Bernstein on Pardons

Carl Bernstein (Opinion, Jan. 10) attacked the wrong pardon. It was not Richard Nixon’s Watergate crimes that fathered the recent constitutional criminality--it was Gerald Ford’s pardon.

Watergate was a moral watershed in the life of the country. Instead of Nixon being impeached and possibly imprisoned, a great constitutional crime went unpunished, and the most important symbolic criminal escaped scot-free. Instead of spending his remaining years in well-deserved disgrace, as a living example and warning to subsequent administrations, Nixon is now a grand old man of American politics.

Bernstein wrote that “men and women . . . recognized in Richard M. Nixon’s behavior a grave threat to the U.S. constitutional system”--but the grievous failure of the nation to turn that recognition into punishment created the climate for the subsequent Reagan/Bush wrongdoing--and led inevitably to the recent pardons.

Now as then we hear, “Let us put this behind us.” The crime of Watergate was not put behind anything other than a shabby pardon, and its odor stinks in our nostrils to this day.

FRANCIS MEGAHY

Los Angeles