In May, 1974, John Doar, the special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee, called the Yale historian C. Vann Woodward into his office and asked him to figure out just how badly Presidents had behaved in the past, and how they had answered accusations against them. A sense of scale seemed needed, a sense of magnitude. Doar gave Woodward until July to pull together a report, a catalogue of every charge of Presidential misconduct from 1789 to 1969. Was Richard Nixon worse than the worst? Or maybe not that bad? Historically speaking, what is “politics as usual,” anyway?
It would be good to know the answers, with regard to the current occupant of the White House. The conviction of Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, tars him, and the guilty plea of Michael Cohen, his former attorney, implicates him. Cohen has pleaded guilty to violating federal law at Trump’s direction, making the President an unindicted co-conspirator. If Trump were not President, he would very likely be charged with a crime. What else he has done, and what can be proved, and what Republicans are willing to do about it remain to be seen; meanwhile, Trump’s entire Presidency, from his Cabinet appointments to his foreign policy, lies in a muddle of money-grubbing, kowtowing, and influence-peddling.
Is Trump more of a crook than Nixon was? That’s not the right question, but it’s the inevitable one. Asked to measure Nixon against every President from George Washington to Lyndon B. Johnson, Woodward divided the work among fourteen historians. They were to exclude from consideration any allegations that appeared to be merely partisan or ideological, and confine themselves, as Woodward explained, to the “responses of the President, on his part or on the part of his subordinates, to charges of misconduct that was alleged to be illegal and for which offenders would be culpable.”