In 1973, as a student journalist, I stood against the back wall of the ornate Senate Caucus Room and scribbled notes as the Senate Watergate Committee held hearings on the tangled misdeeds of President Nixon.
I listened as John W. Dean, Nixons former counsel, said he had warned of a cancer on the presidency.
In 1999, as a Times reporter, I stood in the Senate Press Gallery and watched senators solemnly pronounce their verdicts in the impeachment trial of President Clinton, including, on one count, a carefully choreographed 50-50 tie.
And last week, I watched House Democrats launch the third formal effort to impeach a president in the last half century, this time against President Trump.
NO TWO PRESIDENTS are alike, of course, and no two impeachment battles are alike. Nixon resigned in disgrace in 1974 once it was clear that he would be impeached by the House and removed by the Senate. Clinton was impeached by the House but acquitted in the Senate, and finished his term as a largely popular figure.
The obvious question is whether Trumps experience will be more like Nixons, ending his presidency, or like Clintons, an ordeal he turned into a victory of sorts.
Nixons offenses were weighty. In August 1974, the House Judiciary Committee approved three articles of impeachment, including one for abuse of power stemming from his attempts to use the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service to investigate his political opponents.
Clintons offenses stemmed from his extramarital affair with a former White House intern and his false denials under oath. The principal charge was perjury.
In both cases, impeachment began as a partisan affair Democrats investigating Nixon, Republicans pursuing Clinton. Most Americans initially opposed removing either president from office.
But the two impeachments went in opposite directions.
In Nixons case, two years of investigations unleashed an avalanche of new facts: abuses of power, an elaborate White House cover-up and undeniable evidence that Nixon had directed the entire criminal affair.
Yet public opinion shifted very slowly. Only after the discovery of a smoking gun, an Oval Office recording of Nixon ordering the cover-up, did a majority want him to resign.
Within days, Republican leaders told Nixon that he had lost the support of his own party, and he quit.
In Clintons case, an independent counsel found that he had lied under oath to cover up his affair. Most Americans didnt see that as just cause to oust him. When the House voted to impeach Clinton in December 1998, only 29% of voters approved, few of them Democrats.
Lesson One: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is correct: An impeachment effort can succeed only if it has bipartisan support.
Thats why Republicans, not Democrats, are the ones to watch now.
