By: Robert E.L. Walters
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A little over half-a-century ago, on 08 September 1974, Gerald Ford, our only unelected elected Vice President turned unelected President, shocked the nation (and possibly ruined his chances to be elected President in his own right) by giving Richard M. Nixon a "full and unconditional pardon for any crimes that he might have committed against the United States as president," verbiage that sounds very similar to another pardon; the one issued Thanksgiving weekend to Hunter Biden, the troubled son of our sitting President, as his dad, the President heads for the door of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in January. Whereas the verbiage of these two pardons is nearly identical, their motivations and scope couldn't be more dissimilar.
First let's look at Ford and his motivations, and to be fair, I will examine them from both a patriotic and political viewpoint as was done fifty-years ago.
In Ford's own words at his hastily arranged inauguration on 09 August 1974, he viewed Nixon's resignation (and by extension, his own ascension to the presidency) as the end of "our long national nightmare" by which he meant, an end to the period of the Watergate Scandal. It is rather hard to qualify let alone quantify the impact of Watergate on the American psyche even today. Besides being a terrible sucker punch in the gut of an American electorate, who had returned Richard Nixon to office in 1972 with 520 electoral votes and 60.7% of the popular vote (the highest ever achieved by a Republican Presidential candidate), the scandal came on the heels of a decade of dire disillusionment for Americans.
From 22 November 1963, when Nixon's former rival in the very close (and somewhat shady) 1960 Presidential Election, John F. Kennedy, was gunned down in Dallas, Texas under murky circumstances, along with his alleged assassin the next day, through the assassination of Martin Luther King on 04 April 1968, and John F. Kennedy's brother, Robert Kennedy, on 06 June 1968, the country had been in a sociological game of "Whack-a-Mole," augmented by race riots, a highly divisive (and deceitfully prosecuted) war in Southeast Asia, the curious decision of Lydon Johnson not to run for re-election in 1968, and the rapid assent of the once discounted Nixon.
The newly minted Twenty-fifth Amendment came to the fore in October of 1973, when the sitting Vice President, Spiro Agnew, resigned his office upon pleading nolo contendere to tax and corruption charges in Maryland, thus elevating Ford to the Vice Presidency, a temporary position as it would turn out, since Ford would be President within ten-months, a fact certainly not lost on anyone in government by this point in time.
Throughout all this turbulence the United States was engaged in two existential wars. The Cold War against Communism in general and the U.S.S.R. in particular, and the Culture War within the United States itself, pitting "traditional" mid-twentieth-century values against a growing counter-cultural revolution centered on minority and women's rights. And this is not even considering the drastic upheavals and convulsions in the American South as desegregation and busing roiled communities even beyond that region.
All this exposition is to underscore a point: Ford had every good reason to consider the pardon of Nixon as a patriotic act of national healing. From a pragmatic standpoint (and Gerald Ford was nothing if he was not pragmatic) the spectacle of further investigating, trying, and possibly incarcerating a resigned President (the first ever in our history) was not only ghastly, it could very well have put the final kabbash on the American experiment for good and all. At the very least, through the lens of the Cold War and Soviet propaganda, such an activity being paraded through the world press would have only fueled greater speculation and commentary on "Western decadence," a popular recruiting tool for Soviet hegemony at that time.
None of this however, placated the many people in Ford's day crying corrupt bargain. The unfolding of Ford's assent from the U.S. House of Representatives to the Vice Presidency had seemed unlikely enough at the time, but in the retrospect of Nixon's resignation, it seemed downright suspiciously crooked to Washington wags already out for fresh blood in the water in the wake of Watergate.
Ford paid a high price for this pardon. Perhaps no passage summarizes the situation better than a contemporary editorial from the New York Times that decried... "the Nixon pardon was a 'profoundly unwise, divisive, and unjust act' that in a stroke had destroyed the new president's 'credibility as a man of judgment, candor, and competence'". Ouch! But Ford was undaunted even in defeat. For the remainder of his life he carried in his wallet a portion of the text of Burdick v. United States, a 1915 U.S. Supreme Court decision which stated that a pardon carries the imputation of guilt, and that acceptance of the same, carries a confession of guilt. In perhaps a surprising (but nonetheless vindicating postscript) in 2001, the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation awarded the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award to Ford for the Nixon pardon. In presenting the honor to Ford, Senator Ted Kennedy cited that he had initially been opposed to the pardon, but later realized that history had proven Ford correct in his decision.
So whether you lean to the viewpoint of 1970's political wags, or to that of the late Senator Ted Kennedy, Gerald Ford made a decision one month into his presidency to pardon Nixon, and he did so in a nationally televised address to the nation, clearly spelling out his motivations for good or for ill, and most likely ended his entire political career as a result. Let's juxtapose that with the events of last Sunday evening, 01 December 2024, when President Biden pardoned his son, Hunter Biden by a third party statement in the obscure hours at the end of a long holiday weekend.
Nearly four years ago on 12 December 2020, The Socratic Review published its weekly commentary entitled: The Case for Commonsense: Why influence peddling is more quacking duck than smoking gun and subtitled: The Biden Saga (like the Clinton Saga before it) is drama worthy of Euripides, complete with a chorus of "journalists" hiding behind improbable masks of impartiality. The gist of the piece pointed out that whereas the author (me) did not believe that President.Biden (or any other modern President for that matter) directly profited from their office, that did not mean that indirect profit was not commonplace and entirely legal, since the politicians themselves write the laws and control the regulations. The essay went on to summarize Hunter Biden's improbable career (at least improbable if you take away the fact that his father was a U.S. Senator, Vice President and President) and how some points in that career, such as working for a Ukrainian oil company and paling around with the Communist Chinese does not provide good optics in any light, let alone as the son of a sitting Vice President cum President.
Now in light of President Biden's most recent action, I have to rethink that position a bit. My father used to say "everything in politics boils down to stupid or evil," so which was this? Did President Biden, in a pique of paternal generosity do something "stupid" since his own party is vitriolically deriding his decision, or did he do something inherently "evil," because under the veneer of paternal tenderness there is a real concern that the Biden family is underpinned by a foundation of crime and corruption?
If we use Gerald Ford's own justification for Nixon's pardon, it doesn't look good. If a pardon (especially one of this scope) is an "imputation of guilt, and that acceptance of the same, carries a confession of guilt," then President Biden threw his son under a humongous bus, not only for drug crimes and gun crimes of which he had already been convicted, but not sentenced, but for any other crimes that may have been committed.
On a personal note, I feel sorry for Joe Biden in this as in so many cases. Whereas I have never been fond of his politics, and have always found him dissembling and a little bit shady, not to mention woefully wrong in public policy both foreign and domestic throughout his entire career, I have never viewed him as any more venal than any other middle-Atlantic pol of his generation to include Nancy Pelosi. I sympathize with him because, although I have no children, I know plenty of parents who do have children and who have had to deal with all the angst that Hunter Biden has foisted on his dad. And I also have known many parents who have pulled every string and called in every favor they could muster to extract same kid from their troubles. Getting wrapped around the axle over President Biden exonerating his son when viewed through this lens, is not only unrealistic its unreasonable.
But this should not take away from the other side of the equation. By making this pardon so far-reaching and all encompassing, President Biden, a very old man predictably at the end of his life, has laid a very unflattering capstone on his legacy and that of his family. In a stroke of his pen, he has permanently shrouded the entire Biden family in the fog of innuendo and suspicion for decades if not centuries to come. Whatever might have happened to Hunter after Mr. Biden left office; whatever witch-hunts and investigations might have turned up unflattering or even criminal activity in the future, any of that might have been dealt with in a reasoned and pragmatic way.
Now, the Biden family belongs to the ages, and with this pardon, they go into the liber of history with a deed encumbered by conspiratorial suspicions and dark intimations for time immemorial. I feel for the President, but I hope that his family and eventually the nation, understands the depth of his sacrifice both for himself and for his legacy. Personally, I feel it may be the one and only unselfish and truly altruistic act I have every witnessed from Joe Biden, and I only lament that it took him so long to finally discover the moral fortitude he has long claimed, but rarely displayed.
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