Thoughts on the passing of Gerald Ford
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.
4 Responses to “Thoughts on the passing of Gerald Ford”
Oh Geez! Are we gonna saint him like we did Reagan? I can’t stand it.
I liked Gerald Ford because he seemed a really sincere honest man. I haven’t felt that way about a president since Ike. I couln’t vote for Ike but I liked him.
don’t worry Green, on the day GWB goes to his reward, Democats and Republicans will take moment to fight each other in the streets for 5 minutes as a way to make testimony to his claim that he was a “uniter not a divider” claim. HA HA.
Charles Jordan- I was a little kid when Ike was in the WH, but, from what I remember and what I have read since, the comparison with Ford and Eisenhower is a good one. He was a good, not a great man, and a solid leader-but not a great one.
The Nixon pardon was one of those thorny, no-win decisions. I disagreed with it then, and still do now, but I understand why he did it. He said that at news conferences 30% of the questions were about Nixon. He felt that both he and the country needed to move beyond Watergate. He did it to reestablish calm in tumultuous times. Ford and Nixon had been friends for a quarter of a century, and he was worried that if he died, it would be his fault.
He was like a reassuring dad-the one you can come to when you’ve backed into the neighbor’s car or gotten your girlfriend pregnant.
The reason I disagree with it, is that we never got justice after Watergate, and it set a bad precedent for later administrations who acted like they were above the law.