Word: pardoner
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...Ford misjudged both Americans in general and American churchmen in particular. Evangelist Billy Graham applauded the Sabbath pardon, but he was a decided exception. Conservative or liberal, Christian or Jew, most other religious thinkers deplored Ford's action on grounds of theology as well as simple justice...
Beyond the disastrous political and social consequences?the reopened Watergate wound, the revived climate of distrust and division?the pardon, for all its compassion, is bad theology. On its own terms, within Ford's Bible-oriented, evangelical Christian framework, it does not meet traditional tests for an act of judicial mercy. One of the most serious defects is Nixon's continuing reluctance to admit any real fault in the Watergate affair...
...pain" over the Watergate "mistakes" and "misjudgments." His behavior even comes perilously close to that in Jesus' famous parable of the unmerciful servant: a man had been forgiven a large debt by his master, then brutally tried to collect what was owed him by a subordinate. After his own pardon, Nixon fervently opposes amnesty for Viet Nam War resisters. Indeed, according to his son-in-law David Eisenhower, Nixon now says that he would not have accepted pardon at all if it had been tied to amnesty...
...Nixon has not forgiven himself," observes Maryknoll Priest-Psychologist Eugene Kennedy. "He has not admitted that he is capable of evil, that he has hurt countless persons. Forgiveness is a tough existential transition." Divine forgiveness is the model for human pardon, notes Church Historian Martin Marty, a Lutheran, and involves "an annihilation of what the sinner was. God completely wipes the slate clean. But that only happens if there is repentance, an about-face, a 180° turn. There is no evidence that the former President is doing anything of the kind." Nixon's attitude, complains Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, president...
...just such forlorn human beings whom Abraham Lincoln, the greatest of presidential pardoners, could not resist. Lincoln believed in a stern divine justice, yet time and again during the Civil War he exasperated his generals by pardoning boys who faced execution for such capital crimes as sleeping on sentry duty or even desertion. But Lincoln's pardons were often just commutations of death sentences, not passports to complete freedom; offenders could still find themselves at hard labor on the dread Dry Tortugas. Ford's pardon of Nixon may stem from similar motives of compassion, but it is hardly the same...