David E. Kyvig

The constitutional device of impeachment, previously little used, has been repeatedly employed since 1960. From "Impeach Earl Warren" billboards through campaigns to remove Supreme Court Justices Abe Fortas and William O. Douglas to congressional investigations of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, four 1980s judicial impeachments, and the trial of Bill Clinton, impeachment has has become a recurring feature of an increasingly strident and impatient political culture. A careful and well-contextualized historical inquiry and analysis of impeachment, using archival sources, oral history interviews, and the public record, will illuminate relatively unexamined interconnections and matters of fundamental public importance in evolving US political/constitutional culture.