Andrew Johnson, Nixon, Clinton, Trump: Duquesne's Ken Gormley weighs in on presidential impeachments

After traveling the country promoting his New York Times bestseller “The Death of American Virtue: Clinton v. Starr” in 2010, Ken Gormley was encouraged that Americans were on track to heal the bitter divisions that grew during the impeachment of President Bill Clinton.

That optimism was misplaced, Gormley concedes.

“Sadly, it has become even worse, and I don’t know exactly how that happened,” said the former law school professor and dean who has served as Duquesne University president since 2016.

The 64-year-old Forest Hills resident knows impeachment.

He penned a respected 1997 biography of the Watergate special prosecutor titled “Archibald Cox: The Conscience of the Nation.” As a young law professor, he gained access to and spent hundreds of hours interviewing the principals in the Nixon and Clinton impeachment proceedings.

“No president likes impeachment proceedings. They all think they’re biased and unfair and political witch hunts. I think Clinton actually used that term as well. But they often do evolve from a series of things that raise concerns that kind of blossom into an impeachment proceeding,” said Gormley, sitting inside his Pittsburgh office. Photos of high-ranking officials he has interviewed, including President Gerald Ford, line one wall, and another wall of windows overlooks the bluff above the Mon River hundreds of feet below.

Gormley said a series of events soured public opinion on Richard Nixon in the days leading up to impeachment hearings, including the infamous Saturday Night Massacre.

On Oct. 20, 1973, Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire special prosecutor Cox, who was leading the Watergate investigation. Richardson refused and resigned. Nixon then ordered Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus to fire Cox. He, too, refused and resigned. Solicitor General Robert Bork finally fired Cox.

Likewise, Gormley said the 1998 Clinton impeachment hearings followed a series of investigations prior to news of his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

“It started with Whitewater shortly after Bill Clinton took office. So, I chuckle at times when I hear discussion of President Trump saying Democrats had set their sights on him for impeachment,” Gormley said. “In the Clinton case, there was almost a drumbeat for trying to remove him from day one. When I interviewed (Clinton), he said, ‘It was like Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner, and we were off to the races.’ ”

The tenor of the Clinton and Trump hearings have been dramatically different from the Watergate hearings that culminated in Nixon’s resignation, he said.

“The thing that is so striking in looking at the difference in the Nixon hearings was, although you still had a lot of Republican support for President Nixon, they were much more bipartisan in nature,” Gormley said. “(Democratic Rep.) Peter Rodino of New Jersey chaired the House impeachment proceedings, and he was a very respected member of Congress. And when you got the smoking gun — the tapes that proved Nixon’s involvement — it was actually Republicans from the Senate who went to Nixon and said they could no longer support him.”

He dismissed complaints from Trump supporters that the hearings have not been transparent and failed to give his supporters an opportunity to defend him.

“With Clinton, the House used the Starr Report and called (special prosecutor) Ken Starr to give extensive testimony. You never saw Monica Lewinsky or Paula Jones come in or any of the key witnesses. They did give Clinton’s lawyers a chance to question Ken Starr, but most of the work had already been done behind closed doors by his prosecutors, so they certainly didn’t have a chance to interview the underlying witnesses at all. So, actually, this process is more transparent,” Gormley said.

“I think it’s actually very similar. The important thing to start with is that the Constitution just says the House shall have the power to impeach. There are no rules. Frankly, there doesn’t have to be any process at all,” Gormley continued. “You could have a president commit a terrible action, and the House could walk into the chamber and vote to impeach the president.”

Like many observers, he believes the House will soon issue articles of impeachment and the process will move to the Senate, which will determine whether the president should be removed from office.

Although Clinton and Andrew Johnson were impeached and Nixon resigned, no American president has ever been removed from office.

In “The Death of American Virtue,” Gormley decried the “scorched-earth policy” of the Clinton impeachment that polarized the nation, setting neighbor against neighbor. He worries the level of vitriol today is worse.

“It saddens me. Part of the reason it saddens me is that, in working on both of my books, I had the extraordinary privilege in getting to interview some of the leaders of government on both sides. One of the heartening things I found is these are good people, intelligent people who care about their country,” he said. “And, somehow, something is broken inside the Capitol and more broadly in Washington that just fighting with each other is the norm. That doesn’t reflect what we believe in this country and, more importantly, we aren’t getting any work done.”