Preemptive Pardons

As Jeffrey Anderson reminds readers in his essay “Unpardonable” (Winter 2024/25), Article II of the U.S. Constitution empowers the president “to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.”

First, it should be obvious that the presidential power to grant pardons ought to include the specific offenses for which the pardons are granted, even if, as Clause 1 of Section 2 elaborates, legal proceedings have not yet taken place. A “preemptive pardon” granted “for any nonviolent offenses…which they may [my italics] have committed” is nothing but blanket immunity, a very different power that, to my knowledge, does not appear in the Constitution. Perhaps Joe Biden’s preemptive pardons should be rescinded and their constitutionality challenged.

Second, the offense must be “against the United States.” Second-degree murder (the crime covered in at least one of Biden’s pardons), for example, is a state—not federal—crime, and beyond the power of presidential pardon.

The supposed precedent of Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon could, in retrospect, be seen to be as invalid as any issued by Biden. Ford’s pardon differs in three respects, however: 1) it was offered not just as a personal reprieve to Nixon himself but also to restore tranquility to a traumatized nation; 2) it acknowledged the “punishment and degradation” already incurred by Nixon’s resignation; and 3) more technically, along with offenses he “may have committed,” the pardon does also cite, if not specifically by name, offenses “which he, Richard Nixon, has [already] committed.”

Stanley Spatz, Hollywood, FL

Dissident Devotion

Gary Saul Morson’s sure-footed tour of Russian dissident literature (“Sublime Courage,” Winter 2024/25) is powerfully stirring. He’s right to nominate Patriot—the late Alexei Navalny’s memoir, recounting the deadly buffoonery he suffered at the hands of what passes for the law in Putin’s Russia—as a new classic of the genre. For American readers, accustomed to the melodramatic autobiographical trauma-mongering typical of celebrities like Meghan Markle, it’s bracing to find an author casually mentioning that, since writing the previous chapter, he has been thrown into the prison system where he will die. This is Russian understatement at its finest.

No review—indeed no book—can mention everything worth mentioning. But one major keystone of Navalny’s resilience that merits further attention is his Christian faith. “I’ve gotten quite into religion (ha ha!),” says the entry for May 2, 2021, a little less than three years before his death. The mordant humor and the tone of wry surprise are typical of Navalny—he found himself suddenly and almost unwillingly converted upon the birth of his daughter. “I am a big fan of science,” he writes, “but I decided at that moment that, on its own, evolution was not enough. There must be more. From a dyed-in-the-wool atheist, I gradually became a religious person.”

Arguably this shock of unexpected belief visited upon a hard-bitten cynic—this faith with a gimlet eye—is another hallmark of the prison memoir genre. Christianity has flourished in post-revolutionary Russia, as it has always done under the bitterest kinds of persecution. It is a faith mercifully free of any soapy illusions about what the human race is capable of. Like Dostoevsky in The House of the Dead, who came to see Christ in his unlovely fellow prisoners, like Solzhenitsyn in the Gulag, who learned that belief was the dividing line between the death and life of the soul, Navalny kept his psyche intact with the rituals of the liturgy.

He carried a laminated card in his pocket, inscribed with “A Prayer to the Archangel”—a tchotchke given to him by another unlikely saint. The receipt of it occasions another wonderful passage: “I felt like going over to the [security] camera, thrusting the icon in front of its lens, and yelling, See, you bastards, I am not alone! But that would not have been very Christian and would have disappointed the archangel in my pocket.”

“Your soul, which formerly was dry, now ripens from suffering,” wrote Solzhenitsyn of the marks dug into the soul by barbed wire. Of all the many themes in this profound literary tradition, the most moving is surely the recurring image of the dumbstruck Christian, his feet planted in the prison yard and his eyes raised to heaven as if to say—“Who, me?”

Anne Langley, Ithaca, NY

Gary Saul Morson replies:

I very much appreciate Anne Langley’s reply to my article. In the West the horrors of 20th-century totalitarianism often led to atheism: how could God have allowed this? But in Russia it has often led to the opposite conclusion: if human beings can do this, surely we must place our hopes not in human nature but in God.

Gershwin and Wodehouse

It was a pleasure to read John McWhorter’s charming review of Ira Gershwin: A Life in Words (“Here To Stay,” Winter 2024/25). I wonder if Mr. McWhorter would place P.G. Wodehouse among the “small guild of lyricists in the first half of the 20th century…who elevated a craft into an art.” I gather that Ira Gershwin was a great admirer of Wodehouse’s way with lyrics and that they were lifelong friends. I have read that Wodehouse began “the process that Ira Gershwin perfected—the fitting of words, mosaic-fashion, to existing tunes.” Is that Mr. McWhorter’s understanding?

Winston Moss, Los Angeles, CA