June 14, 2007
Amnesty Now and Then Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 01:50 PM EST There is a striking though certainly not perfect parallel between today’s speculation about Scooter Libby–will the President pardon him or commute his sentence?–and the controversy surrounding Gerald Ford’s decision on September 8, 1974, to issue a full and unconditional pardon to his predecessor, Richard Nixon. At the time, Ford felt compelled to couple Nixon’s pardon with a declaration of conditional amnesty for civilians and servicemen who had either dodged the draft illegally or gone absent-without-leave to avoid deployment to Vietnam. Just shy of 115,000 young men were living underground in the United States or were in exile, most of them in Canada and Sweden. Ford, a decorated World War II veteran, told the national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in late August that these men were “in a sense . . . casualties . . . I want them to come home if they want to work their way back . . . So I am throwing the weight of my presidency into the scales of justice on the side of leniency. I foresee their earned reentry–their earned reentry–into a new atmosphere of hope, hard work, and mutual trust.” Deeply influenced by his three sons, who ranged in age from their late teens to early twenties, Ford introduced a system that allowed offenders the opportunity to turn themselves over to authorities, present their case to civilian and military appeal boards, and receive either commutation of their sentences, a full pardon, or pardon or commutation in return for alternative forms of national service. Roughly 20,000 men ultimately participated in this system, and most received either pardons or clemency. On the subject of Richard Nixon, Ford was eager to get the monkey that was Watergate off his back. Worried that the press was fixated on the potential prosecution and imprisonment of the former President to the exclusion of the new President’s domestic and foreign policy agendas, and genuinely concerned about Nixon’s emotional well-being, Ford understood that he could not seem to be setting one standard for ordinary citizens and another for Presidents. Thus, linking conditional amnesty for draft dodgers and deserters to a pardon for Richard Nixon provided balance. Not everyone was placated. In the wake of the Nixon pardon, Ford’s press secretary, Jerald terHorst, resigned in protest, while Ford’s approval rating plummeted from 71 percent to 50 percent in a matter of days. But by any measure, it was a bold move. George W. Bush has remained quiet on the subject of a presidential pardon for Scooter Libby. At the same time, he has offered lukewarm but certainly not wholehearted support for a bill that would give more than ten million illegal immigrants the opportunity to earn legal status in the United States. Ford’s insistence that his program was not one of “amnesty” but rather “earned reentry” is echoed in the current debate over immigration reform; its supporters also insist that their program is not one of amnesty but rather leniency and fairness. Like the Vietnam-era draft dodgers and deserters, today’s illegal immigrants could enjoy a chance to earn the right to live in the United States. Like the young men of 1974, they would be expected to turn themselves over to the authorities and to undergo a long process before attaining legal status. Conservative Senate Republicans scuttled the immigration reform package last week. Now the question is whether the President will go to bat for that bill as aggressively as he did for tax cuts, the war in Iraq, and his controversial Medicare Part D program. If he does, he can make the case that a pardon for Scooter Libby is in keeping with his general sense of fairness and leniency. If he doesn’t, such a pardon would apply different burdens on ordinary people, many of whose children are American citizens, and vice-presidential aides.
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