Presidential Impeachments Mirror Technological Advances; This Time, It's Smartphones

Center stage in the Trump impeachment inquiry is a conversation that took place by telephone — a device that was 8 years after Andrew Johnson became the first U.S. president impeached by Congress. Telephones, in fact, have played key parts in all three of the presidential impeachment proceedings that followed Johnson's. But each one of those exercises has also featured technological innovations unheard of in Johnson's time. Even the low-tech and ultimately futile attempt to oust Abraham Lincoln's White House successor involved a relatively newfangled technology: the telegraph, Samuel Morse's paradigm-shifting 1844 invention. To make his case that sacking Secretary of War Edwin Stanton was justified despite requiring prior Senate approval, Johnson writes a lengthy to the Senate citing Stanton's mishandling of telegrams as grounds for dismissal. Johnson points to testimony in the impeachment inquiry from his fired war secretary. In it, Stanton acknowledges having received a telegram from a Maj. Gen. Baird asking what should be done about expected riots in New Orleans. "He took no action upon it, and neither sent instructions to General Baird himself nor presented it to me for such instructions," Johnson writes of Stanton. "On the next day (Monday) the riot occurred. I never saw this dispatch from General Baird until some ten days or two weeks after the riot, when, upon my call for all the dispatches, with a view to their publication, Mr. Stanton sent it to me." It was the time stamp on Baird's telegram that bolstered Johnson's claim of negligence by Stanton. But the beleaguered president's argument was not highly persuasive. Johnson was impeached by the House and only escaped conviction in the Senate by . Telegrams had another, more peripheral role in the first presidential impeachment: they conveyed a show of support for Johnson from the hinterlands. "Remain firm," reads one from Pittsburgh sent to the White House and on the front page of the Feb. 25, 1868, edition of of Washington, D.C. "Every decent man in New York City," reads another, "is with you." A full century would pass before the next attempt to impeach a U.S. president. What prompted Congress to seek Richard Nixon's impeachment was a bungled break-in at the Democratic National Committee's headquarters at the Watergate complex in 1972 by five operatives working for CREEP, the acronym of the Committee to Re-Elect the President. The police scanner and walkie-talkies that Washington metropolitan police found in possession of the Watergate burglars were a technological leap forward from the Andrew Johnson-era telegraphs. In the end, though, these gizmos failed to keep Nixon's henchmen from getting busted. It was another 20th century invention that proved central to Nixon's hasty August 1974 resignation as an impeachment vote against him loomed in the House: the tape recorder. Like Nixon, all five presidents who preceded him — from Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Lyndon Baines Johnson — had their White House telephone and face-to-face conversations. All those recordings remained private, and Nixon clearly expected the 3,400 hours of conversations he'd taped would as well. The Supreme Court thought otherwise. In a unanimous decision, the highest court of the land Nixon's claim of executive privilege and ordered the White House to release the audio tapes. In those recordings, White House counsel John Dean warning Nixon of the growing danger posed by the president's efforts to cover up the Watergate affair. "We have a cancer within — close to the presidency, that's growing. It's growing daily. It's compounding," Dean tells Nixon, who grunts audibly in acknowledgement. "It grows geometrically now, because it compounds itself." The tapes turn the political tide decisively against Nixon, with fellow Republicans on Capitol Hill quickly abandoning the president. Barely two weeks after the Supreme Court's July 24, 1974, ruling, Nixon becomes the first U.S. president to the presidency.