GAVEL GAMUT

LEADERSHIP

BY JIM REDWINE JANUARY 10, 2025

President Biden has one more week as president to help bind up our nation’s wounds.
America’s electorate is almost evenly divided by MAGA supporters and anti-MAGA supporters.

Going to a favorite coffee shop or pub has taken on a certain ennui for many of us who used to look forward to seeing friends and discussing timely issues. What used to be lively and enlightening conversations have morphed into dreaded exercises in avoiding issues of substance.

The nation’s political discourse has devolved from constructive give and take to animus.
Important issues are currently not worth the disappointment to risk discussing. Leadership is needed to encourage us all to open our minds so we can face many important issues that, if not faced, may do real harm to our country and perhaps others.

That is the premise behind the prescient article by Indiana University Law Professor
Timothy William Waters published January 06, 2025 via Politico, four years after the incident at our capitol. Professor Waters calls for President Joe Biden to pardon the rioters as an act that would help bridge our nation’s great divide between MAGA and anti-MAGA. Such a magnanimous and courageous act would speak to both sides and could apply some healing balm to our fractious society.

I doubt Professor Waters believes his well-reasoned analysis of the dangers of a house
divided is an original thought. Someone wise enough to advocate for such a brave act of
leadership almost certainly is simply recommending a particular treatment for our ailing
condition. Wise people have realized for thousands of years that peace is more constructive and less destructive than war. I do not know Professor Waters but his article is written as one that demonstrates an attitude of helpfulness not hubris.

From Jesus to Abraham Lincoln to Gerald Ford and many more, we humans have long
known that “malice towards none and charity for all” is not behavior that is only good for those we disagree with but for us too. Such acts as the mean-spirited treatment of Germany after WWI that led to WWII versus the Marshall Plan that re-made Germany into an ally after WWII, teach us that vengeance is not only morally corrupt and selfish but ignorant and self-destructive.

Pardons are to presidents what mediation, probation and parole are to courts. They
acknowledge the sins but affirm the possibility of our nation of laws whose mission seeks
redemption, not retribution. President Gerald Ford by his pardon of President Richard Nixon
used his presidential pardon as it was intended. He helped bind our nation’s wounds at a time we sorely needed it. I realized this and wrote a Gavel Gamut column about it when President Ford died in 2007. I have included it as part of this column.

Perhaps Professor Waters’ article will encourage President Biden and possibly President
Trump to show the same type of leadership President Ford did.

PARDON ME, PRESIDENT FORD
(Week of January 8, 2007)

President Gerald Ford died December 26, 2006. In a life filled with public service, he
will always be best known for his pardon of President Nixon in 1974.

President Nixon personally chose Gerald Ford to replace the disgraced Vice-President
Spiro Agnew who resigned in 1973 amid disclosures of bribery while Agnew was Governor of Maryland.

Vice-President Ford served under President Nixon until Nixon resigned in August of
1974. One month after President Nixon resigned, President Ford issued him a full pardon for any crimes he may have committed while president.

At the time, I and most Americans were calling for a complete investigation of the
Watergate debacle and especially Nixon’s involvement in it. It was a time of a media feeding frenzy and blood in the water.

President Ford took the unprecedented step of going personally before Congress and
flatly stating that President Nixon and then Vice-President Ford had no deal to pardon Nixon if he would resign.

I recall how dubious I was when President Ford stated that he issued the pardon only to
help our country to start healing from the loss of confidence caused by Watergate.

Yet, after a few months I began to have second thoughts about my initial reaction to the
pardon. I began to see how much courage it took for President Ford to go straight into the anti-Nixon firestorm sweeping the United States.

As a country, we were almost paralyzed by the partisan fighting at home and the War in
Viet Nam. We needed a new direction and a renewed spirit. Surely President Ford with his twenty-two (22) years in Congress knew he was committing political suicide by not giving us our pound of flesh. Still, he put his country first.

Of course, the country rewarded his sacrifice by booting him from office and electing President Jimmy Carter to replace him.

But during the campaign of 1976, when President Ford came to Evansville on April the
23 rd , I took my son, Jim, out of school and we went to the Downtown Walkway to cheer the man who put country above self.

For while William Shakespeare may almost always get his character analysis right, when
it came to President Ford, “The good he did lived after him.” Julius Caesar, Act III, sc. ii.
Even President Carter, one of America’s most courageous and best former presidents said
of President Ford: “President Ford was one of the most admirable public servants I have ever known.”

And when it came to the pardon of President Nixon, Senator Ted Kennedy, while admitting that he had severely criticized the pardon in 1974, said that he had come to realize that: “The pardon was an extraordinary act of courage that historians recognize was truly in the national interest.”

So, President Ford, since even your political opponents came to appreciate your courage
and goodness, I am confident that you have long ago “pardoned” all of us who doubted you back when we needed your leadership.

For more Gavel Gamut articles go to www.jamesmredwine.com