For more than a century the official narrative of the first presidential impeachment has been butchered and distorted, reduced to a historical curiosity, a showdown between two irresponsible factions in which voices of reason ultimately triumphed. You were likely taught (if you were taught at all) that the 1868 fight to remove Andrew Johnson from office centered on an obscure and dubious law, the Tenure of Office Act, and that “Radical” Republicans—their influence inflated in the aftermath of the Civil War—overstepped their bounds in a quest for even more power.
This viewpoint was memorialized most famously in John F. Kennedy's Pulitzer-winning 1957 book, Profiles in Courage, which canonized Edmund G. Ross, the Kansas Republican senator whose last-minute decision reversal led to Johnson's acquittal. The verdict, as recounted by Kennedy, was a triumph of sobriety and institutional scruple, of country over party, of pragmatism over ideology. It's all of the stories official Washington loves to tell about itself, wrapped in one: When both sides are to blame, real heroism can mean doing nothing at all.
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