The Wall Street Journal Editorials
The Insult of Carter's Mass Pardon
Letters to the Editor
February 23, 2001
It is a pleasurable experience to watch Bill Clinton
finally being judged, even by his own party, for the ethical
fraudulence that has characterized his entire political career. But
allowing Jimmy Carter a free pass on the issue of presidential
pardons, as was done in a recent piece by his former chief of staff,
Hamilton Jordan, on this page, ignores both the evidence of history
and the trauma that President Carter visited on this country during
his earliest days in office ("The
First Grifters," Feb. 20). Indeed, it could be said that the
seeds of Bill Clinton's political arrogance were sown by Jimmy
Carter's own hand.
While the Carter presidency may have handled cases of
individual presidential pardons with great care, Mr. Carter's first
official act as president was to pardon, en masse, all those who had
been or could be charged with draft evasion during the Vietnam era.
Motivated by the ever-present desire of American politicians to
"heal the wounds" of the Vietnam War, and beyond doubt manipulated
by the army of antiwar McGovernites who had seized control of the
Democratic Party, Mr. Carter's gesture had the symbolic effect of
elevating everyone who had opposed the Vietnam War to the level of
moral purist, and by implication insulting those who often had
struggled just as deeply with the moral dimensions of the war and
had decided, often at great sacrifice, to honor the laws of their
country and serve.
President Carter's all-embracing pardon of Americans who
refused to serve in the military was without precedent. After World
War II, President Truman had given full amnesty on a case-by-case
basis to a limited number of draft evaders, but only after they had
actually been convicted of the offense and then appealed to a review
board that examined the circumstances of their cases. Following
World War I, President Roosevelt had pardoned those who had been
convicted of draft violations and had served out their prison terms,
but did not extend even this limited pardon to those who had left
the country. Much was said about President Lincoln's sweeping pardon
of Confederate soldiers after the Civil War, but this gesture was
made to those who had indeed served, honoring the judgments of their
state governments. Lincoln made this distinction clear in his
remarks when issuing the pardons, and by pointedly refusing to
extend such amnesty to Confederate officials and men of property.
Nor did President Carter's abuse of power end with the
pardoning of draft evaders. Some had criticized this blanket amnesty
as having made class distinctions between college boys who were
"enlightened" enough to oppose the draft and blue-collar boys who
had gone into the military and then either seen the light regarding
the war or suffered the supposed abuses of the military system.
Liberal groups and antiwar politicians assailed the "inequities" of
military justice and the "randomness" of its characterization of
service when one left the military, despite the fact that 97% of
those who served during Vietnam had been discharged under honorable
circumstances. Within weeks of pardoning all the draft evaders, Mr.
Carter invoked his powers as commander in chief and ordered that the
"bad paper" military discharges of hundreds of thousands of
deserters, malcontents and nonperformers be mandatorily upgraded, so
long as they met one of six easily attained criteria.
Again President Carter had upset a delicately balanced
apple cart among the Vietnam generation. By wiping the slate clean
for those who had dodged the draft or created problems while in the
military, he signaled to those who had served honorably during a
horribly emotional period that their self-discipline, loyalty,
wounds and even deaths did not matter. The Congress, and
particularly the Committees on Veterans Affairs, where I then served
as a House counsel, spent the next six months in emotional argument
and negotiation. The House and Senate at times engaged in heated
floor debates and recriminations before some measure of historical
standards were mandated to accompany any veterans benefits awarded
to recipients of Mr. Carter's falsely upgraded discharges.
These acts resonate when one evaluates Bill Clinton's
incessantly arrogant presidency, from the endless string of
conscious and serious abuses of power to the "conversion" of White
House furniture and china on his way out the door. For what we are
seeing are the echoes of a pervasive elitism, from people who were
taught when young that the laws that applied to their countrymen did
not necessarily apply to them.
As one who shares Mr. Clinton's ethnic background, and
whose family was not afforded the opportunity for higher education
until this generation, it is irritating beyond words to see
commentators repeatedly refer to his actions as "redneck" or typical
of "white trash" behavior. Rednecks might hang a velvet picture of
Elvis on their living room wall, but precious few would tolerate any
sort of conduct that might demean the greatness of their country,
much less take part in it. Check the casualty lists in any war. See
who stands tall and salutes when the flag passes by. Note who wasn't
sleeping in Lincoln's bedroom when Bill Clinton occupied the White
House.
Instead, Bill and Hillary's misadventures provide an echo
of a different time and place, another set of values. Of bright
students brought to good schools and becoming convinced, as Ben
Stein wrote of his years at Yale Law School with the Clintons, "that
we were supermen, floating above history and precedent, the natural
rulers of the universe. . . . The law did not apply to us." Of young
men who not only avoided service when 58,000 of their peers were
dying, but who persuaded a softie like Jimmy Carter to say that they
were right, all of them, without distinction. The law? The law was
what you made it.
Americans, bred on fairness and passionate about equality,
have a way of collectively summing things up as time goes by. It is
accurate to say that Jimmy Carter's presidency never fully recovered
from his naive but well-intentioned opening moments. And one can
predict that Bill Clinton will never live down the arrogance of his
final departure.
James Webb
Arlington, Va.
UNITED STATES MARINE CORPS