Yet oddly, for years and years, the intensely dramatic event—the impeachment of the U.S. President—has largely been papered over or ignored. For years, we’ve sidestepped that ignominious moment when a highly unlikeable President Johnson was brought to trial in the Senate, presumably by fanatical foes. The whole episode left such a bitter aftertaste, as the eminent scholar C. Vann Woodward said more than four decades ago, that historians often relegated the term “impeachment” to the “abysmal dustbin” of never-again experiences—like “secession,” “appeasement,” and “isolationism.”
