The Scandal of Pardons and White House Furniture - 23 February 2001

"The president shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offences against the United States."

This little-regarded and rarely-quoted sentence in the Constitution defines a topic that has been shocking our senses during the past few weeks to the exclusion, to put it brutally, of much public interest and the doings and proposed policies of the new president - a situation I've never ever known before.

Well even though the shock hit us a month ago about the manner of the Clintons' departure from the White House - the scandal of several pardons, the looting of the White House furniture - I had been reluctant to talk about it, walking around it, in the hope, which the Democrats, indeed the Democratic Party as a whole share, the hope that it would go away.

My reluctance to talk about it springs honestly from a fact that very rarely confronts a reporter who tries to tell a story that's fair to all sides. The trouble with this story is that there doesn't seem to be more than one side.

You must have guessed by now that I'm talking about what has variously been called "the squalid Clinton exit", "the shrieking ex-presidency", and about which the Washington Post, which has been a steady admirer of Mr Clinton for most of eight years, wrote, regretfully, last week: "The defining characteristic of the Clintons is their incapacity to feel embarrassment."

Before we go into what it is so shocking or bizarre about the Clintons' exit it might be useful to look at the normal procedure, the normal behaviour of a president leaving the White House on the day of the inauguration of his successor.

I've looked through the comings and going of the presidents for the past hundred years, for the 20th Century only.

Briefly then, in that time, during that century, there were 17 presidents before Clinton. Looking for the norm you have to discount quite a few of them.

Two were assassinated, two died in office, three - Coolidge, Truman, Lyndon Johnson - announced early on that they would not seek another term, so they had no further ambition to nurse or promote.

One was impeached and resigned, rather than face a trial he knew he would lose.

Two retired to their homes but remained the titular leaders of their party until a new one would emerge.

Two had served the maximum terms under the new two-term rule and so joined the remaining five, who went home to a dignified or unpublicised retirement.

They, I believe, established the norm. And they include in our time Presidents Eisenhower, Carter and Ford.

What they did on the election of the incoming man was to do what had been done since the middle 19th Century: They accompanied the new man to the Capitol - until 30, 40 years ago, in an open car - saw him sworn in and quietly left with their wives and went back to the homes they had left.

So really the normal behaviour comes down to what the majority of the people expect or have come to expect about how a president leaves the White House.

The best thing I can do is to recall a memory of the most typical presidential exit I can remember.

A bright, mild day in 1953 in Washington. The usual date: 20 January. The day of the inauguration of the former general, Dwight D Eisenhower. The departing president was Harry Truman.

It was a simple story. By the afternoon about a hundred people of every sort had gathered on a street in Georgetown - the old Georgian suburb - where the departing president was the guest of Truman's secretary of state, Mr Dean Acheson.

The small crowd simply waited till the lunch was over in order to watch Mr Truman and his wife come out of Mr Acheson's house and leave for the last time.

He came out, his large glasses glinting in the sun. He shaded his eyes, saw the small crowd, put his hand up for quiet and said two sentences.

He said: "Your coming out here means more to me than many enthusiastic meetings I had as president. Now I'm Mr Truman private citizen."

He got in a car with is wife and he left for the railroad station and there he stood on the observation platform of the train and waved and smiled, and the train pulled out.

Next thing we learn from his diary. After he arrived in Independence, Missouri, where he was born, he went to the only house he'd ever owned - a modest, two-storey house on a side street - and he wrote: "First thing I did was to take the suitcases upstairs, like the old days." And that was it.

The first misgiving, shall we say, about Mr Clinton was that when he left President Bush to the inaugural luncheon in the White House and the following parade, he went to the airport and spent two hours with a crowd of friends and supporters, complete with microphones and television cameras.

He flew to New York - a White House plane for the last time - where it turned out he'd invited 10,000 people to see him land at Kennedy. The weather was atrocious, only about a thousand came to hear him but mainly to hear the new senator - Mrs Clinton - make a political speech.

What Mr Clinton was doing was swiping the limelight, not only from the new president, but from the forgotten Vice-President Gore and proclaiming himself still leader of the Democratic Party.

Next day he appointed a friend and big money raiser as chairman of the Democratic National Committee - not by custom the privilege of an ex-president.

There was a pervasive mutter in the media that this performance was immodest. Well, not in the best of taste.

And then only days later we heard that the Clintons had walked off with something like $190,000-worth of White House furniture.

At first this was not to be believed but then came the stupefying, the more incredible story, of the pardoning of Mr Marc Rich.

All presidents, in the last days of their term, exercise this constitutional privilege of pardoning people who, one way or another, have committed offences against the United States - usually who violated ethics rules of Congress, prisoners whose guilt is dubious - rarely if ever I believe men indicted, as Mr Rich was, or convicted of trading with the enemy or, as other Clinton-pardoned felons, of drug dealing or money laundering.

Presidents routinely check with the Department of Justice to see the seriousness of the offence.

Mr Clinton did not. But he said that three lawyers approved Mr Rich's pardon.

Next day all three said they had never approved any pardon for Mr Rich and all three, it turned out, had been Mr Clinton's defence lawyers in his previous troubles.

So what had Mr Rich done? He'd been indicted for a raft of criminal charges here in New York 17 years ago by Mr Giuliani - New York's mayor - who was then the United States Attorney.

Mr Rich, apart from charges of massive tax evasion and money laundering, traded with Libya in defiance of the embargo, with Iran while the American hostages were held there, with Iraq through the Gulf War and with South Africa in defiance of the United States embargo against the apartheid government.

Then came out the news that Mr Rich's former wife had given $450,000 to the coming Clinton Library, three millions to Democrat fundraising lunches, 10,000 to Mr Clinton's legal defence fund.

Well there once was a time in the long ago when even civil servants, in several Western countries, were not only expected to do not wrong, they could be fired for giving the appearance of doing wrong.

Today a great majority of Americans, including many Democrats in and out of Congress, and a host of liberal commentators, believe that Mr Clinton has given the appearance of doing wrong.

Stronger language has been used most recently. Even an ex-president and Democrat - Mr Jimmy Carter - has called the Clinton behaviour "simply disgraceful".

Every day it gets worse. The United States attorney in New York has instituted a criminal investigation into the history and circumstances of Mrs Rich's gifts and that is where I think, for the moment, we ought to leave it.

A public question which was asked almost two years ago and comes up again is: Did Mr Clinton degrade the presidency? Well certainly we can say now he degraded his presidency.

But we should remember that during the long, Roman decadence, there was from time to time the interruption of a virtuous emperor. The presidency is there and new and decent men will come to inhabit it.

And then there is the curious evidence of the polls that still about 40% of the people can see no fault or flaw in Mr Clinton as president.

How about as a man? Ah well the polls say almost 70% now agree he is - and this was put to them - "dishonest and untrustworthy".

But doesn't this affect his standing as president? To many people, apparently not. Such people certainly don't believe, with Franklin Roosevelt, that: "The president is assumed to be the moral leader of the nation."

There's finally the fatalist view that Mr Clinton is not a noticeable sinner but merely reflects the morality of our time.

Such a fatalist was Edward Gibbon who could write about Rome in decay what might well have been is epitaph on the Clinton presidency:

"The people became insensitive or indifferent to the debauches of the emperor provided he repaired the roads and remitted taxes."

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