Customer Reviews

Grand Inquests: The Historic Impeachments of Justice Samuel Chase and President Andrew Johnson

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Rehnquist is obviously alot more thoughtful than the "liberal" community, in which I often count myself, has been led to believe. He provides a good summary of the issues that surrounded the impeachments of Chase & Johnson, the constitutional questions these events raised & helped to settle, and their long-term implications. Rehnquist is not, in this book anyhow, the best stylist in the world, but he also doesn't descend into so much legal mumbo-jumbo that non-lawyers would be turned off. Also, his sections of background history are just OK. History buffs may find some factual, emphasis or interpretative points to dispute in those sections.

This book is much more than an account of the two major impeachments in U.S. history. The bulk of the book consists of a remarkably well-written history lesson covering the period of 1775 to the 1868 Johnson impeachment trial. The last part of the book then discusses the lessons to be learned from these two impeachment efforts.

The 1805 impeachment trial of Justice Chase, a Federalist judge, involved his (mis)handling of 3 cases as a circuit rider judge (in those days Supreme Court justices actually spent most of their time riding circuit). The best the Republicans could do was a 19-15 vote for conviction on one of the Articles, still 4 votes short of the 2/3 needed to remove Chase from office. The effort failed because 6 Republicans defected and voted for acquittal, realizing the impeachment effort was partisan in nature and contrary to what the founding fathers intended.

The 1868 impeachment effort against Johnson similarly failed when 7 Republicans voted against removal. (Terminology here can be confusing; in 1805 Jefferson's party was called "Republican", and later came to be called "Democratic". In 1868 "Republican" was used for the new party formed in the 1850's.) These 7 Republicans can now be seen as the true constitutional heroes that they are. Had the radical Republicans succeeded in removing Johnson, it would mean that from then on the President would serve at the pleasure of the Senate, and the true purpose of the impeachment provision in the Constitution would have been obliterated in a sea of partisanship.

Rehnquist concludes that "The importance of these two acquittals in our constitutional history can hardly be overstated....These two "cases"--decided not by the courts but by the United States Senate--surely contributed as much to the maintenance of our tripartite federal system of government as any case decided by any court." He is right, and he has contributed enormously to our understanding of this issue by his articulate discussion of it contained in this book.

Who knew that the late Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, leader of the conservative counter revolution against the legacy of the Warren Court, wrote so well?

You would not guess that from his opinions penned over a generation. His court writing is exact but dry, a great contrast to the colorful rhetoric of his conservative colleague, Antonin Scalia.

But in "Grand Inquests," a telling of the impeachment trials of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase and President Andrew Johnson, Rehnquist demonstrates a compelling narrative style and the novelist's keen eye for detail. Rehnquist also demonstrates the good novelist's ability to describe the important details at considerable length while limiting the lesser facts in length.

The important details of these two impeachments surround the personalities of the major players that brought about the impeachment instead of ascribing the trials to historical circumstances, as if the impeachments were forced by mysterious forces instead of angry human beings. Rehnquist paints vivid portraits of Andrew Johnson, a one-time tailor and self-made politician, the ambitious and independent Edwin Stanton, whose refusal to give up his post as Secretary of War set the impeachment proceedings in motion, and the Radical Republicans who were furious with Johnson for obstructing Reconstruction, Thaddeus Stevens, Ben Wade, George Boutwell, Charles Sumner, and Ben Butler.

Rehnquist makes a convincing argument that men make their own destiny by their choices when he implies, quite correctly in my view, that Justice Chase would not have been impeached if he were not abrasive and heavy handed in court, and President Johnson would not have been impeached if he had been more even tempered in his disagreement about Reconstruction and presidential appointment power with the opposition Republicans. Johnson, for example, referred to Radical Republican leaders Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner as "traitors."

Both impeachment proceedings occurred in the wake of highly charged political times, Rehnquist observes. Chase was impeached shortly after President John Adams had packed the federal government with appointees of his Federalist Party in the final hours of his presidency. And Adams had also tried to stifle dissent by his political opponents, incited by his idelogical adversary, Thomas Jefferson, with the repressive alien and sedition acts. Johnson faced impeachment during the difficult aftermath of the Civil War. Brave Senators such as Bradley of Vermont and Gaillard of South Carolina risked their political careers to acquit Chase. Likewise, Senators Edmund Ross of Kansas and Lyman Trumbull of Illinois defied the public hysteria against Johnson.

Rehnquist brilliantly cuts through the emotions of the times to show that Chase basically faced impeachment because of biased instructions to a grand jury and questionable instructions to a jury in a criminal trial involving sedition. Johnson was impeached for opposing Reconstruction and firing Secretary of War Edwin Stanton.In firing Stanton, Johnson's political enemies asserted that he was in violation of a congressional act, The Tenure of Office Act, which called for Senate approval of presidential firings. Clinton, of course, whose trial Rehnquist presided over, was impeached for engaging in oral sex in a bathroom near the Oval Office.

Presidential powers became more firmly defined by Supreme Court decisions in the 20th century, Rehnquist notes. A President's sole authority to hire and fire executive department political appointees was not as clear in 1866 as it is in 2006. Indeed the rule of law on presidential power to fire at will political appointees was not decided until "Humphrey's Executor v. United States" in 1935. The Court then held that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had the power to fire Federal Trade Commissioner William E. Humphrey on political grounds. Today we would laugh at the idea that a President would have to seek permission from Congress to fire an executive branch official who was not a career public employee.

Rehnquist has written the best book on impeachment. Read it and enjoy it.

[Hansen Alexander is an attorney who lives and works in New York City. He is the author, most recently, of the introductory legal text "A Tort is Not a Pastry."]

Justice Rehnquist made a historic case of impeachments NOT being a case of recreational politics. In both cases detailed in the book, the people being impeached were really on trial for being out of touch with popular opinion. In both cases, the impeachment failed. An excellent book, well written. Parallels to the current situation are exaggerated, and this book offers NO insight to what degree of criminal violations need to be reached to justify impeachment. Nor does he offer any advice as to what to do if an official DOES get severely out of touch with public opinion.

If you're looking for clues as to how Rehnquist will preside over the impeachment trial of Bill Clinton you'll be disappointed. In fact this book is more like a simple retelling of events than a focus on constitutional issues. Rehnquist does make the point that the acquittal of Justice Chase helped foster a judiciary independent of political litmus tests by Congress, and the acquittal of President Johnson did likewise for the executive branch, both of which Rehnquist feels are good things, but other than that you'll be hard pressed to find anything about the author's personal opinions. The narrative of the book is far too much concerned with broad historical developments which are discussed in much better detail in other sources, rather than focussing on the particulars of the impeachment trials. The material on the trials themselves probably takes up no more than a quarter of the book.

I enjoyed this book. Its an excellent primer on both impeachment and American History. I recommend it for anyone whose looking for a good introduction or review of the history of our country from its founding through reconstruction.

A great and timely book to explore the mind of the Chief Justice on the current events in the whitehouse. An intelligent history book thats sure to go out of print again and become a wanted book.

While I read the book several years ago, I reread it in view of, shall I say, recent events. Like his other two books (All the Laws But One & The Supreme Court: How It Was, etc.,), this book is succinct and easy-to-read. The Chief's very conservative views apparently have been edited out. Good but not great.

I reviewed this book for the JOURNAL OF AMERICAN HISTORY when it first appeared, and nothing that has happened in the seven years since 1992 has changed my mind. Chief Justice Rehnquist writes clearly and well, but his research and historical perspective are sadly outdated. For example, he accepts the hoary myth that there was no good reason at all to consider Andrew Johnson an appropriate target for impeachment, despite Michael Les Benedict, THE IMPEACHMENT AND TRIAL OF ANDREW JOHNSON (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), a fine study showing that Johnson deliberately violated many Congressional civil-rights and Reconstruction statutes validly enacted over his veto, that he also sought to gut efforts to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment, and that ultimately he deliberately provoked the 1868 attempt to remove him from office. Moreover, Rehnquist's analysis of the impeachment and trial of Justice Samuel Chase fails to situate it in the context of the previous year's impeachment, conviction, and removal of U.S. District Judge John Pickering, or the larger battle between Jeffersonian Republicans and Federalists over the control of the nation's judiciary -- a context without which the Chase impeachment is all but impossible to understand. Readers seeking light on this subject should consult Richard E. Ellis, THE JEFFERSONIAN CRISIS: COURTS AND POLITICS IN THE YOUNG REPUBLIC (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971; Norton paperback, 1973).

Chief Justice Rehnquist's book extols executive and judicial independence -- unexceptional and unexceptionable positions, to be sure -- but he also implicitly denounces the actions of democratically-elected legislatures -- a position more open to question, even as it is consistent with much of his constitutional jurisprudence as shown in Sue Davis, JUSTICE REHNQUIST AND THE CONSTITUTION (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).

Ultimately, perhaps, readers may value this book for its potential illumination of the presiding officer over the Senate's trial of President Clinton, but it adds little or nothing to our understanding of the history and law of the impeachment process. -- Richard B. Bernstein, Adjunct Professor of Law, New York Law School

What I'd hoped for was a historical perspective on the impeachment process as a primer to further reading on the Clinton impeachment proceedings. The historical context provided is, at best truncated--the history reads like an early draft compiled from a chronologically ordered fact list. Hence, the reader is to often required to make the connections between historical precedent and subsequent results. Also troubling were some typographical errors. For example, my paperback edition has James Buchanan being elected president in 1865. When a nonhistorian catches errors like this, doubts begin arising about other listed facts.

I thought too that the book is not especially well written. I ran across too many paragraphs whose thoughts seemed to have been morphed in with insufficient attention to their contributions to context. As one who believes fuzzy writing to be symptomatic of fuzzy thinking, alarm bells went off each time.

In the end, I wasn't confident that I had gotten a good primer for the follow up reading I'd planned.