DETROIT – Hard to believe now, but for a long time presidential pardons were mostly noncontroversial. That changed on a fall afternoon half a century ago, when Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon a month after he became the only president to resign.
When I heard the news I felt betrayed, as did most Americans. President Ford had taken the oath of office only a month before, vowing that we would once again be a government of “laws, not men.”
That was Sept. 8, 1974. Ford’s approval rating quickly fell from 71 percent to 50 percent, and kept dropping, bottoming out at 37 percent by January. Two years later, he narrowly lost his bid for re-election, something he and many others believed was because of the pardon, especially since Nixon didn’t openly admit guilt in the Watergate scandal which stained the Presidency.
What I never imagined that day was that two decades later I would have the chance to sit in President Ford’s home in Rancho Mirage, California, and interview him about the pardon. What he told me that day changed my mind. I saw why he did it, and agreed.
Many others came to change their minds, too. One of the harshest critics of the Nixon pardon was U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy, who ended up presenting Ford with the JFK foundation’s Profiles in Courage award in 2001, saying “Time has a way of clarifying past events, and now we see that President Ford was right,” about the pardon.
All this came back to me on the first of this month, when a federal prosecutor messaged me that President Biden had just pardoned his son Hunter, who had been convicted of federal firearms and tax charges and was awaiting sentencing. Once again, I felt as though I had been slapped or betrayed, though this time it was worse.
For Joe Biden had promised he wouldn’t pardon his son. He didn’t just pardon him for the crimes of which he had been convicted, but for any other “offenses against the United States which he was committed or may have committed,” since January 2014.
“What a mind-blowingly awful decision,” said my prosecutor friend, who voted for Biden in 2020 and Kamala Harris this year. “He just gave the green light (for Trump) to pardon the January 6th defendants — all of them,” he said. Law professors and lawyers I talked with largely agreed it was ethically terrible.
Jamie Powell Horowitz, a Michigan district court judge and a liberal Democrat before being elected to the bench, thought the pardon disrespected the jurors who found Hunter Biden guilty.
However, judged from comments on social media, most Democrats strongly supported pardoning him.
The reasons they cited were, at least to me, even more alarming than the pardon. Many said the old norms and standards of ethical behavior had been damaged or destroyed by the first Trump administration, that the second would be worse, and that Democrats had every right to issue preemptive powers to protect their own.
In other words, they’re doing it, so we should too. Others said in so many words, that any father should put the need to protect his son ahead of anything else. “Who among us wouldn’t protect their child from the evil that awaits on January 20?” said a Michigan artist and former teacher named Leigh Ann Charpie.
There seemed to be little understanding that if you are President of the United States, you are supposed to put the good of the nation above anything else. When Franklin D. Roosevelt died unexpectedly during World War II, his wife cabled their sons in the military, “he did his job to the end as he would want you to do.”
Several said that Gerald Ford’s pardon of Nixon opened the floodgates for Presidents to pardon relatives and cronies, and indeed, both Bill Clinton and Donald Trump did plenty of that.
But that’s not what Ford had in mind when he pardoned Nixon. He told me he was spending too much time on issues relating to “Richard Nixon and his problems.” He thought putting Nixon on trial would have been a further distraction, and with inflation soaring and South Vietnam still an issue, “America needed a full-time President.”
So he pardoned him, and then voluntarily became the first sitting President to testify before Congress to explain why he did it.
Today, I’m not as sure as I was five years ago that President Ford did the right thing, especially if it made it easier for Donald Trump to pardon cronies like Roger Stone and political supporters like Joe Arpaio, the immigrant-bashing Arizona sheriff. I am certain that Ford would have been appalled by the idea of a President pardoning his own son, a convicted felon.
And I know that Gerald Ford would have seen a vast difference between a pardon designed to help the nation and one designed to help one’s family, one’s cronies or oneself. That so many others today evidently can’t see that ought to worry us all.
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