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a note on my desk. The president would like to see you after the broadcast. I crumpled it up and tossed it into the waste can after the Coke. He was going to ask me how the speech was going. And I was going to have to tell him that I couldn’t write it. “Sir, you’re a statesman,” I wanted to say. “A statesman doesn’t make speeches like this.”
    But I knew what he’d reply. “No, I’m not a statesman. I won’t be a statesman until I leave office. Until then, I’m the man who has to make difficult decisions.”
    “But not this one, sir!”
    “Yes, even this one.”
    We’d had the argument a dozen times. And each time, there were a few less voices saying that the president should resist the cries for his resignation.

    Cronkite came back on the air then. Now, he began chronicling the unraveling presidency of Adlai Stevenson. He worked his way steadily through all six years of it. The endorsement of Oppenheimer, even though J. Edgar Hoover said he was a known Communist. The commutation of the death sentence of convicted atomic spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The president’s public opposition to the hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. The Berlin wall embarrassment. The Soviets’ growing atomic stockpile. The continuing failures of the Vanguard missile system. The Northrop vs. Symington Flying Wing scandal. The attempt on Khrushchev’s life at Disneyland. The Soviet demonstration of a 100-megaton nuclear weapon. The breakdown of relations with France because of the president’s refusal to back them in Indo-China. The public break with J. Edgar Hoover, resulting in the firing of the director of the F.B.I.—and didn’t that one set off the howls from the right! Simultaneous inflation and recession. The civil war in Cuba—and the very unpopular decision to send in troops to support the Batista government. And then—goddammit!— Sputnik, the Russian satellite. It seemed that nothing that Adlai Stevenson did was the right thing to do.
    The founder of the John Birch Society insisted publicly that the president was a Communist agent; that was the only logical explanation for the floundering of America—Stevenson was trying to bring the country to its knees so that the Soviets could triumph without firing a shot. “Khrushchev says that he will bury us—and Adlai Stevenson wants to hand him the shovel.” Stevenson’s response: “No, I’m a capitalist. I’ll sell him the shovel.” But the joke fell flat. It’s a bad sign when even the press corps doesn’t laugh at the president’s jokes. Even worse, the late night TV talk show hosts, Steve Allen and Jack Paar, were starting to make jokes that were hostile to the president. Those jokes would be repeated in a hundred thousand stores and offices the next day and the day after that.
    And then, that grandstanding little son of a bitch—the congressman from Van Nuys—stood up in the House of Representatives and introduced a Bill of Impeachment. He charged the president with “non-feasance in office,” whatever that was. Maybe he’d meant it as a joke to call attention to the rampant hostility on the Hill, or maybe he’d intended it as a way to get himself a little public attention, or maybe he’d meant it only as a political stunt, deliberately designed to embarrass the president—or maybe he just meant it.

    Whatever the case, the press took it seriously. And because the press took it seriously, so did the American public. And within two weeks, a House Committee was drawing up Articles of Impeachment and holding hearings. The House Republicans were still angry over the slapping down they’d gotten over the Committee on Un-American Activities, so they were only too happy to go after the egghead—“You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggheads.”
    But there was no support on the left side of the aisle either. The Democratic party’s unity was fractured so badly, there was talk it might break apart into two new