The NPR Politics Podcast - Impeachment Then & Now: Trump Vs. Nixon & Clinton

Episode Date: October 10, 2019

As Congress walks down the path of impeachment The NPR Politics Podcast takes a step back and compares this moment to past impeachment proceedings. They provide a road map while still remaining wildly different from each other. This episode: White House correspondent Tamara Keith, Congressional correspondent Susan Davis, and editor correspondent Ron Elving. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Ron Elving, Editor-Correspondent. And I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. And today we are going to talk about impeachment, then and now, because it turns out there are a lot of parallels between past impeachment situations and the current impeachment inquiry into President Trump. So there's a pretty small sample size when it comes to impeachment in America, right? We have President Bill Clinton. And President Richard Nixon.

And don't forget President Johnson. You know, I got to tell you, I have forgotten President Johnson. It was a little before my time, but I do personally remember Nixon. You were in journalism school at the time, right? Roughly, yes. Roughly. At the time of Watergate. Yes, I was in graduate school. So I met during Andrew Johnson's. OK, so we are going to focus on the two that happened in Ron's lifetime. That's right. Modern times. Yes. In modern times. And we should say that President Bill Clinton was impeached by the House, but not convicted by the Senate.

President Richard Nixon resigned before the House voted on impeachment. The through line through all of these impeachment inquiries is that a president has never been removed from office via impeachment. And as we are in the fourth ever impeachment inquiry in American history, it's also probably reasonable to conclude that Donald Trump will not be removed from office by this process either. That's right, because there are 53 Republicans in the Senate. And right now, we don't have a commitment from any of them to actually vote for the president to be removed from office. And there would we don't have a commitment from any of them to actually vote for the president to be removed from office. And there would need to be 20. I can't wait to play this clip in like six months. I mean, either you will be so right or we will be so wrong. Well, if Trump is being

removed from office via impeachment, it means events have happened that none of us could predict that have radically shifted the political landscape of this country in such a dramatic and profound way that we would have at least 20 Republican senators willing to vote to convict him on articles of impeachment and remove him from office. Even in the weird, wild times we live in, I can't imagine a scenario where that could play out right now. But yeah, you're right, Tam. Play this back to me in six months and we'll see. All right. So let's go through some of these radical moments that shaped the past impeachments.

And I think we should talk about what's similar and also what's different. So let's start, Ron, with what is similar. The most important thing that's similar here is the similarity between this particular process and what happened with Richard Nixon, because in both cases, the allegations of wrongdoing had to do with the abuse of power for the purpose of securing re-election. So Richard Nixon's original burglary and all the other events around it that got labeled Watergate because the original burglary was in the Watergate Hotel. And they were breaking into the Watergate Hotel because the Democratic National Committee had its offices there, its headquarters there. That was all about securing and assuring Richard Nixon's reelection in 1972.

That's when the burglary happened. And in this particular instance, what's being alleged about this phone call with Ukraine and a number of other issues around it have to do with President Trump's efforts to secure his own reelection in 2020. And there are tapes. Well, there aren't tapes that we know of this time, but there were tapes for Richard Nixon and there are transcripts, yes? Yes. Let's say there is crucial evidence that emerged in the first round of hearings that were looking into Watergate back in the summer of 1973 when one of the witnesses testified, everything in the Oval Office is recorded, why don't you guys just listen to the tapes? Well, it took about 10 months to get hold of those tapes

and it took a decision by the Supreme Court to turn those tapes over. And at that point, Richard Nixon essentially resigned just days later. So getting that essential evidence to establish what the president's role had been in Watergate was the crux of a year and a half of struggle between the Congress and the president back in the Watergate era. And we're probably going to have a lot of struggle over evidence now again, in the Trump instance, possibly more information about that Ukraine phone call and possibly information about a lot of other phone calls too. We dug up some audio of Richard Nixon talking about the tapes. As far as what the president personally knew and did with regard to Watergate and the cover up is concerned, these materials, together with those already made available, will tell it all. I shall invite Chairman Rodino and the committee's ranking minority member, Congressman Hutchinson of Michigan, to come to the White House and listen to the actual full tapes of these conversations so that they can determine for themselves beyond question that the transcripts are accurate and that everything

on the tapes relevant to my knowledge and my actions on Watergate is included. In this audio, he is saying, like, I have nothing to hide. Here you go. And that's exactly what President Trump was saying about the rough call log of his call with President Zelensky of Ukraine. The only thing that matters is the transcript of the actual conversation that I had with the president of Ukraine. It was perfect. The fascinating thing about how Nixon left office was that it never even came up for a full vote in the House of Representatives. Articles of impeachment were approved out of the Judiciary Committee, which has did not have the support to stay in office because that was the shift from within his own party. Members of his own party informed the president, including in the Senate, that he was likely to lose and would be forced out of office.

And what Nixon did, and you see some parallels today in which they're saying Trump would be less likely to do this, is part of the reason why he left is that he was doing it to protect the party, that the Republican Party saw Nixon as such an existential threat that he left office and the party was grateful to him for that. And Republicans, in some ways, I think, were supportive of Nixon in the end because he, quote unquote, did the right thing and stepped down for the good of the country, for the good of the party. He fell on his sword. Exactly. That is not Donald Trump. And here's how Nixon characterized his departure. I have never been a quitter. To leave office before my term is completed is abhorrent to every instinct in my body.

But as president, I must put the interests of America first. America needs a full-time president and a full-time Congress. One of the unique realities of this moment is Donald Trump is a Republican president, but he is not a creature of the Republican Party. I think it's fair to say that he does not share the same level of loyalty to his political party as past presidents of all parties have felt loyal to theirs. You know what that Nixon tape makes me think about is just how incredibly wrenching impeachment is for a country. This is not something gone into lightly. This is not easy. This is painful. And when Gerald Ford then comes in after Nixon and he says our long national nightmare is over, we are now in the midst of one of these incredibly wrenching moments in American history.

At a time when the country is already pretty wrenched. That's right. Just as, again, with Andrew Johnson, that followed on the Civil War, immediately upon the Civil War. And with Richard Nixon, it followed on years and years of division over Vietnam. Vietnam was, in fact, still going on at the time. This is also a divisive time in our history, but impeachment could be said to have emerged from much larger issues. And that would, to a lesser degree, apply to Bill Clinton as well. And we're going to talk about the lessons we can take from the Clinton impeachment and apply to this moment after a quick break. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Aspen Snowmass, dedicated to meaningful action on

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And let's turn to Bill Clinton, because that is the most recent example of a president going through an impeachment process. And it's very different from Nixon and what's happening now, because at the core of that one is a sex scandal. That's right. It was about a sexual escapade or affair, whatever you want to call it. In today's atmosphere of hashtag Me Too, I think people would have judged Bill Clinton even more harshly than he was judged at that time. But at that time, when the House impeached him in December of 1998, only 30 percent, three, oh, less than a third of the country supported that impeachment in the Gallup poll. That did not deter the House majority.

They were the Republicans. And they had an intense relationship of antagonism against Bill Clinton, much like the Democrats have against Donald Trump. Republicans in the 90s were investigating the Clintons at every turn for very similar political partisan motivations. They were looking for something to get the Clintons. Things like their former real estate deals, his past personal behaviors as governor. And it was only in the Monica Lewinsky incident. I don't even know what you would call it because it wasn't that the affair was not the crime, right? The cover up was the crime in that the president lied under oath about his sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky. He started by lying to the whole country in public on television.

But lying to the public is not a crime. I want you to listen to me. I'm going to say this again. I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time, never. These allegations are false, and I need to go back to work for the American people. Thank you. God, I remember exactly where I was when he gave that speech. And it was all a lie.

And it was all a lie, and he later admitted it. And what's more, and where he really got into trouble, because as has been often observed, there is no law against lying to reporters on television or lying to journalists or being on television. There is a law against lying to a grand jury. And when Bill Clinton did it again in front of a grand jury, that's what got him impeached, or that at least was the final thing that the House voted an article of impeachment on, perjury and obstruction of justice, because of those lies, not the lie we just heard.

The benefit that Clinton had was at the time, the country was in a pretty good mood, and he was more popular through his impeachment than Donald Trump has been at any point in his presidency. In fact, his approval numbers went up after he was impeached and reached the highest point they ever reached. So you have to see in that a country that was not persuaded the president needed to be removed, even for a repugnant example of bad behavior of a personal nature in the White House. So it was a real issue, but it was not viewed as an impeachable issue. I don't know how to say this like artfully, but I'll just say it like what Clinton did was more relatable to everyday people, right? Like there were people that could see someone and

understand why they might lie about having an affair. And they didn't necessarily blame them for it. And they certainly didn't think you should get thrown out of office for a personal failing. But the Republican Party for its own motivations, because they had created such a case against the Clintons, and I think that's a good lesson for today, too, is to forgive you if you walk it back and say, you know what, never mind. We've decided that articles of impeachment are just not the way to go. Yes. And they blew through some pretty big stop signs, too, including in November, a 1998 midterm election in which they had expected to pick up 20 to 30 seats. And instead, they wound up losing about half a dozen. And that was a huge shock. And it actually cost the speaker at that time, Newt Gingrich, his job.

But they still went ahead the following month in special session and impeached him anyway. I just want to go back to where we started, which is that there is an incredibly small sample size here. There are not a lot of examples. The conventional wisdom is based on a couple of instances, which makes it really tough to know how this is actually all going to turn out. And in each of these four instances, this being the fourth, the country was radically different. You know, late 90s America wasn't early 70s America wasn't post-Civil War America. And 2019 America is none of those things either. I mean, in each situation, I think has to be judged by its, you know, pinpoint in history. And we have to sort of look at these as their

own unique events at the same time. And you could say that each of these presidents had also come to the actual presidency, the actual Oval Office, by unconventional or something other than typical political means. Richard Nixon had been rejected as a presidential nominee. He was kind of a remarkable comeback figure. Bill Clinton was thought to be almost laughable when he first started running, and we found out about some of his personal peccadillos and his draft dodging and so on, and yet he miraculously rises from way back in the polls to win. And Donald Trump, perhaps the most unconventional of all. So it's possible, too, that people can view all of this as the system,

if you will, the mechanisms of the establishment figuring out some way to re-eject a person they weren't interested in in the first place. All of that past conventional wisdom does provide us some sort of guideposts along the road as to how this might go. But anybody who tells you conclusively, this is going to be great for Trump, or this is going to be great for Democrats, they don't know. We're all guessing. Or maybe they're being paid to have that opinion. When it actually gets into impeachment proceedings, the tone of the building shifts and members take on a solemnness and a seriousness because they understand that these are history making votes. These are the moments in time that not only the president, but members of Congress will be judged for. These are the votes that will be in your political obituary. And how the country processes all of this is the wild, wild west right now of politics.

All right. That was impeachment then and now. We are sure that you have a lot of questions about it. And the best way to get some answers and to tell us what your questions are is to go to our NPR Politics Facebook group. You can join by heading over to n.pr slash politics group to join. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. And I'm Ron Elving, editor correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.