“The day Richard Nixon failed to answer that subpoena is the day he was subject to impeachment because he took the power from Congress over the impeachment process away from Congress, and he became the judge and jury.”

— Rep. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), on the Senate floor arguing in favor of Bill Clinton’s impeachment in 1998.

New York Times: “One day in October 1992, four Republican congressmen showed up in the Oval Office with an audacious recommendation. President George Bush was losing his re-election race, and they told him the only way to win was to hammer his challenger Bill Clinton’s patriotism for protesting the Vietnam War while in London and visiting Moscow as a young man.”

“Mr. Bush was largely on board with that approach. But what came next crossed the line, as far as he and his team were concerned. ‘They wanted us to contact the Russians or the British to seek information on Bill Clinton’s trip to Moscow,’ James A. Baker III, Mr. Bush’s White House chief of staff, wrote in a memo later that day. ‘I said we absolutely could not do that.’”

“The poll numbers are in on impeachment, and it’s not good news for President Trump. A clear plurality of Americans approve of the House’s impeachment inquiry into Trump, and they are split on whether they want to impeach and remove him from office,” CNN reports.

“Americans are more eager to impeach Trump now than they were at similar points in the impeachment sagas of Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon.”

Pew Research: “In the spring of 1974, despite the indictment of top former White House aides, and Nixon’s release of what were seen as ‘heavily edited’transcripts of tapes of his aides plotting to get White House enemies, the public was still divided over what to do about the president. For example, by June, 44% in the Gallup Poll thought he should be removed from office, while 41% disagreed.”

“Only in early August, following the House Judiciary Committee’s recommendation in July that Nixon be impeached and the Supreme Court’s decision that he surrender his audio tapes, did a clear majority – 57% – come to the view that the president should be removed from office.”

Amy Walter: “The mythology surrounding the 1998 impeachment still drives a lot of the conventional wisdom today. That thinking goes like this: Republicans pushed an unpopular impeachment and paid for it at the polls. But, it’s not 1998 anymore. We are a much more polarized country than we were back then. Partisans are less willing to give the opposite party credit for things going well, and more willing to support their own party when things turn sour. We also know that this president is more unpopular than President Clinton was at any point during his impeachment.”

“We are a deeply divided, deeply polarized country. Almost everything we do — from choosing where to eat lunch (Chick-fil-A vs. Whole Foods), to picking where to live (urban/suburban vs. rural/small town) is filtered through the lens of how we identify politically. As such, we shouldn’t expect views of impeachment to be any different. Opinions won’t swing wildly from day to day or week to week. We also shouldn’t expect to see Americans overwhelming support or overwhelmingly oppose impeachment. Like everything in this era, the final verdict on impeachment is likely to be decided on the margins by voters who are holding conflicting views on the president and the process of impeachment. It will be decided by those who may dislike Trump, but are also frustrated by the paralysis in Washington, or those who may like the agenda of the president, but are troubled by his behavior.”

“House Judiciary Committee transcripts of some of President Nixon’s Watergate tape recordings differ extensively, and in many cases significantly, from the edited transcripts made public by the White House.”

— New York Times, June 20, 1974

Jonathan Bernstein: “Very early on, when the original cover-up was still intact and President Richard Nixon was cruising to a landslide re-election, House Majority Leader Tip O’Neill, as Fred Emery tells the story, ‘reckoned that so many bad things had been done by the Nixon men that they simply could not be kept secret indefinitely. Privately, he urged his surprised colleagues in the House leadership to ‘get ready for impeachment.’”

“But O’Neill was patient. The House didn’t move after the cover-up collapsed in spring 1973, or after dramatic Senate hearings that summer revealed that Nixon was personally involved. Only after the Saturday Night Massacre in October, when Nixon ordered Justice Department officials to fire the special prosecutor overseeing the probe, did they start moving toward impeachment. And then for months, the judiciary committee slowly gathered evidence to make its case. This strategy eventually worked, as the story gradually came out and moderate Republicans and conservative Democrats began defecting from Nixon – followed by the rest of the Republican Party in August 1974.”

“Has Pelosi been emulating O’Neill? She’s been taking plenty of heat from pro-impeachment Democrats. She’s certainly been unwilling to get ahead of her caucus. Perhaps that’s because she thinks impeachment could be avoided. Or perhaps she’s been betting that Trump’s past and current lawlessness would keep supplying new evidence pushing ambivalent Democrats toward action – and that a measured, patient process would be far stronger than a rushed one.”

Out next week: The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 by Garrett M. Graff.

Politico runs an excerpt: “Nearly every American above a certain age remembers precisely where they were on September 11, 2001. For a small handful of Americans—many of them among the most senior officials in the U.S. government—that day conjures memories of a bunker underneath the White House, built for the Cold War but never used until that Tuesday morning 18 years ago.”

“What had begun as an odd incident, with the crash of American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m., quickly escalated 17 minutes later when United Airlines Flight 175 crashed into the South Tower. As the world realized the country was under attack, Vice President Dick Cheney and senior White House aides were rushed to that bunker under the White House, known as the Presidential Emergency Operations Center. There, underneath the executive mansion’s north lawn, they tried to figure out how many more hijacked planes were in the air. They knew of at least one: United Flight 93.”

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The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11

• Garrett M. Graff
• Publisher: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
• Hardcover: 512 pages

$23.99

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