Bush and the Libby Pardon

As the curtain closes on the presidency of George W. Bush, the one loose end dangling is the pardon of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. In 2007 Mr. Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, was convicted for perjury and obstruction of justice.

AP

I. Lewis Libby

Let us be clear about the Bush legacy. After September 11, not a year into Mr. Bush's term, his became a war presidency. George Bush's place in history will turn on what becomes of Iraq and al Qaeda. If Iraq fails, history will mark down the Bush presidency. If by fits and starts Iraq grows into the Middle East's first large, functioning democratic republic, a more likely result, the Bush presidency will be one of the great building blocks of the new century's political order.

In his final press conference Monday, Mr. Bush described the disarray after the airliners slammed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field: "People were hauled in front of Congress and members of Congress were asking questions about, 'How come you didn't know this that or the other?'"

The Bush team righted itself and assembled a tough response to the attack: the assault on the terror strongholds of Afghanistan and the Patriot Act. Then, in astonishingly short order, the political unity of 9/11 dissolved. Mr. Bush and his team found themselves embattled by the opposition party, much of the Beltway press corps and a leaking national-security bureaucracy. The goal of the domestic opposition was to thwart the Bush antiterror policy, or take down the people shaping it.

Scooter Libby is the most notable casualty of the domestic war that ran alongside the global war on terror.

In my many years of writing about Washington's politics, I thought that the Plame affair, its long, mad hunt for the leaker, and then the Libby trial, was one of the most fantastic, preposterous events I've ever watched.

A Washington press corps for whom leaks have become the oxygen of life spent three years writing about who leaked Valerie Plame's name to Robert Novak. Of all the serious and genuinely damaging leaks during the Bush presidency, this was the only one the press chased. Why? This one was different. This leaker was thought to be a top Bush aide, perhaps even the vice president. Once named, this aide could be demolished by a prosecution.

That proved true. Scooter Libby was demolished.

Nominally the legal case was about the wheels of a prosecution in motion. Indeed by its end the details of the case against Mr. Libby had burned down to a travesty. But make no mistake. The effort that went into keeping the Plame affair alive was about discrediting the war effort in Iraq and the Bush antiterror program.

To the extent the Libby prosecution distracted the White House staff, consumed its working hours, eroded personal savings on lawyers, and inevitably pitted the president's aides against each other, the strategy worked. The domestic opposition didn't deter George Bush. But like any tireless pack, it hurt him and it hurt his goals.

I often wonder what the Bush presidency would have been like without 9/11. I wonder as well about the unhinged antipathy that grew against this president. For his own part, Mr. Bush clearly decided that his obligation was to exercise the powers of the presidency with as much will and wisdom as he could muster after that murderous attack.

The president's pardon authority is embedded with clarity in our spare Constitution. Alexander Hamilton argued it should reside with "a single man of prudence and good sense."

I think there is a good legal argument for the Libby pardon, but others have done that well, making a credible case that he in fact is innocent. But there is another dimension to this that deserves consideration.

Washington is on thin ice. The American people could not be more disgusted than they are with the tenor and conduct of politics in Washington. The long Libby case was more muck. When the vice president's chief of staff was convicted, financially ruined and professionally destroyed on the basis of a conversation, my first thought was, this is going to make it hard to attract the best people to serve in Washington.

Why wouldn't the spouse of anyone offered a similar job argue that if the system can let a Scooter Libby wash over the falls for this, the price is just too high. "You aren't going to put our family's future at this much risk. We won't serve. We can't."

Yes, a pardon would set the anti-Bush chorus to howling. So? They've done plenty to turn the city into a viper's nest.

George Washington, in his farewell address, warned against the destructive force of party rancor. Something like that is at stake here again. Serious people in our politics, Republicans and Democrats, would understand that a Bush pardon of Scooter Libby is mainly about closing some of the worst wounds of these long war years. And about giving the nation a chance at refinding that lost unity.

These were hard years, and required hard decisions. It's time to let Scooter Libby get back to work. Like the rest of Washington.

Write to henninger@wsj.com

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