As a political science major in college many, many years ago, I viewed the past week as intriguing as any World Series. No, more intriguing. I mean the World Series is played every year; only three times in the 243-year history of our country has a president been impeached.

Agree with it or not, like it or not. Donald Trump has been impeached and will carry that stain not only for the rest of his life but also for the rest of eternity. The United States Senate is not very likely to convict Trump, but the House has impeached him.

That act last week makes Trump the only president I know who has been impeached. I readily acknowledge I did not know Andrew Johnson, who was impeached in 1868, and I do not know Bill Clinton, who was impeached in 1998.

However, I met Trump at Yankee Stadium some years ago when I was covering the Yankees. He was there as a guest of George Steinbrenner, and to get to the elevator and exit he had to pass through the rear of the press box, where I encountered him. He, of course, was not president or even a politician or television celebrity at the time.

He recognized my name, he told me, because “I’ve been reading you since I was in college.”

More encounters with Trump were to follow, mostly in his interest in buying a baseball team in a proposed new league that some entrepreneurs were trying to start during labor disputes between players and club owners in 1989 and 1994.

The latter venture collapsed when Trump and his partner, Meshulam Riklas, failed to show at a meeting of prospective owners at which critical deposits were to be made to fund the league. Trump never explained his absence although some people suggested he had wanted two franchises, one in New York and one in New Jersey, and the other investors balked at that.

At the time Trump was suspected of wanting to parlay his team into a team in Major League Baseball as he had planned with the NFL and his purchase of the New Jersey Generals. Yet he told me, “I see it as a very viable league. project. “Otherwise I wouldn’t do it. We’ll have a long-term contract with a major television network or a number of major networks, including cable.”

Neither league, of course, came into existence, and Trump never became an owner of a baseball team. Just president, an impeached president.

TAKING A RIDE WITH JFK

I never actually met John Kennedy, and come to think of it 60 years later, that was strange, perhaps rude, too.

I was the editor of the Pitt News, the University of Pittsburgh student newspaper, and I assigned myself to cover a campaign appearance at Pitt by candidate Kennedy. One problem, though. Kennedy was holding a news conference at a downtown hotel first, and I felt I should cover that, too.

But there was a streetcar strike, and I didn’t know how I could get to Pitt in time for the Kennedy speech. I don’t know how or where I got the nerve, but I asked one of Kennedy’s aides if I could thumb a ride with them.

So there I was riding in a limousine with Kennedy and two of his advisors, Pierre Salinger and Ken O’Donnell.

As an extra added benefit I was invited to wait in the Kennedy suite until JFK was ready. Jackie – the future first lady – was in the suite, but I didn’t dare try to initiate a conversation with her.

On the way to Pitt, Kennedy, sitting in the front seat with Salinger and O’Donnell and me in the back, expressed impressive knowledge of Pitt athletics, not that Pitt athletics were impressive.

About a year later Kennedy was back in Pittsburgh, this time as the Democratic presidential candidate, and I was working for the Associated Press. I covered my first World Series, Games 6 and 7 (Mazeroski’s home run), then the next day covered a Kennedy campaign appearance. For a political science major and a baseball fan, it couldn’t get any better than that.

BUSH THE AMIABLE

Of the presidents I have known, George Bush was by far the easiest to talk to and deal with. That was George W. Bush, the former controlling owner of the Texas Rangers and son of former President George H.W. Bush. He was as down to earth as any president has been, and even if you didn’t like his politics, you couldn’t help but like him.

As an owner, he was a politician, and when a gang of owners engaged in a plot to oust Fay Vincent as commissioner, Bush, a Vincent supporter, urged him to be more a politician. Playing politics, however, wasn’t Vincent’s style, and Bush didn’t have enough fire power to keep him in office.

Bush, on the other hand, wasn’t able to win all of his own fights through politics.

In 1994 Bush opposed Commissioner Bud Selig’s plan to realign some of the divisions, including putting the Rangers in a division with three West Coast teams. Bush objected, saying his team would be playing many of its games at a time too late for its fans to watch on television. This is how I described one of the meetings on that subject:

“One owners’ meeting comes to mind where, it turned out, Selig did not know and a vote backfired on him. That evening he emerged from the meeting room and, walking down the hall, spotted a reporter and made a gesture as if he were holding a machine gun and aiming it at the owners back in the room. That was a rare instance, though.”

Selig, fortunately for Bush, did not have a machine gun, but he had authority, and he couldn’t do any better than that. There’s more to the Selig-Bush story – including how both baseball and the country in the 21^st century could have been drastically different – but that’s for another time.

NIXON AND MY COUSIN

I didn’t know Richard Nixon, but we had a connection that was critical in his becoming president.

When Nixon began his political career, he ran for Congress from California. He defeated his first two opponents, beating Jerry Voorhees for a seat in the House of Representatives and Helen Gahagan Douglas for a seat in the U.S. Senate. He used the same strategy against both opponents, coloring them “pinkos,” suggesting they had Communist leanings. That was the Joseph McCarthy era, and it made Communists unpopular.

The strategy was devised by Nixon’s political adviser, Murray Chotiner, my cousin, my father’s nephew.

The Chotiners and the Chasses were not close geographically so I never met my cousin. When the family emigrated to America from Russia, the members initially all lived in Pittsburgh, where my uncle had settled when he emigrated, but eventually split up, the Chotiner segment going to Los Angeles.

I don’t know how Chotiner became Nixon’s political adviser, but without him, Nixon might never have become president. By the time he became president, though, Nixon and Chotiner had separated, at least publicly, because Chotiner had been caught up in a scheme involving Army coats and Nixon couldn’t afford to be tarnished with the connection.

Ironically, Chotiner was replaced by H.R. Halderman and John Ehrlichman, who wound up going to prison for their roles in the Watergate scandal that doomed Nixon’s presidency.

Chotiner was not around for Watergate, but had he not died in 1974 allegedly as the result of an automobile accident, he would have been involved in it because it was his sort of thing.

To complete this Nixon portion of my presidential tale, I have to note the day he resigned as president. That was August 9, 1974, when he left the White House with one of his hearty waves and flew home to southern California.

My wife, Ellen, and I were vacationing in California at the time and, incredibly, were driving south on the Pacific Coast Highway as Nixon’s plane flew overhead. I pulled off the highway, stopped at the side of the road, got out of the car and scooted up the adjoining hill. I did not see the former president, though, because the plane had taxied too far from the highway.