"PARDON ME, MR. PRESIDENT...!"

By Edwin Cooney

Article II Section 2 of the Constitution gives the President of the United States a number of powers including the power to "...grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment.”

President Washington used the pardoning power in 1795 on behalf of two Western Pennsylvania farmers who'd led a rebellion against the government's 1791 whiskey tax in 1794. Western Pennsylvania farmers could make a lot more money selling corn that had been turned into whiskey than they could from ears of corn shipped in bulk for general consumption. Hence, they regarded the Washington Administration’s tax as a form of legal robbery. Thus Philip Vigol and John Mitchell took up arms against the tax. In 1794, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton's urged President Washington to lead an army of 13,000 soldiers across the Allegheny to collect the tax. (Actually, President Washington only led the army part of the way across Pennsylvania.) Several deaths of federal troops resulted and Vigol and Mitchell were tried for treason and sentenced to hang. The reason Washington led the troops was to establish the authority of the government to collect an essential tax. Once the rebellion was put down, President Washington felt it was necessary to establish another principle, the right of the people to protest and to use the proper ways and methods to alter government policies. (Note: I've found it interesting and significant that the first tax to anger the people was not a tax issued by a socialist but rather by our most important "founding father” and perhaps the leading capitalist of the day, Alexander Hamilton!)

In January of 1833, George Wilson, who had been convicted of train robbery, was pardoned by President Andrew Jackson, a friend. However, the fly in the ointment for Wilson was that Jackson's pardon was limited to only that one charge and so Wilson refused the pardon. The court debated as to whether Wilson was obligated to accept the limited pardon and decided that they couldn't force him to accept it — so he didn't. Two separate sources tell different stories. One story says that since the pardon only covered one of the charges facing him, Wilson refused it and was subsequently hanged. Another story says that George Wilson languished in prison and reapplied to President Martin Van Buren for a second pardon. This one he accepted.

By the time James Buchanan became president in 1857, beleaguered Mormons who had literally been driven out of several states (it was legal to murder them in Arkansas and Missouri) had settled in Utah territory. There, they established a theocracy under Brigham Young. Fiercely self-protective, President Buchanan came to suspect that the Mormons were allying themselves with the Paiute Indian Tribe to harass wagon trains passing through Utah to California in retaliation for the way they'd been treated in the midwest.  Hence, he sent federal troops into Utah with the option of removing Young from office. By 1859, President Buchanan, believing that no one but Young was capable of governing Utah, pardoned Young for any role he might have played in the September 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre that cost the lives of 120 California-bound pioneers from Northwest Arkansas who were members of the Baker-Fancher wagon train.

In 1868, President Andrew Johnson, in defiance of the Republicans who had impeached him, pardoned most Confederate soldiers except those who were very rich. Johnson could never abide rich plantation owners or military personnel! 

One Union soldier named Fitz John Porter was not to be pardoned for anything. He had been involved in the Second Battle of Bull Run in 1862. Due to contradictory orders from General John Pope, there was confusion in the ranks and Fitz John Porter was blamed for the loss. He was cashiered out of the Union Army. Fitz John Porter fought his expulsion until, in 1882, President Chester A. Arthur restored Porter into the army. In 1885, President Grover Cleveland gave Porter a full pardon.

Eugene V. Debs, the perennial Socialist Presidential candidate, was arrested and convicted of sedition for denouncing our participation in the war against Germany. He had also encouraged potential soldiers to avoid the draft. Hence, he ran his 1920 presidential campaign from his cell in Atlanta. It would be his last campaign. By Christmas of 1921, President Warren Harding decided that Eugene V. Debs had been punished enough. Against the recommendation of Harry Daugherty (Harding's Attorney General and original presidential backer), Harding brought Debs to the White House from his prison cell and commuted his sentence. "A peaceful man should be home with his wife on Christmas Day," Harding is reported to have proclaimed. Debs' friends and political supporters were bitter that Harding had only commuted Debs' sentence rather than pardoning him, but Harding insisted that because Debs was guilty of the crime, only a commutation of the sentence was justifiable.

In 1951, President Harry Truman commuted Oscar Collazo’s death sentence to life in prison. Collazo was one of two Puerto Rican nationalists who tried to assassinate Mr. Truman on Thursday, November 2nd, 1950. (Note that the shooting occurred outside Blair House and cost the life of a Secret Service man, Leslie Coffelt.)   

In 1976, President Gerald R. Ford, who had fought the Japanese in the Pacific and nearly lost his life at one point when he almost fell overboard during a storm, pardoned Iva Toguri D'Aquino (known as Tokyo Rose), an American broadcaster who had been a conduit between the Japanese Imperial government and Americans fighting in the Pacific. President Ford learned that much of the testimony against Iva Toguri, only one of a number of “Tokyo Roses,” was largely coerced from the witnesses by Walter Winchell and the FBI and was false, so he pardoned her.

In 1979, President Jimmy Carter, believing that her punishment for bank robbery was too harsh, commuted Patty Hearst's sentence. As he saw it, she had been both kidnapped and coerced. A decade later, President Bill Clinton pardoned her.

President Ford's most infamous pardon was for Richard Nixon. Many people believe it cost him re-election in 1976. (Note: I believe Jerry Ford was right, but I didn't like it at the time. I'm often wrong, you know, but it's healthy to indulge in give and take on historic events!)

As I see it, President Clinton's pardon of Mark Rich and President Trump's pardons of Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, and Paul Manafort were all reckless, selfish and abused the power of the presidential pardon. As for George H. W. Bush’s pardon of several Iran Contra figures including Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, Robert (Bud) McFarlane, and Elliott Abrams (an assistant National Security advisor), I would rate those as traditional and purely political.  After all, the CEO of the Occidental Petroleum Company, Armand Hammer, had just contributed $110,000 to the Republican National Committee prior to his pardon.

Presidents Washington, Arthur, Cleveland, Harding, Ford, Carter, and one of Clinton's pardons were respectable, but Presidents Jackson, Andrew Johnson, Clinton, and Trump were both nearsighted and unhealthy for their reputations and for the national welfare. Now to some mischief:

When Nixon resigned in 1974, many who opposed Nixon personally and politically asserted that they would have cheerfully gone along with a Nixon pardon had he first been tried and judged before an American jury. Should President Trump be indicted, how might a Biden pardon of Trump affect the American body politic?

Pardon me, please, President Biden, for even suggesting the above! After all, even considering such an idea makes me feel old and tired! I can only imagine what such an idea would do to you!

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY