Overview

In May 1974, as President Richard Nixon faced impeachment following the Watergate scandal, the House Judiciary Committee commissioned a historical account of the misdeeds of past presidents. The account, compiled by leading presidential historians of the day, reached back to George Washington's administration and was designed to provide a benchmark against which Nixon's misdeeds could be measured. What the report found was that, with the exception of William Henry Harrison, every American president has been accused of misconduct. Now, as another president and his subordinates face an array of charges on a wide range of legal and constitutional offenses, a group of presidential historians has come together under the leadership of James M. Banner, Jr.--one of the historians who contributed to the original report--to bring the 1974 account up to date through Barack Obama's presidency. Based on current scholarship, this new material covers such well-known episodes as Nixon's Watergate crisis, Reagan's Iran-Contra scandal, Clinton's impeachment, and George W. Bush's connection to the exposure of intelligence secrets. But oft-forgotten events also take the stage: Carter's troubles with advisor Bert Lance, Reagan's savings and loan crisis, George H. W. Bush's nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, and Obama's Solyndra loan controversy.

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A Guggenheim Award-winning historian, James M. Banner, Jr., was on the Princeton faculty in 1974 when he contributed to the presidential misconduct report and is now an independent historian in Washington, DC. He was a cofounder of the History News Service, a moving spirit behind the National History Center, the author of many books, including Being a Historian, and the editor of Presidential Misconduct: From George Washington to Today. Mike Chamberlain is an actor and voice-over performer in Los Angeles whose audiobook narration has won several AudioFile Earphones Awards. His voice credits range from radio commercials and television narration to animation and video game characters. Stage trained at Boston College, he has performed works from Shakespeare and the classics to contemporary drama and comedy.

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