Word: pardoner
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...healing gesture could come from Richard Nixon himself, suggests Theologian Claude Welch, president of Berkeley's Graduate Theological Union. "An honest admission of real guilt would do a great deal toward making sense out of the pardon." Somewhat optimistically, Welch observes that "a forgiving spirit"?like Ford's pardon of Nixon?"can precede awareness of guilt. Forgiveness is part of the process by which relations that have been destroyed, between two people or between one man and a nation, can be fully restored...
That is a generous assessment of what the pardon might accomplish. Yet the very existence of a lost man?and Richard Nixon, whatever his remaining perquisites or power, is a lost man ?impels a compassionate society to hope that the rift between it and him can somehow be healed. Such a hope stems not from mere pity, but from self-recognition. Each of us is to a degree lost, tied to the rest of humanity?and to God?by fragile strands of grace, strands that fray and break. Pardon is a favor that we may sometimes...
...Pardon Unpardonable...
...have mixed emotions, but it is undoubtedly good for the country that we do not have to continue as a divided nation. History will take care of Nixon without a formal judicial finding. His Administration will go down as one of the worst in history because of corruption. The pardon of Nixon should be matched by the granting of unconditional amnesty to those who resisted service in the Viet Nam War. The young men who refused to take part in that war for reasons of conscience have an even higher right to amnesty and pardon than Nixon...
America's greatest President was a man of compassion. A century later we have a new President who is also a man of compassion. Long after the vultures and biodegradables have departed, the pardon of Richard Nixon by President Ford will go down in history as the mark of a man who is both courageous and decisive...