More than a year ago, I thought it would be a good idea to take a look at the subject of presidential pardons. (Little did I know … )
When you decide to study pardons, there are several obvious questions. How many pardons did each president grant? To whom? Why? It turns out that one person found out all the answers—P. S. Ruckman Jr.
For presidents going back to William McKinley, the Department of Justice has the data on pardons on its Web site. As for pardons during the first century or so of American history, however, there’s no information there at all. That’s where Ruckman, a professor of political science at Rock Valley College and an instructor at Northern Illinois University, came in.
Ruckman carved out a distinctive niche. He went to the National Archives, sought out the original records for presidential pardons going back to George Washington, and created a database for all the early pardons. Working alone, Ruckman uncovered the stories of all the pre-McKinley grants of clemency by presidents. “It was extremely valuable,” said Jeffrey Crouch, a professor at American University. “He was the only person I knew who had the fullest picture of what clemency has been over the course of American history.”
In the small community of pardon scholars, citations to Ruckman’s data were ubiquitous. He found out peculiar and interesting things. For example, Rutherford B. Hayes granted clemency more than 1,000 times, including to 24 murderers on death row. James Garfield and William Henry Harrison are the only presidents to have granted no pardons.
By the standards of academics, Ruckman appeared to be a modest eccentric. His name was Peter, but he insisted on being referred to as “P.S.” The professor’s father was Peter Ruckman Sr., a fundamentalist Baptist preacher in Florida, who was famous in religious circles for his insistence that the King James version of the Bible was the only legitimate holy text.
The younger Ruckman was similarly outspoken in his field of expertise, albeit with an awkward personal style. Once, in 2013, Ruckman prevailed on a fellow pardon expert, Daniel Kobil, of Capital University Law School, in Columbus, Ohio, to write him a letter of recommendation for an award from Ruckman’s alma mater, the University of West Florida. In an e-mail thanking Kobil, Ruckman wrote, “I did manage to get some others to help out so you are not out on a limb when, one day, I am busted for drugs, porn, prostitution, child slavery and listening to Kenny G. ‘music.’” (Ruckman was also highly opinionated about music.)
Ruckman was kind of the unofficial mayor of pardon-land. He maintained a Web site on the subject, which linked to news about pardons and clemencies, and he was a frequent e-mailer to other specialists. He spoke often of writing a magnum opus about pardons—it was to be called “Pardon Me, Mr. President: Adventures in Crime, Politics and Mercy”—but as the years passed, the book never appeared.
Still, it wasn’t a particular surprise when about a half-dozen of the leading lights in the field received an e-mail from Ruckman at 4:37 P.M. on February 28, 2018. The professors often heard from Ruckman, but this surprised them. Attached to the e-mail (and several that followed immediately thereafter) were spreadsheets containing Ruckman’s findings about the early presidential pardons. In short, Ruckman had turned over the entirety of his life’s work.
This was odd because Ruckman was generally reluctant to share his underlying data. “It was a strange thing for him to do,” said Mark Osler, a professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law, in Minneapolis. “He was very protective of his work.” Ruckman’s note with the first e-mail said only, “Would want you to have this and use freely.”
Still, the pardon professors mostly paid little attention to Ruckman’s message until a day or two later, when the news reached them of what happened after he sent the e-mail. At some point on the night of that February 28, or in the early-morning hours of March 1, Ruckman shot to death his two sons, Christopher, 14, and Jack, 12, as they slept in their bedroom of the family home in Winnebago County, Illinois. Ruckman then turned the gun on himself.
On the night of the killings, according to the local paper in Illinois, “Ruckman posted 18th century poetry and 19th century art and music — all of which convey feelings of loss, grief, pain, betrayal, destruction and death. At 12:57 a.m. March 1, he wrote, ‘The only thing permanent is change’ along with an image of sheet music for ‘Tod und Verklärung,’ a classical symphonic composition by Richard Strauss about a dying man.”
The pardon scholars sought explanations for the inexplicable. Then 58 years old, Ruckman had gone through a rancorous divorce, but so have millions of others.
Gregory Korte, then a reporter for USA Today, had relied on Ruckman for a series of stories about pardons, and he knew the professor as well as any of his correspondents. “He struck me as smart, hard-working and occasionally moody,” Korte later wrote. “I also know he was proud of his sons.” Ruckman had shared with Korte a YouTube video of one of his sons playing the guitar.
Korte knew that Ruckman favored greater use of the pardon power by presidents. “I got the impression that those views were informed by Christian values of redemption, forgiveness and mercy,” Korte wrote. Ruckman wanted presidents to dispense mercy, but he could not offer it himself, not even to his own sons.
Jeffrey Toobin, a legal analyst and journalist, is the author of many books, including Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism
