Read With Liberty and Justice for Some Online
Authors: Glenn Greenwald
With Liberty and Justice for Some (3 page)
Notably, there were a handful of influential people at the time of the Watergate scandal, including some in government, who vehemently objected to Ford’s pardon. They pointed out that the pardon subverted the central American premise that all are equal before the law, and warned that immunizing Nixon would create a dangerous precedent. Ford’s own press secretary, Jerald terHorst, resigned in protest a mere thirty days after being appointed. In his September 8, 1974, resignation letter, terHorst condemned the two-tiered system of justice he believed the pardons would entrench.
As your spokesman, I do not know how I could credibly defend that action in the absence of a like decision to grant absolute pardon to the young men who evaded Vietnam military service as a matter of conscience and the absence of pardons for former aides and associates of Mr. Nixon who have been charged with crimes—and imprisoned—stemming from the same Watergate situation….
These are also men whose reputations and families have been grievously injured. Try as I can, it is impossible to conclude that the former president is more deserving of mercy than persons of lesser station in life whose offenses have had far less effect on our national wellbeing.
TerHorst’s view was shared by large numbers of ordinary Americans. Hersh reports that “seventeen thousand telegrams were sent to the White House within two days, running at ‘about six to one,’ by a White House spokesman’s count, against the pardon.” And a handful of liberal Democrats, including Elizabeth Holtzman, Bella Abzug, and John Conyers, demanded an investigation into Ford’s conduct. But theirs was clearly the minority view in America’s most influential circles.
Instead, appeals to empathy were deployed to defend the pardon. As
Time
reported in October 1974:
Some of the members of Congress were worried about what Ford’s pardoning of Nixon did to the nation’s standards of equality under the law. California’s Don Edwards, a liberal Democrat, wondered how Ford would explain American justice to his students if he were a high school teacher in Watts or Harlem. Ford’s reply was that Nixon was the only President to resign in shame and disgrace; that, he implied, was punishment enough. South Carolina’s James R. Mann, a conservative Democrat, asked if Ford agreed with “the maxim that the law is no respecter of persons.” Ford’s reply: “Certainly it should be.” The gentle, courtly Mann seemed about to follow up the question but hesitated and then said softly, “Thank you, Mr. President.”
Needless to say, the empathy Ford expressed for Nixon is rarely invoked as a means of arguing for leniency, let alone immunity, for ordinary Americans. That’s because Ford’s call for “empathy” is merely disguised aristocratic privilege.
The Precedent Exploited
The precedent established by the Nixon pardon would be exploited little more than a decade later, when another group of high-level offenders—the Iran-Contra criminals of the Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations—were seeking immunity from prosecution. Sure enough, they got it: White House officials who clearly and knowingly broke the law, and then deliberately lied to Congress about what they had done (also a felony), were systematically protected from any consequences for their crimes.
The Iran-Contra scandal erupted in 1986, when it was revealed that the Reagan administration had sold arms—anti-tank and antiaircraft missiles—to the Ayatollah Khomeini’s regime in Iran. The purpose of the deal was twofold. Initially, it was meant to help secure the release of six American hostages who were being held by Iranian-backed Shia militants in Lebanon. At the same time, the money received from the sale of these weapons to Iran was used to fund the Contras, a CIA-backed rebel group fighting to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.
Reagan’s approval of a weapons-for-hostages deal was an astonishing act of hypocrisy for a self-styled tough guy who had boasted that he would never “negotiate with terrorists.” Indeed, Reagan had imposed a harsh embargo against Iran because of the hostage crisis, so the news that he was covertly shoveling high-tech arms to the Iranian government was politically shocking.
But the funding of the Contras—a guerrilla group responsible for brutal atrocities against civilians, widely denounced in many parts of the world as a terrorist organization—was not just shocking. It was a clear-cut crime. In 1982, Congress had enacted and Reagan had signed into law the Boland Amendment, which explicitly banned any government assistance to the Contras for the purpose of overthrowing the Nicaraguan government. (The law had been prompted by the revelation that the CIA had been funding and providing assistance to those guerrillas without the knowledge of Congress.) The 1986 Iran-Contra disclosures revealed that Reagan officials had done exactly that which the law prohibited: they had funneled millions of dollars to the Contras in order to facilitate the overthrow of the Sandinistas.
When the covert program was revealed, numerous legal proceedings were initiated. Among them was an action brought by Nicaragua against the United States in the International Court of Justice, charging that the United States had illegally attempted to overthrow the Nicaraguan government. The court ruled in favor of Nicaragua and ordered the United States to pay substantial compensation, but the Reagan administration refused to comply with the court’s order and then used the United States’ seat on the Security Council to veto any efforts by the United Nations to enforce the judgment.
Domestically, the Justice Department appointed an independent prosecutor, Lawrence Walsh, to investigate Iran-Contra. Over the next several years, numerous Reagan appointees—including high-level officials at the National Security Agency, the Defense Department, the CIA, and the State Department—were indicted, both for the crimes themselves and for lying to federal investigators and to Congress in order to cover up the scandal. In the end, though, not a single one of them would serve even a day in prison.
Two key Reagan aides—Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North and John Poindexter—had their convictions overturned on appeal, on the ground that information they provided under a grant of immunity had been improperly used against them. National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane and Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams pleaded guilty to several misdemeanor counts of illegally withholding information, but they were pardoned by George H. W. Bush during his last month in office. Yet it was the treatment of the highest-ranking official to be indicted—Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger—that best illustrates the prevailing ethos of elite immunity.
Weinberger had been charged with multiple felony counts of perjury and obstruction of justice after the 1991 discovery of diaries that contradicted much of what he had told investigators. Though he had been required to turn over those diaries to prosecutors, Weinberger had failed to do so. Once the contents of the diaries were publicly revealed, the reasons for his concealment became obvious. Not only did they contradict his own denials of knowledge of the transactions, but the diaries directly implicated other key officials, including President Reagan himself. As Walsh put it, “Weinberger’s early and deliberate decision to conceal and withhold extensive contemporaneous notes of the Iran-contra matter radically altered the official investigations and possibly forestalled timely impeachment proceedings against President Reagan and other officials.” The special prosecutor added that the “notes contain evidence of a conspiracy among the highest-ranking Reagan Administration officials to lie to Congress and the American public.”
Weinberger’s trial was set to begin in January 1993. However, on December 24, 1992, the former Pentagon chief, along with five others (four of whom had already been convicted and one of whom was set to stand trial), was pardoned by Bush 41, who was less than a month away from leaving office, having been defeated by Bill Clinton in the 1992 election. A December 25, 1992, editorial in the
New York Times
—one of the very few mainstream institutions to condemn the pardons—noted that the rationale invoked by Bush 41 to justify his actions was a replica of the excuses Ford had relied on to protect Richard Nixon.
If Mr. Bush had rested his pardon of Mr. Weinberger on the former Defense Secretary’s health alone, he might deserve credit for compassion. But he went on to lecture Lawrence Walsh, the independent prosecutor, against what he called “the criminalization of policy differences.”
That’s a bogus complaint. Mr. Weinberger was not charged with lying to Congress because of policy differences; lying to Congress for any reason is criminal conduct….
When President Ford pardoned Richard Nixon for Watergate crimes—a precedent Mr. Bush ignored in his pardon message—he said he acted to restore harmony and move on. Mr. Bush invoked the same sentiments. But the Nixon pardon was wrong, too.
And like Ford’s pardon, Bush’s won praise from the overwhelming majority of politicians and journalists. Weinberger, after all, was a member in good standing of the political class generally and the Washington establishment in particular. He had been a close associate of Reagan’s since the 1960s, when Reagan was governor of California, and he had held a number of key posts under Nixon—including director of the Office of Management and Budget, where his merciless cost-cutting measures had earned him the nickname “Cap the Knife.” In a pattern no one considers unusual anymore, “Cap the Knife” had then converted the praise earned as Nixon’s OMB cost cutter into a plum position as vice president and general counsel of the Bechtel Corporation, which must have found his contacts in DC to be very useful indeed.
In other words, in the eyes of the political and media establishment, Weinberger was not someone who belonged in a prison cell—not even when there was clear evidence that he had committed serious felonies. As Robert Parry detailed in
Consortium News
, journalists and political operatives from across the political spectrum closed ranks to celebrate the immunity bestowed on Weinberger and his coconspirators.
The Washington elites rallied to Weinberger’s defense. In the salons of Georgetown, there was palpable relief in December 1992 when President Bush pardoned Weinberger and five other Iran-contra defendants, effectively ending the Iran-contra investigation.
Washington Post
columnist Richard Cohen spoke for many insiders. In a column [on December 30, 1992], Cohen described how impressed he was that Weinberger would push his own shopping cart at the Georgetown Safeway, often called the “social Safeway” because so many members of Washington’s establishment shopped there.
“Based on my Safeway encounters, I came to think of Weinberger as a basic sort of guy, candid and no nonsense—which is the way much of official Washington saw him,” Cohen wrote in praise of the pardon. “Cap, my Safeway buddy, walks, and that’s all right with me.”
Let us pause for a moment to reflect on how perverse that is. Richard Cohen describes himself as a journalist and is presented as such to his readers by the
Washington Post.
Our journalist class never tires of touting their vital role as intrepid, adversarial watchdogs keeping a keen eye on the politically powerful. Yet here was an influential pundit explicitly defending the immunity granted to Caspar Weinberger on the grounds that the Pentagon chief was in his social circle and was a fine, admirable man and thus—unlike the many common Washingtonians convicted and imprisoned every day for petty crimes without the slightest objection from Cohen—deserved to be shielded from the criminal justice system. A more naked rejection of Jefferson’s “natural equality of man, the denial of every preeminence” can scarcely be imagined.
What made the pardon even more pernicious was that the person issuing it—George H. W. Bush—had been centrally involved in many of the incriminating acts as Reagan’s vice president and was widely believed to be at risk himself if the trials of Weinberger and the others proceeded. A major effect of pardoning the remaining Iran-Contra criminals was to put an end to the investigations and thus to exempt Bush from accountability for his own crimes. The post-Nixon pattern was reaffirmed: those who are most politically powerful in our society could break the law with impunity. Lawrence Walsh, the Iran-Contra special prosecutor (and lifelong Republican), said as much.
President Bush’s pardon of Caspar Weinberger and other Iran-contra defendants undermines the principle that no man is above the law. It demonstrates that powerful people with powerful allies can commit serious crimes in high office—deliberately abusing the public trust without consequence.
Weinberger, who faced four felony charges, deserved to be tried by a jury of citizens. Although it is the President’s prerogative to grant pardons, it is every American’s right that the criminal justice system be administered fairly, regardless of a person’s rank and connections.
The path from the Watergate and Iran-Contra pardons to the immunity now routinely enjoyed by political elites is easy to see. In 1987, when a House committee issued a report finding that Reagan officials had broken the law, a dissenting claim (authored by future Bush 43 White House aide David Addington) was filed by then–GOP congressman Dick Cheney. Despite obvious evidence of lawbreaking, Cheney defiantly argued that the Reagan administration had done nothing wrong, but rather had acted patriotically. Cheney claimed that Article II of the Constitution, by anointing the president “commander in chief,” vests him with virtually absolute power in foreign policy-making; the other branches cannot restrict him even by duly enacted statutes of the Congress. Two decades later, when the
New York Times
reported that the Bush administration had ordered the National Security Agency to spy on Americans without the warrants required by law, Cheney likewise insisted that it had done nothing wrong and relied on that same theory of presidential omnipotence. When asked how he could advance such a claim in light of the clear dictates of the law, he responded, “If you want to understand why this program is legal…go back and read my Iran-Contra report.”