I won’t add much here to what Joe and my fellow co-bloggers have written on Gerald Ford. Suffice it to say that, in my view, he was both in the right place at the right time and the wrong place at the wrong time. He never would have been president without Nixon, but he could not escape the shadow of Nixon while president. He provided a sense of sanity after Watergate and Vietnam, but overall he was an unelected mediocrity.



Much has been written on Ford, both in the news media and in the blogosphere, and much of it has been quite friendly. Which is to say, he is being remembered quite fondly. (See, for example, Timothy Noah’s piece at Slate on the misguided “cult” of Ford in Washington.) I would argue, however, that his pardon of Nixon was premature and that his best move, his nomination of John Paul Stevens, now a crucial liberal stalwart, to the Supreme Court, was but an accidental success. And I would argue further that his worst move was his support for Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor, a reprehensible policy decision that contributed to the slaughter of well over 100,000 people (and perhaps as many as 200,000).



For more of a look back at Ford’s fleeting presidency, see here.