WASHINGTON — Gerald Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon incensed the nation and may have cost him the White House.
Before Watergate drove him from office, Nixon came under fire for commuting Teamster President Jimmy Hoffa's 13-year prison sentence for jury tampering, pension fraud and conspiracy.
Even Abraham Lincoln, one of the nation's most respected and beloved presidents, ran into trouble with the presidential pardon. In 1863, Lincoln infuriated the North when he offered amnesty to Confederate soldiers who had fought in the Civil War.
For all of the public outrage, congressional hearings and criminal investigations into Bill Clinton's pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich, the former president is hardly the first chief executive to invite contempt for exercising his constitutional power to pardon.
Most such flaps eventually fade from the public consciousness, and some historians predict the uproar over Clinton's pardons will eventually blow over as well.
If anything, the current controversy will probably be remembered only in the context of other scandals that shadowed Clinton during his White House years, said Harold Krent, professor and associate dean of the Chicago-Kent College of Law.
"People can say it is more of the same, but I don't think it is the defining scandal of his administration," Krent said.
The president's pardon powers are found in Article 2 of the U.S. Constitution, which gives the commander in chief broad authority to grant pardons and reprieves for offenses against the United States. Pardons can be granted to an individual or to large groups of people in the form of amnesty.
The controversy over presidential pardons goes back to the beginnings of the presidency.
George Washington raised eyebrows when, in his last official act in 1795, he pardoned ringleaders of the Whiskey Rebellion, an uprising over an excise tax on distilled spirits.
Benjamin Harrison's pardon of Mormons convicted of polygamy was seen as scandalous by many. Warren Harding's pardon of Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs stirred public outrage.
Andrew Johnson followed Lincoln's lead and also granted clemency to Confederate soldiers. Johnson went a step further and pardoned confederate President Jefferson Davis, prompting a huge outcry from the North.
"Almost everyone in the North had a brother, son or husband who had fought, and a lot of them had not come home," said Andrew Busch, a presidential historian at the University of Denver. "There was a lot of raw anger."
Johnson's pardon of Davis caused more public outrage than Clinton's pardon of Rich, Busch said. Though misuse of pardon powers was not one of the charges brought against him, it is widely believed the pardons were one of the factors that led to Johnson's impeachment by Congress.
"In general, they thought he was too soft on the Confederacy, and the pardons were a part of that," Busch said.
Ford's pardon of Nixon for crimes that may have been committed during the Watergate scandal is probably the best-known modern-day use of the presidential pardon.
Ford believed his actions were necessary to end what he called a "long national nightmare," but the pardon itself became a political nightmare that would haunt Ford through the remainder of his White House term. Two years later, he was defeated by Jimmy Carter.
Carter, too, found himself mired in controversy when he granted amnesty to draft dodgers from the Vietnam War.
President George H.W. Bush caused a stir when he pardoned former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and other figures in the Iran-Contra scandal on Christmas Eve in 1992.
Critics charged that the pardons may have provided cover for Bush and kept his own possible involvement in Iran-Contra from becoming public.
There is one significant difference between the past controversies and the current flap about Clinton: Other presidents cited a need to heal national wounds or some other compelling public interest as the reason for granting questionable pardons.
Clinton has been unable to make such a case for his pardon of Rich, who is under indictment in New York for income tax evasion, fraud and participating in illegal oil deals with Iran.
"There just wasn't any kind of understandable reason for giving him a pardon," Krent said. "It seems so unconnected to any kind of plausible public purpose."