Article snippet: The president came to power by accident, a populist, out of the mainstream of the party that nominated him, and believed by many to be a racist. His name was Andrew Johnson and he escaped removal from office by impeachment by one vote in the Republican senate. In looking for an historical parallel to the statements this week of prominent Republican senators about the president of their party—the example of Andrew Johnson is the closest I can come. Sure, there have been lots of senators who have opposed their party’s presidents — think Jimmy Carter in 1980. But to have this kind of denunciation of a president’s character by high-ranking members of his own party is virtually unprecedented. Andrew Johnson, of course, came to power after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. He had been a Democrat but an ardent Union man who refused to secede from the Senate with his home state of Tennessee. When Lincoln sought a second term his re-election was far from certain and he needed the support of “Union Democrats” so he chose Johnson as his running mate. The new vice president disgraced himself at the inauguration by showing up drunk (his defenders insisted that he was ailing) and he was dismissed by the powers in Washington as an irrelevancy. But just weeks after he assumed his position as the number two in government, he ascended to number one. At first the Radical Republicans in Congress thought they could work with him because of his populist positio... Link to the full article to read more