Amnesty

PRESIDENT FORD should have granted unconditional amnesty to draft evaders and deserters. Since he won't, Congress should. Everyone should support the activities of groups like Cambridge's recently organized Students for Amnesty.

We take this position despite the weakness or irrelevance of some comparisons and arguments frequently advanced as reasons for amnesty. For example, when it seemed as though Congress or later Ford might pardon Richard Nixon and repatriate America's exiles in some sort of package deal, a number of commentators stressed similarities between the lawbreakers of the Vietnam and Watergate years. Both groups of people--these commentators explained--broke laws in defense of what they believed to be higher moral or national interests.

There are several problems with this comparison--most importantly, that the exiles were right and Nixon was wrong. So while Nixon's pardon certainly contrasts oddly with the nearly meaningless conditional amnesty extended the exiles, stressing that contrast too much can lead to obscuring issues it should clarify. Similarly, proponents of amnesty may have spent too much time defending the exiles from the American Legion's charges of cowardice--charges that are not just false but also beside the point. Even if all the exiles had deserted just because they were scared, they would still merit amnesty: if someone orders you to kill innocent people, it may be more honorable to refuse because you disapprove of killing than because you're afraid you might be hurt--but you don't deserve punishment for refusing in either case.

The exiles are less injured victims of the high government officials who sent more dutiful and equally well-meaning American boys to their deaths, who used them to kill equally innocent Vietnamese boys and girls and to destroy large parts of Indochina, and who are now supplying the wherewithal for the destruction of much of the rest. Apart from their right to live in peace in their own country, the country needs the exiles--to help stop these men, the Kissingers and Fords, who continue to defend subversion of a people's government in Chile and implore Congress for more money to attack a people's government in Vietnam.

"Healing the nation's wounds" seems to be the great slogan of the highly-touted "post-Watergate era." The events of the last few weeks--the pardon of Nixon, the refusal of amnesty, Ford's defense of the CIA in Chile and appeals for aid to Thieu--show how selectively President Ford means this policy. But even at its best it wouldn't be enough. A patient with a malignant tumor doesn't worry first about wounds made by the surgeon's knife: those wounds will heal by themselves, when the tumor is gone. The slogans of the pre-Watergate era are still good enough for us, though they've taken on new shades of meaning: Bring the boys home, and End the war now.