or a more benign thought that these really
are national security issues--there really is a conjunction between throwing the missile and Clinton's
crisis. There is probably a relationship, but it seems to play out very differently with different
presidents and crises. With Clinton you just don't have the summit-level diplomacy, and in any event
the talking diplomacy really has failed in several different areas, probably for lack of preparation.
Hoff: We've
had a real dry spell in foreign policy, not simply with Clinton but since the end of the Cold War
under Bush as well. People are talking about a conceptual vacuum on foreign policy, so that there
really isn't any foreign policy in the last ten years that isn't just reactive. And consequently when you
are in that type of a situation, and then you get a president who lied to the public on other issues
having nothing to do with foreign policy, unfortunately, it would almost be better if he had lied about
foreign policy, but then it's bound to come into question when he takes somewhat erratic action, in
terms of the use of cruise missiles and bombings that were timed in December just before the
impeachment vote and earlier in August after the public apology, when we went into Sudan and
Afghanistan. It raises these questions. It's not unique, however, to Clinton. It appears a little more
blatant than with some other presidents. Back in 1975 when we were in the height of the
post-Vietnam syndrome, Kissinger and Ford decided to take dramatic action over the Mayaguez incident, the
capture of an American ship, and consequently overreacted in that case; Ford's polls went up as a
result. After the killing of our
Marines in Beirut, Reagan of course went into Grenada, for reasons that still escape a lot
of people, and his polls went up. And Bush into Panama. Presidents have used
these military interventions--which they can do with impunity, regardless of the War Powers Act,
since '74--to bump up their popularity. It isn't unique. It's just that in Clinton's case, it was seemingly
so exclusively tied to his domestic problems, whereas the Mayaguez, Grenada, and Panama
were not necessarily tied to particular personal problems that the president was facing domestically.
It's a way presidents get out of trouble. I don't think we need to fear that it will usually be used in any
way to get us seriously involved; they are usually tiny, tiny operations where we lose very few lives
and look good in the aftermath, and there's no long-term significance--unfortunately--to these events.
The upshot for scholars
21stC: It seems that the role of researchers as public figures, the role of historians
and political scientists and commentators from the university sphere, is becoming more important.
What effects would these events have on how researchers view our political institutions?
Pious: I would like to think that it would lead to a resurgence of historical studies,
a resurgence of research into documentary sources, and I would like to think that we would get back
to constitutional law studies, public law studies of all kinds.
Do I believe that will happen? Absolutely
not. What's happening in political science is it's all becoming mathematical. It's all being developed
in terms of the theory of rational
choice. Why is that? A, the money is there; the support is there from Washington and
foundations, and forward-looking provosts in American higher education believe in this stuff, and
therefore we are going to get it. These people have absolutely nothing to say about these kinds of
issues that any intelligent person would want to listen to. What is really happening in my field, as
opposed to what I think should be happening, is like night and day.
Hoff: As
historians
we always wait around. We don't ever want to comment on contemporary events. We need this
mammoth amount of documentation, which you don't have on contemporary events. But I do think
it's incumbent on historians to try to comment on current events and their future significance, even
though in the case of this impeachment process and this presidency, again, it's going to be like the
Nixon or Reagan presidency. It takes about 30 years for the documents to be opened up, and it
depends initially on how the president goes out of office. Nixon went out with very low public
opinion polls, and with a number of intellectuals and journals and scholars absolutely hating him. And I count
myself among those. I don't have a single personal positive memory of Richard Nixon. But I did
change my mind on his domestic policies after I researched them. Initially all the literature was
negative. It took until the first part of this decade to get even-handed accounts of his presidency. My
prediction is that the initial accounts of Clinton will be more positive, more defensive of him; then, in
this 30-year process, they will be more critical. I think his real weakness to date--and I think he
recognizes it as his problem--is this "legacy thing," as he would say. He doesn't have at the moment a
legacy to fall back on in either foreign or domestic policy. Consequently, I think that will ensure a
more negative evaluation of him as time goes by in the next quarter century. In contrast, Nixon did
have these strong actions in both foreign and domestic policy, and although I will disagree with most
of his foreign policy, Nixon's domestic policy looks good in retrospect. He seems much more liberal
than any president that came after him in terms of domestic policy. It's a sad thing to say.
Foner: I fully agree that historians need to get involved in public discourse about
history. We are at the Journalism School, so I guess I
can say that in my opinion as a historian, the journalistic treatment of impeachment, in terms of its
history or its constitutional bearing, was appalling, truly appalling.
Pious:
You shouldn't be so
generous.
Foner: All right. I'm trying to be nice. Most journalists, I believe, have college
degrees; It's unbelievable how ignorant of American history they are. Where did they go to college?
As a scholar of Reconstruction, I was completely shocked to see the Dunning
School, which no historian has believed in for 30 years, resurrected as the standard journalistic
account of Andrew Johnson's impeachment. Andrew Johnson was a guy hounded by radicals,
fanatics, because he wanted to be lenient to the South. They got in their mind the idea that well,
Clinton's a good guy who a bunch of fanatics in Congress were trying to get rid of, so that's what
happened to Andrew Johnson, and a good analogy. It was appalling, as a scholar of that period, to
see how all our scholarly work of 30 years had made no impact whatsoever on journalists' thinking
about American history. I blame ourselves to some degree, but I think the journalists are mostly to
blame for never actually
cracking a book when they want to write about history. They just remember what they learned in
high school. But on the other hand, I don't think that a lot of historians covered themselves with
glory, either, in this episode. I should ask Joan, before I say any more, whether she was one of the
400 who signed the historians' statement against impeachment.
Hoff: No, I did not.
Foner: You did not. Neither did I.
Hoff: Because I read it--the statement, and it was inaccurate historically.
Foner: Well, that's exactly my point. Thank you. Historians have as much right as
any citizen to comment on public events. When they wear the mantle of history and claim to be
speaking for history, or in the famous words of one of our colleagues, speak as if "history will track
you down," they invoke a particular vision of history for transparently partisan purposes. I did not in
any way support the impeachment of Clinton, but I did not think history tells us that Clinton ought
not to be impeached, or that there is a single meaning of the impeachment clause in the Constitution.
So I think we as scholars have to be very careful. I don't think anyone came out of this whole episode
looking good from top to bottom.
Hoff: It didn't do any good for constitutional history in the sense that
constitutional specialists became hired guns in their testimony before Congress. The Republicans
testified one way and the Democrats testified the other way. And then--
Foner: People who never have believed in original intent suddenly started
scouring the Federalist Papers to discover that Alexander Hamilton, whom they would never invoke
for any other purpose, thought that impeachment ought not to be used for a purpose like this.
Hoff:
And people who weren't constitutional specialists suddenly were.
Pious:
There's a long
history, though, of 180-degree turns. Take the debate between Hamilton and Madison, for 10 years or
so after the Republic was founded. They just switched every time. What drove their constitutional
law analysis at all points was their economic program or their political position. Then you look in the
1960s. My favorite example is Sen. William Fulbright, Cornell Law Quarterly, in 1960: The
president has to have absolute authority to make war, because we're in an atomic age and Congress is
outdated. Four years, five years later, he turns on a dime. Arthur
Schlesinger: same thing. All of what they used to call
the high-flying-prerogative men changed around in the middle of the Vietnam War.
Foner: Well, one might say in their defense, perhaps, that they changed their mind
because conditions changed and they realized they had been wrong. And one does not have to hold
the same idea throughout life. Professor Hoff has changed her mind on Nixon, which is fair enough.
That's what historians are supposed to do if they encounter new evidence. But when historians go
and speak for History with a capital H, as if there is a single historical perspective which is correct
about impeachment--that's when I think they are not doing the study of history good service.
Historians like to wait awhile before making judgments, not only because more documents become
available, but because we like to see how things turn out. If you were judging Millard Fillmore's
administration at the end of his presidency in 1852, you'd say, "Look, this guy settled the slavery
issue, the Compromise of 1850:
fantastic, what a leader!" Well, it turned out it wasn't really settled. We will have to see: Have we
settled the Middle East question? Have we settled the Bosnia question? Twenty years from now
maybe we'll say, "My God, Clinton settled those issues with those agreements, fantastic; everybody is
living in peace and harmony." Or maybe there will be a war in the Middle East four years from now
and people will say, "Clinton was just deluded in thinking..." So that's why historians like to know
how the story turns out before making their judgment. Maybe this is unfair, but before we make our
judgment, we'd like to see what happens with the accomplishments of the president.
Related links . . .
U.S. Diplomatic
History Resources Index, Nick Sarantakes, Texas A&M Dept. of History
Office of Independent Counsel Kenneth W.
Starr
Guide to
Pres. Clinton's political crisis, Court TV
Washington Post special report "Clinton Accused"
Eric Foner on the
Fugitive Slave Law, "Africans in America," PBS
The Impeachment of
Andrew Johnson: Harper's Weekly coverage, 1865-1869
Reconstruction timeline and
bibliography assembled by independent history buff Jim Klann, Glendale Hts., Ill.
American Bar
Association's impeachment resources
Michael Les Benedict, "A New
Look at the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson," Political Science Quarterly v. 113,
no.3 (Fall 1998)
"Secrets
of an Independent Counsel," PBS Frontline
Joan Hoff, Michael Beschloss, Haynes Johnson, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and Margaret
Warner (moderator), "Impact on the Presidency," Online NewsHour, August 13,
1998
Peter Kornbluh and Malcolm Byrne, eds., The Iran-Contra Scandal: The Declassified
History (A National Security Archive Documents Reader) (NY: New Press/Norton,
1993)
The Nixon Center, foreign policy
think tank founded by the former president
ERIC FONER, Ph.D., is DeWitt Clinton
Professor of History at Columbia and author, most recently, of The Story of American
Freedom (NY: Norton, 1998).
JOAN HOFF,
Ph.D., is professor of history and director of the Contemporary History Institute at Ohio
University, author of Nixon Reconsidered (NY: Basic Books, 1994), and a regular
commentator on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, PBS.
RICHARD PIOUS, Ph.D., is Adolph S. and
Effie Ochs Professor of Political Science at Barnard and the author most recently of The
Presidency (NY: Allyn & Bacon, 1996).
|
Photo Credits |
Computer Illustration: Howard R. Roberts
Clinton, Nixon: Wide World Photos
A. Johnson: Dover Books
Poindexter: AP / Wide World Photos
Conference Photos: Lena Lakoma
|
