Scandalous Presidents: 5 Things Podcast

On today's episode of the 5 Things podcast:

Presidential scandals have been around for probably as long as the office itself. Presidents from Andrew Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton and Donald Trump to name a few, have had scandals surround their presidency. Some were political, some were personal.

The team at Five Things wanted to look deeper into presidential scandals throughout history. David Jackson, national political correspondent for USA TODAY and who covered both the Clinton and Trump administrations, takes us through an excusive group of scandalous presidents. He talks about two of the most scandalous presidents and what they have in common and what is different about them.

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James Brown: Hello, and welcome to 5 Things. I'm James Brown. It's Sunday, September 4th, 2022. Every week, we take a question and idea or concept and go deep. If there's something you'd like us to look into, you can always email me at jabrown@usatoday.com or at podcasts@usatoday.com. I'm also everywhere on social media, James Brown TV. I tweeted thread on every episode and we'd love to hear from you.

Presidential scandals are nothing new. My first memory of one was back in 1992. Before Bill Clinton was president, he and Hillary Clinton went on 60 Minutes to do damage control after a supermarket tabloid broke the news of an alleged affair with Gennifer Flowers.

Speaker 2: I think most Americans would agree that it's very admirable that you have stayed together, that you worked your problems out, that you seemed to have reached some sort of an understanding and an arrangement.

Bill Clinton: Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. You're looking at two people who love each other. This is not an arrangement or an understanding. This is a marriage. That's a very different thing.

Hillary Clinton: I'm not sitting here as some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette. I'm sitting here because I love him and I respect him and I honor what he's been through and what we've been through together. And if that's not enough for people, then heck, don't vote for him.

James Brown: That was the tip of the iceberg. He was investigated for most of his presidency and eventually impeached. He finished two terms in office and Hillary Clinton became a US senator. A couple decades later came Donald Trump, who narrowly defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016 to become president. Much like Bill Clinton, rumblings of scandal in Trump world started early before he became president and he was investigated for most of his term in office.

Eventually, he became the first president to be impeached twice and not long ago, the first ex-president to have his resident searched by the FBI. Thankfully, I know someone who can help me make sense of this. My colleague, David Jackson, he's a frequent flyer here on 5 Things. He's a national political correspondent for USA Today. He's covered both the Clinton and Trump administrations. He joins me now for a walk through in exclusive group of scandalous presidents.

David Jackson, welcome to 5 Things.

David Jackson: Hey, thanks for having me. It's an interesting topic.

James Brown: What was the first presidential scandal you remember?

David Jackson: Watergate, when I was ... I'm a little older with you, James. I know this comes as a shock to you, but I am. But when I was a lad in my teen years in South Carolina, I remember watching the Senate Watergate hearings, which were daily television fair back in the summer of 1973, I believe it was. So that was the scandal in which somewhat President Nixon supporters broke into democratic headquarters looking for salacious material. They got caught and eventually, Nixon got caught trying to obstruct justice by protecting the people who did the break-in.

So it led to his resignation. The only time in presidential history that's ever happened. And that's really still the gold standard of presidential scandals.

James Brown: I wasn't born yet, obviously. But I hear it had a huge effect on the psyche of America. What do you recall of that? You were young at that point. Did it cast a poll over the country?

David Jackson: Oh, I think people just thought it was politics as usual. You had some Americans who felt like all politicians do it. Others thought that Nixon was a singularly corrupt president. It's really the similar kind of arguments you hear about Donald Trump. But one thing I think Watergate did too, it did kind of broke through the dam because there was a time in American history when these kind of things really weren't talked about much. There were suspicions of presidents involved in illicit activities, but it was rarely investigated by Congress or prosecutors. And it was even more rarely reported on in the press.

I mean, presidents were generally considered above it all. We have had our share of presidential scandals, like Ulysses S. Grant, had some during his administration. President Warren Harding had some during his administration in the 1920s. But those scandals were never tied directly to the president himself. Watergate was different in that Nixon himself was implicated in the wrongdoing, and people started reporting on it and investigating it.

A lot of people from the media to Congress, to the US attorney's office here in Washington, it was really a turning point, I think for presidential scandals, because whereas once upon a time presidents were considered untouchable. Now, they're fair game for this kind of thing.

James Brown: I'd love to hear more about those scandals in a bit. But before we get there, in your career, you've covered two of the most scandal-written presidents ever, Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. What did they have in common? And what's the biggest difference between the two?

David Jackson: The thing they have in common is that their past behaviors led to investigations. So they had a lot of enemies, many of whom were willing to investigate them in their practices, both in the White House and be in the years beforehand. So I guess that's the biggest thing they have in common is they were both very big political targets and eventually legal targets.

The differences, I think, are just manifest. Clinton was a very experienced politician, very good speaker. He knew a lot about government. He knew why he wanted to become president. Trump is basically a celebrity who decided one day that he wanted to be president because the idea sounded good to him. He wasn't nearly as experienced in politics as Clinton was nor did he have any experience in government. So I think the biggest difference was that it was experience.

James Brown: And your piece, you went back as far as Andrew Johnson and Ulysses S. Grant, both were presidents and then late in the mid-1800, for those who don't know. What's your takeaway from their scandals?

David Jackson: Well, Andrew Johnson, I should have mentioned him earlier. He also was involved in quite some scandals and that was in a particularly pivotal time in America because he was the president who replaced Abraham Lincoln, who had been assassinated. And then the nation was still recovering from the civil war at that time. And political feelings ran very deep at that time, as you might imagine. A lot of people didn't want to let the south back into the union.

Johnson was from Tennessee and wanted somewhat easier treatment of the south and wanted to try to reunite the country as soon as he possibly could. That made him quite a few enemies in Congress. And there were many clashes between the two branches of government at that time. And that's what led to his impeachment. The deal there was that Congress passed a law that said the president could not fire any cabinet members unless it had the approval of Congress. Johnson thought that was unconstitutional. He went ahead and fired a Secretary of War anyway, and Congress impeached him over it. So it really wasn't a legal kind of thing that we're seeing today. It was strictly a political impeachment, and Johnson survived by only one vote.

The Ulysses S. Grant thing was that Grant succeeded Johnson in the presidency because Johnson couldn't run it again after he'd been impeached. But the Ulysses S. Grant was a series of financial scandals by his aids. Basically, people cashing in on the government. There was the Whiskey Ring. There was a so-called Credit Mobilier scandal, which involved selling of shares in the growing railroad companies. So basically, it was a bunch of Grant people becoming greedy and trying to make money off of their government experience. And none of those touch Grant himself. He was pretty much immune from legal investigation, but his people certainly weren't.

James Brown: So, it's interesting, Grant in this case, just in your descriptions of them, it seems a little bit different than Clinton and Trump and Johnson because the genesis of their scandals seem to be more in the type of enemies they had. And Grant was more of the malfeasance of the people around him.

David Jackson: Right. Also there's an area, as I told earlier, Grant was in that era when presidents were considered kind of above it all. I don't think people ever really dreamed that it would investigate an actual sitting US president because it's just the kind of thing that wasn't done. Johnson, as I said, his impeachment and investigations were more of a political nature. It was basically political opponents investigating him because of his policies.

It didn't have anything to do with criminal law. Whereas right now, what we're seeing with Clinton and Trump do involve the criminal law. They involve prosecutors who were investigating the presidents themselves. And I think that's the biggest difference is that we have presidents who've managed to get themselves into legal trouble and no one has managed to get themselves in a more legal trouble than Donald Trump.

James Brown: Take me through Warren Harding. We spent some time on Nixon, so tell me about Warren Harding.

David Jackson: Warren Harding was also ... Not unlike Grant. Also, he was a very popular figure personally but he hired some people who were less than honest. The biggest scandal on the Harding administration was what they call Teapot Dome, and it basically involves government officials taking bribes to grant oil leases to oil companies to go ahead and drill on federally-owned lands.

That was the big scandal of the Harding administration, but there's no evidence that it touched Harding himself. He also had several aids who were basically selling favors to people in exchange for money. There's no evidence that Harding himself was involved in any of this kind of thing. He again was above it all. But he was aware of the problems in his administration. And a lot of people think that it contributed to his declining mental state and made him ill physically. He eventually died of a heart attack and many people believe it was because of the pressure of all the scandals that were surrounding him.

James Brown: So we just hit on four presidents that you didn't cover clearly that are in this group. Is there one of those four that you wished you could have, that would've been interesting to cover?

David Jackson: Oh, Andrew Johnson and Grant, both. I think the civil war ... The post-civil war era is a fascinating part of American history as the nation tried to come together after one of the bloodiest conflicts in world history, brother against brother. And I think that would've been a fascinating presidency to cover. Of course, it was a lot harder to cover people back in those days. It was a hard to get stories out and hard to transmit stories and hard to get them in the newspaper, but it would've been quite a challenge, I think. And it would've been a very interesting thing.

James Brown: I would agree with you in that, that seems like just a fascinating time to be alive. I don't think there's anything remotely like it in American history. I mean, where you literally have a country torn in half and then try to stitch itself back together. And it took decades really to really come back together and you could argue that even longer, even.

David Jackson: Very much so. You can't get much more divided than civil war. Although I must add that we have seen, at least in my lifetime and your parents' lifetime, we've seen the country similarly divided. I would argue that the 1960s era, the era of Vietnam and civil rights, there were many protests in the country. And there was a feeling that the country was coming apart.

And you can talk to some of historians who feel like that kind of spawned the problems of the Nixon era, because a lot of the things that he did, he bugged. He had his people wire-tap people, break into other people. And one of his concerns was the fact that there was a strong, almost revolutionary element in the nation that really wanted to try to overthrow the government and make some changes. And there was a lot of violence in the country and Nixon was concerned about it, and he would argue that that's one of the reasons he did what he did, that people needed to keep tabs on some of the revolutionist who were involved, who were talking about trying to take down the government.

Now, that's of course Nixon's defense, but I would also argue that just the sheer divisions of the 1960s spawned by Vietnam, civil rights, and other social convulsions, it did lead to just a very difficult political atmosphere in Washington that led to the kind of police state tactics that would eventually bring Nixon down.

James Brown: Do you buy Nixon's excuse?

David Jackson: Only in part. Like I said, he has the defenders, including some democratic defenders who felt like the country really was on a knife's edge in terms of stability. And that Nixon had every right to be concerned about some of the threats that were being made against the government. But I think he took it to an extreme as he tended to do. And he also expanded ... His list of enemies were expanded to conclude his political opponents, and that's where he got in trouble as well.

James Brown: Some say that Trump trumps everyone. Do you buy that?

David Jackson: I think Trump is very unique. I mean, he was always a unique candidate that we'd never had a president before who had absolutely no experience in government or the military. So he came in totally cold. And as we've discussed, we've seen a lot of presidential scandals over the years. But we've never seen the amount of scandal and the intensity of the scandal that attended Donald Trump.

I mean, from the moment he stepped onto the political stage, there were rumors about Russian support for his candidacy and the Russian hackers hacking into democratic records with the aim of helping Trump win elections. So from the start, there's also big questions about his business practices that date back years. And those things were hyped up during his presidential campaign. So from there all the way through the present mess involving his handling a national security, it's just been one thing after another with Trump.

James Brown: And I'd love to get your perspective on this, as I think through what's going on with Trump and the Mar-a-Lago raid. I don't recall, at least in my short lifetime, a former president chased down after they left office quite like this. Have you found an analog? Is there anything close that you can think of?

David Jackson: No, nothing even close. When Nixon resigned, his successor, Gerald Ford, issued him a pardon. So people didn't go after Nixon. Now, he did have to testify in at least one Watergate related trial. And he was involved in a lawsuit with the national archives over who had possession of the famous Nixon tape. So, there's some vague similarities.

But nothing like we've seen with Trump. I also have to add that we've never seen a former president continued to dominate his party the way Trump has, or a former president who's continued to attract the kind of media attention that Trump has. But he's a totally unique situation. It's something we've never seen or dealt with before.

James Brown: Where are we going from here? Any sense?

David Jackson: No way to tell because of the unprecedented. I hate to say things are unprecedented because history repeats itself as we know. But I really do think we're in unchartered waters and that means I really have no idea where to go. I think Trump is vulnerable to an indictment either over this handling of classified information, or possibly over January 6th. But there are also a grand jury in Atlanta that could conceivably indict him for trying to change the results of the election in Georgia.

And I just don't ... I have a feeling that Trump supporters will react to that quite badly. And I think we'll see protests in the streets and just a lot of increased tension, if in fact he's charged with a crime. But it's very hard to predict. It always is with Trump, but it won't be boring. How about that?

James Brown: Any famous last words, David Jackson?

David Jackson: Not that, it's just stay tuned. Who knows where we'll be at a year from now or even six months from now? But I can guarantee you it'll be a different situation than what we're in now.

James Brown: If you like the show, write us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening in. Do me a favor, share it with a friend. What do you think of the show? And what was the first political scandal that you remember? Let me know. Email me at jabrown@usatoday.com, or at podcasts@usatoday.com. Or leave me a message at 585-484-0339. Or find me on Twitter, @JamesBrownTV. We might have you on the show.

Thanks to David Jackson for joining me. You can find his history of presidential scandals in the description or on usatoday.com. Thanks to Alexis Gustin for her production assistance. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with five things you need to know for Monday. And for all of us at USA Today, thanks for listening. I'm James Brown and as always, be well.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Scandalous Presidents: 5 Things Podcast