The Pardon: The Politics of Presidential Mercy - Couverture rigide

Toobin, Jeffrey

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 1668084945 ISBN 13 : 9781668084946

Editeur : Simon & Schuster, 2025

Synopsis

“A splendid narrative about political power and mercy.” —David Grann, #1 bestselling author of The Wager

The power of the presidential pardon has our national attention now more than ever before. This “thought-provoking and strenuously argued” (The Washington Post) book from New York Times bestselling author and CNN legal commentator Jeffrey Toobin provides a timely and compelling narrative of the most controversial presidential pardon in American history—Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon, revealing the profound implications for our current political landscape, and how it is already affecting the legacies of both Presidents Biden and Trump.

In this deeply reported book, Toobin explores why the Founding Fathers gave the power of pardon to the President and recreates the behind-the-scenes political melodrama during the tumultuous period around Nixon’s resignation. The story features a rich cast of characters, including Alexander Haig, Nixon’s last chief of staff, who pushed for the pardon, and a young Justice Department lawyer named Antonin Scalia, who provided the legal justification.

Ford’s shocking decision to pardon Nixon was widely criticized at the time, yet it has since been reevaluated as a healing gesture for a divided country. But Toobin argues that Ford’s pardon was an unwise gift to an undeserving recipient and an unsettling political precedent. The Pardon explores those that followed: Jimmy Carter’s amnesty for Vietnam draft resisters, Bill Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich, and the extraordinary story of Trump’s unprecedented pardons at the end of his first term.

“A master class on a power wielded by presidents for more than 200 years” (The Guardian), The Pardon is a must-read for anyone interested in American history, the complex dynamics of power within the highest office in the nation, and the implications of presidential mercy.

A propos du livre

À propos de l?auteur

Jeffrey Toobin, the longtime CNN legal commentator, is the author of ten books, including The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, The Run of His Life: The People vs. O.J. Simpson, Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism, American Heiress, The Oath, Too Close to Call, and A Vast Conspiracy. A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School, he lives with his family in New York.

Extrait. © Reproduit sur autorisation. Tous droits réservés.

Prologue: Daredevil Sunday PROLOGUE Daredevil Sunday
EVEL KNIEVEL WAS NEVER A very skilled daredevil, but that was part of his charm. His attempts to vault motorcycles across long distances, like over rows of cars in the Astrodome or above the fountains at Caesars Palace, often ended in theatrical crashes. (He was said to have broken every bone in his body.) But Knievel’s showmanship and bravado, along with his trademark red-white-and-blue jumpsuit, which was inspired by his friend Liberace, always attracted attention, and the climax of his career came on Sunday, September 8, 1974. On that day, the nation—the whole nation—was watching to see if he could pull off his greatest stunt.

Knievel had built what he called the Skycycle X-2, a sort of cross between a rocket and a motorcycle, which was going to be propelled off a ramp across a remote stretch of Idaho’s Snake River. The goal was to land safely on the other side, about 1,500 feet away, without falling 600 feet to the bottom of the canyon. A crowd of 33,000 fans made the trek to watch the jump in person, and a closed-circuit feed was beamed to hundreds of theaters for pay-per-view audiences. As always with Knievel, he promised a spectacle combining life-and-death drama with camp comedy.

This rubbernecking lark fit the national mood. Just a month earlier, on August 9, President Richard Nixon had resigned, bringing to an apparent close the grim saga of the Watergate scandal, which had dominated public life for more than a year. Gone at last was endless talk of cover-ups and hush money, of White House tapes and indicted and unindicted co-conspirators. Gone, most specifically, was Nixon himself, who took his endless store of rancor and victimhood to exile in California. People needed a break from all the drama.

In Nixon’s place came Gerald R. Ford, who represented a sunny alternative to his scowling predecessor. Ford fit a mid-century archetype of American positivity. He was an open-faced son of the Midwest, an Eagle Scout, a college football star at Michigan, a graduate of Yale Law School, a 33rd-degree Mason, a Rotarian, an Elk, and a veteran of World War II. In a quarter-century in the House of Representatives, he made scores of friends and, it seemed, not a single enemy. At a time when many worried about an imperial presidency, Ford was, the nation learned, a president who toasted his own English muffins in the morning. When he became vice president, just eight months earlier, he had acknowledged that he was “a Ford, not a Lincoln,” but at this moment, that sounded more like a boast than a confession. Normal was in; contention was out.

Ford had lived through the final days of the greatest scandal in American political history, and he both reflected and expressed the relief at its conclusion. On the day that he became president, Ford said that “our long national nightmare is over.” Three days later, when he first spoke to a joint session of Congress, he said, “I do not want a honeymoon with you. I want a good marriage.” Ford already had the first, and it looked like he might have the second, too.

But then, just a few hours before the Knievel vehicle was expected to go skyward on September 8, Ford went to the Oval Office for a hastily scheduled address. The plan for the speech had come together so late the previous evening that, with the primitive technology then available, there was no time to wire the room for live TV transmission. Nor was there time to program a teleprompter, so Ford read from the papers on his desk in remarks that lasted less than ten minutes. Ford started speaking to a single video camera just after 11 a.m.; the recording was broadcast to the nation a few moments later. He concluded with the words of an official proclamation: “Now, therefore, I, Gerald R. Ford, President of the United States, pursuant to the pardon power conferred upon me by Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution, have granted and by these presents do grant a full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from July 20, 1969 through August 9, 1974.” In nervousness, perhaps, Ford said July when he meant January. Then, still on camera, he grasped a ballpoint pen in his left hand and signed the document. “In witness whereof,” he ended his speech, “I have hereunto set my hand this eighth day of September, in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and seventy-four, and of the Independence of the United States of America the one hundred and ninety-ninth.”

Before the day was out, Ford’s honeymoon was over and the nightmare of Watergate had returned. The Knievel spectacle had a similarly sour denouement. The parachute on the Skycycle deployed prematurely, and the vehicle didn’t come close to reaching the other side of the canyon. Instead, it drifted to an ignominious thud on the bank of the Snake River. Knievel was unharmed; his fans, who wanted a more dramatic outcome, one way or the other, were disappointed.

In exercising his power to pardon, Ford was employing an anomalous provision of the Constitution. A central principle of the nation’s governing document is separation of powers; the underlying theory is that the branches of government can prevent abuses by checking and balancing one another. In the famous words of James Madison in Federalist No. 51, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” There is, however, no check or balance on the president’s power to pardon. It is the provision of the Constitution most directly descended from the authority of kings of England.

The history of the pardon power bears out Madison’s warning about unchecked powers. Pardons have often led presidents, and sometimes the country, into peril. There is a paradox, too, in presidents’ untrammeled authority to grant or withhold pardons. At times, presidents have barely seemed to be in charge of their own pardon powers, because those around them have so successfully manipulated them. In establishing the separation of powers, the Constitution mandates certain processes for the operations of government. For example, laws must be passed by both houses of Congress, and the president can veto them, and those vetoes, in turn, may be overridden by supermajorities in the House and Senate. But the Constitution creates no process for pardons; this absence invites chaos in the executive branch. Presidents improvise their methods for conferring pardons, and this lack of structure invites manipulation and misjudgments.

And this, ultimately, is the story of Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon. Ford was the most accidental of presidents, the only one ever to take office without winning, or even running in, a national election. Before Ford became president, he spent his brief tenure as vice president attempting to avoid becoming president. His principal duty during that period was to travel the country extolling Nixon’s presidency and thus trying to keep Nixon in the Oval Office and himself out of it. Throughout his life, Ford was often given the athlete’s accolade—team player—and that was how he behaved until August 9, 1974. To plan for his own presidency would have been to betray his president, so Ford didn’t do it. But that meant that when Ford did become president, he was uniquely underprepared, at least as far as Watergate was concerned. Ford was bolstered by his placid temperament and manifest decency, but he had been shielded, and shielded himself, from the precise nature of the issues he would have to address. This was especially true of the remaining challenges of Watergate, which did not disappear, much as Ford wished that they would. In the early days of his presidency, Ford largely depended on the White House staff that he inherited, notably Alexander Haig, who was Nixon’s last chief of staff and Ford’s first. To understand the pardon, it’s necessary to understand the loyalties of those who were advising the new president.

For one of the more straightforward provisions in the Constitution, the pardon power has been the subject of a good deal of litigation over the years, including in the Supreme Court. During the controversy about the Nixon pardon, Ford himself, as well as his most important adviser on the subject, became fixated on a previously obscure Supreme Court decision from 1915. (Indeed, for the rest of his life, Ford carried in his wallet an excerpt from the Court’s opinion in that case.) But it’s an error—and it was Ford’s error here—to believe that the pardon process is fundamentally legal in nature. Above all, pardons are political, not legal, and to be successfully defended, they must be defended in the language of politics. Pardons are the consummate discretionary acts; presidents are never required to issue even a single one. In this way, pardons reveal their roots in the royal prerogative of mercy. There is only one reason why presidents, or kings, issue pardons: because they want to.

For better and worse, pardons operate like X-rays into the souls of presidents. Gerald Ford revealed himself to be earnest, impatient, and overmatched by the dark genius of his predecessor. On his first day in office, Jimmy Carter used a broad clemency to hasten the end of the domestic traumas of the Vietnam War. Early in his presidency, Ronald Reagan used a pair of pardons to announce that he and the Republican Party were finished feeling guilty for the abuses of the Watergate era. In subsequent years, Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush revealed themselves by the pardons they did not grant; displays of mercy were in conflict with their tough-on-crime values. Bill Clinton, too, rose to power in the era of mass incarceration, and his own stinginess with pardons reflected that unforgiving moment. At the end of his tenure, in a headlong rush to make up for his harsh record, Clinton embarrassed himself with several unwise pardons. Like George H. W. Bush, Clinton also used clemency to settle scores with the special prosecutor who plagued their administration. Uniquely among modern presidents, Barack Obama moved to reverse some of the effects of mass incarceration, but he did it in a characteristically cautious and limited way. Joe Biden betrayed his principles, went back on his word, and damaged his legacy by pardoning his son.

Still, as with so much else, Donald Trump was, and is, different. The pardons in his first term reflected the characteristics he displayed throughout his presidency; he was transactional, narcissistic, and nearly joyful in provoking the ire of his enemies. Pardons and commutations have rarely figured in presidential elections, but Trump put a promise of clemency at the center of his victorious campaign in 2024. About 1,500 people have been convicted of participating in the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021; they were there at Trump’s instigation to try to overturn his loss of the 2020 election to Biden. Trump described those who committed crimes at the Capitol as hostages, and he vowed to pardon them. When he does, Trump will again remind us who he is but also tell us something about the country he leads.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Simon & Schuster
• Date d'édition: 2025
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1668084945
• ISBN 13: 9781668084946
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 304
• Coordonnées du fabricant: Simon & Schuster; casetta@mondadori.it; ; Via Mondadori 1,; Segrate Milano; 20090; Italie