Thursday, December 28, 2006
7:52:05 PM EST Jerry Ford's legacy: The dark side (3), Rummy and Cheney, "healers"
President Ford chats with Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld and Rumsfeld’s assistant Richard Cheney in the Oval Office 04/28/1975 (no doubt planning new ways to promote national healing)
(White House Photograph Courtesy Gerald R. Ford Library)
Back in Jerry Ford's administration, as we all now know, "healing" was the business of the President. But not single-payer health insurance or any such socialistic deviance. No, it was spiritual or psychological or political or, heck, some kind of healing.
The Healer-in-Chief had Rummy as his chief of staff, and Rummy brought in Dick Cheney as his deputy. Later, Rummy moved to be Secretary of Defense and Cheney became White House chief of staff.
In Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency (2006) by Lou Dubose and Jake Bernstein, we get the following glimpse at how Rummy and Cheney practiced the healing arts. Ford selected former New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller as his Vice President. Rockefeller was the bogeyman of the Reagan wing of the Republican Party, having been Barry Goldwater's chief primary opponent in 1964 in a bitter intra-party contest. Dubose and Bernstein write:
Cheney did more than write memos to Ford. Working with Rumsfeld, Cheney took the vice president [Rockefeller] out of the White House policy process. When the vice president proposed an idea to Ford, the president would hand it off to Rumsfeld, and later Cheney, who would then insure it died somewhere in the bureacracy. "We built in a major institutional conflict with Nelson Rockefeller, a strong dynamic political leader in his own right," Cheney would later acknowledge. "The Vice President came to a point that he was absolutely convinced that Don Rumsfeld and I were out to scuttle whatever new initiatives he could come up with." Rockefeller was right about that.
"They were two little throat slitters," says a journalist who knew Cheney and Rumsfeld socially at the time. (my emphasis)
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6:45:00 PM EST Jerry Ford's legacy: The dark side (2)
President Ford with George Harrison and Billy Preston in the Oval Office.
(White House Photograph Courtesy Gerald R. Ford Library/Photographer: David Hume Kennerly)
Yes, Ford occasionally hung out with hippies. At least for photo-ops.
But another important aspect of Ford's legacy as President that is very much with us today is his role in creating and perpetrating the "stab-in-the-back" mythology of the US and South Vietnamese defeat in the Vietnam War. Ford was of course President during the last months before Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese Army (PAVN).
Ford was instrumental in enabling more constructive lessons from the Vietnam War to be developed by the government and the military. Part of Ford's "healing" process was to try to get people to shut the hell up about the war and its lessons. John Schaar wrote in The American Amnesia New York Review of Books 06/24/75 issue (behind subscription):
Surely the most striking aspect of the present [1975] political scene is the absence of the recent past from it. There seems to be something like a tacit agreement among the presidential contenders, and between them and the public, that the record of recent events has no bearing on our present condition and future prospects. The closest Ford comes to touching the past is in vague allusions to some dragon called détente, which he will guard us against just as he will preserve our ethnic treasures here at home. Those fronts secured, we can move forward into the third century, which is to be the century of American Individualism. Ronald Reagan sounds like Teddy Roosevelt, all teeth and bluster, about to lead the Rough Riders in another charge, this time into the Panama Canal. Jimmy Carter overleaps the recent past by centuries, and assures us that America still stands in a covenant of nations with God. The people and their leaders agree: let's forget the recent past and get on with the business of building a brighter future. That, of course, is exactly the advice Nixon gave the nation at the height of Watergate.
This silence is all the more remarkable when one remembers that among the events unspoken are a constitutional crisis greater than any since the Civil War, absolute proof that for years national law enforcement and intelligence agencies violated law and elementary decency here and abroad, and a desolating war in Southeast Asia. The constitutional crisis has been reduced to an exciting film entertainment about the thrills and triumphs of investigative reporting, and to something like court scandal based on dubious research methods and ethics. Behind the scenes, the war continues to exist in the same basic doctrines and inflated military budgets that produced and sustained it in the first place. Out front, it exists only in occasional stories about the affairs of Lieutenant Calley and the difficulties of adjustment experienced by the Vietnamese refugees.
As the Mayagüez incident showed, not even the most obvious "lessons" of Vietnam have been accepted. In that episode, President Ford replayed Vietnam in miniature. He unleashed force against a small Asian country without consultation outside the Executive. The force was vastly greater than any sensible appraisal of the situation would have recommended. The affair was misrepresented to the public and casualty lists were falsified. The president crowed that the encounter was a victory for America, proving once again that we would stand behind our word and use our arms to back our interests.
Ford's distinguished predecessor, Tricky Dick himself, laid out his version the stab-in-the-back theory with his distinctive venom and dishonesty in No More Vietnams (1985). Focusing specifically on the 1974-75 period, he wrote:
I was shocked by the irresponsibility of the antiwar majority in Congress. South Vietnam was a small country that depended on the United States for help in order to survive against a brutal onslaught from a totalitarian power. Senators and congressmen who demanded that our South Vietnamese allies stand alone were being totally unfair. None would expect South Korea to be able to deter an attack from North Korea without the presence of 50,000 American troops. None would expect the countries of Western Europe to hold off the Soviet Union without the help of 300,000 of our troops and a threat of American nuclear retaliation to back them up. None would expect Israel to be able to survive attacks from its enemies without massive military assistance from the United States. Yet they were unwilling to allow us to retaliate against a North Vietnamese invasion or even to provide the South Vietnamese with enough ammunition for their guns.
I could understand their desire to put the Vietnam War behind us. But I could not understand why they seemed so determined to see South Vietnam conquered by North Vietnam. Whatever their intentions, that was the effect of their actions. ...
Hanoi's leaders could not believe their good fortune as the antiwar majority in Congress did their work for them. ...
Congress turned its back on a noble cause and a brave people. South Vietnam simply wanted the chance to fight for its survival as an independent country. All that the United States had to do was give it the means to continue the battle. Our South Vietnamese friends were asking us to give them the tools so they could finish the job. Congress would not, so our allies could not. (my emphasis)
Nobody could lie quite the way Dick Nixon could. It's amazing. Rush Limbaugh will never come close, no matter how much OxyContin he takes.
I addressed the stab-in-the-back myth here back in July 2005. I'll refer you to that post for a fairly long discussion of the whole thing, focusing in particular on the 1974-75 period.
There were many problems that led to the collapse of the South Vietnamese regime. In those last months, massive corruption problems and abuse of the local population by ARVN (South Vietnamese Army) forces were major factors undermining the Saigon government.
This article, Vietnam: After the Debacle by Jean Lacouture New York Review of Books 05/01/75 issue (behind subscription), from the time just before the end of the South Vietnamese regime noted a major problem generated by the ARVN itself. Reporting on the refugees being generated during what would prove to be the last weeks of the fighting, Lacouture wrote:
If few reports of the exodus have made clear how many of the refugees are tied to the government, some reports, especially in US papers, have at least given us some idea of another factor, showing us that the South Vietnamese army itself has caused terrible disorder, pillaging, extorting, terrorizing helpless local populations. One can imagine the hysteria of people who see turned against them the weapons of their own defenders.
Jeffrey Record of the Air War College in The Wrong War: Why We Lost in Vietnam (1998) looks carefully at the various options open to the United States. He writes that the PAVN and the NLF (Vietcong) were unable to defeat the American military while they were in the lead combat role:
Yet such a solution could never endure against a determined Hanoi and capable PAVN absent a permanent and significant U.S. force presence in South Vietnam and to a constant U.S. willingness to reenter the war whenever it was necessary to forestall a decisive South Vietnamese defeat. The United States could not have picked a more intractable enemy and a feebler ally than it did in Indochina, and while the United States was never prepared to accept the Vietnam War's permanent Americanization, neither was it able to build a South Vietnamese nation capable of surviving without a massive U.S. military presence. (my emphasis)
The North Vietnamese and the NLF probably surpassed the Iraqi insurgents in tenacity and commitment to their cause. But when it comes to feeble allies, the Thieu regime in South Vietnam was a rock-solid ally compared to the Al-Maliki government in Baghdad or the Karzai regime in Kabul. But those are other stories.
Record expands on the history of the South Vietnamese government as he evaluates military claims that more bombing, or more this or that would have made a difference in the outcome:
[N]ot even an early grant of the broadest operational ladtude to the military could have compensated for what in the long run Vietnam War historian George C. Herring has correcdy identified as the single greatest obstacle to the preservation of a noncommunist South Vietnam: the "fundamental and apparently unsolvable problem" of "the weakness of the South Vietnamese government." Unless communist military forces, especially the PAVN, could have been permanently crushed, or unless the United States was prepared to stay in the war indefinitely, the GVN was ultimately in a an irremediable situation. John Prados has rightly recognized that "any victory had to utilize what was there, what was available in South Vietnam, and since the national identity and the aspirations of the Vietnamese favored the other side, any potential strategy had an extra obstacle to overcome." As noted, if the United States could not have picked a tougher and more obstinate adversary anywhere in the world than it did in the communist Democratic Republic of Vietnam, it also could not have chosen a more feckless ally than it did in the noncommunist Republic of Vietnam. "The war not only had to be won in South Vietnam, but it had to be won by the South Vietnamese. Unfortunately, to the end the South Vietnamese performance remained the Achilles' heel of the allied effort," concludes Guenter Lewy. Even the Chinese in the Korean War proved more politically tractable than did their counterparts in North Vietnam in the 1960s, and the South Korean government and military forces had considerably more vitality and staying power than did their counterparts in South Vietnam. Clark Clifford, who in 1965 counseled President Johnson against intervention in Vietnam and later replaced McNamara as secretary of defense, observed after the war that, "From its beginning,. . . we were constrained by the fact that our South Vietnamese allies were corrupt, inefficient, and poorly motivated. This was critical: in the final analysis, American objectives in Vietnam depended more on the capabilities of our allies in Saigon than on our own efforts. And the more we did for them, the more dependent and ineffectual they became. It was on this very point that our policy would ultimately fail." (my emphasis)
Record also has some harsh words for our infallible generals of those days:
Finally, it should be observed that the military's desire to increase U.S. forces' operational effectiveness via greater operational authority was not accompanied by a willingness to tackle its self-imposed obstacles to operational effectiveness. It was — and remains — disingenuous of the military and their conservative political supporters to whine about civilian intrusion upon potential U.S. military effectiveness in Vietnam when the U.S. military itself was hobbling that effectiveness through disunity of command, a faulty attrition strategy, rear-area bloat, and idiotic personnel rotation policies. The military's appeal to civilian authority for more operational latitude in Indochina clearly would have carried with it greater moral force had the military first put its own house in order. (my emphasis)
Whine? Did he say our holy generals that lead our sacred military "whine"? And that they made actual mistakes? Even maybe at least one "idiotic" one? The warbloggers will be shocked!
It's also worth noting that before the final collapse and surrender of the ARVN at the end of April, 1975, North Vietnam made an offer to return to the framework of the Paris Agreement of 1973 if Gen. Thieu would step aside and allow Gen. Duong Van Minh to step in as head of the South Vietnamese government. Gareth Porter provided a look at the cynicism of Jerry Ford's "healing" administration during those weeks in A Peace Denied: The United States, Vietnam, and the Paris Agreement (1975):
But the offer to return to the Paris Agreement's political formula was ignored by Washington and the US Embassy in Saigon. State Department officials had gone out of their way in late March to make it clear to the press that the Peace Agreement was, in their view, "inoperable," and that there was no possibility of a negotiated settlement. In mid-April, Ambassador Graham Martin said in an interview, "There has been no advice from Washington for Thieu to step down." At the same time, Martin was actively discouraging a military coup against Thieu, assuring former Vice-President Ky that Thieu would soon step down. This attitude of determined disinterest in a political solution was consistent with earlier reports from State Department sources familiar with [Secretary of State] Kissinger's thinking emphasizing that a North Vietnamese military victory was already considered inevitable and that Kissinger's only concern was to appear to be a "good ally" to the very end.
Instead of trying to end the killing as soon as possible by pressing for a change of regime in Saigon, therefore, the Ford administration went through the motions of asking for an additional $722 million in military aid on April 11. Kissinger, in a background briefing for the press, suggested that the administration understood thatthe war was already lost, and hinted that the posture of all-out support for the Thieu regime was necessary in order to have its cooperation in the evacuation of Americans from Saigon. Kissinger spoke of trying to establish a perimeter around Saigon in the hope of negotiating a cease-fire and evacuating large numbers of Vietnamese from the city. But he did not indicate any intention to work for a political solution by replacing Thieu. (my emphasis)
And part of this pantomine, perhaps the most important part from the viewpoint of Ford, Kissinger and the Republicans, was to be able to say until the end of time that they had stuck it out with the plucky South Vietnamese government until the end but those evil Democrats in Congress refused to go along with that last infusion of aid that would have saved the day.
And we hear part of the results of that part of Ford's "healing" every time a war fan or Republican politician smears war critics as traitors or allies of The Terrorists.
With "healing" like that, what would it look like if the Republicans set out to wound us?
Oh, yeah. It would look like the Cheney-Bush administration.
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6:18:35 PM EST Jerry Ford's legacy: The dark side (1)
President Ford (r) meeting in the Oval Office with Dick Cheney (l) and Rummy (c)
Seeing the obituary tributes in the press to Gerald Ford, pre-written to "accentuate the positive" and to be inoffensive to Republican Party conventional wisdom, made me think more specifically about the Ford administration. This is a case where the good ole days were much better than they used to be.
So, yes, I'm taking the "Bah, humbug!" approach on the late President Ford's career.
I looked up some contemporary articles in the New York Review of Books (archive is behind subscription, unfortunately). Ah, the memories!
In Just Plain Jerry by Nicholas von Hoffman New York Review of Books 09/19/74 issue, an article from just after Ford assumed the Presidency, Von Hoffman reminds us of one of the seedier episodes in Ford's career, his attempt to impeach liberal Supreme Court Justice William Douglas:
Nevertheless, the formal biographies in both The New York Times and The Washington Post omit discussion of Ford's attempt to impeach Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas for frisking about with a twenty-three-year-old girl. The formal charges Ford laid against Douglas were hardly more serious than that, involving as they did publication of an excerpt of a book in a magazine containing dirty pitchers and an innocent connection with a foundation that may or may not have had dirty money in its treasury.
I.F. Stone also wrote about newly-installed President Ford in The Fix New York Review of Books 09/12/74 (10/03/74 issue).
He begins by criticizing the deal that Ford made with outgoing President Nixon to allow Nixon to control access to the Nixon White House tapes during his lifetime and even to destroy any he chose after five years. Fortunately, this agreement was later set aside. Stone reported on Ford's appearance before the Senate Rules Committee during which he testified about the Nixon tapes, suggesting he would be opposed to allowing Nixon to suppress them:
This is of a piece with [Ford's] conduct on the pardon. He gave the Senate committee and the country the clear impression, without saying so directly, in that disingenuous style of the Nixon and Lyndon Johnson eras, that he would not issue a pardon to Nixon. "I do not think the public would stand for it" has proven to be his most accurate prediction.
Ford made another implied pledge at the same hearing which also deserves more notice than it has received. "The attorney general," he said, "in my opinion, with the help and support of the American people, would be the controlling factor." This implies that the attorney general would be consulted in advance of a decision on pardon—otherwise how could his views possibly be "controlling" and how could public opinion help him block a pardon? But the attorney general said the day the Nixon pardon was announced and has repeated several times since that he was never consulted on the Nixon pardon.
If this is true, and Saxbe's press aides keep repeating it, then the attorney general was as much taken by surprise as Congress and the country. The surprise was all the stronger because at Ford's press conference of August 28 he over and over again gave the impression that he would take no action on a Nixon pardon until legal process had run its course. Yet we now learn that only two days later he disclosed to a few intimates that he had decided to pardon his predecessor. Duplicity is the only word for that sequence.
Stone's verdict of Ford's decision on the tapes was harsh:
This was Nixonism, pure and undefiled.
An honorable man in Ford's shoes before entering into his tapes agreement with Nixon would have consulted the attorney general, the special prosecutor, and the judges who have cases involving Watergate or the tapes. He would have sought the advice of Chairman Ervin of the Senate Watergate investigation committee and Chairman Rodino of the House Judiciary Committee, both of which still have outstanding subpoenas for tapes which Nixon refused to honor.
At his confirmation hearing Ford over and over again expressed disagreement with the withholding of these tapes by Nixon. That he has now acted so differently, and so covertly and so swiftly, speaks for itself about the true character of Gerald Ford. Tricky Dicky has been replaced by Foxy Ford. All this will deepen the suspicion that the pardon was part of a prenomination deal. If not, Ford could have plainly said so before the Senate committee last November instead of evading the issue with his disingenuous remark that "the public wouldn't stand for it." Was he then telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth—so help him the God he evokes as effusively and frequently as did Nixon before him?
Stone picked up his reporting on Ford's Presidency in Mr. Ford's Deceptions New York Review of Books 10/24/74 (11/14/74 issue). Ford appeared before the House Judiciary Committee as President to testify about his pardon of Nixon. Stone was downright scornful of the performance of the Democratic-majority Committee. The Committee, he complained, wasted time "in fulsome obeisance to His Imperial Majesty".
This is a reminder of the roots of the Democrats' style of bipartisanship, of which Joe Lieberman has become a sad caricature. The Democrats had been the majority party in Congress and held the Presidency most years from 1933 to 1974 (when Ford became President). They expected that a Republican President would have to work with the Democrats in Congress on key legislation. And they also expected to keep winning the Presidency most of the time, so they had a stake in setting a precedent of cooperation between President and Congress. In addition, still in 1974 there were many conservative Southern Democrats who would often vote with Republicans in support of conservative issues and still some moderate and even liberal Republicans (yes, liberal Republicans) who would vote with liberal Democrats on many issues. Today's Republicans have put those days behind them. But the Democrats, even though they no longer have a segregationist Southern wing to worry about, can't quite let go of that bipartisan inclination, which under Cheney and Bush translates into more "fulsome obeisance to His Imperial Majesty".
I.F. Stone is considered one of the great investigative reporters, a rapidly-disappearing phenemenon in American journalism. (Not just the "great" ones, but investigative journalism itself.) But Stone didn't do his work through the kind of "access" for which Bob Woodward sold his journalistic soul to the Cheney-Bush administration. Stone got much of his material by carefully studying public documents, such as government reports and Congressional testimony, and then teasing out connections between them. In this article, we see that process at work. Building on revelations provided by Ford himself, Stone asks some reasonable questions:
Ford says he did not make a deal. Nobody asked him what he meant by a deal. He certainly didn't make a deal in the sense of saying, "Dick, if you resign and give me the presidency, I'll pardon you for any crimes you may have committed." But in the conversation with Haig could they not very naturally and urgently have said to each other that anything would be better for the GOP and the country than a general self-pardon? Was there not a kind of political blackmail in Nixon's implied threat to pardon himself? Did Ford mention to Haig that for him to pardon Nixon would also be embarrassing in view of the position he had taken at his confirmation hearing? Was this Nixon threat "the reality" Ford said at one press conference he had to contend with when asked about his earlier implied pledged not to pardon - the pledge he dismissed as "hypothetical"?
He proceeds to elaborate on the circumstantial evidence suggesting that Ford indeed made a deal with Nixon over the pardon, which I'm convinced he did.
But would Ford actually need to keep such an agreement a secret? Stone explains, in a passage worth remembering in light of more recent circumstances:
One thing is clear, and was almost certainly brought to their attention by their lawyers in studying the pardon question. Criminal liability attaches to an agreement to grant a pardon except where the contract serves some law enforcement purpose. Section 2 of the chapter on pardons and parole in American Jurisprudence says, "Where, however, personal interest enters into the success of the contract, or the use of personal influence is contemplated, the general rule is that the contract is illegal as against public policy, and so unenforceable." A pardon tainted by fraud is revocable in the courts under a rule already old at the time of Blackstone, who wrote, "Any suppression of truth, or suggestion of falsehood, in a charter of pardon, will vitiate the whole." It may not be merely public relations or propaganda which leads Ford now to stress that the pardon was given not to help an ailing Nixon but to help an ailing country.
And in light of the sachrine homages to how Ford "healed" the nation with his Nixon pardon, Stone's following observation is worth quoting at some length:
A similarly naïve question might be asked of Ford. If he truly wanted to save the country from more divisiveness and suspicion in the wake of Watergate, why didn't he "touch all bases" before pardoning Nixon? How different the effect would have been if Ford had consulted the attorney general, as he implied he would last November, and Jaworski and the eight congressional leaders who are supposed to be consulted before any step to limit or abolish the special prosecutor's office.
How impressive, how healing it would have been if the Nixon pardon had been countersigned, as it were, by the attorney general, the special prosecutor, and the eight congressional "watchdogs" set up by his charter! How impressive indeed! But even a latter-day Hans Christian Andersen would find it hard to imagine any of these other public officials counter-signing so preposterous and unprecedented a pardon before investigation and prosecution of the Watergate affair, up to and including the Oval Office, had been completed.
To have consulted the attorney general would have been most embarrassing. Under the Code of Federal Regulations—and the Supreme Court in US v. Sirica has just held that such regulations, until repealed, have "the force of law"—a "pardon attorney" in the Department of Justice is in charge "of the receipt, investigation, and disposition of applications to the president for pardon."
The code sets up an elaborate machinery for investigating such applications. It also provides that no petition for pardon can be filed until three years after release of the petitioner from confinement, or three years after conviction if no prison sentence is imposed. But in cases of violation of "income tax laws, perjury, violation of public trust involving personal dishonesty…a waiting period of five years is usually required." That would seem to cover any and all Watergate defendants including unindicted co-conspirator Nixon.
Of course a president can pretty much do as he pleases and get away with it in exercising the pardoning power, as in many other matters. But if the White House or the attorney general had inquired of the pardon attorney, as we did, they would have been told that the present occupant of the office had never heard of a presidential pardon outside these channels, that he had asked his predecessor who took office in 1950, and that the latter too could not recall such a presidential pardon. That covers the last quarter century at least.
Stone proceeds to follow the precedent even farther back.
Ford's pardon of Nixon was precedent-setting, in more ways than one:
The only way for a president to grant a swift pardon outside these time-honored channels is by proclamation, and that is the method adopted by Ford in the case of Nixon. But those at the National Archives to whom we put the question were unable to find a single precedent for the pardon of one man by proclamation. Pardon or amnesty proclamations have mostly been issued in connection with wars and have covered a whole class of persons. The earliest was issued to reward Jean Laffite's pirates for their aid to Andrew Jackson in the War of 1812. The famous pardon and amnesty proclamations of Lincoln and Johnson were issued on special statutory authority from Congress under a law repealed in 1867.
One of the things that Ford revealed at that hearing was that Nixon had considered issuing a blanket pardon for himself and all the other Watergate criminals. Stone also focused on the fact, which Ford had revealed at the hearing, that "Nixon's main concern during his last days in office was how to avoid prosecution". That's something that we should keep in mind about the current Vice President and President. Journalists almost never mention it. But it's clear that the possibility of serious legal trouble is a major concern on their minds. (See Bush is bracing for new scrutiny: White House hiring lawyers in expectation of Democratic probes by Julie Hirschfeld Davis Chicago Tribune 12/26/06 for an exception to press silence on that matter.)
Gary Wills expressed his own dissent from Ford's nice-guy reputation in He's Not So Dumb New York Review of Books 10/16/75 issue:
He has even turned a half-joking reputation for dimwittedness to political advantage. When he performs hack work or malicious hatchet jobs—even the Douglas campaign, which lasted more than a year and sank to vicious tactics—he remains "good old Jerry" just doing someone else's dirty work. That is how members of the confirmation committee treated the affair, even though Ford renewed his Douglas trouble with unconvincing stories under oath. No one suspects him of being tortuous or Machiavellian; an engaging simplicity absolves him from ability to scheme. He intuitively plays on this. As Nixon blundered down, Ford took Pollyanna flights around the country, delivering pep talks on Republicanism. Some advised him to stay in Washington, to bone up on his future job. They did not reflect that the first thing he did, after being chosen to supplant Charles Hoeven as chairman of the Republican Conference, was to leave the country. He managed three vacations while his backers managed his coup.
He will do almost anybody's dirty work - Dirksen's, or Nixon's, or Mitchell's, or Agnew's - but he is careful to have others do his own. Even his lies before the committee were received as exercises in doomed loyalty to Nixon rather than in personal mendacity. Ford knows when to let others do the ground work for him. He only needs a wink, and then he can relax - a rare gift among politicians, who like to be doing something about their careers all the time. Ford credibly repeated that he was making no preparation to be president while Nixon fought the sheriff off. Bob Hartmann and Phil Buchen were doing the preparing. They assembled the transition teams, without Ford's formal acknowledgment (much like the "draft" campaigns for candidates, undertaken without the formal approval of their beneficiaries).
"He will do almost anybody's dirty work ... but he is careful to have others do his own." I'm sure he and Dick Cheney got along just fine.
Wills also includes the LBJ quote that I screwed up a bit in my comments to Wonky Muse's post about Ford's passing:
When he has to, [Ford] can change his story on the stand. Those who think Jerry Ford "too dumb to fart and chew gum at the same time" ... need only read the confirmation hearings to see he can maneuver inch-by-inch to save his skin.
Juan Cole recalls Ford's foreign policies in his post, Ford and Foreign Policy: Snapshots from the 1970s, Informed Comment blog 12/27/06. He writes:
All presidents make errors, and some abuses occurred on Ford's watch, though they often were initiated by [Ford's Secretary of State Henry] Kissinger. But Ford faced with no illusions the challenges of his era, of detente with the Soviet Union, continued attempts to cultivate China, the collapse of Indochina, the fall-out of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, and the beginnings of the Lebanese Civil War. Ford was right about detente, right about China, right about Arab-Israeli peace, right about avoiding a big entanglement in Angola, right to worry about nuclear proliferation (one of his worries was the increasing evidence that the Middle East had a nuclear power, Israel, and India was moving in that direction).
Ford's challengers on the Reagan Right were wrong about everything. They vastly over-estimated the military and economic strength of the Soviet Union (yes, that's Paul Wolfowitz). They wanted confrontation with China. They dismissed the Arab world as Soviet occupied territory (even though the vast majority of Arab states was US allies at that time) and urged that it be punished till it accepted Israel's territorial gains in 1967. They insisted that the Vietnam War could have been won.
But despite its illusions and Orwellian falsehoods, the Reagan Right prevailed. Ford only momentarily lost to Carter. Both of them were to lose to Reagan, who resorted to Cold War brinkmanship, private militias, death squads, offshore accounts, unconstitutional criminality, and under the table deals with Khomeini, and who created a transition out of the Cold War that left the private militias (one of them al-Qaeda) empowered to wreak destruction in the aftermath. The blowback from that Reaganesque era of private armies of the Right helped push the US after 2001 toward an incipient fascism at which Ford, the All-American, the lawyerly gentleman, the great Wolverine, must have wept daily in his twilight years.
Cole is being generous to Ford in the last sentence. And his thought may be accurate. But I don't recall hearing anything about Ford expressing any great reservations about the Cheney-Bush policies at home and abroad. Declining health may have affected his ability and willingness to do so. But Ford was a loyal Republican. And if he didn't express such doubts, well, no evidence is no evidence.
Cole is right that the difference betweenn Ford Republicans and Reagan Republicans was significant. But it's easy to overdraw that distinction. The "moderate" Republicans like Ford hardly bolted the party as it went farther and farther in the direction of rogue operations, to the point where today's Cheney-Bush foreign policy is basically one big set of rogue operations.
Ford also appointed Old Man Bush as CIA director, strenthening the Bush's dynasty's intelligence ties. Some of Old Man Bush's actions as CIA director and later in using his intelligence connections have never been adequately investigated, specifically the Iran-Contra affair and the "October surprise" deal with the Iranian theocratic government in 1980 to delay release of American hostages until after the Presidential election.
Update 12/28/06: Via Laura Rozen, I see that Ford did speak out against Dear Leader Bush's Iraq War. Although speak "out" may be the wrong term, since it was in an "embargoed" interview. God forbid that denouncing an unjust war terribly damaging to the United States should take precedent over avoiding embarassment for the Republicans in an election year. And what Bob Woodward is reporting hardly counts as a ringing denunciation. From Ford Disagreed With Bush About Invading Iraq by Bob Woodward Washington Post12/28/06:
Former president Gerald R. Ford said in an embargoed interview in July 2004 that the Iraq war was not justified. "I don't think I would have gone to war," he said a little more than a year after President Bush launched the invasion advocated and carried out by prominent veterans of Ford's own administration.
In a four-hour conversation at his house in Beaver Creek, Colo., Ford "very strongly" disagreed with the current president's justifications for invading Iraq and said he would have pushed alternatives, such as sanctions, much more vigorously. In the tape-recorded interview, Ford was critical not only of Bush but also of Vice President Cheney -- Ford's White House chief of staff -- and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who served as Ford's chief of staff and then his Pentagon chief.
"Rumsfeld and Cheney and the president made a big mistake in justifying going into the war in Iraq. They put the emphasis on weapons of mass destruction," Ford said. "And now, I've never publicly said I thought they made a mistake, but I felt very strongly it was an error in how they should justify what they were going to do."
Tags: ford, gerald ford, nixon, nixon pardon, president ford, richard nixon
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