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Ticket of admission to the U.S. Senate galleries for the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson
In 1868 President Andrew Johnson was saved by one vote in the Senate after the House approved articles of impeachment against him over a dispute on the post-Civil War reconstruction of the South.
Besides Clinton, only one president has been impeached: Andrew Johnson, the seventeenth chief executive. Johnson, a Southern Democrat who became president after Lincoln\'s assassination, supported a mild policy of Reconstruction after the Civil War. The Radical Republicans in Congress were furious at his leniency toward ex-Confederates and obvious lack of concern for ex-slaves, demonstrated by his veto of civil rights bills and opposition to the Fourteenth Amendment. To protect Radical Republicans in Johnson\'s administration and diminish the strength of the president, Congress passed the Tenure of Office Act in 1867, which prohibited the president from dismissing office holders without the Senate\'s approval. A defiant Johnson tested the constitutionality of the Act by attempting to oust Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton. His violation of the Act became the basis for impeachment in
1868. But the Senate was one vote short of the two-thirds majority needed to convict, and Johnson was acquitted May 26, 1868.
In 1974 President Richard Nixon chose to resign in disgrace rather than face impeachment for his role in the cover-up of the Watergate break-in.
Of thirty-four attempts at impeachment in the nineteenth century only eight have come to trial. Because it cripples Congress with a lengthy trial, impeachment is infrequent. Many officials, seeing the writing on the wall, resign rather than face the ignominy of a public trial.
The most famous of these cases is of course that of President Richard Nixon. After five men hired by Nixon\'s reelection committee were caught burglarizing Democratic party headquarters at the Watergate Complex on June 17, 1972, President Nixon\'s subsequent behavior -his cover-up of the burglary and refusal to turn over evidence--- led the house Judiciary to issue three articles of impeachment on July 30, 1974. The document also indicted Nixon for illegal wire tapping, misuse of the CIA, perjury, bribery, obstruction of justice, and other abuses of executive power. \"In all of this,\" the Articles of Impeachment summarize, \"Richard M. Nixon has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and subversive of constitutional government, to the great prejudice of the cause of law and justice, and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States.\" Impeachment appeared inevitable, and Nixon resigned on Aug. 9,
1974. The Articles of Impeachment, leave no doubt that these charges qualify as \"high crimes and misdemeanors,\" justifying impeachment.
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