A good man, by all accounts:
Gerald Rudolph Ford Jr., 93, who became the 38th president of the United States as a result of some of the most extraordinary events in U.S. history and sought to restore the nation’s confidence in the basic institutions of government, has died. His wife, Betty, reported the death in a statement last night.
“My family joins me in sharing the difficult news that Gerald Ford, our beloved husband, father, grandfather and great grandfather has passed away at 93 years of age,” Betty Ford said in a brief statement issued from her husband’s office in Rancho Mirage, Calif. “His life was filled with love of God, his family and his country.”
Ford died at 6:45 p.m. Tuesday (PST) at his home in Rancho Mirage, Calif., about 130 miles east of Los Angeles, the Associated Press reported. No cause of death was given.
Still not sure if I agree with his pardon of Nixon (maybe some swift justice for Nixon would have nipped the cronyism, corruption, and lawlessness that seems pervasive on Capitol Hill), but by all accounts, Ford was a good man who tried to do the right things. RIP.
Zifnab
We could use more Carter/Ford and less Bush/Kerry elections in this country.
Ugh
Nixon needed to be prosecuted and sent to prison for at least a couple years, Ford could have then pardnoned him after the 1976 election, which he then might have won. This would given Cheney and Rumsfeld a real signal that their view of the Presidency were/are seriously wrong.
Blue Neponset
I think Ford did the right thing pardoning Nixon. Tricky Dick paid a huge price for his misdeeds and anything a judge or jury could have done to him was peanuts in comparison. As a result there was no need to rip the country apart further with a trial.
It is too bad that pardon cost him the 1976 election. If he had won we probably wouldn’t have had to suffer through 18 years of St. Ronny, Bush 41 and Dubya.
The Other Steve
I was listening to an interview a while back that Ford gave where he explained his decision.
He said it wasn’t what he wanted to do, but he and the Whitehouse staff were spending 8 hours a day dealing with Watergate fallout. Requests for evidence, decisions to be made, etc.
He explained, that he had to pardon Nixon just to make the whole thing go away so that they could focus on the matters of state. It wasn’t that he approved of what Nixon had done, it wasn’t that it was what he wanted to do. It’s just that the affairs of the Presidency had to move on, and they couldn’t afford to be distracted by it any longer.
Anyway, I always respected Ford. I think it’s too bad he did not win in ’76, as he would have certainly been a better President than Carter was, and I think it would have negated the influence of the Reagan ideologues in the party.
merlallen
He said he pardoned Nixon for the good of the country.He was the last Repub President who did anything for the good of the country.
The Other Steve
Reagan ideologues = John Birch Society
sadly
Steve
I don’t understand why Nixon being forced to resign in disgrace supposedly sent a message to future generations that there are no consequences for lawlessness in the Oval Office. Sure, the consequences could have been worse, but it’s not as if Bush goes around thinking “worst case scenario, I only have to resign in disgrace!”
ThymeZone
I voted for Ford against Carter. They don’t make Republicans like him any more, it seems.
And that’s a shame.
mrmobi
I also think that Ford did the right thing for the country by pardoning Nixon. It didn’t feel like the right thing when it happened, but it put Watergate behind us, and that was a good thing.
RIP for a decent, moderate Republican public servant.
DougJ
Ford seemed like a decent man to me. We’ll not see his like in the Republican party (among presidents and presidential candidates if not rank and file members) anytime soon.
CaseyL
RIP for the last of the decent, moderate Republican public servants who genuinely believed in bipartisanship. There are no others.
I’m old enough to remember Watergate from its very beginning: I was in high school at the time, and followed the story obsessively to the very end. I remember how much relief and joy I felt, watching Ford get sworn in; and hearing him say that our long national nightmare was over.
ThymeZone
Hopefully, we can say that again in about two years.
Anderson
I had thought Ford was a bit more of a Republican fanatic as a U.S. Representative. Apparently, he grew in office & afterwards. God bless him.
Btw, tho it will hopefully be fixed when you see it, someone is making an, er, statement at the Wiki article on Ford.
Steve
Ford was a hardcore Republican, no question about it. But they used to make Republicans differently.
KC
My problem with Ford’s action is that it sent the wrong message to the neoconservative authoritarians who now dominate the White House. Indeed, combine Ford’s pardon with Bush I’s pardon of many of the worst of the Iran Contra offenders and you get what we have today: a bunch of Nixon-Reagan retreads that truly believe, as Nixon did, that whatever the President does is legal, even if it violates the law.
VidaLoca
I’m not sure any such message was sent — or to be more precise, I think the message that was ultimately received was that consequences could be avoided by making sure that deniability was in place. Thus the role of the Gipper in the Iran-Contra fiasco. It’s for that reason that I disagree with the position that Ford did the right thing by pardoning Nixon. Nixon should have been tried and convicted to make all the points that we miss so much today about the Constitution — rule of law, separation of powers, checks and balances are inviolate and putting partisan goals above them brings down retribution. Nixon suffered enough? Well, no, not really although by the time he left office he was not in good health; although I’d advocate his trial and conviction I wouldn’t advocate imprisonment.
And if this is true
it just boggles the mind. “Make it go away to focus on matters of state”? Right, like the memorable “Whip Inflation Now” campaign. He tried to “put Watergate behind us” by sweeping Watergate under the rug and we live with the consequences of that decision today.
Our long national nightmare has been running 30-odd years now, it will not be over until we get beyond pardoning the kind of policies that Nixon pioneered.
Zifnab
Yeah, I’m sorry, but VidaLoca’s got a point. You can’t just kick the problem to the curb and expect it to go away. Yes, a President on trial would have been hard for the nation, but would it have been harder than Iran-Contra or Monica-Gate? No one seemed to have raised concerns that the repeated Constitutional Crises of the Reagen 80s would impair the country. Certainly, fears that the nation would be riped apart at the seams never arose during a Democrat administration.
I fail to see how Nixon not getting convicted of a crime made the US a better place. America survived a civil war, I think it could have survived a Presidential OJ Trial.
John Cole
And, in fact, we did. See Clinton, Billy Jeff.
CaseyL
Oh, I agree that in the long run Nixon should have stood trial. But Ford made his decision in 1974. The horrors of Iran-Contra, the GOP’s self-serving War on Clinton, and the absurdist black comedy that is the Bush Admin couldn’t possibly have been predicted back then.
Blue Neponset
Need I remind you that O.J. was found not guilty?
VidaLoca
Casey,
Well, right — those specific events couldn’t have been predicted back then. It seems to me, though — and it’s highlighted by TOSteve’s quote from Ford that he pardoned Nixon “to make the whole thing go away” — that what we have here is a case of a decision made in the name of short-run expediency (which, let it be added, benefitted the party of Nixon and Ford to no small degree at that time) over good government. The bad consequences that flow from decison-making like that could have been predicted.
All of which is not to make an argument that Ford was a bad person or a bad President — especially in comparison to several of his successors. But I’m not willing to give him a pass on this decision and I think that to the extent he lost his bid for election to the Presidency in his own right as a result of it, he got exactly what he deserved.
And then he went golfing off into the sunset…
The Other Steve
I think you missed the part about Ford and the Whitehouse staff spending 8 hours each day just dealing with Watergate crap.
I think we all agree that Nixon should have stood trial. But I can see the point that the new President(who was not involved) shouldn’t have to spend all of his time responding to subpeonas and so forth.
Second of all, I do NOT think it would have mattered. That is, Cheney and these other cretins. You think that they would have learned a lesson from Nixon going to jail?
No. In fact you don’t seem to understand what Cheney took from Watergate.
Cheney blamed Nixon for the loss of Presidential prestige. That is, Nixon fouled it up by abusing the powers, resulting in a backlash.
How would Nixon going to jail have changed that lesson?
demimondian
Like Casey, and ppG, I remember Watergate from beginning to end. What always struck me as interesting about the Nixon pardon was that the Constitution explicitly restricts impeachment and conviction from the extent of the Presidential impeachment authority, and that residence in office is not necessary to impeach or convict.
So Ford’s pardon couldn’t have stopped the Congress from continuing the process if it had really wanted to do so. Thinking back on it, now, I wonder if that was the point, though; the Constitutional crisis ended with the pardon, because it gave the Congress an out, not because the Congress couldn’t have acted if it had wanted to. The truth is, it didn’t want to any more than Ford wanted it to.
Steve
The chief reason people commit crimes is not because they think the punishment is relatively light, it’s because they think they won’t get caught.
This is true from top to bottom, but it seems particularly apt when you’re talking about guys like Cheney who think they’re unaccountable and untouchable.
I see zero evidence that pursuing Nixon to the full extent of the law would have sent a stronger message to future administrations than his resignation already did. Bush needed to pardon Weinberger to save his own skin, it would have happened regardless.
At the end of the day I think Ford was an honorable guy who tried to make the right call, plain and simple. And he got held accountable for it by the voters regardless, so I don’t see the point in continuing to beat him up for it. Right now my concern is that the younger generation doesn’t even realize that Republicans like Ford once existed.
VidaLoca
TOSteve,
Well, obviously I can’t prove it would have, and I take your point about Cheney: Cheney is going to do what Cheney wants to do, he’s a hardhead who always wants to play by his own set of rules. BUT he can’t choose his own historical and political context to play in; so it seems to me it’s always better to circumscribe as much as possible the choices someone like Cheney can make when they come along. For example, if Nixon had been tried and convicted (jail is to me, moot) would the legal theories of John Yoo have gained as much traction?
Not sure I agree here. It seems to me that Cheney’s take-away from the Nixon experience is that Nixon fouled it up by abusing the powers incompetently and Cheney is bound and determined to get it right this time.
You can’t always stop that kind of an agenda, and you’re right: nobody can prove conclusively that the trial and conviction of Nixon (back then) would have any bearing on the Cheney situation now. I think an argument can be made that it could have, though, and that failure to try and convict him was an (opportunistic) failure of due diligence.
This is not persuasive. “8 hours a day” has the ring of hyperbole and even if it’s true, you hire more staff and get the job done. That’s what due process is about.
But isn’t the fact that Ford and his administration were not involved likely to lead to the result that the person who has to spend the most time addressing the subpoena problem is the person who suddenly has the most free time to do so?
I’m completely skeptical of Ford’s self-justification here.
VidaLoca
Oh, right — there is no point in continuing to beat him up.
We’re just playing “historical judgements” here and to me the conversation among ourselves is much more interesting than dumping on Gerald Ford, who was relatively speaking not that bad a person or a President.
Right now my concern is that Bush goes around thinking “history will not judge me if I end it”. (1)
(1) h/t “The Onion”
The Other Steve
Nixon didn’t get in trouble for abusing Presidential powers.
Nixon got in trouble because he hired a couple of guys to break into a Hotel room to mess with the opposition’s campaign.
It was the fallout of that, and all the subsequent outrage, which limited the Presidents powers. As far as Cheney is concerned, that’s what is wrong. He has no interest in breaking into hotel rooms.
I’m just trying to explain this to you from a Cheney perspective. you think Cheney would not have held the views he did if Nixon had not been pardoned. I’m simply pointing out, that none of that would have much mattered.
Evil men don’t think they are evil.
just sayin
I don’t remember if it was a comedian or a “serious” commentator who asked a very good question in 1974: “If you could find 12 people who don’t have an opinion on Watergate, would you trust them to sit on the jury?” From 30+ years later it’s easy to understimate just how difficult it would have been to pull off anything like a fair trail. As someone who remembers the whole thing and disliked Nixon about as much as anybody, I’d say Ford did the right thing.
And add me to the list of those who think a trial of Nixon would only have made the Cheney/Rumsfeld types even more contemptuous of limits on Presidential power. Whatever the merits of the pardon, I don’t think that’s one of the consequences.
It would be nice if the electorate had made clear sometime in the last 30 years that there was a price to pay for trotting out Watergate (or Iran-Contra) retreads, but that hasn’t been the case. Perhaps the (at least perceived) fecklessness of the alternative has something to do with that.
As far as the idea that the pardon “benefitted the party of Nixon and Ford to no small degree at that time,” that’s a misreading of events. The pardon made the Watergate more relevant in the ’74 midterms, which were a Dem landslide, and contributed to the GOP loss of a winnable Presidential election in ’76 (they were running against Jimmy Carter, for crying out loud). The pardon didn’t make the Watergate issue go away. The nascent GOP noise machine and Jimmy Carter did that a little later.
Darrell
Amen. And RIP James Brown.
Newport 9
Like vetoing the Freedom of Information Act, because his new Chief of Staff, Donald Rumsfeld, and his new Deputy Chief of Staff, Richard Cheney, told him he should.
Krista
Thanks for remembering James Brown, Darrell. I was privileged enough to see him in concert a little over two years ago. Even then, his health wasn’t good — he only did a very short set. But, while he was there, he put his whole heart into it. A damn fine performer.
As for this…
It’s nice to dream, isn’t it?
Steve
Yeah. Um, I guess this is supposed to be my mandatory liberal outrage of the day? The guy had a whole body of work, you know, and vetoing FOIA isn’t exactly killing kittens.
Krista
Christ, those guys have been the proverbial devils on the shoulder of the Republican party, haven’t they? Hopefully Rumsfeld won’t pop back up in some other incarnation the next time a Republican gets elected. As for Cheney, I think when he dies, he needs to be buried facedown with garlic in his mouth.
Newport 9
Let’s see, Mayaguez Incident, pardon Nixon, “Whip Inflation Now”, blame fall of Saigon on Congressional Democrats, “Ford to City: Drop Dead”.
Yep, that’s a mighty fine resume, there.
CaseyL
I wanted Nixon in jail as much as anyone, but it occurred to me (while posting at ObWi) that we really don’t know what would have happened politically if Nixon had been tried in court.
Even assuming his conviction was a foregone conclusion, we’re talking about a trial that would have lasted at least a year, and dominated the news all that time. There were other things going on – Vietnam, inflation, another war in the Mid-East, the resultant oil embargo (which threw the entire country into a tailspin), the Church Committee hearings – that Americans would probably have preferred the government pay more attention to than a trial of Richard Nixon.
It’s impossible to know what effect Nixon’s trial would have had on party politics. Americans were, by and large, happy to have Nixon out of the White House, and eager to move on. In event of a protracted legal battle that ate up the White House’s focus on other issues, there’s no way of knowing if voters would have turned on the GOP (for being Nixon’s Party) or on the Democrats (for being the ones to “benefit” from Watergate generally, and/or Nixon’s trial, specifically).
I don’t think it would have made a difference in ’76. Americans were fed up enough with the economy to vote against Ford, no matter what else was going on.
But it’s not at all clear that not-pardoning Nixon would have meant the Iran-Contra felons wouldn’t have been pardoned. If America was sick of the Nixon trial, it’s possible that Congress wouldn’t have gone after Iran-Contra as hard as it did – “to spare the country another circus like the Nixon trials.”
Jane Finch
Ford may have been a great guy and a decent man, but a good Republican? Hey, I’d love to sit around with GW too because he’s got such a quick wit, but he’s still a terrible President (and Republican), as was Ford.
Both Ford and GW are responsible in their own way for the present disaster, and no amount of folksy rose-coloured memory is going to change the fact that Ford prevented any serious self-examination of American foreign policy or Presidential abuse of power. He not only pardoned Nixon like a good little Republican player, but he also brought people into his administration that are responsible for the present disaster. To his everlasting discredit, Ford gave Cheney and Rumsfeld their first taste of power and the chance to shape American policy. No amount of “good guy” persona will change that.
CaseyL
It’s very wierd to find myself consistently defending a Republican, but all day I’ve been saying Nice Things about Ford. Considering that I didn’t support him and didn’t vote for him in ’76, this is major Cognitive Dissonance time.
However – once again into the breach! – if we are to blame Ford for what Rumseld and Cheney did 25 years after he appointed them, then we should probably blame Ted Bundy’s high school guidance counselor for not realizing he was about to become a mass murderer. And we should certainly take a few pot shots at whoever Timothy McVeigh’s immediate commander was in Gulf War I, for not realizing he was dealing with a nutjob who would blow up almost 300 people.
Steve
I mean, the guy was pro-choice, even supported gay marriage, but today I’m told I must hate him anyway because he vetoed FOIA. I apologize to my fellow liberals for sometimes being incapable of keeping track of all our sacred cows.
The Other Steve
I was listening to a commentator tonight on NPR, and he noted that Cheney/Rumsfeld has changed remarkably over the years. Something about the first Gulf War did something to them.
Personally I blame it on Leicester cheese.
CaseyL
Plus Betty. Never forget her, or underestimate the effect she had.
As much as I liked Ford, in a “he’s trying the best he can” sort of way, I adored Betty Ford, and think she alone justifies the Ford Administration.
scarshapedstar
Well, I’m damn sure – that I agree! CNN is right. Pardoning Nixon brought Closure to America.
Just like we give Closure to the families of rape victims by pardoning the rapist. Oh, wait…
demimondian
I’m a huge fan of Betty Ford, drug-addled First Lady model for the Acid Queen. And I’m even more a fan of what she did to create the Betty Ford clinic. She was the great ex-President of the pair.
Beej
I’m curious. How many of you were alive and old enough to understand what was going on during the whole of Watergate? This isn’t intended as snark or disrespect, I just wonder if you remember that it really was a “long, national nightmare”. I was in graduate school at the time, and I watched the Senate Watergate hearings as well as the impeachment proceedings. Every reporter who wrote about it at the time included the information that a contingent of Senators and Respresentives went to the White House to try to convince Nixon to resign. Barry Goldwater led the contingent. They informed Nixon that articles of impeachment were going to be voted, and that they were going to be voted by members of both parties. It was after this meeting that Nixon decided to resign.
Ford did the only thing he could have done at the time by pardoning Nixon. Did it leave a bad taste? Yes, it did, but you also have to remember that the Vietnam was drawing to a nasty, chaotic conclusion at about the same time, and the Soviets were having a field day supplying surrogates all over the world while the attention of the U.S. government was turned inward toward Watergate. Ford ended the damned thing. It needed doing. He knew he was going to get hammered for it, but he did it anyway because he believed it was the right thing for the country. Now he might have been wrong, but just doing it took a whole lot of guts. You have to give the guy credit.
Beej
I’m curious. How many of you were alive and old enough to understand what was going on during the whole of Watergate? This isn’t intended as snark or disrespect, I just wonder if you remember that it really was a “long, national nightmare”. I was in graduate school at the time, and I watched the Senate Watergate hearings as well as the impeachment proceedings. Every reporter who wrote about it at the time included the information that a contingent of Senators and Respresentives went to the White House to try to convince Nixon to resign. Barry Goldwater led the contingent. They informed Nixon that articles of impeachment were going to be voted, and that they were going to be voted by members of both parties. It was after this meeting that Nixon decided to resign.
Ford did the only thing he could have done at the time by pardoning Nixon. Did it leave a bad taste? Yes, it did, but you also have to remember that the Vietnam was drawing to a nasty, chaotic conclusion at about the same time, and the Soviets were having a field day supplying surrogates all over the world while the attention of the U.S. government was turned inward toward Watergate. Ford ended the damned thing. It needed doing. He knew he was going to get hammered for it, but he did it anyway because he believed it was the right thing for the country. Now he might have been wrong, but just doing it took a whole lot of guts. You have to give the guy credit. How many of today’s Republicans (or Democrats for that matter) would do what they thought was right for the nation knowing that it was going to cost them big-time in a political sense? Not many, I’d guess. Yeah, once upon a time, there actually were politicians who thought about what was right for the nation before they thought about their own skins. Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio?
Beej
Oh, damn! Sorry for the double post.
Beej
I really need a new computer!
VidaLoca
TOSteve,
No — I don’t care about Cheney’s views; Cheney’s beyond redemption. I care about Cheney’s actions, which are purely contingent on what Cheney thinks he can get away with. Evil men do not, indeed, think they are evil — in fact just the opposite; they appropriate all the means available in pursuit of ends they define as the “greater good” and skate as close as they can to the edge of the law (and sometimes beyond) in order to do so. And there will always be such people among us. And “nobody could have guessed”, 31 years ago, what kind of a person Cheney would turn out to be. So best to circumscribe their choices when the opportunity presents itself.
Cheney’s interests go way beyond breaking into hotel rooms — Cheney’s interested in tapping phone calls, Cheney’s interested in denial of habeas protection. If you think he’s only into burglary you underestimate Cheney.
Let me quote another point of view on Cheney:
So, deniability. The Gipper was big on deniability. Bush I claimed he was left “out of the loop”. And to be fair, it would have to be said that parsing “what the definition of ‘is’ is” is a grasp at deniability.
To repeat, I’m not trying to pile on Gerald Ford. I can understand why he made the decision he did, I can see the reasons for it even though I think the appeal to expediency is weak. I think demi makes a good point that it was not just Ford who was eager to see the whole thing swept under the rug.
And here we have Cheney, who seeks to deploy a cover of deniability over the project of turning the presidency into a dictatorship. We had a chance, historically, to break the deniabilty defense in the wake of Watergate; we let it slip away; Ford contributed to that and we live with the consequences. We had another chance in the wake of the Iran-Contra fiasco; G.H.W. Bush’s pardons doomed that endeavor. Maybe another chance is coming around again.
bud
Oh, the Democratic controlled congress had nothing to do with the fall of Saigon? The fact that they cut off all miltary funding to the RVN gov’t is immaterial? Where do you guys get your history?
It’s bad enough when I have to pay for the mistakes of people that I voted for, so, as a taxpayer on the other side of the country, I was rather grateful for the “drop dead”, since it maeant that, for a change, I wasn’t being billed for the incompetance and corruption of NYC.