It was announced yesterday (2006 Dec 27) that Gerald Ford, 38th President of the United States, passed away at the age of 93. I will admit that I’ve always had a soft spot for the Ford presidency, derided in popular culture as one of the least effective in history. I generally root for the underdog, so I was once in the habit of quoting the stats that showed how Ford had begun to get the economy back in motion, had begun the rebuilding of American military strength after the Viet Nam debacle, and so on. I still think Ford deserves more credit for doing a difficult, almost impossible, task and doing it with some grace. Also, Ford was perhaps the last of the civil service Presidents: someone who saw government as part of the solution and not a problem in itself; someone who thought that the greatest calling for a citizen is to serve his fellow citizens.
On the other hand…
On the other hand, as always happens when a former President dies, there erupts a spring tide of fulsome praise, prattling on about how his critics misunderstood him and how history has vindicated his policies. It happened with Reagan and the buildup of the 1980s. It even happened with Nixon and his alleged foreign policy triumphs. Now it’s happening with Ford and The Pardon. On 1974 September 8, Ford granted Nixon a full pardon for any crimes he “may” have committed in office. Ford offered the explanation that any full trial would inevitably divide and embitter the nation, whereas the granting of a pardon would allow healing to begin and draw to a close “our long national nightmare”. At the time there was outrage and condemnation; almost certainly, the Pardon cost Ford re-election and gave Jimmy Carter the Presidency. But — we are told today — the consensus has grown that Ford knew what he was doing and that in fact he saved the nation from a destructive poisoning of the well of civic discourse.
Ironically, at the moment that conventional wisdom has finally caught up to me, I must part ways with it again. I used to think the same way — that The Pardon was an ugly but necessary step that wrapped up Watergate and allowed us to move forward. But there are no “Reset” buttons in life. There are no magic slippers that allow one to skip past ugliness and bitterness. Problems don’t go away just because you choose not to discuss them. Rather they fester and metastasize — and that’s exactly what happened here. The villains of Watergate didn’t “learn their lesson” and rejoin civilized society. They decided they were tricked, not rejected, and so subverted political discourse for a generation. We pay the price now, with a Nixon cabinet official occupying the office of Vice President and claiming that the mistake in Watergate was to be ashamed of it — that Nixon’s flaw wasn’t an overreaching drive for imperial powers but that he thought too small. Cheney can claim, with as straight a face as he ever musters, that the Congress, reacting to Watergate, “crippled” the executive — and he can claim it because there were no ugly investigations, no unrelenting uncovering of executive malfeasance. By pardoning Nixon, Ford made it possible for all those snakes to claim that they’d done no wrong, that their enemies were exaggerating for political advantage; that “history” has retroactively justified them.
That single sin undermines all of Ford’s legacy. I have to laugh when I read that, at the very least, The Pardon spared us a descent into partisan rancor. Have any of these commentators been awake for the past fifteen years? Once the Watergate snakes got their breath back — once they had recovered their footing and the public had started to mist over about the crimes — they dove right back into politics and poisoned the well. The rise of the “Angry Right” owes its existence, at least in part, to The Pardon. Had there been investigations and a trial of the President and a thorough airing of his role, then all of that mess would have been a part of the public record and not easily dismissed, distorted, or ignored. But the American system failed, or rather, was not allowed to succeed: Because of Ford, it never got the chance to repudiate the Thug-in-Chief and so it never squashed the insects that served him. We are still paying the piper for that, and likely will be for many more years.
So, a nod to Gerald Ford and the unsung Presidency. But hold off on the unqualified applause and the apotheosis of a moment of weakness. His role in American history is more nuanced than today’s blathering heads can appreciate.
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