David Hume Kennerly/The U.S. National Archives
In August 1974, when I was 13 years old, I attended a historic speech. A few days into his presidency, Gerald Ford announced to the Veterans of Foreign Wars’ national convention in Chicago his intention to offer Vietnam War draft evaders and military deserters a chance for clemency. Even though I understood the importance of the speech at the time, my main memory of it today is my awareness of a judgmental television camera that was positioned on the stage to capture audience reactions. I was just a few rows away.
Because our father, a World War II veteran, had been a national VFW officer, our parents often brought us kids to these conventions. This time, only my 10-year-old sister and I made the trip, while our two older brothers prepared for college. My father and brothers had been arguing about Vietnam. During one supper, tempers flared enough that one brother picked up his plate to eat in another room. Dad made him stay at the table, but the argument ended.
The August 19 speech at Chicago’s Conrad Hilton Hotel marked Ford’s first trip out of Washington, D.C., since former President Richard Nixon’s resignation 10 days earlier, which had moved then-Vice President Ford into the Oval Office. His early decision to announce his clemency plan before an audience presumably unfriendly to it was courageous.
After some opening remarks regarding veterans programs, Ford broached his main topic with an apparent attempt to disarm his audience. “Unconditional blanket amnesty for anyone who illegally evaded or fled military service is wrong,” he said. The statement drew loud approval. “Yet,” he continued, “in my first words as president of all the people, I acknowledged a power higher than the people, who commands not only righteousness, but love; not only justice, but mercy.”
Moments later, speaking of those tens of thousands of “our countrymen” then living under the shadow of “offenses loosely described as desertion and draft-dodging,” Ford laid out his vision not for amnesty but clemency: Offenders could “work their way back” by performing public service in lieu of prison time. “I am throwing the weight of my presidency into the scales of justice on the side of leniency,” he said.
The room was silent.
According to journalist Barry Werth’s 2006 account, 31 Days: Gerald Ford, the Nixon Pardon and a Government in Crisis, Ford had informed his aides what he would say only on that morning’s flight from Washington. Alexander Haig, Nixon’s chief of staff, whom Ford had retained, feared the VFW would boo the president. Instead, the vets held their tongues and stood to applaud him at the speech’s end. Later, however, they twice passed resolutions opposing clemency.
Another question of leniency hung over the early days of Ford’s term in office. Just as Ford opposed amnesty for Vietnam offenders, he also at first publicly resisted pardoning Nixon for his role in the Watergate scandal. Nonetheless, many Americans saw Vietnam clemency as cover for an expected Nixon reprieve. Indeed, three weeks later, Ford pardoned the ex-president.
Shortly thereafter, he convened a Presidential Clemency Board to review applications for the program. Aiming for a range of political diversity almost unimaginable today, Ford appointed Notre Dame’s president, Father Theodore Hesburgh, CSC, to the board as one of three liberal members along with three moderates and three conservatives, such as Lew Walt, a retired four-star general of the United States Marine Corps.
The program’s reach fell short of virtually everyone’s expectations. Within a year or so, the board processed some 21,500 cases, mostly for desertion, recommending more than 13,000 pardons, often with no service requirement. Criticized by many Americans — draft evaders, especially those who had left the country, were generally ineligible for the program — Ford essentially disowned the clemency effort. He lost his reelection bid to Jimmy Carter in 1976 and barely mentioned the episode in his 1979 autobiography.
In January 1977, Carter granted broad amnesty for draft violations. Only one in five Americans supported his plan. Most thought it went either too far or not far enough. For this and a host of other reasons, Carter, too, was rewarded with defeat in the next election. It’s not surprising that presidential pardons are rarely so sweeping.
Rewatching Ford’s speech decades later, I worried the camera may have caught me doing something embarrassing. At one moment I saw myself slouching between my mother and sister, looking sidelong at the camera, always conscious of its scolding gaze. I feared I might have scandalized my father by reflexively applauding Ford’s clemency announcement on national TV, but I found no video evidence of that.
What I did see, though, got me thinking. After acknowledging a higher power, Ford invoked familiar words: “I ask all Americans, who ever asked for goodness and mercy in their lives, who ever sought forgiveness for their trespasses, to join in rehabilitating all the casualties of the tragic conflicts of the past.”
Jesus’ words are hard enough for individuals to put into practice, much less for whole societies — and governments needing the consent of the governed.
Forgive trespasses. The reference to the Our Father was unmistakable, and the specific petition to which Ford alluded attaches a lien on our behavior, not God’s: “forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” We ask to be forgiven in the same way that we forgive. The evangelist Matthew follows the prayer with Jesus’ blunt closer: “If you forgive others their transgressions, your heavenly Father will forgive you. But if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your transgressions.” The imperative to forgive is a tall, hard order.
Yet despite its being addressed to an audience composed predominantly of Christian veterans, Ford’s Our Father gambit didn’t pay off. They wanted justice on behalf of those who had served honorably in Vietnam — and surely on behalf of their own service. Their silence signaled their feeling that this particular trespass was unforgivable.
Raised by a proud veteran whom I loved and whose service I honor — and who was on the dais for Ford’s speech — I understand the objection that not holding Vietnam offenders accountable threatened to devalue military service and sacrifice. Yet despite the clemency program and Carter’s eventual amnesty, men and women continue to serve their country in the military. Today it is one of America’s few institutions held in high regard.
The Our Father, which many people pray daily, exempts no trespasses but also demands no contrition. The latter point seems pertinent to Ford’s clemency rationale. Many Vietnam-era offenders believed they had done nothing wrong and had in fact acted virtuously. Jesus would expect forgiveness for them, as well as for the similarly unrepentant President Lyndon Johnson, who had escalated the war in Vietnam, and Nixon.
Forgiving without the satisfaction of remorse? In our own political moment, the repercussions of such profligate mercy are nearly unimaginable.
Forgiveness and reconciliation projects have had success in some countries, but in the U.S., the results have been mixed. Despite residual dissatisfaction that lingered for many years, Ford’s Nixon pardon and Carter’s Vietnam amnesty have since been widely accepted as having been best for the country. The same likely applied to the inclusive treatment of British Loyalists after the Revolutionary War.
On the other hand, the ultimately low bar for Confederates to rejoin the American polity as voters and officeholders required no contrition and minimal loyalty. It also ended Reconstruction and arguably enabled another century of de facto slavery and white supremacy, the effects of which are still playing out. Not for nothing is it said the North won the war, but the South won the peace. Ultimately the success of public forgiveness may depend on one’s perspective on the trespass.
Jesus’ words are hard enough for individuals to put into practice, much less for whole societies — and governments needing the consent of the governed. The prayer’s expectation of radical forgiveness is risky. It requires almost superhuman levels of goodwill to achieve the desired healing. Most seem to believe it’s unrealistic. So why do we pray it every day?
Fifty years after Ford’s speech in Chicago, small though such a gesture would have been, I wish I had clapped for his clemency plan. Maybe the camera would have treated me better.
Patrick Gallagher lives and writes in Aberdeen, South Dakota.