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Source: CNN
Roundup
12/15/19

Every president since Washington has been accused of misconduct, but Trump's is off the chart

by Joseph J. Ellis

Joseph J. Ellis is an American historian who won the Pulitzer Prize for "Founding Brothers." He is the author of "American Dialogue: The Founding Fathers and Us." 

In 1974, at the height of the Watergate investigation of President Richard Nixon, the House Judiciary Committee asked Yale historian C. Vann Woodward to prepare a comprehensive account of misconduct by all American presidents from George Washington to Lyndon Johnson. Woodward assembled a star-studded team of American historians who proceeded to deliver a book-length report in record time. Entitled "Response of the Presidents to Charges of Misconduct," it provided the most comprehensive account of presidential misdeeds ever assembled. The goal was to recover the historical context within which Nixon's behavior could be most fairly and fully assessed.

But Nixon's unexpected decision to resign from office before his case went to the Senate rendered the Woodward report irrelevant. And it has languished in some archival version of oblivion ever since. Now, suddenly, the impeachment of President Donald Trump has rendered the report relevant. Fortuitously, a new edition, entitled "Presidential Misconduct: From George Washington to Today" with updated chapters on American presidents from Nixon to Obama has been published by The New Press.

"Presidential Misconduct" is a definitive account of America's longstanding love/hate affair with the office of the Presidency. The book's most jarring revelation is that every President from George Washington onward has been accused of corruption, abuse of power or some violation of his oath of office. The only exception is William Henry Harrison, who died four weeks after taking office.

In the earliest years, when the revolutionary embers were still warm, any robust exercise of executive power was condemned as monarchy, a second coming of George III. Even Washington was not immune to the charges, bolstered by the publication of forged documents purporting to show that he had been a covert British agent throughout the war for independence, an early example of "fake news." John Adams was falsely accused of plotting to crown his son, John Quincy, as his successor.

Read entire article at CNN