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THE SCIENCE OF GRACE #1
THERE’S ONLY ONE PRESIDENT
Time was running out for Bob . . . and he knew it. There was only one person who could keep him out of prison, and he wasn’t sure he could get through to his elusive benefactor.
He started off by calling Larry Higby, his former employee – just to feel him out. What was the mood there in the EOB, or Old Executive Office Building? And, lowering his voice, he dropped just the first hint. A presidential pardon would sure be nice. Of course, Higby didn’t have any authority to hand one out, even to his boss.
But Bob Haldeman was just getting started. Tuesday, August 6, he placed a phone call to Alexander Haig, Richard Nixon’s new chief of staff. Of course, that had been Haldeman’s old job – and the crew-cut ex-employee knew that Haig had Nixon’s ear just as he had once had. Was a pardon possible, he wanted to know. Haig thought that politically it was a bad idea but promised to pursue it.
Wednesday, the 7th, the clock was really ticking now. Haldeman got with his lawyer, Frank Strickler. The end was surely in sight, according to all the networks and the mood on Capitol Hill. If Haldeman was going to get a pardon, he’d better get it in writing right this minute. The document got over to Haig at the White House, and he ran it by Barry Goldwater, the conservative senator from Arizona. “I don’t think it would be wise,” Goldwater said slowly. “But [Nixon] has the power, and if that is the cost, so be it.” By now Goldwater was so anxious to get Nixon out of the White House, he was willing to sign off on almost any deal.
So Haig, now really confused, got together with Leonard Garment, one of Nixon’s personal lawyers. Could Nixon give his old friend a pardon? Was it possible, here in these final moments of Watergate, for the President to hand out “Get out of jail free” cards to his entire team of co-conspirators? And Garment came completely unglued. No way, he said. Absolutely no way. Quoting from the classic Woodward/Bernstein book, The Final Days:
“Totally out of the question. It would be grotesque. Up to this point, [Nixon] has, oddly enough, worked within the system, even though it is undoing him. Pardons would be outside the system. It would be saying to hell with the system, with justice. It would bring the roof down.”
Garment was so mad he could feel his entire body flushing red. “It would be the single most devastating thing that could be contemplated.”
And you know, it finally came down to Thursday afternoon, August 8, 1974. The very day Nixon went on television to resign . . . and Bob Haldeman was still trying to get through the White House switchboard and pull strings. At 4:18 that afternoon, he placed a call to the Oval Office, and was headed off at the pass. Haig wouldn’t let the call go through. Later that night, after the televised speech to a watching, shellshocked nation, as Nixon was back in the White House residence with his family, stricken with grief, Haldeman called again, still desperate for a last-minute, almost last-SECOND pardon.
The call was rejected, and Bob Haldeman, former aide to the world’s most powerful political leader, quietly accepted his fate and went to a minimum-security prison where he served an 18-month jail term for his crimes.
Well, friend, it’s hard to believe that this tangled web was spun a good thirty years ago. And there are a lot of spiritual lessons we’ve learned over the years from that nine-letter word “Watergate.” As we begin an extended radio study we’re entitling THE SCIENCE OF GRACE, this desperate Bob Haldeman quest for a pardon comes into full view for sure. Because here was a man who desired a clean slate. Forgiveness. He wished above all things that his guilt should not be counted against him, that he should receive unmerited favor. Put bluntly, he didn’t want to go to prison! He deserved to; his deeds demanded that he be locked up. But he didn’t want to go. And so he made the phone calls; he wrote out on a yellow legal pad his “case” for clemency; he marshaled his arguments. Nothing would have made him happier than to get a friendly dose of grace.
But the reason we kick off our radio adventure with this story is this: there was only one place Haldeman could get grace: from President Richard Nixon. Only the Chief Executive could hand it out.
The President’s lawyers couldn’t do it. Haldeman’s aide, Larry Higby, certainly had no “standing” to give away a pardon. Haig had zero authority on constitutional grounds. Vice President Ford couldn’t do it. Oh, 24 hours later, when he was sworn in, THEN he had the Presidential pen in his hand. But here on August 8, there wasn’t any purpose to calling Ford. Only Nixon enjoyed the privilege, the constitutional clout, provided for in Article II, Section Two. With a simple signature, Richard M. Nixon – and only Richard M. Nixon – had the power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States.
Not long ago, some of us here at the Voice of Prophecy were just blown away by a great journal that came into our lives like a beacon of warm light. It was a special edition of the Adventist Review, official weekly journal in my denomination, prepared as a “Week of Prayer” series of readings for 2003. And the magazine’s theme was this: “Overflowing Grace.” It contained eight awesome, life-altering articles, all bathed in grace, for the blessing of the entire church. And for these next few weeks, I’d like to invite you to look through our church windows a bit and just let God’s grace nurture and cleanse you as well as we study this most magnificent of heaven’s gifts together.
The lead article, “Meaningful Grace,” written by our “General Conference” President, Jan Paulsen, makes a powerful point immediately. Four words: “Grace is from God.” Simple as that. If a man or woman needs grace, needs forgiveness and undeserved love, then God is who and what they truly need. Because God is the provider of grace. It is His thing, His creation, His invention, His attribute, His character, His purpose.
Notice how Paul begins his letter to his Christian friends in Ephesus:
“Grace and peace to you FROM GOD our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.”
Six chapters later, at the close of this eloquent letter, he finishes by wishing his friends peace, and love, and faith, and grace – again “from God.” In the seventh verse of chapter two, Paul informs us that:
“. . . In the coming age [God] might show the incomparable riches of HIS GRACE, expressed in HIS kindness to us in Christ Jesus.”
Now, friend, let’s think about this a little bit. Haldeman could only get a pardon from one place: the man sitting behind the desk in the Oval Office. Only the President could write out forgiveness on a piece of paper and have it mean anything.
What about with us? Yes, there is a way where you and I express grace and forgiveness to one another. We agree to overlook some things. We shake hands and tell each other that such-and-such misdeed is forgiven. And we should do that; that is a biblical thing. But the grace we share among ourselves, sweet as it is, is really nothing more than an agreed-upon attitude. It’s a kind of good mind game. But there is nothing cosmically LEGAL about it. In terms of lasting effects, of punishment, of “standing” in heaven’s courtrooms, our shared expressions of forgiveness among ourselves are really just Christian courtesies.
But when a man or woman comes to God, to the source and author and provider of grace, something very real happens. Your sins truly are washed away. They are gone. They are no more. People within the faith, standing in the mighty ocean of this grace, like to say: “It is as though you had never sinned.”
It’s interesting that when President Gerald Ford decided to pardon his predecessor, just about a month after Haldeman’s futile search for absolution, he used this expression:
“Only I, as President, have the constitutional power TO FIRMLY SHUT AND SEAL THIS BOOK.”
And as of that moment on Sunday, September 8, 1974, something absolutely real happened in America. The heavy door of constitutional power and authority was slammed shut. Nothing could open it. The bulwark of forgiveness was as strong as America itself, because, friend, there is nothing as mighty here in the United States as our constitution. Presidents and armies and entire populations bow before it. And just one man, the man with the power of the presidential seal, was able to forgive in a way that gave a beaten and broken sinner named Richard Nixon absolute assurance that he would never go to jail or be punished for his sins.
Interestingly, as Ford was doing research for this wrenching, difficult executive decision, lawyer Benton Becker dug out a 1833 statement from Chief Justice Marshall, calling a presidential pardon “AN ACT OF GRACE . . . which exempts the individual on whom it is bestowed, from the punishment the law inflicts for a crime he has committed.”
So friend, if you and I are in need of an act of grace, and we want grace that has some reality behind it, all of heaven’s cosmic authority – then there’s only one place we can get it. The river of grace only flows from one throne.
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