Fathers Playing Catch With Sons
Well, what would you do?
When President Biden decided to grant a broad immunity to his son Hunter after repeatedly saying he would not, his emotional statement claimed that “raw politics” had infected the legal process. Two weeks before the younger Biden was due to be sentenced for firearms and tax offences, he received a “full and unconditional pardon” as his father heads into the final phase of his time in office. The move was widely attacked and left disappointed Democrats scrambling for a response.
David French said at the New York Times that “Biden’s inability to separate his personal feelings as a father from his moral and constitutional obligations as a president might be understandable on a human basis, but it’s indefensible as a moral and political matter.”
French went on:
“The pardon is far more wrong than it is politically stupid. Give [incoming President] Trump five minutes, and he’ll say or do something that knocks this pardon off the front page. People will forget the pardon soon enough. But the nation needs integrity, and Biden’s dishonesty contributes to the sense that there isn’t really that much difference between Trump and his opponents.”
Tom Nichols at The Atlantic called Biden’s decision a “strategic blunder that will haunt Democrats as they head into the first years of another Trump administration.”
“The reality, of course, is that Trump’s malevolent and trollish pardoning of various cranks and cronies is not in the same universe as an anguished father pardoning his son, but President Biden has now ensured that no one will really care much about the difference.”
Bill Kristol at The Bulwark agreed:
“It’s by no means clear Hunter Biden deserves a pardon on the merits. It’s altogether clear that President Biden promised not to pardon his son. And it’s unfortunately clear that this is a very bad time to indulge in a pardon that gives political ammunition to an incoming administration determined not to make exceptions to the rule of law but to shred it wholesale.”
And that point can’t be overstated. Biden effectively kicked away the cornerstone of the whole “no-one is above the law” argument. It would hardly be surprising now, for example, for the incoming President to feel he has cover – not that he needed it – to announce some form of pardon for those convicted on charges related to Jan 6, perhaps even during his inaugural address. There has also been renewed talk of a pardon for Edward Snowden.
Whatever happened was always going to be a win-win for Trump. A pardon would allow Biden’s political opponents to extrapolate whatever they wanted into his motivation, while the incumbent President’s hypocrisy, as Eric Lutz wrote at Vanity Fair, “contradicted his values and reinforced the right’s cynical theory of power.”
But against all that, of course, once you’re a father, you’re never not one.
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Donald Hall, baseball’s own poet laureate, alludes in his famous collection of essays to how love and respect for the game is passed from one generation to the next and by extension an understanding of how the world works.
Growing up outside the US, I didn’t play catch with my father. Rather, we bonded over football; or as he would never, ever call it, “soccer”.
Since I first came to the US in 1982, my friends filled in the father-figure role when it came to teaching me how to appreciate baseball, a game I became completely smitten with. I passed that exquisite combination of love and constant, repeated disappointment (at least until 2016) down to my own son.
Now, as my 88-year-old father sits in his nursing home wrestling with his worsening dementia and eyesight, one of the roads I try to use to reach him is through football coverage on the newspaper back pages, in the hope it triggers some brief memory we can share.
Some days Dad recognises me when I visit, other days he doesn’t. Every day, he asks about my mother, who passed away five years ago. He doesn’t remember enough about me or my life to ask anything beyond “Is everything ok with you?” But the relief on his face when I tell him it is makes it worth any small deception.
Professor Randall Horton wrote earlier this year, “Sometimes the prodigal son does return – and as a better person, a better human. But just like in the story of the prodigal son, we need the arms of a loving father to welcome us back.”
Hunter had fallen. Joe caught him.
He did it knowing it would damage his reputation and his legacy, and knowing it would be seen as deliberately avoiding accountability and undermining the rule of law, something he had apparently revered his entire professional life.
Because he could doesn’t mean he should; but for a man who had more tragedy in his life than any of us deserve, knowing no-one else could spare his son and not doing it would have destroyed him.
So.. what would you do?
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