Daily Inspiration Quote by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

Impeachment, in Schlesinger's telling, is less a legal cudgel than a constitutional act of stagecraft: it creates a way to condemn a president while keeping the presidency intact. The line turns on a crucial separation Americans routinely blur in moments of crisis, when rage at a person metastasizes into contempt for the system. His word choice, "genius", isn’t hero worship; it’s a historian’s admiration for an institutional design that anticipates human weakness. Leaders will abuse power. Voters will sometimes excuse it. Parties will sometimes enable it. So the architecture must provide a sanction that doesn’t invite regime change.

The subtext is anti-monarchical. In a monarchy, the sovereign embodies the state; punishment destabilizes the whole order. The American presidency flirts with that symbolism, especially in wartime or media-saturated eras when a president becomes a national avatar. Schlesinger pushes back against that gravitational pull. Impeachment is supposed to be personal, not cosmic: accountability aimed at misconduct, not a referendum on whether the office itself deserves to exist.

Context matters: Schlesinger wrote in a century that repeatedly tested presidential power, from FDR’s expansion of the executive (which he both chronicled and, at times, championed) to the imperial presidency he later warned against, culminating in Watergate’s hard lesson that charisma and statecraft don’t immunize you from rules. The intent here is civic: preserve legitimacy by proving the system can discipline its own. If impeachment becomes mere tribal warfare, it does the opposite, punishing the office through spectacle and erosion of trust. Schlesinger’s point is that the mechanism’s brilliance depends on restraint: severity toward the individual, reverence toward the institution, and a public mature enough to tell the difference.