I remember seeing a headline about a break-in at a place called Watergate and wondering what that was about. It was June 1972; I was 15 years old; and I had taken a job selling newspapers room to room in Overlook Hospital in Summit. I was probably looking at the New York Times, which was one of several papers that I hawked, somewhat oblivious to the fact that the people in those rooms were sick, and some of them likely were contagious.

Two years later, when I was running the “trading post” at Camp Glen Gray, a Boy Scout camp in Oakland, NJ, I listened intently as the House Judiciary Committee seriously considered something that had once seemed unthinkable but was starting to seem absolutely necessary: impeaching the president of the United States.

It was unthinkable because up to that point, the only president who had suffered that fate was Andrew Johnson, who was impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives on February 24, 1868. To mark that occasion, today’s #stampoftheday is a 17-cent stamp portraying Johnson issued in 1938. (The stamps was part of the “Prexies,” a series of stamps that portrayed every US president from George Washington to Calvin Coolidge.)

While a majority of the Senators voted to convict him, Johnson was not removed from office because the Senate fell one vote short of the two-thirds required for removal. (Some modern commentators believe that a key bloc of Senators had agreed on this outcome as a way to signal their displeasure with Johnson but their unwillingness to set a precedent by removing him from office over a differences about policy.)

Nixon, of course, resigned before his almost certain impeachment and conviction. Two presidents have been impeached (but not convicted) since then: Bill Clinton and Donald Trump (twice). Trump, who now holds the records for the most impeachments, may also be vying with Johnson (and a few others) to be ranked as America’s worst president.

While they had similar styles, in many other ways, Johnson was the opposite of Trump. Born in a log cabin in North Carolina to nearly illiterate parents, Johnson did not learn how to read, write, or do math until he was 17 when his young wife would read to him and teach him while he worked as a tailor in Greeneville, Tennessee. Johnson, who was smart, organized, and had a knack for public speaking, went on to be a successful politician, serving as an alderman and mayor before being elected as a state representative, state senator, US representative, governor, and, in 1857, a US Senator.

In his rhetoric, he tended to express the “class resentments of non-slaveholding yeomen farmers against elite planters, and in the cultural differences between the mountainous, “upcountry” regions of the South (such as Johnson’s own East Tennessee) and the low country plantation districts” wrote Elizabeth Varon, a history professor at the University of Virginia. However, Varon added, “he often took positions that seemed contradictory at first glance. He opposed…federal funding of internal improvements yet strongly advocated homestead legislation granting free western lands to settlers. Johnson raged against the interests of his state’s planter class…Yet he supported the Compromise of 1850…Stephen Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, and the presidential candidacy of John C. Breckinridge in 1860.”

While “these political choices put Johnson firmly in the states’ rights, proslavery wing of the Democratic Party,” Johnson, who owned a few slaves, “had no tolerance for any talk of breaking up the Union.” Indeed he was the only southern Senator who did not resign when the Civil War started. This made him a hero in the North and in 1862 Lincoln appointed Johnson the military governor of Tennessee. And in 1864, Lincoln, who wanted to run for reelection as a unity candidate, tapped Johnson to be his running mate (and, in doing so, pushing out Hannibal Hamlin, a former governor of and senator from Maine who had been his running mate in 1860).

Five weeks after he was sworn in, Johnson became president when Lincoln was assassinated. “It quickly became clear,” Varon wrote, “that Johnson would block efforts to force Southern states to guarantee full equality for blacks, and the stage was set for a showdown with congressional Republicans, who viewed black voting rights as crucial to their power base in the South.” This culminated in his impeachment in 1868. Johnson, who unsuccessfully sought the Democratic nomination for president in 1868, returned to Tennessee and gained some vindication when he was elected to the Senate in 1875, which made him the only former president to serve in the Senate. However, he died five months into his term.

While we tend to view his presidency as a failure, that was not always the case. In the early 20th century, many historians, such as James Ford Rhodes, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his multivolume history of the Civil War believed that while Johnson was right to focus on reconciliation between North and South and correct in his views that former slaves, he lacked the personal and political skills needed to achieve his goals. “Johnson acted in accordance with his nature,” Rhodes contended. “…His pride of opinion, his desire to beat, blinded him to the real welfare of the South and of the whole country.”

In the late 1920s, several historians went further and downplayed Johnson’s faults. Assessing these writer in 1979, historian Albert Castel noted: “According to these writers, Johnson was a humane, enlightened, and liberal statesman who waged a courageous battle for the Constitution and democracy against scheming and unscrupulous Radicals, who were motivated by a vindictive hatred of the South, partisanship, and a desire to establish the supremacy of Northern ‘big business’. In short, rather than a boor, Johnson was a martyr; instead of a villain, a hero.”

Lost in all of this, of course, was the fact that Johnson was a virulent racist, a fact that increasingly has colored assessments of his presidency, which is now viewed as among the worst in American history. As historian Annette Gordon-Reed noted in 2011, “We know the results of Johnson’s failures-that his preternatural stubbornness, his mean and crude racism, his primitive and instrumental understanding of the Constitution stunted his capacity for enlightened and forward-thinking leadership when those qualities were so desperately needed.”

But, then she added, “At the same time, Johnson’s story has a miraculous quality to it: the poor boy who systematically rose to the heights, fell from grace, and then fought his way back to a position of honor in the country. For good or ill, ‘only in America,’ as they say, could Johnson’s story unfold in the way that it did.”

To a certain extent both Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton also fought their ways back to places of honor after they were impeached. At the moment, however, it’s hard to imagine Donald Trump following that path.

Be well, stay safe, seek enlightened and forward-thinking leadership, fight for justice and work for peace.