In 1868, President Andrew Johnson was impeached for violating the Tenure of Office Act that had been enacted by Congress over his veto in 1867. Defying the law, Johnson fired Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, without getting Senate approval, as the act required him to do. In his 1956 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, John F. Kennedy made Edmund Ross one of the Senate's "Profiles in Courage" for his decisive and heroic vote not to convict and remove Johnson. Repealed in 1887, the Tenure of Office Act was later declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. But while the act was the lethal...