Do I Remember????
A reader didn’t like my taking Jerry Ford to task for pardoning Richard Nixon before Watergate could be properly investigated:
The sad truth is that both political parties have been bought and paid for many times over. Get a quick start on what you obviously never learned in school about the government of your native land and how it came to be. Read: “The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America” by Prof. Gary B. Nash of UCLA. Consider the exercise due pennance [sic] for being gullible enough to believe the morons who taught you history, civics, etc., and not do some of your own reading and fact finding.
Wake up and smell the coffee…
Red Barron, Vienna, VA
There is only one correct response to offer. To quote a well-known social philosopher of the late 1970’s:
“EX-CUUUUUUUUUUUUUSE ME!”
To be fair to my critic, his book recommendation is a good one, and I also recommend WWII veteran Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States, and James W. Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, to get you started on a lifetime path toward learning to doubt everything you were ever taught about American “history” in school.
It’s clear that my scolder walks his own talk:
Look, never let it be said that I would think that the sun rises and sets with any Republican. In my lifetime of some 6 decades the GOP has been nothing but a proxy for the super rich. Anyone with average deductive powers and half a brain can clearly see that.
A very few powerful people call all the shots regardless of which party holds power. The electorate mostly goes along with them due to “learned helplessness” and the fact that most people are pre-occupied sheep. Any goodies thrown to the masses are mostly for appearances and to keep the mob quiet, in the same vein as the Roman bread and circuses.
But this is where we part company:
However, to let poor deceased Jerry Ford off the hook somewhat, do you even close to remember just how savagely divided America was in the early ’70’s?
I certainly do! I also remember how things were declining because of that divisiveness. As Jeffrey H. Birnbaum of the Washington Post wrote on December 28, 2006:
The U.S. economy was in sad shape when Ford replaced the disgraced Richard M. Nixon to become the nation’s 38th president. Then it got worse. The economy fell into the steepest recession since World War II, coupled with an upward price spiral that was faster than at any time in modern memory. Unemployment approached 9 percent, inflation ran at a 12 percent annual rate, and the gross domestic product was flat or declining. Energy prices, in particular, soared due to an oil shortage.
I remember shipping companies announcing fuel surcharges almost daily, and the prices of the products they hauled almost increasing as you watched. I was one of those 9% who was looking for employment. I had college loans that were coming due, and I wasn’t making enough in the temporary part-time jobs I did find to pay them and still pay my normal monthly expenses, thanks to the inflationary effects of the first Oil Embargo. I couldn’t get interviewed for some jobs, because those who supported the war weren’t about to hire a longhair who was clearly opposed to it, and they would let me know in no uncertain terms! I remember the discomfiting uncertainty of the future, and felt that we needed to restore trust in our leaders so that this divisiveness would end.
We didn’t get that chance, as Gerald Ford chose instead to be swayed by the blandishments of Nixon staffers Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Cheney. I’ll let Richard Ben-Veniste relate the tale as seen from his experience as a member of the Watergate Special Prosecutor’s Office:
Upon taking office as president, Gerald Ford gave reason to believe that any decision regarding a pardon for his predecessor would be made carefully and deliberately. Nineteen days after taking the oath of office, he responded to a press inquiry about a possible Nixon pardon, saying that until any legal process was undertaken it would be “unwise and untimely for me to make any commitment,” adding that “until the matter reaches me, I am not going to make any comment during the process of whatever charges are made.”
Yet, only 11 days later, Ford reversed course.
The pardon decision was met with strident criticism by much of the media. The Post equated Ford’s pardon to another chapter in the coverup; the New York Times called it “profoundly unwise, divisive and unjust” and “a body blow to [Ford’s] credibility.”
At bottom, the decision to pardon Nixon was a political judgment…
[which] put to the test the maxim that no man is above the law.
This has been the specific issue over which I hold Jerry Ford’s action in contempt. We are either a nation of laws, or we are not a nation. Allowing those leaders who violated the public entrustment of power to escape the consequences of their actions destroys the necessary cohesiveness required for a society to deal with continuing change as a nation.
My correspondent protests:
I personally don’t believe that we collectively could have stood a full blown trial of Richard Nixon. We had more chaos than we could stand as it was.
By the time Nixon was pardoned, much of that chaos that Red Barron recalls had ended. What we went through was far worse than the examination of the crimes of a trusted official.
We had concluded our participation in the Vietnam War, ending the huge anti-war protests which disturbed so many. The violent race riots of the Sixties, exacerbated by the draft of the urban poor to staff that war, were smaller, more localized, and much less frequent. The era of expensive energy had begun, but the importance of this development hadn’t yet struck home in suburbia. In addition, we were well on the way toward coming down from the emotional trauma of watching a popular president getting his head blown apart because he was going to get the US out of Vietnam before it could really get going, ruining the profit plans of certain well-connected companies. We wanted to return to normality, to that “Leave It To Beaver” world lost to Southeast Asia.
Columnist Bob Herbert remembers that desire, along with the new problems we faced, that we never got to solving because of the rash decision of Gerald Ford to interrupt what would have been an accepted process of a criminal trial:
If history tells us anything, it’s that we never learn from history. Mr. Ford was more than just the designated healer after Watergate. The nation was looking for a way forward.
The U.S. was in the final throes of the long national nightmare of Vietnam, and it was stuck in a protracted energy crisis. The trauma of the 1973 oil embargo actually spooked the country into action on the energy front. Fuel economy standards for automobiles were ratcheted up and improvements were made in the energy efficiency of refrigerators, air-conditioners and other household appliances.
Red Barron claims that “Jerry Ford saved us from going into a meltdown…”
No, he didn’t. He only delayed it, and made it worse. He enabled our current troubles by listening to politically-tainted advice in favor of the pardon, as Bob Herbert reminds us, from men who remain staunch advocates of the false principle that the president is above the law:
[I]t’s impossible to reflect on the presidency of Gerald Ford, who formally ended U.S. participation in the war in Vietnam, and fail to notice that his defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and chief of staff, Dick Cheney, were among the chief architects of the current calamity in Iraq. There were lessons galore to be learned from Vietnam. But Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Cheney, like frat boys skipping an important lecture, managed to ignore them.
We could have stepped back from the war in Iraq, and stepped up to the challenge of global warming. But those successful early efforts, instead of being strengthened, were undermined by the conservative political tide of the past several years. Now we’re confronted with the dire threat of global warming, and as usual there is no plan.
So now, we are looking at the pending execution of Saddam Hussein, a move which will create the same sort of outrage over an investigation of a crime cut short through a hurried imposition of a ’solution’ intended to bury the evidence of those activities with the one person who can tie it all together. Many of those to be protected by this ‘justice’ are themselves guilty of instigating a criminal war against a sovereign people, creating a situation which will, in the end, reduce the United States to the level of Iraq. They got their start in the Nixon White Hose, and were shielded by Jerry Ford pardoning Richard Nixon.
Watergate, and Ford’s pardon of Nixon for that crime, destroyed the trust that the American people once held of their leaders, however misled they might have been, as my reviewer points out:
[T]hings have been like this since the 1780’s. [D]o some scholarship of your own … [about] how things actually were and how they come to be as they really are today. The revolution was sabotaged by the very people we popularly revere as our founding fathers. They cleverly stage managed it to bend it to their own uses. All that was why true patriot George Mason wouldn’t sign the constitution. Look it up.
I agree with his assessment, and extend it to an newer plane.
The world has lost its trust in the United States due to the imperious and rash actions of Ford’s Pardon Advocates - Cheney and Rumsfeld:
U.A.E. to sell dollars for euros
By Matthew Brown, Bloomberg News
December 27, 2006
The United Arab Emirates plans to convert 8 percent of its foreign-exchange reserves to euros from dollars before September, the latest sign of growing global disaffection with the weakening U.S. currency.
The Gulf state is among oil producers, including Iran, Venezuela and Indonesia, looking to shift their currency reserves into euros or sell their oil, which is now priced in dollars, for euros. The shift to euros underscores its growing role as a reserve currency nearly eight years after its establishment.
The move by the U.A.E. central bank “is hard evidence that diversification is happening,” said Shaun Osborne, chief currency strategist at TD Securities in Toronto. “This is negative for the dollar in a broad sense as it reflects falling confidence in the currency.”
Central banks in Russia, Switzerland and New Zealand are also diversifying away from the dollar and into yen after the Japanese currency reached a 10- month low against its biggest trading partners in October. Central banks often keep the details about their currency holdings a secret. But the signal that such a move sends to financial markets is a negative one. “It is a recognition of the vulnerability of the dollar over the coming year,” Simon Williams, an economist with HSBC Holdings, said by phone from Dubai.
Part of the reason for the decline is the outlook for slower U.S. growth, which makes the dollar a less attractive investment. But fears that the dollar’s level is unsustainable because of the heavy indebtedness of the United States to other countries is also behind the weakness this year, analysts said.
But let’s not worry about the Nixon Alumni and their Iraq Oil War bringing about a collapse of the American economy. Who cares about economic stability and prosperity anyway? Let’s instead exert our maximum effort to protect the creation of a false history in the public image of a decent, if naive, man who listened to vile political devils seeking to protect themselves from the consequences of their actions.
I suppose that, in the long run, it is much more important that the official record reflect the current political correctness rather than the historical facts. And if you want to praise a President for saving America from going into a meltdown, then remember to praise Jimmy Carter for pardoning the Vietnam draft evaders when the time comes. Can you imagine the divisive witch hunt that Reagan’s goons would have conducted without that pardon? That would have been an incredible meltdown of the Great American Experiment! Who would have saved us from that? Reagan? Bush?
Please!
By the way - by the time Jerry Ford lost to Carter, unemployment had dipped to about 7 percent, and I was still looking for a steady job.
Yeah, I certainly DO remember.