Rick Perlstein on presidential pardons, January 14, 2021

Click here  for an article in The New Yorker by Isaac Chotiner entitled "The Lessons of the Nixon Pardon," dated January 14, 2021 (after the insurrection and a week before Biden's inauguration) in which Chotiner interviews historian Rick Perlstein.

After Ford's pardon of Nixon, Carl Bernstein called Bob Woodward and said, “The son of a bitch pardoned the son of a bitch.” That really seemed to express a pretty widespread national sentiment, as Ford’s approval rating dropped from seventy-one per cent to forty-nine per cent.

Ford's opinion was that if Nixon went to trial, it would be so disruptive and divisive to the operation of the country that it wasn't worth it. In relation to a possible trial of Trump, Perlstein says "any kind of accountability for Trump will require a big chunk of the Senate calendar. In order to be President and govern the country, Joe Biden needs to nominate and have confirmed all sorts of key officials, and that’s going to be difficult work in any event. He’s talking about taking up half the Senate calendar with impeachment."

Asked about the damage to the country resulting from allowing Nixon to go unpunished, Perlstein said; 

I think the cost to the country was colossal. I think it caused a cascade of élite wrongdoing that was specifically enabled by this single act of determining that the Presidency was “too big to fail."

Perlstein goes on to say:

And of course, quite often, justice is destabilizing. Achieving African-American civil rights was destabilizing. Achieving the vote for women was destabilizing, and I’m sure investigating the bribery at Teapot Dome in the nineteen-twenties was divisive. But doing the work of reckoning does all kinds of other important things. It sends a signal that lawbreaking won’t be tolerated."

And of course, if you don't send that signal, wrongdoers are encouraged to act. Had Nixon been tried, convicted, and punished, would Poppy Bush have been more reluctant to get into the Iran-Contra affair, as a result of which several administration officials were indicted and convicted, including Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger? So the wrongdoers were indicted, convicted, and punished, and all is well in Voltaire's "best of all possible worlds"? Sorry, no: They were pardoned by Poppy Bush.

When Obama was elected in 2008, there was a strong push to indict W, Cheney, and Rumsfeld for war crimes (and possibly other administration figures as well), but Obama's famous response was “We need to look forward and not backward.” Yet again, wrongdoing is not punished.

Persltein finds it poetic that the Republican opposition to Trump is led by Liz Cheney, and says:

"If Trump becomes the Herbert Hoover of the twenty-first century, that kind of one-word summary of all that was failed and illegitimate, then what we’re left with as the operational ideology of the Republican Party is Cheneyism. Not only does that revive the family name but it moves the Overton window to the right. The amount of executive malfeasance that is acceptable to official Washington is what Cheney did because it sure is better than what Trump did. It’s a fascinating multigenerational thing going on here."