History’s David Kyvig wins Wilson Center fellowship

by Tom Parisi

NIU History Professor David Kyvig has won a fellowship to the prestigious Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., where he will spend the coming academic year conducting research for a book on the modern history of impeachment.

Kyvig is one of only 23 scholars from the United States, Austria, India, New Zealand and Russia named as Wilson Center fellows for 2004-05. He also is receiving a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies.

The Wilson Center is a nonpartisan institute for advanced study. It brings pre-eminent thinkers to Washington for extended periods to interact with policymakers through a large number of programs and projects.

Kyvig, an NIU Presidential Research Professor who specializes in 20th century U.S. history and the Constitution, will examine what he calls “the age of impeachment,” from 1960 to the present day. He plans to produce a book on the topic.

The U.S. Constitution provides a vehicle for removal of a public official through the process of impeachment in cases of “treason, bribery, and other high crimes and misdemeanors.” The House of Representatives initiates impeachment; the accused is then tried before the Senate, with the chief justice of the Supreme Court presiding over the trial.

“The impeachment device was very infrequently used in the first century and three quarters of American history,” Kyvig says. “In recent decades, it has become much more frequently employed. I’m interested in why that happened.”

The decade of the 1960s saw three impeachment efforts against Supreme Court justices. In 1974, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee recommended the impeachment of President Nixon, who resigned shortly thereafter. During the 1980s, multiple impeachment efforts were brought against federal judges, while President Reagan was threatened with impeachment over the Iran-Contra affair. In 1998, Bill Clinton became only the second U.S. president ever impeached by Congress. (Neither Clinton nor Andrew Johnson in 1868 was convicted of a crime.)

In 1951, the 22nd Constitutional Amendment was adopted, imposing a two-term limit on the presidency. Since then, three out of four second-term presidents (Nixon, Reagan and Clinton) have confronted impeachment, Kyvig notes. Only Dwight Eisenhower escaped this fate.

“We’re starting to see this notion of impeachment as an ordinary part of the U.S. political culture,” Kyvig says. “We’ve already seen several calls for the impeachment of George W. Bush, most notably by Ralph Nader this past year. The notion of impeachment as a political device has certainly started to take on a life that it simply didn’t have during most of our national political history.”

The framers of the Constitution likely intended the process of impeachment to be a method of last resort, Kyvig adds. “It wasn’t an ordinary device for restraining an office holder,” he says.

During his fellowship, Kyvig will interview a wide variety of people involved in various impeachments, including elected officials, impeachment inquiry staff members and journalists who covered the events.

Kyvig’s wife, Christine Worobec, also will spend the academic year in Washington on leave for her NIU Presidential Research Professorship, which she received last year. Worobec is working on several research projects related to Russian history.

5-17-04