PRESIDENTIAL PARDONS

by William H. Benson

December 19, 2002

     Late on the evening of January 19, 2001, Bill Clinton threw caution and counsel aside and signed his name to a document that granted a presidential pardon to Marc Rich, a fugitive living in Switzerland since 1983 and wanted here in the U.S. for tax fraud amounting to $48 million and racketeering charges.  Prosecutors had desperately wanted to get their hands on him for seventeen years, and then Clinton in the last hours of the last day of his Presidency had pardoned him.

     His three legal counsels later testified that they had strenuously argued against the Rich pardon and thought that they had persuaded Clinton to reject it.  But then at 3:00 p.m. on the 19th Clinton had spoken to Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, and Clinton had tipped the other way.

     It was a “highly questionable pardon”, given the severity of the charges against Marc Rich, and the fact that Denise Rich, Marc’s ex-wife, had donated more than $1.3 million in political contributions to Bill and Hillary, including $450,000 to Clinton’s library in Arkansas.

     Indeed, Denise Rich had written a passionate application to Clinton begging for the pardon, playing on Clinton’s own resentment toward zealous prosecutors, and saying that she knew “what it feels like to see the press try and convict the accused without regard for the truth.”

    The fury and the outcry coming from the legal establishment deafened Clinton’s plea, that “once the facts are out there, people will understand what I did and why, even if they may not agree with it.”  Newsweek responded, “He couldn’t have been more wrong.”

    On August 9, 1974 Nixon resigned rather than face an impeachment and possibly a criminal trial in which he stood a reasonable chance of going to jail, as did Haldeman and Ehrlichman and the others who had participated in the Watergate burglary and coverup.  Then, on September 8, 1974, President Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon.

     The outcry against this unexpected and unpopular decision colored badly the first days of the Ford Presidency.  A month later Ford defended himself before the House Judiciary Committee, saying that he wanted to end the national divisions created by Watergate.

     In his Second Inaugural Address Lincoln had pled for clemency for the South.  “With malice toward none, with charity for all, . . . to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”  He proposed that when at least 10 percent of the voters in each of the Southern states had taken a loyalty oath to the Constitution, each state could then return to the Union.

     Following Lincoln’s assassination, President Andrew Johnson wanted to continue Lincoln’s plan, but Congress, led by Senator Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens in the House, wanted revenge and retribution.  So they sent down the Northern troops and created military dictatorships in each of the Southern states to ensure that blacks were freed and given the right to vote.

     By 1868 Congressional Reconstruction had turned ugly.  The political hatred went beyond anything seen before or since.   The Southern whites boiled in helpless rage at Congress’s vindictive nature, and so they turned on the blacks with a ferocious hatred.  When Johnson tried to stand up to Congress, Congress impeached him on trumped-up charges.  Only one vote prevented Johnson from being ousted from the White House.

     The poisoned atmosphere in Washington gave rise to an ocean of hostility.  Suspicion, mistrust, denunciation, accusation, and bitterness broke down normal channels.  And then in the midsts of all that hatred, on Christmas Day, December, 25, 1868, in his last few days as President, Johnson issued a Presidential pardon, an unqualified amnesty to all who had participated in the insurrection or rebellion against the United States.  Congress was stunned at his temerity.

     Right or wrong and for their own reasons, with a signature, Clinton had pardoned Marc Rich, as Ford had pardoned Nixon, and as Johnson had pardoned the Southerners.  A pardon or a pound of flesh?  Clemency or vindictiveness?  The magnanimous gesture or retribution?  Mercy or justice?  Which is it this Christmas season?  The angels sang on the Judean hills that Christmas night “Peace on earth.  Goodwill toward men.”  May it be so.

WALTER DISNEY

by William H. Benson

December 5, 2002

     Time‘s critics say that the new Lord of the Rings movie, The Two Towers, is even better than last year’s first installment, The Fellowship of the Ring, a film that I did enjoy.  Although fantasy is not my favorite literary form, seeing the Hobbits, such as Bilbo Baggins and Frodo and the wizard Gondolf, on the screen held my attention for all of  the three plus hours the movie lasted.

     I did read The Hobbit some thirty-three years ago, when in high school, but I have never been able to finish John Ronald Reuel Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, despite numerous determined starts.  And the same is true of C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia and even now of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series.  With fantasy it seems that some people prefer the movie version.

     Someone who knew the power of a fantastic story presented on the screen, rather than in printed form, was Walter Elias Disney, born December 5, 1901, 101 years ago today.  He believed in children’s fantasy and built his career around cartoon animals designed for kids.

     After losing the rights to Oswald the Rabbit, his first cartoon creation, to unscrupulous distributors, Walt Disney turned to others animals: Mickey and Minnie Mouse, Donald and Daisey Duck, Pluto, and Goofy–all as American now as apple pie.  Never would he consider giving up his rights to them.

     Ridiculed initially, Walt eventually won over the critics to his movie-length cartoons, such as Snow White, Pinocchio, Dumbo, Bambi, and even Fantasia.  He said it best, “I prefer animals to people.”  And he put them on the screen again and again.

     True, Disney created a fantastic and unreal world, a place of happiness and escape from the less colorful facts of human life, but the reality of his own personal life was everything but happy.  Relentlessly, he strove to create his fantasy dreams through sheer willpower alone.

     Analysts now believe that Disney was probably manic-depressive who suffered from a death-wish mentality and who constantly lived on the edge of collapse.  He would live and work at the studio for months at a time on a project, exhausting himself to such a degree that weeks of rest were then required, only to be followed by more work.  And so the pattern was set; manic-like work followed by exhaustion and depression.

     Repeatedly he bet everything on his latest project, stringing himself out on the edge of financial collapse.  Twice he was bankrupt while still in his twenties.  Eight other times he faced personal insolvency.  Never was he able to estimate the costs, personal and otherwise, beforehand that a project would require.  And so he consistently moved from crisis to crisis, precarious at best.

     In 1931 his wife Lillian found Walt unconscious from an overdose of sleeping pills, and the doctors saved his life by pumping his stomach.  That was the first of eight total nervous breakdowns he would suffer during his adult life.   

     Driving himself to perfection, the overwork plus the cigarettes (three packs a day) and the heavy drinking took its toll as it always does.  He dropped dead on December 15, 1966 at age 65 unable to ever enjoy the dreams he had dreamed and which he had so graciously given away to others but at a tremendous personal cost to himself.

     While fantasy is dream-like, light, fluffy, in technicolor, it is usually short-lived; reality is of a darker hue with shades of gray, uglier, often heartbreaking, and lasts much longer.  We walk into a darkened movie theater seeking moments of escape from everyday life, and the original imagination-makers like J.R.R. Tolkein and C. S. Lewis and J. K. Rowling and Walter Elias Disney are there to provide us those pleasurable minutes.

LEE HARVEY OSWALD

by William H. Benson

November 21, 2002

     In the thirty-nine years since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the American public has had a difficult time accepting the idea that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.  The public mind seems to enjoy the thrill and shudder of living in the aftermath of a mystery, that a conspiracy struck down the nation’s President, and that someday the truth will surface.  Some apparently simple events have magnified into something far more complex than first imagined.

     The facts present themselves.  On November 22, 1963, Friday, just after noon, a sniper shot at least three bullets at the President’s car.  Two struck the President: one in the upper back and the other in the back of the head, which killed him.  The third struck Texas Governor John Connelly.

     Within forty-five minutes, a Dallas policeman, J. D. Tippit, tried to detain a suspect for questioning and was shot and killed by same suspect with a revolver.  Minutes later Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested in a nearby movie theater, and was found carrying a revolver.  The spent shell casings found at the Tippit killing were positively identified as those coming from the same revolver Oswald carried.

     Police found a rifle on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository with Oswald’s palm print on the stock of that rifle.  It had been purchased by Oswald some months ago but under an assumed name.  A bullet (exhibit 399) was recovered, most likely from Governor Connelly’s stretcher, and identified as coming from that same rifle.  Oswald had access to the Depository because he worked there.

     A prosecutor looking at those facts would conclude that he had enough evidence to present a case to a jury and demand “guilty” verdicts for both the murder of the President and of J. D. Tippit.  A statement from Oswald would have cinched it.  However, when questioned by Dallas police, Oswald admitted nothing.  Then, on Sunday noon with the television cameras rolling, Jack Ruby, a local nightclub owner, acting out of grief stepped forward and shot Lee Harvey Oswald.

     President Kennedy was buried at Arlington National Cemetary on Monday, November 25, and  four days later President Johnson established the Warren Commission to sort out the evidence.

     Ten months later the Warren Commission Report and its associated twenty-six volumes of documentation stated that Oswald was a loner, a self-styled Marxist, and a Castro supporter.  He had lived for thirty-two months in Russia, where the authorities there had regarded him as unstable and had kept him under surveillance.  The commission found no evidence that he acted in concert with anybody or any organization, and all historians since have agreed.

     Since the release of the report a flood of books and speakers have countered with a conspiracy theory: that Lee Harvey Oswald was a patsy and part of a scheme devised by either the CIA, the Russians, or the Mafia, and that there was a conspiracy after to suppress the truth.

     After all, there was evidence: the grassy knoll, a white cloud of smoke, Abraham Zapruder’s film, the single bullet theory, and a guy named Garrison in New Orleans, played by Kevin Costner in Oliver Stone’s movie, JFK.  It all added up to conspiracy.  But the facts add up otherwise.

     Some years later Professor John Kaplan, a professor of law at Stanford, said “that the full truth about the assassination will never be known.  This is partly due to the death of Oswald himself. . . . But in many of a nation’s affairs, as in many of an individual’s, truth can never be known, and even the important questions cannot be settled one way or another beyond a reasonable doubt.”

     Now that statement in many ways is a most upsetting statement, and the American people are upset by it, and rightfully so.  Americans want to know the whole truth.  And yet Kaplan said, “It is a sign of maturity to recognize that even the most important of issues often cannot be resolved to a point of absolute certainty.”  In other words, Americans have had to grow up over this issue and give up their dream of a vast conspiracy that killed their favored President and accept the idea that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

KARL MARX

by William H. Benson

November 7, 2002

     At the age of thirty, Karl Marx fled his native Prussia following the collapse of the 1848 Revolution and migrated to London, where he chose to live the next thirty-five years of his life.

     There, in London he and his wife and six kids lived hand-to-mouth, mainly because Marx considered himself a revolutionary and was too proud to work.  What prevented the family from starving was Freidrich Engels, who out sympathy sent them money.  At the same time Marx suffered from poor physical health but also from even poorer mental health.  Bouts of depression and apathy distracted him from any meaningful work or ambition.

     Many people admired Marx and what they thought was his brilliant work on political and economic theory, but he had few friends.  And those one by one he turned on until they became his fiercest enemies.  Only Engels remained true.  Marx broke off all correspondence with his mother and was hostile to his sisters.  Cordiality was not in his character.  Only around his wife and children could he relax and become witty and playful.

    With Engels in 1848 he had written The Communist Manifesto in which he had set forth his ideas.  He saw history as a series of conflicts between classes–rich, poor, and middle.  He did not approve of the free enterprise system because of the natural way it divided people into classes based upon the wealth individuals had acquired.

     He suggested socialism as a way to end class divisions.  Eliminate private ownership of the means of production–factories, farm land, resources, capital, and labor–and instead allow the state to produce goods, such as food, clothing, shelter, and transportation.

     Marx then went on to make bold predictions.  A classless society would result–a promised heaven on earth.  Socialism is inevitable.  And the working class (the proletariat) will overthrow the middle class (the bourgeoisie).  It is the prophetic quality of Marxist thought that made it initially such a powerful force.  The difficulty came with applying his thoughts to a real world.

     Decades later a Russian named Vladimir I. Lenin adopted Marx’s ideas, created a Russian Communist party called the Bolsheviks, and on November 7, 1917 seized important points throughout Petrograd.  That same evening soldiers and sailors led by the Bolsheviks attacked Czar Nicholas II’s Winter Palace.  By November 15 Lenin also controlled Moscow.

     The problem with Marxist philosophy as applied by Lenin in Russia was its real and actual and terrible outcome–Joseph Stalin.  The cruelest dictator of all known history, he turned on everybody.  Millions faced arrest, imprisonment, and extermination.  All bent to his wishes.  The spy system he instituted fostered terror and suspicion and poisoned the atmosphere.  As if a black cloud had descended across the Russian land, trust between ruler and ruled evaporated. 

     Instead of a classless society, there were two: Stalin in one and everybody else in the other.  Marx’s shiny and modern theory had turned sour and ugly when placed in the hands of the gangster Stalin.  Not exactly what Marx had intended.  And so it was a happy day in March of 1953 when Stalin breathed his last breath.

     In the early 1960’s Nikita Kruschev still held firmly to Marx’s predictions when he taunted, “We will bury you.”  But then in the early 1980’s Ronald Reagan called Russia “an evil empire”, and the Russians winced, knowing he might be right but not wanting to admit it.  Then, in December of 1991 Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin agreed that the U.S.S.R. would cease to exist as of January 1, 1992.  The Russian Communist Party fell apart, and Marxist thought was discredited as a workable and desirable political system for people.

     A Russian observer once remarked, “The reason America has succeeded when Russia did not  is because for years millions of Americans have climbed out of bed every day and gone to work.  They then get paid money which they then spend.  Karl Marx’s theory sounds better, but in practice the Russians preferred not to work when they did not get paid.” 

     Is it not remarkable that Karl Marx, who chose not to work, would devise a theory where the people also chose not to work?     

DUALISM AND VOLTAIRE

by William H. Benson

October 24, 2002

     In 1727 the French authorities banished the philosopher, Voltaire, from his native Catholic France, and so he ventured to Protestant England. What he saw there astonished him, for the British Isles were religiously diverse.  There were Quakers, Presbyterians, Unitarians, Puritans, Separatists, Baptists, and Congregationalists, all living side by side in relative peace.

     And because of this tolerant attitude, truly great people with great ideas had sprung up, such as Francis Bacon and John Locke, and especially Isaac Newton, who Voltaire considered the greatest hero in human history.  Others had conquered the world, but Newton had enlightened it.

     Voltaire’s argument that a nation could flourish, not despite religious diversity, but because of it, was a stinging rebuke to the French belief that having only one religion was a necessity for social order and peace.

     Sadly the world today seems increasingly polarized into two religious and political and cultural camps.  On the one hand the United States represents a powerful and democratic and Christian nation, the best that Western Civilization can produce.  On the other hand, Iraq stands for a weak and yet despotic Middle Eastern and Muslim nation, ruled by Saddam Hussein.

     This polarization into two camps gives way to dualism, that doctrine that the universe is under the dominion of two opposing principles, one of which is good and the other evil.  And, of course, where we happen to live is the “good” and the other camp is “evil”. 

     Last week President Bush invited Congressmen to the White House to witness the signing of Congress’s resolution that authorized the President to use military force to oust Saddam Hussein.  Bush also met last week with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and promised him that the U.S. would protect Israel if the U.S. attacked Iraq.

     In the United Nations last Wednesday speech after speech “called Iraq’s decision last month to allow U.N. inspectors to return an important first step.  Many warned that a new war would add to the suffering of the Iraqi people, possibly engulf the Middle East, and have dire consequences on global stability and the world economy.”

     Meanwhile in Iraq U.S. air forces continue to strike at will at Iraq’s ground defenses, south and north of Baghdad, enforcing the no-fly zones, all preparatory for a full-scale invasion.

     Any political opposition in Congress to stop Bush’s juggernaut for demanding war and Saddam Hussein’s removal rolled over dead a long time ago.

     Only a few brave journalists have dared to defy the President’s demands.  Anna Quindlen in Newsweek wrote that “the march toward battle has never included a detailed explanation by the President of why Iraq must be attacked at this particular moment.  Why did the U.S. manage to live for decades with the dangers of the former Soviet Union and yet cannot practice containment with a far less formidable foe?”

     Charley Reese has gone even further and has declared that the Bush administration has practiced outright deception upon the American people.  “Virtually everything the President and his minions have said about Iraq is distorted to make it appear other than what it is.”

     And then two weeks ago Jerry Falwell appeared on a Sunday night segment of “60 Minutes” and stated that the founder of the Muslim religion, Muhammed, was a terrorist.  That newsclip received a lot of press coverage across the Muslim world and was played and replayed, saying, in effect, “We told you that America hates Islam.”  And where are the religious moderates willing to stand up to America’s religious hateful extremists, like Falwell and Pat Robertson?

     Yes, the world today is deeply divided into two camps–Christian and Muslim, and the bridges spanning the two were dynamited long ago.  No one wants to rebuild them.

     Voltaire said that with one religion you have intolerance and despotism.  Where there are two religions, they will cut each other’s throats.  But where there are a multiple number of religions there is peace and tolerance.  Today in our global community there are two primary world religions, and each side is once again poised and about to begin swinging swords at the other.

THE OTHER SIDE OF 1492

by William H. Benson

October 12, 2002

     On January 1 and 2, 1492 the last of the Muslim officials abandoned Granada and chose permanent exile in North Africa.  All of what is now modern-day Spain was from then on ruled by the Monarchs–Queen Isabella of Castile and King Ferdinand of Aragon.  A sense of euphoria swept through the Iberian peninsula, for after seven centuries of Muslim rule on Iberian soil, the Moors had chosen to leave.  Christianity had triumphed.

     On March 31, 1492 Isabella and Ferdinand decreed that all of the Jews in Spain had three months in which to convert to Christianity or leave Spain.  Called the Edict of Expulsion, it affected some 80,000 practicing Jews.  About 40,000 chose to leave for Portugal, Italy, or North Africa, while the remainder converted and were thereafter called Conversos.

     Hated and accused of secretly practicing their Jewish faith, the Conversos received the full force of the Catholic Monarchs’ agency for discovering the truth–the Spanish Inquistion. The screams of the tortured resounded throughout the Chambers, where new and old methods of inflicting excruciating pain were used; execution was often a blessed relief.  The Inquisition executed more than 5000 Conversos, most in a state of confusion about what religion to believe.

     At the time, Christopher Columbus’s first voyage was almost a non-event.  (Of far greater importance was Vasco da Gama’s voyage around Africa and into the Indian Ocean.  This circumvented the longer and more arduous overland spice trade and was great news in Europe.)  Because Queen Isabella had little to lose, she agreed to finance the voyage, and on October 12, 1492 Columbus landed on a Caribbean Island.

     Over the last decade Columbus’s place in history has been downgraded.  His venture is not considered as innovative as was once believed.  His actions in the Indies remain open to question, especially his treatment of the islands’ natives.  However, he was a man filled with ambition, and aboard a ship he was a superb sailor.  And yet, he failed miserably as a colonial administrator.

     What is not so widely known is that he was also a religious fanatic.  Professor Teofilo Ruiz at UCLA has found that Columbus was motivated by an almost apocalyptic religious fervor.  He collected prophetic sayings, was deeply interested in apocalyptic writings, and may have seen himself and his voyages as ushering in a new age.  When he gazed on the delta of the Orinoco River, he believed that he had discovered the site of an earthly paradise.

     Columbus returned to Spain and presented to Queen Isabella some of the islands’ inhabitants plus some colorful tropical birds.  Isabella was less than impressed, but agreed to finance a second voyage.  And this was of more importance because Columbus took several ships with about 1500 men and set up a colony.

     What happened in the Caribbean is now considered “an ecological and human catastrophe”, for  the Castilians introduced institutions that allowed them to exploit the natives and secure their work in return for the promise of Christianity.  Within one generation, by 1510, disease and overwork virtually had exterminated the islands’ people.  The Spaniards repeated the pattern of conquest.  From the Caribbean they launched an invasion of the Aztecs in central Mexico and the Incas of South America.

     For the Muslims, the Jews, and the Catholic Christians of Spain in 1492, it was an intertwined history, marked by suspicion, animosity, violence, judicially-mandated torture and execution, an Edict of Expulsion, and a move toward a single pure and triumphant religious faith.  But for those natives standing before the Queen of Castile, as well as their families back on the islands, the future appeared bleak, if not ugly.  For they faced annihilation and a program of genocide. 

     The human record is not always one of inevitable progress working its way into a promising future.  More often than not, it is a record of human folly, of misguided actions with unwitting consequences, and of outright human devastation, at times religiously-motivated.  Consider the other side of 1492.