On Bill Clinton’s last-minute pardon of fugitive Jewish billionaire Marc Rich

pp. 202-203:

Walter Reich, a psychiatrist and professor of international affairs, ethics and human behavior at George Washington University, was director of the Holocaust Memorial Museum from 1995 to 1998. Reich saw the Rich pardon through his own lens. He thought the pardon touched “directly on some of the most incendiary stereotypes about Jews.”

Reich was alarmed that Ehud Barak had lobbied Bill Clinton to pardon one of the Justice Department’s most-wanted fugitives. Rabbi Irving Greenburg, whom Clinton appointed to chair the board of the Holocaust Museum, had urged the president to “perform one of the most God-like actions that anyone can ever do.”

It was, Reich wrote, “in a way, as if the 6 million murdered Jews were beseeching the president, through their official spokesman, Greenburg, to pardon Rich…. This exploitation of the Holocaust in support of a billionaire on the lam is a grave cheapening of Holocaust memory and a devaluation of its moral force.”

Website note: Abraham Foxman, wealthy and controversial chief of the Anti Defamation League, likes to refer to himself as a “Holocaust survivor.” As a biography on this website shows, he was not even born when Hitler invaded his native Poland, and he was looked after by Polish Catholics throughout the war; his parents also “survived”. Author, “Never Again? The Threat of the New Anti-Semitism,” foreword by Elie Wiesel ($24.95, 304 pages).

Reich was alarmed because all of this “plays into the oldest and most damaging stereotypes and canards, and it is likely to give aid and comfort to the worst varieties of anti-Semitism… the canard of the Jewish connection with money and power that’s easily evoked in the public imagination.” Reich found it ironic that one of those writing on behalf of Rich was Abraham Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League, “which is supposed to fight anti-Semitism, not provide fodder for it.” ¹³ In late March [2001], Abe Foxman [see box on left] admitted he had erred in writing a letter of support for Marc Rich.

Conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer condemned the Clinton pardons precisely because the power he had abused was so unique and absolute. “The pardon power is special,” he wrote. “The American people feel it. Bill Clinton, oblivious as he was to the reverence due every other power of his office, from the Lincoln bedroom to the Oval Office, was supremely oblivious to the sacredness of this one.” Because the pardon power is God-like, Krauthammer concluded. “It was not bad judgment. It was sacrilege.” ¹⁴

Notes: 

13. Walter Reich, “Pardons Jeopardize Good Name of Jewish People,” Houston Chronicle, March 1, 2001, p. A27.14. Charles Krauthammer, “The Unpardonable Offense,” Washington Post, March 2, 2001, p. A25.