Ron Grossman
It’s only human to ponder the wisdom of trying Donald Trump for a nonviolent offense related to buying a porn star’s silence.
Richard Nixon’s story suggests it is better for the nation to forgive and forget. But that of Confederacy president Jefferson Davis says it is dangerous to let losers tell the tale.
One thing is for sure: Trump has put us on notice he won’t go quietly. He told his followers to protest if he is indicted. His rallying cry evoked images of the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the U.S. Capitol.
That bloody encounter is being investigated by a special counsel appointed by the U.S. attorney general. A Georgia special grand jury may indict Trump. The waiting could go on and on, in a nation divided by the question of whether Trump was a threat or a savior to the republic.
Could President Joe Biden be persuaded to pardon Trump, much as successor Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon after he resigned the presidency? Ford explained that not doing so would have prolonged the national agony.
“After years of bitter controversy and divisive national debate, I have been advised, and I am compelled to conclude, that many months and perhaps more years will have to pass before Richard Nixon could obtain a fair trial by jury,” Ford told the nation in granting Nixon’s pardon.
Nixon reluctantly accepted the pardon, which implied he was guilty, wrote his memoirs and cautiously tiptoed into the limelight.
Davis’ initial reception by his former countrymen was infinitely more hostile. Union soldiers captured him at the end of the Civil War and left him to rot in prison while federal authorities debated what to do with him.
Some wanted him charged as an accomplice of John Wilkes Booth, who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln. Others considered him responsible for the 13,000 Union soldiers who died in the Confederacy’s Andersonville, Georgia, prison.
Then an epidemic of profound war weariness rolled across the North.
“There has been an almost radical change of opinion as to the best and wisest disposition to be made of Jeff. Davis not only in many of the most prominent Republican leaders but also in the loyal public at large since last August,” the Tribune reported in November 1865.
Authorities released Davis in 1867 pending trial on charges of treason.
Frederick Douglass was outraged. “What more could government have done to encourage another treasonable outbreak!” the Black abolitionist wrote.
The trial was quietly shelved, leaving Davis free to spin the story into a “lost cause.” In a two-volume book published in 1881, Davis argued that the Civil War was the North’s fault and the South was simply fighting for its crinoline and plantation way of life.
Enslaved people weren’t abused, Davis believed. To the contrary, “you cannot transform the Negro into anything one-tenth as useful as slavery enables him to be,” he wrote in 1861.
Davis died in 1889, unrepentant and not a citizen of the United States. He refused to ask for a pardon, since that would have required he acknowledge he did something wrong by leading the Southern states’ rebellion.
But the North enabled the narrative of his fabled “lost cause.” It dropped a virtual curtain on the Civil War. Behind that curtain, Jim Crow’s re-subjugation of Black people and countless deaths by lynching commenced.
America didn’t resume discussing racial problems until the nation’s slums exploded in the 1950s and Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. marched for civil rights.
Now imagine Trump’s take on our era, should he get a pass. He would transform his brazen attempt to get Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to throw him 11,780 votes after the 2020 election into this: “It was a perfect phone call.”
Ron Grossman is a Tribune reporter.
