Many Commutations Inspired by Loyalty

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DANIEL SCHORR: The topic du jour at countless Washington Independence Day parties was the remission of Lewis Libby's prison sentence.

MELISSA BLOCK, host:

NPR senior news analyst Daniel Schorr.

SCHORR: What was President Bush's rationale for doing it without even checking with the Justice Department? The commutation does not affect the $250,000 fine, which Libby paid by check today. I suggest that you not get too involved in the details of the president's power to pardon or commute, which is almost unlimited. What's at issue here is not law, but loyalty. What does he owe an aide who has broken the law, in the cause of serving him or some greater cause?

Former CIA Director Richard Helms made his loyalty to the CIA clear in 1973, when he misled a Senate committee about the agency's efforts to bring down Chilean President Salvador Allende and then announced that he would wear his conviction as a badge of honor.

President Bush followed the example of his father, who issued pardons to former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and others involved in the Iran-contra scandal. Then, there were President Clinton's wholesale pardons while leaving office, including fugitive financier Marc Rich, whose wife was a loyal money-raiser for Clinton causes.

President Nixon, on the other hand, let his loyal aides John Mitchell, H.R. Haldeman, and John Ehrlichman go to jail without lifting a finger to save them. That's what you call one-way loyalty. Watergate burglar Howard Hunt expressed his bitterness in a posthumously published memoir.

But one pardon we were spared. In 1974, President Nixon was advised by his chief of staff Alexander Haig that his options included pardoning himself and then resigning. Nixon preferred to wait for a pardon from his successor, Gerald Ford, whose loyalty he thought he could count on.

This is Daniel Schorr.

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