Andrew Johnson figures in The Bob Zadek Show chiefly as the one American president whose removal trial actually tested the Senate’s two-thirds threshold, and as the target of a post-Civil War effort to reshape the Supreme Court. Across four episodes the excerpts return to his 1868 impeachment as evidence that removal is a political proceeding rather than a legal one, and that the structural rules governing it — not the merits of the charges — determine outcomes.
The 1868 impeachment and the two-thirds threshold
In the 2014 episode on elective monarchy, Frank H. Buckley told Bob Zadek that the two-thirds Senate vote required to remove a president has been satisfied only once in American history, when one party held the presidency and the other party held two-thirds of the Senate and the House: 1868. Zadek supplied the name — “That was Andrew Johnson” — and Buckley confirmed it. Buckley added that John F. Kennedy wrote Profiles in Courage to celebrate the one senator who switched his vote to save the presidency, and that in his view the man was bribed and Kennedy did not write the book, Ted Sorensen did. Buckley said he would have preferred a simple majority, and credited Gouverneur Morris with slipping the two-thirds requirement past the Framers. Has America Become an “Elective Monarchy”? (2014)
The same episode used Johnson’s case to illustrate how close a removal vote can come. Buckley noted that on Clinton the Senate vote to remove was 50-50, and that but for the last-minute change from a simple majority to two-thirds, Al Gore would have cast the deciding vote. Has America Become an “Elective Monarchy”? (2014)
The Tenure of Office Act and the Ross vote
In the January 2020 episode with John Rothmann, the charges against Johnson were described as fundamentally based on the Tenure of Office Act, which Rothmann said was passed by Congress in order to get him. Rothmann stated that Johnson was saved by one vote — that of Edmund Ross of Kansas — and directed listeners to Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage. He drew the general lesson that a crime is not necessary for impeachment: you can impeach someone if you have the votes, and convict in the Senate if you have the votes, regardless of the merits. Withholding Judgment on Impeachment with John Rothmann (2020)
Rothmann placed Johnson in a sequence — the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, the impeachment that theoretically would have taken place with Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, and now Donald Trump — and reminded listeners that no president of the United States facing trial in the Senate has been convicted and removed from office. Withholding Judgment on Impeachment with John Rothmann (2020)
Court packing and Lincoln’s successor
The 2021 episode with Philip Hamburger treated Johnson from a different angle. Zadek, framing the history of court packing, said that after the Civil War the country felt vulnerable and that Congress moved against Lincoln’s successor, describing Johnson as far more sympathetic to slavery. Hamburger said the closest thing to successful court packing came around the time of the Civil War, when Congress increased the size of the court both under Lincoln and afterwards, for fear that Southern sympathizers might dominate it; he called that the only clear successful example in American history and noted it came in response to a civil war, when the loyalties of the court were uncertain. Philip Hamburger on Court Packing (2021)
Across episodes
The 2018 episode with Gene Healy of the Cato Institute is represented only by a summary stating that the discussion covered the origins of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” the precedent set by early judicial impeachments, and the historical context of Andrew Johnson’s trial as a framework for modern debates over executive removal; the excerpt contains no speaker-level detail on Johnson. Low Tweets and Misdemeanors: The Impeachment Debate Through the Lens of History and the Constitution (2018) Between the 2014 Buckley episode and the 2020 Rothmann episode the treatment shifts emphasis: Buckley stressed the arithmetic of the two-thirds rule and the single switched vote, while Rothmann stressed the Tenure of Office Act as the substantive basis of the charges and the political character of the proceeding. The 2021 Hamburger episode raises a distinct thread — the post-Civil War enlargement of the Supreme Court as an action against Johnson — that the other episodes do not develop.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state the outcome of the 1868 Senate trial in numerical terms beyond the single-vote margin, nor do they identify the articles of impeachment or the specific votes on them. They do not give Johnson’s earlier offices, his state, or the dates of his presidency beyond the year 1868. The Healy episode survives only as a topic summary, so its treatment of Johnson cannot be described. Where the 2014 excerpt breaks off at “Potential Structural Changes,” and where the 2020 excerpts break mid-sentence, nothing further is reported here.