New York, August 22—The American Bar Association has voted unanimously that no bill of immunity should be passed for the exclusive protection of Richard Nixon. One could hardly have expected anything else, save possibly, under the professionally pressing circumstances of the past few years, a motion to recommend a law limiting the number of lawyers that can be sent to jail in any single year.
Obviously the Nixon problem is not, at this stage, a lawyer’s problem. And anything that approaches an attempt to codify a solution to the Nixon problem has the effect of retarding a solution to the Nixon problem. The whole idea of executive clemency is that the law should be transcended. You cannot, by logical definition, pass a law to transcend a law. What is required is that an individual should go out on a limb and say: to suggest that “Nixon has suffered enough” is hugely to underrate what has happened to him. His mortification is a continuing punishment. The probabilities are that he will go to his deathbed an unhappy man. To put him behind bars, under the circumstances, is not to “punish” him more, it is to achieve formalistic juridical satisfaction at the expense of acquiring for the country the reputation for a finicky vindictiveness that does us discredit.
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