I Come Not To Praise Jerry, But To Bury Him Once And For All
Don’t include me in the pantheon of mourners for the original enable of the rise of American corporofascism. Jerry Ford, while probably a most-decent man on a personal level, was extremely malleable through subtle persuasion. He was putty in the hands of Nixon aides Rumsfeld and Cheney (these names sound familiar?). They are the ones who are attributed with getting Ford to see the “wisdom” of pardoning Nixon before any serious investigation into the Watergate activities could begin.
But Ford won’t be remembered for his defective deliberative abilities as much as he will for his slapstick physicality:
Ford’s Image Belied His Reality
By John J. Miller, National Review Online
12/27/2006
Somehow, the only president who ever tackled a Heisman Trophy winner gained the reputation of a lubber.
Ford couldn’t get away from the teasing about his clumsiness. On a visit to Austria, Ford tripped down the steps of Air Force One — to the chuckles and clicks of a press corps that, in the aftermath of Watergate, was no longer interested in protecting the image of the president. He fell down on skis. He bumped his head while getting off a helicopter. His stray golf balls became the stuff of legend.
“It’s not hard to find Jerry Ford on a golf course,” quipped Bob Hope. “You just follow the wounded.”
The jokes kept coming: Have you heard about the Jerry Ford doll? Wind it up and it lurches into something. The only thing between Vice President Nelson Rockefeller and the Oval Office, it was said, is a banana peel.
Other comedians piled on. Saturday Night Live’s Chevy Chase lampooned Ford as the president who couldn’t stay on his feet.
And yet, somehow, Jerry Ford tended to land on his two left feet anyway while the nation crashed.
Ford: the accidental president
By DARLENE SUPERVILLE, Associated Press Writer<
12/28/2006
Gerald R. Ford was a man of limited ambition who, through bizarre circumstances never before experienced by the country, achieved an office that others win through the greatest determination and calculation.
Charles O. Jones, a political scholar at the Brookings Institution, said Ford “truly was an accidental president and he ought to be judged that way.” Ford, he said, had the least political capital of almost any president because he wasn’t elected. “He had to come in entirely depending upon the difference of himself and Nixon,” Jones said Wednesday [12/26/06].
Ford wanted only to become speaker of the House. Ford was comfortable in the House, representing a Michigan congressional district for 25 years, rising to Republican leader and working toward his dream of one day running the chamber, when President Nixon called. Ford wasn’t Nixon’s first choice, but the president agreed that the amiable Republican would be the easiest to win confirmation by both houses of Congress.
Yet eight months later, the scenario got even stranger. The scandal of Watergate drove Nixon to become the only president to resign.
What little capital Ford did have was quickly spent when, just a month after taking office, he granted Nixon a federal pardon for all crimes committed as president — further angering the country. “It wasn’t handled well,” Erwin Hargrove, who taught political science at Vanderbilt University, said Wednesday. “He could have prepared the path for a pardon. He did it too abruptly.”
Many believe the pardon contributed to Ford’s loss to Democrat Jimmy Carter in 1976.
It certainly affected my vote! I wasn’t too fond of Jimmy Carter in 1976. In fact, my impression of him and his platform made me consider voting for Ford, even up to the final days prior to the election. But Ford’s pardon of Nixon was the deciding factor for me, even those my negative feelings about Carter were realized, causing me to renounce my Democratic registration in favor of non-partidan or third-party identities ever since.
But I was discussing Ford and the Pardon. I remember watching Jerry Ford present his case to the American people as to why he chose to act as a unitary executive long before that loaded term became popular:
Ford pardon sealed Watergate shut
By LARRY MARGASAK, Associated Press
Dec 27, 2006
On a September Sunday in 1974, President Gerald Ford told the nation it was time to “shut and seal this book” of Watergate by pardoning his predecessor, Richard Nixon.
He said his was a solitary decision.
“There are no historic or legal precedents to which I can turn in this matter, none that precisely fit the circumstances of a private citizen who has resigned the presidency of the United States,” he said. The accusations of Nixon’s Watergate misdeeds “hang like a sword over our former president’s head, threatening his health,” Ford said.
“Who gives a damn about his health after what he almost did to our nation!” I yelled at the television. Ford had a ready answer for my protest: His primary concern was FOR the nation:
“My conscience tells me clearly and certainly that I cannot prolong the bad dreams that continue to reopen a chapter that is closed,” he said. “My conscience tells me that only I, as president, have the constitutional power to firmly shut and seal this book.”
Just WHERE have we heard this recently? At least Ford didn’t claim that God chose this decision for him. No one back then would have believed it.
Nixon stood accused, if unindicted, of serious crimes that would take years to investigate. A grand jury had voted 19-0 to name him an unindicted coconspirator in the cover-up of White House involvement in the 1972 break-in at Democratic headquarters in the Watergate office building. Even the staunchly conservative Chicago Tribune eventually came out in favor of an investigation into the activities of the Committee to Re-Elect the President, properly known as “CREEP”. This was Nixon’s Watergate Waterloo. He said something to the effect of, “If the Trib’s against me, then all is lost.”
But at the time, Nixon (as Dubya today) still personally saw nothing to indicate that any of these accusations were justified:
Nixon held up the process when he balked at Ford’s request for a public statement of contrition. The final draft of Nixon’s statement bore no acknowledgment of guilt.
But eventually, perhaps because he was able to leave behind the location of his insane reach for absolute power, he later came to see that his accusers were vindicated:
“That the way I tried to deal with Watergate was the wrong way is a burden I shall bear for every day of the life that is left to me,” Nixon wrote.
To the end of his days, Jerry Ford saw no need to exonerate himself of the accusations of political collusion to suppress the truth of Nixon’s crimes:
Ford wrote in his book. “I felt very certain that I had made the right decision, and I was confident that I could now proceed without being harassed by Nixon or his problems any more.”
And wasn’t he wrong about that idea! Former Rep. Bill Archer, D-Texas, who served as chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, said Ford would have won the 1976 presidential election against Jimmy Carter had Ford not pardoned Nixon in September 1974.
But Ford had the ready explanation for his surety:
“If I had not granted a pardon, Mr. Nixon would have been indicted and convicted and there would have been at appeal and there would have been a three- or four-year period … that issue would be the headline,” Ford said in an interview with FOX News a few years ago. “We had to get that off the front page. The only way to do it was to make a decisive mood, grant pardons, and get on with the business of the country,” he continued.
Of what importance would it be to keep the investigation of the Watergate crimes off the front pages if there wasn’t something nefarious that needed to be protected from undesired attention? It was about this time that those who brought Ronald Reagan to the fore and initiate the Neo-confidence Era were making their initial moves - and CREEP’s actions were taken to ensure that the political opposition didn’t regain power and derail that effort. It may not have been in concert with the future PNAC crowd, but their enemy was common to both - the Democrats.
The media revisionists are busy to provide the factoid truthiness to defend Ford’s actions and deflect serious examination of the pardon:
“[Ford] took us out of Watergate, he brought us out of Watergate, and those were perilous times,” said former ABC news director Hal Bruno, who added that the “clumsy” way the pardon was handled was more Ford’s downfall than the pardon itself.
Perilous times - has anything changed since the pardon? Russia is still acting like our enemy, and the Chinese own the nation due to our profligacy. I needn’t mention in detial the real threat of Al Qaeda in addition to these “quaint” threats.
Now come the blind assertions of rectitude with no supporting evidence offered for validation:
“The pardon itself was inevitable. It had to be that way and probably most people knew it and agreed with it.”
Inevitable? Had to be that way? Why? And I didn’t know many people who agreed with the pardon, although I knew there were defenders of the pardon. They were the ones the media kept presenting, making unsubstantiated claims that the pardon controversy was interfering with “the nation’s business”.
Maybe they should have said, “the nation’s business interests”. That may well have been much closer to the truth.
But the damage was done, and some still remember how much has changed, thanks to Ford:
Gerald Ford, R.I.P. Reflections
by Brent Budowsky
12/27/2006
It will be interesting to watch how many of the pundits in the mainstream media, will point out in the coming days how far the Republican Party has come from the days of Gerald Ford as President.
I was young in Washington, working for Senator Lloyd Bentsen, during the Presidency of Gerald Ford. It is easy to forget, especially for those who are younger, that American politics in 2006 is not the way it has been, and not the way it should be.
The passing of Gerald Ford is a reminder not only of an age when Washington had leaders in both parties with mutual respect, but a reminder of how far the Presidency of George Bush has gone from what has been normal throughout American history.
Gerald Ford was a Republican in the days when Republicans could select a liberal such as Nelson Rockefeller to be Vice President. Gerald Ford was a partisan Republican who was a close personal friend of Tip O’Neill. He was a President who had many friends among the press corps, and would never think of calling them traitors. He was a Congressional leader when friendships crossed the aisles, when disagreements were stated in intelligent and respectful debate. Gerald Ford embodied goodwill and decency, bipartisanship that meant honest and honorable reaching out with respect. President Ford would never have thought of using war as a partisan weapon, or questioning the patriotism of political opponents.
[I]t’s important to remember that President Ford followed the divisions, partisanships and crimes of Richard Milhous Nixon. When he said “our national nightmare is over,” referring to Nixon, he was expressing the sentiments that many Americans will feel when the post-Bush-era, which has already begun, is made formal by the election of a new President. The abuses of Richard Nixon led to Gerald Ford becoming President, led to the election of a reform Democratic Congress in 1974, and led to the election of a new Democratic President in 1976.
This was the unpardonable sin committed by Jerry Ford - a Democrat electorally defeated him, fair and square.
Just as the Republican strategists learned from Richard Nixon’s mistakes, they also learned from Gerald Ford’s. The next GOP uber-candidate would never be Mr. Nice Guy where the Democrats, their platform, and their supporters were concerned. The new Republican Party electoral behavior strategy of 1980: hyper-hate, hyper-partisanship, an attitude that opponents are enemies subject to character assassination, and a firm belief that dissent should be demonized while seeking the total partisan power that was never part of the world of Gerald Ford.
But it worked, and that’s all that mattered. It brought Ronald Reagan to power at the head of the world-dominant-wannabe forces of corporate neo-confidence, which was almost lost when “Read My Lips” became a broken promise. But thanks to the GOP partisans on the Supreme Court, that particular problem was rectified, and Poppy’s mistakes were noted for avoidance.
Thus, through the trial and error efforts of the analysts of the four most recent Republican presidents - Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Bush I - Bush II can rest assured that there will be no serious threat of investigation of his un-Constitutional activities, nor of his numerous war crimes and treasons.
Thanks, Jerry! Thanks a WHOLE bunch, Twinkletoes!