Politics & Polls #143: The Impeachment of Andrew Johnson Featuring Brenda Wineapple

Jun 12 2019
By Morgan C. Tucker
Source Woodrow Wilson School

As the country debates whether President Trump should be impeached, many are making comparisons to past presidencies like Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. Less attention, however, is paid to the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, the first president to be impeached by the House of Representatives.

Brenda Wineapple, author of “The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation,” joins Julian Zelizer to discuss the components of the impeachment process of Johnson. Having begun “The Impeachers” six years ago, Wineapple talks about her book and demonstrates Johnson’s impeachment as a significant event in American history.

Wineapple also wrote “Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877,” named a “Notable Book” by The New York Times and “White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson,” a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award

ABOUT THE HOST

Zelizer has been among the pioneers in the revival of American political history. He is the Malcolm Stevenson Forbes, Class of 1941 Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University and a CNN political analyst. He has written more than 900 op-eds, including his popular weekly column for CNN.com and The Atlantic. This year, he is the distinguished senior fellow at the New York Historical Society, where he is writing a biography of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel for Yale University's Jewish Lives Series. He is the author and editor of more than 19 books including, “The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society,” the winner of the D.B. Hardeman Prize for the Best Book on Congress. In January 2019, Norton will publish his new book, co-authored with Kevin Kruse, “Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974.” In spring 2020, Penguin Press will publish his other book, “Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, The Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party.” He has received fellowships from the Brookings Institution, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation and New America.