Peter Yarrow's Pardon: Jimmy Carter and the Lost Virtue of Absolution

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Peter Yarrow – of Peter, Paul, and Mary – died today at 86. Yarrow holds chief writing credit for “Puff the Magic Dragon.” The song was the first whose words made me cry, and all these years later, it still has the same effect. (Take a representative sample of Americans born between 1955-1969, coax their aging bones into sitting crisscross-applesauce on a shag rug, and hire some earnest buskers to play Puff to them. There will be open weeping from 90% of us. I guarantee it.)

Because #MeToo is still with us, the dead’s sins – particularly if they were sexual – must take pride of place in the departed’s obituary. The most painfully offensive headline belongs to the Forward: In Peter Yarrow’s legacy, an uneasy blend of Jewish values and personal transgressions. (The sentence needs a verb and an actual subject. “We, the desperate-not-to-offend-and-censorious, find in Peter Yarrow’s legacy a blend of Jewish values and personal transgressions that make us – have we mentioned how censorious and morally upright we are? – feel all kinds of queasy and uneasy.”)

It is true that Yarrow was convicted in 1970 for “indecent liberties” committed against a fourteen-year-girl the year before. (The girl was a fan who had knocked on Yarrow’s hotel room door, hoping for an autograph.) He admitted guilt and served three months in jail. He was one of countless male pop stars of his era to cross the line with underage female fans. We could add David Bowie to that same list, or Steven Tyler, or Robert Plant, or just about any of their peers. Then again, Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith didn’t sing folk music that captivated children. Peter, Paul, and Mary were guileless, gentle, and – by all outer appearance – safe and sober. Perhaps that made Yarrow’s “indecent liberty” feel like a greater betrayal.

Jimmy Carter, whose long life we celebrate this week and whose body we will soon commit to the earth, pardoned Peter Yarrow for that misconduct. Carter issued that pardon on January 19, 1981 -- his last full day in office, while the nation was focused on the release of the American hostages held in Iran. No one protested that Jimmy had abused the pardon power. Those who noticed it at all chalked it up to Carter’s deep affection for folk, country and rock music. They also may have noticed that Yarrow himself wrote a heartfelt appeal for a pardon, declaring his own contrition, his willingness to make amends to the girl he’d harmed, and his desire to tell his children that while their daddy had done something wrong, he had also been forgiven.

Many of those who grieve Jimmy Carter most do not mention his pardons when they recount the highlights of his extraordinary career. They would rather speak of the houses he built, the diseases he eradicated, the elections he oversaw, the sometimes-rogue diplomacy he conducted, and the denunciations of Israel he issued with ever-greater vehemence. The pardon of a sexual abuser, like his earlier decision to restore full citizenship rights to Confederate President Jefferson Davis? My left-wing friends sigh.

“Carter had the defects of his virtues,” those pals might say. “He went too easy on ol’ Jeff Davis, and he went too easy on ‘pedo’ Pete Yarrow.” If your Christianity leads you to condemn the right wars, and it leads you to live simply and humbly – why, you’re a splendid moral exemplar. If you believe your Christianity should lead you to restore the rights of rebels, and pardon a molester? Why, you’re a gullible softy, ignorant of both entrenched racism and the true horrors of sexual abuse.

Jimmy Carter was a complicated man. He was not a mere one-dimensional saint, nor was he merely a peevish incompetent who rose wildly above his station. He was a president who took his faith seriously, and who understood that our frailties and our passions do not define us. He extended posthumous forgiveness to those who took up arms against the republic, and he extended pardon in this life to an immensely talented but foolish man who crossed a line he should never have crossed. In the 1970s, that kind of charity and humanity was, like wide lapels, en vogue. In the 2020s, our lapels are thinner, and so too is our generosity towards those who fall short of the mark. It is a pity that our empathy for the imperfect is so straitened, but the historian comforts himself with the certainty that the wheel will turn again.

In his message restoring President Davis’ full rights, Carter proclaimed:

Our Nation needs to clear away the guilts and enmities and recriminations of the past, to finally set at rest the divisions that threatened to destroy our Nation and to discredit the principles on which it was founded. Our people need to turn their attention to the important tasks that still lie before us in establishing those principles for all people.

The bold is mine. It is a timeless message, and it applies to what happened at Fort Sumter in 1861, and it applies to what happened in a New York hotel room in 1969, and you may not like to hear that, but it is so, nonetheless. And Jimmy Carter knew it.

Thank you, Peter. Thank you, Jimmy.