The Atlantic

Impeachment: An Argument

In the March 1976 issue of The Atlantic, Elliot Richardson, the former attorney general, made a silver-lining argument about the then-recent constitutional crisis:

Beyond its own sordid confines, Watergate has been redemptive—a disguised stroke of good fortune … The good fortune may yet turn to ashes, but I am one of those whom H. L. Mencken called the “optimists and chronic hopers of the world,” and I see gain

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