Trump is more Andrew Johnson than Andrew Jackson.
I’ve been reading Ron Chernow’s vast biography of Ulysses S. Grant. It’s an epic story of American character and grit. But what really struck me was a subplot I hadn’t expected.
Sandwiched between the accounts of Grant’s hard-nosed Civil War generalship and his election to the office of president are 70 pages describing Grant’s service as peacetime general under President Andrew Johnson. Read that section and you feel like you just picked up this morning’s Washington Post or New York Times. It would serve as good bedtime reading for our current president.
When Donald Trump began his presidency he fancied himself a successor to the rough populism of Andrew Jackson. He even hung a portrait of Old Hickory in the Oval Office. He was off by about thirty years and a couple of consonants. Instead of Andrew Jackson, Trump is mirroring the unhappy trajectory of Andrew Johnson.
The 17th President of the United States came abruptly to office when John Wilkes Booth fired his derringer into Abraham Lincoln’s skull. The job ahead of President Johnson was doubly difficult. He had to fill the shoes of a wise and equanimous predecessor. He had to pick up Lincoln’s unfinished work of healing a country so brutally torn apart.
Instead of approaching his administration with the sensitivity that might suggest, Johnson lurched into governing with a massive chip on his shoulder. He was polarizing and overtly racist, at a time when the urgent question of the day was finding a path to citizenship for 4 million newly freed slaves. His temperament was as erratic as it was intransigent. His defining style was to pick fights with the people he was supposed to be working to bring together.
It’s like Andrew Johnson invented Trumpism 150 years before Trump.
In Chernow’s book the story of the Johnson presidency is told from the perspective of Grant, who believed his duty was to stay out of politics and keep the peace he and his army had fought to win. This is what makes it feel so relevant to the present moment. With each turn of the page you experience yet another level of Grant’s growing dismay at his president’s hard determination to appeal only to a narrow, intolerant base at the expense of the greater nation. The worst elements of the former slave holding aristocracy took their cues from Johnson’s low character and hostility to justice, and unleashed a wave of domestic terrorism across the South. Grant was given little alternative but to break with the president he had intended to serve and put entire states under martial law in his efforts to restore peace.
To make a painful story short, by the time of the midterm elections Johnson had so thoroughly alienated the voting public that the opposing Republican Party won an overwhelming majority in Congress. Johnson became the first president in U.S. history to be impeached, although the articles of impeachment were more a list of technicalities than any clear high crime or misdemeanor. The case was really about a general agreement that Johnson had proven himself woefully unfit for the presidency.
Johnson managed to hang on to his office by a one-vote margin. He faded into a noisome irrelevancy during his last months in office, while Congress governed and the nation counted the days until he could be replaced by Ulysses S. Grant in the next election.
The story is an American tragedy, certainly for Andrew Johnson, but also for the nation as a whole. We can only wonder how things might have turned out if a coarse and pugnacious president had not arrived to wreck the national healing begun by General Grant’s unexpected magnanimity to General Lee at Appomattox Court House. Would we have managed to avoid some of the entrenched racism and bitterly hardened fractures that have plagued the nation ever since?
And yet, there is also hope in this strange passage from America’s story. It was far from a shining moment for the nation’s institutions, but at the least they functioned to contain a presidency veering dangerously out of control. Impeachment was defined as more a political tool than a legal one. The lesson learned is that if it’s needed again, a larger and more illuminating charge might work better than an assemblage of legal technicalities. Breaking the presidential oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution comes to mind as an overarching theme.
Think how useful it would be for the current president to read Chernow’s book on Grant, although, at 959 pages long, we’re more likely to see pigs taking wing around the D.C. airspace. Trump would find solace in the fact that Grant fought often with a hostile press, and his political skills were severely underestimated. Trump might even experience a rude epiphany in the story of Andrew Johnson, and reverse some of the habits bringing down his presidency. If they truly want to support their man, perhaps someone from Fox & Friends could summarize the cautionary points for him.
