Foreign Affairs Reviews James Banner's Presidential Misconduct: From George Washington to Today

In 1974, John Doar, special counsel to the House committee handling impeachment proceedings against U.S. President Richard Nixon, decided that the committee’s work would benefit from expert analysis that would compare Nixon’s wrongdoing to that of past presidents. In an astonishing eight weeks, a team of 15 scholars, recruited and led by the historian C. Vann Woodward, produced a volume of brief, factual reviews of misconduct by every administration from George Washington’s through Lyndon Johnson’s, excluding purely private behavior or actions that the authors judged to be merely partisan or ideological. Their work has now been reissued with added reviews of eight more administrations (Nixon’s through Barack Obama’s).