AMERICA AT LARGE:AS A general rule we'd go to great lengths to avoid putting ourselves in the company of a room full of Republicans, but last April 1st was an exception.
Nearly 10 months have passed since I travelled to Washington that day for the formal announcement that Arizona Senator John McCain and New York Congressman Peter King were introducing a bill in their respective chambers aimed at securing a posthumous pardon for Jack Johnson, the heavyweight champion of the world who had almost a century earlier been hounded out of the country, deprived of his right to earn a living and ultimately imprisoned at the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas.
Even at the time it was plain enough that Johnson’s conviction for violating the Mann Act – which made it a federal crime to transport a woman across state lines for “immoral purposes” – was racially motivated. It was not only a shameful episode in boxing’s history, but a blight on the nation’s history as well.
McCain, who as a Naval Academy midshipman had boxed as a lightweight, has authored the two most significant pieces of boxing legislation enacted into law, and over the past decade has made the Johnson pardon a personal crusade. Several similar resolutions had been introduced, but between Congressional foot-dragging and the enthusiastic intervention of then-White House chief of staff Karl Rove, not one of them had even reached the desk of George W Bush.
“We need to erase this act of racism against a great American citizen,” said McCain that day. “Jack Johnson was prosecuted on trumped-up charges.”
His opponent in the 2008 election had been sworn in just two months earlier. McCain noted at the time that, unlike Bush, “I have great confidence that this president will be more than eager to sign this resolution.”
Before the summer was out H Con Res 214 had been passed by both the Senate and the House, but President Obama, taking a cue from his predecessor, has treated it like a live grenade. Christmas came and went and the Johnson pardon remained unsigned. Although nobody at the White House is saying so, the suspicion is that Obama is doing his level best to avoid what might be perceived in some quarters as a hot-button issue with racial overtones.
Our disappointment over the president’s failure to act was only exacerbated on Tuesday when he welcomed the NBA champions Los Angeles Lakers to the White House for a reception, in the course of which he posed for photo ops with the accused rapist Kobe Bryant and the reality TV bimbo Khloe Kardashian-Odom. (What’s he going to do next? Invite Tiger Woods for a sleep-over in the Lincoln Bedroom?)
In 2003, Bryant was indicted and charged with the rape of a 19-year-old hotel employee in Colorado. When the case came to trial a year later, and it became apparent the victim would be fair game and would have to answer questions about, among other things, her sexual history, she declined to testify and prosecutors were forced to drop the charges. When the victim then pursued a civil case, Bryant’s attorneys brokered a cash arrangement and settled out of court.
Bryant’s guilt or innocence has never been tested in a court, but by any reasonable calculation the evidence against him was somewhat more compelling than in the case against Jack Johnson.
As the star of a TV series called Meet the Kardashians(of which we can say with some pride we've never watched a single second), Khloe had her own tenuous links to the world of sport even before she married Lakers' forward Lamar Odom. Her stepfather is Bruce Jenner, winner of the decathlon gold medal at the 1976 Montreal Games. Her father, the late Robert Kardashian, was, like his daughters, one of those people well-known for being well- known, at least until June 17th, 1994. On that evening, while live shots of police pursuing a white Ford Bronco containing OJ Simpson and his former Buffalo Bills team-mate Al Cowlings through the streets of LA played on the nation's television sets, Robert Kardashian provided a live reading of what seemed to be OJ's suicide note.
(We had our own encounter with Mr Kardashian later that week. A few days before the World Cup final at the Rose Bowl, we were dispatched to the courthouse for the city and county of Los Angeles, where Cowlings was being arraigned on a multitude of charges in connection with the Bronco chase. Kardashian, who hadn’t practised law for more than 20 years, renewed his licence to represent Cowlings that day, and subsequently signed on with Simpson’s defence team.)
So it does make you wonder. If Obama’s spin doctors have deliberately insulated him from controversy with this hands-off policy with regard to Jack Johnson, what on earth can they have been thinking when they let him publicly pose with Kobe Bryant and Khloe Kardashian? In December, a few weeks before the traditional pardoning season, a government lawyer named Ronald R Rogers, in what can hardly have been an innocent slip of the tongue, publicly noted that the Justice Department does not generally recommend pardons for “dead people”. To the best of our knowledge there have been two posthumous presidential pardons. One, by Bill Clinton, involved Henry Flipper, an African American army officer who was court-martialed and convicted on embezzlement charges that were probably racially-motivated in 1882.
The other, granted by Bush the Younger three years ago, was a Christmas-time pardon of Charles Winters, who had been convicted of violating the Neutrality Act when he stole two B-17s and flew them to Israel, which used them to bomb its Arab neighbours in the 1948 war of independence.
This summer will mark the 100th anniversary of Johnson’s 1910 “fight of the century” against Jim Jeffries in Reno, Nevada. A three-day commemoration planned for Reno in July is a “Jack Johnson Pardon Dinner”. We were recently assured the plan now called for Obama to announce the pardon at that event, a process which would be of some benefit to Nevada Senator Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, who will by then be involved in a tough re-election campaign.
But since in recent weeks Reid and Obama have had their own little disagreements, the smart money behind that theory doesn’t look so smart. We’d be tempted to ask the president about it ourselves, but he’s too busy meeting the Kardashians.
