Flowers lay awake at night or found his sleep broken by what seemed “some sordid dream: to impeach the President of the United States, the Chief Executive of our country, our Commander-in-Chief.” He didn’t want to do it. Political reality in his district dictated that he stand with Nixon; so did his own conservative instinct to support the institution of the presidency. But the evidence kept piling up, and Nixon and his lawyers kept making it hard for Flowers: “If they flagrantly disregard a subpoena, I think it would be very bad. If requests have been flagrantly disregarded, I think that the assumption goes against the President.” As for the principle of executive privilege, Flowers said, “Bull.”

It got so bad that a stomach ulcer from his days as a trial lawyer came back.

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In the end, the decision came down to the integrity of American institutions—to the example that would be set for future presidents by a vote of no. On July 25, as the committee deliberated in televised hearings, Flowers found an eloquence that no one had ever heard from him. When it was his turn to speak, he didn’t declare which way he would vote. “The power of the presidency is a public trust, just like our office,” this obscure congressman said. “If the trust of the people in the word of the man to whom they had given their highest honor or any public trust is betrayed, if the people cannot know that their president is candid and truthful with them, then I say the very basis of our government is undermined.” And he went on: “We have in the tradition of this nation a well-tested framework of values: liberty, justice, worth and integrity of the individual, individual responsibility. Our problem is not now to find better values, but I say our problem is to be faithful to those that we profess—and to make them live in modern times.”

Watergate was the first news story to which I paid any serious attention. I was in junior high school, and every turn in the drama that unfolded over the two years from the burglary in the summer of 1972 to Nixon’s resignation in the summer of 1974 fascinated me. Still, I can reliably distinguish very few original memories from the later accretions of conversations, old newspaper articles, books, documentaries, feature films, and the general obscuring that comes from mistaken or wholly invented versions of what we think we once experienced. One of those rare memories is of Walter Flowers.

I remember watching on TV on July 27, 1974, as the Judiciary Committee prepared to vote on Article I—obstruction of justice. Flowers was the last member to speak before the roll call, in which six Republicans joined 21 Democrats, including Flowers, in the vote to impeach. He addressed a constituent back in Alabama who had written to describe the pain that a yes vote would cause him. “I say to you, my friend,” Flowers drawled softly, “I have enough pain for the both of us.” Until this morning, I’d never watched or read another version of that moment, and so I know the memory is real. It’s also, like every memory, wrong. What Flowers actually said (it comes from Drew’s account, which sits by my desk) was this: “There are many people in my district who will disagree with my vote here. Some will say that it hurts them deeply for me to vote for impeachment. I can assure them that I probably have enough pain for them and me.”