A prominent Reform rabbi said today that President Ford’s full and unqualified pardon to former President Nixon “violates our sensibilities and is an affront to our sense of justice.” Rabbi Alexander Schindler, president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, predicted in a statement issued here that “Mr. Ford’s premature act will serve only to ignite further controversy and to destroy that sense of unity which his ascendancy to office promised and which we so desperately needed.”
Rabbi Schindler added: “This is not to say that we desire vengeance. No one wants to see the former President languish in jail. We would have accepted this pardon, gladly, fully, had it been preferred after the legal processes had reached their conclusion and once the record was established for all to see.”
Rabbi Schindler expressed concern over how Americans generally and “especially our youth” would react to the pardon. “What are we to tell them? Dozens of the (former) President’s men are in jail or awaiting sentence, their lives in ruin, while the man in whose behalf they acted is held immune,” Rabbi Schindler said.
He also asked “How are we to equate this act of mercy with that qualified and most restrictive amnesty which President Ford proposes to offer those of America’s sons whose only crime was to listen to the still small voice within them?” Rabbi Schindler foresaw “only a deepening of the cynicism of our citizenry and their conviction that there are indeed two laws of the land–one for the lowly and one for those who rule on high.”
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