The impeachers had reduced the seventeenth President to a shadow—a shadow President; that is, a President who did not cast a long shadow, although his regressive policies would. The impeachers had warned the country about these policies as best they could, and offered to us, clearly and without apology, a cautionary tale. And they provided hope. For in an essential way, impeachment had accomplished what it had set out to do. It spoke beautifully and with farsighted imagination of the road not yet taken, but that could exist: the path toward a free country, a just country, a country and a
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