Impeachment?

Lock Him Up?

   We gather, from way up here, that many Trump supporters chant loudly, ‘Lock Her Up’, whenever they gather. While it appears that many Americans think Hillary should be in jail, we have heard rumours that the tiny group of Trump opposers think, perhaps the President is the felonious one.  Although he recently attacked Canada, I do think we should stay north of the partisan fray and seek professional advice. Apparently that advice is found in a book that was mentioned in a recent article in the New Yorker.  The book was mentioned, however, the title was not provided. As a public service I will provide it here so you can get the book and determine the degree of his guilt for yourself.

    On the last occasion (well, one of the last) of presidential malfeasance,  “In May, 1974, John Doar, the special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee, called the Yale historian C. Vann Woodward into his office and asked him to figure out just how badly Presidents had behaved in the past, and how they had answered accusations against them.” In order to assess how bad Nixon was compared to his predecessors, Woodward assembled fourteen historians who “dropped everything for the project.” They completed the project quickly, but Nixon resigned and the work was not published.

     Woodward, however, decided to produce “A whole book devoted exclusively to the misconduct of American presidents and their responses to charges of misconduct”. It was published, but the political attention span being what it is, it was not much noticed. Apparently the copy in the Widener Library at Harvard has only been signed out twice since 1974.

   All of this information is offered by the historian, Jill Lepore, in the article: “Measuring Presidents’ Misdeeds: During Watergate, Historians Helped Catalogue Accusations Made Against Past Presidents; Their Findings May be Useful Again.” New Yorker, Sept. 3, 2018

   Agreeing with her that such a study would be useful, I went looking for it in the Western Libraries here in London. Since the title was not provided, I searched for the book by author (the C. is for Comer, by the way) and was pleased to find it. If you are really interested in presidential misdeeds see: Responses of the Presidents to Charges of Misconduct  (A study undertaken for the Impeachment Inquiry Staff of the House Committee on the Judiciary, with an added intro. Includes bibliographical references.)

Post Script
   The article in the print edition is found under “The Talk of the Town” on p.15. Even if you can grab it for free, you should get a subscription since Conde Nast, like most magazine publishers, is in trouble.
    The book is still in the library (in storage). Having provided the public service, I will leave it up to you to carry on from here.