Accounting

So there we were, remembering Gerry Ford and thus, unavoidably, reconsidering his decision to grant Richard Nixon a "full, free and absolute pardon."

The thing about pardons which are "full, free and absolute" is that it becomes difficult, later, to determine exactly what such pardons were for. Nixon was pardoned for "Watergate" — referring not only to the infamous break-in at that hotel, but also to a whole host of high crimes and misdemeanors, abuses of power and a general, habitual contempt for the Constitution. Ford alluded to all of that when he took office and described that process as the reassertion of that Constitution and of the rule of law:

"My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over. … Our Constitution works; our great republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule."

Ford viewed his pardoning of Nixon as a way of hastening the end of that "national nightmare." The sooner he and the rest of America could move beyond Richard Nixon, he believed, the better we would all be. Here's how he described that decision to National Public Radio:

"I finally decided that as a new president under very difficult circumstances, I had an obligation to spend all of my time — all — on the problems of 200 million Americans. And therefore, the only way to clear the deck, to get to the substantive problems that I faced, was to pardon Mr. Nixon and get his problems off my desk in the Oval Office. … It wasn't sentimental; it was purely practical. What I thought was in the best interests of all the people.

That's understandable. He wanted, and needed to get Nixon off his desk so he could get on with his (rather important) job. Nixon was the past and Ford felt he needed to concentrate on the present and the future.

The pardon let us think we were through with the past. The problem, as the book says, is the past wasn't through with us.

Nixon's full, free and absolute get-out-of-jail-free card taught others — including, apparently, Ford's own White House chief of staff — that laws could be violated with impunity, without any accounting or accountability. They took from this "purely practical" pardon the lesson that if you were high enough in the power structure, the rules no longer applied. If your sins were such that not only their commission, but their punishment might provoke a constitutional crisis, then you could rest assured that, if you ever got caught, others would intervene to "spare the country" (and therefore also spare you) the drawn-out nightmare of calling you to account for your crimes.

It would have been possible, as Matt Yglesias argues, to achieve Ford's practical goal without a "full, free and absolute" pardon by something like:

… the Truth and Reconciliation Commission model where ancien regime figures confess to their political crimes in exchange for amnesty. The general idea is that such an arrangement does more to promote actual resolution of the issues than would an adversarial trial process in which the accused have the incentive to destroy evidence, deny everything, and stymie investigations.

That's not at all what Ford did. … He took the bizarre step of granting Nixon "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 (January) 20, 1969 through August 9, 1974." Nixon, in response, offered not a confession, but only an extraordinarily vague message of pseudo-contrition. …

Nixon, in short, confessed to nothing. And Ford … offered blanket amnesty for unspecified crimes.

What's more, by the time of the pardon it had become clear that "Watergate" as such … was really the least of our Nixon-related concerns. The Watergate incident happens to have been the caper that first led to fruitful investigations of the Nixon administration, but turned out to be merely a small piece of a very large puzzle of abuses of power. … Nor did Ford in his address to the nation acknowledge that he had just pardoned Nixon not only for "Watergate" but for the whole kit and kaboodle, a series of events whose very occurrences neither Ford nor Nixon even acknowledged.

So anyway there we are, thinking about all of this — about the competing needs of the past and the future, about the inescapable need for a full accounting of past crimes and the equally inescapable need to get past them — when along comes the second Big Story of this week: the execution of Saddam Hussein.

Saddam's death, as Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki said, "ends a dark chapter" in that nation's history.

The problem here is that Iraq has moved past that dark chapter without reading it in full. Iraq's young criminal justice system required that Saddam, having been convicted and sentenced to death, be executed speedily, according to a rather short and strict calendar. So even though Saddam remained accused of dozens of other crimes against humanity, he is no longer around to stand trial for those crimes.

American justice works differently. Here a suspect in multiple cases involving the possibility of capital punishment cannot be executed for one of his crimes until he has been tried for all of them. While it's true that this process might be exploited by a condemned serial killer seeking to prolong his life, it has the advantage of ensuring that every crime is given a full account.

Saddam has been served with the ultimate accountability for one particular crime, or set of crimes, for one massacre out of many, so it seems odd to worry that he has somehow escaped accountability for his many other crimes. (No matter how many times a man is sentenced to death, after all, you can only hang him the once.) But while Saddam has been fully held to account, the possibility of a full accounting of his other crimes may have died with him. And I worry that the lack of such a full account may be something that the people of Iraq may one day regret.

Saddam's case is, of course, rather exceptional, and the swift carrying out of his death sentence probably really had less to do with the particular processes of Iraq's new judicial system than with the more important consequence of the tyrant's death — the guarantee that he can never again return to power. So I appreciate, as a "purely practical" matter, their desire to quickly be done with Saddam and to be through with that dark chapter of the past. But, again, whether that past is through with them remains to be seen.

Nixon's absolute amnesty for unspecified crimes emboldened others who followed to repeat many of those same crimes. Here's hoping that the execution of Saddam Hussein — which leaves many of his other, grievous crimes unspecified and unaccounted for — does not similarly embolden his successors.

(Please note that the above, rather airily abstract discussion of crime, punishment and accountability in no way suggests that all crimes or all criminals are equivalent, still less that Nixon and Saddam were. Yet despite that, and despite this parenthetical bit of troll prophylactic, I expect that some of our occasional stupid and/or confused visitors will try to twist such a suggestion from the above. I blame the schools.)