What The Media Have Not Said Upon Ford's Passing

January 3, 2007

By Lawrence R. Velvel
Lawrence R. Velvel is the Dean of the Massachusetts School of Law


The death of Richard Nixon led to an outpouring of praise for him. You would have thought a saint had died. It was not until awhile later that people began to publicly remember that Nixon had been an evil man, had been, in his own famous description of what he claimed he was not, "a crook."

The death of Ronald Reagan was met by a more balanced assessment than Nixon's. This was surprising because, though people of my own views disliked most of what he was and did -- except, of course, for what is generally though not universally thought to be his role in causing the collapse of the Soviet Union -- the fact is that a large portion of the country regards him as Saint Ron. For a balanced assessment upon death to be made of Saint Ron, when only huzzahs for his accomplishments greeted the passing of the aptly nicknamed Dick Nixon, struck one as unusual.

The passing of Gerald Ford has generally been met, one thinks, with the same kind of balanced assessment as was Reagan's. At least this seems true as I write, on Friday, December 29th. Yet there are two points which give pause, one of which was passed over very lightly in the media, the other of which has been the subject of extensive discussion.

The matter given hardly a lick and a promise is Ford's effort to impeach Justice William Douglas.

In recent years, conservatives in departments of history or political science, and in the judiciary, have done their best to savage Douglas. They accuse him of being a liar, of being a philanderer, of not caring about judicial craft, and of almost any other sin or alleged sin you can think of. Maybe there is something to what they say, maybe not. Maybe there is something, but less than they claim (or pretend). I personally met Douglas twice, once at a dinner honoring him, attended by about two dozen people, in my home in Lawrence, Kansas, before he made a speech at the University of Kansas, and once afterwards in his chambers (i.e., his office) for lunch when I was visiting Washington. Both times he was a very charming, very nice fellow, and on the first occasion he showed himself especially percipient about the future course of Harry Blackmun. So I can't really comment on the conservative claims of turpitude. I can say, however, that back in the '50s, '60s and early '70s, the attempts to "get" Douglas were basically motivated by a conservative-to-reactionary attempt to hold back the tide that swept over mid-late and late 20th century America. Nor would I be surprised if at least some -- who knows what percentage? -- of the recent efforts to savage him have been motivated by, or at least reflect, pique, or anger, that things Douglas stood for have prevailed.

Jerry Ford was prominent -- was a ringleader -- among those who tried to "get" Douglas because the Justice was in the forefront of the liberal wing of the Supreme Court, both before and after Earl Warren, as well as during the Warren Court. In attempting this the reactionaries and the conservatives wanted to reverse or nullify, if they could, the Court's rulings on reapportionment, on voting rights, on free speech, on religion, on rights of privacy (which culminated in that famous case about alternative choices of waterborne movement, Roe v. Wade), on criminal rights, and who knows what else. Ford was one of the reactionaries who desired some or all of these reversals, and was in the van of the movement to try to impeach and get rid of Douglas because of the Court's decisions. Yet many of the decisions or perhaps even most of them -- one would guess there are people who think all of them -- became part and parcel of the America of today. Douglas was a man who was on the right side (meaning the correct side) of everything. Ford was a man who was on the politically right (and therefore the wrong) side of lots of things, most things in fact. What Ford attempted to do to Douglas was unforgivable, and should not be forgiven. But we have heard very little of it upon his passing. Perhaps this is precisely because what Ford did was unforgivable.

The matter which has received extensive treatment is, of course, Ford's pardon of Nixon. I am willing to take at face value Ford's denials that there was a deal in advance for a pardon, and am willing to do so despite Alexander Haig's discussion with Ford, and the two relevant pieces of paper he gave Ford a week or so before Nixon resigned (one of the papers was a blank pardon.) In this connection I'll accept either or both of two non-mutually exclusive propositions: that Ford was honest and that he was unintelligent enough to fail to comprehend the possible implications of Haig's comments. But even accepting the denial of a deal, the pardon was inexcusable and is to this day unforgivable.

One is aware, of course, that after being greeted with a huge outcry -- even Ford's Press Secretary resigned rather than defend it -- the pardon came to be seen as a good and courageous thing, and is thusly lauded today. (Even Ted Kennedy, who at first opposed it, ultimately changed his mind about it.) One is likewise aware that Ford, and people who now approve it, think the pardon helped to supposedly "heal" this country, as it is said, and to further put an end to what Ford had called our "long national nightmare." None of this moves me one bit. I think that in the long run, and considered in the light of what has happened and what America has become, the pardon was a disaster -- or, perhaps more accurately, was another in a train of disasters.

The pardon showed, once again, -- in fact I think it publicly showed for the first time, really -- that in America we do not punish criminals in high office or, for that matter, people at somewhat lower levels if they are acting in accordance with the wishes of those in high office. There have been some exceptions to this, of course -- Iran Contra being a major one, although even there no punishment was imposed on the people at the very top, including Reagan. But by large, if you are high enough, and if what you've done is bad enough, you can expect to get off scot-free in this country. So Johnson, McNamara, Bush, Nixon, Kissinger, Bush II, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al -- unlike the soon to be hung (or, by the time this appears, perhaps the recently hung) Saddam -- will never see the inside of a dock or a prison let alone stand on a gallows. That the truly big time miscreants inevitably get off scot-free here is one of the reasons many Americans (justifiably) have little or no faith in our government. It is also one of the main reasons our leaders all-too-blithely take us into wars, uselessly bomb large sections of other countries to smithereens, order up torture, mess over and suppress civil rights, and so forth. There is nothing holding them back, you see. There will be no trial, no punishment, and, for that matter, not even an impeachment. Neither will their own children or relatives get caught up in a war. So this cautionary possibility does not hold them back either. And the lesson that our home grown warmongers will never suffer trial and punishment for their illegal deeds was driven home -- maybe, as I say, for the very first time -- by Gerald Ford's (precedent setting?) pardon of Nixon.

In this greater scheme of things, it is mere irony that Ford also committed the basest hypocrisy by saying, earlier in his speech announcing the pardon, that he believes people must be treated equally before the law.

One knows, of course, that Ford and persons who approve of the pardon have said it saved us the divisiveness that would have been caused by the sight of a President defending himself against criminal charges for a year or three. This could be true, but in a larger sense is just a bunch of humbuggery. The pardon may have spared us that particular divisive sight, but it certainly did not spare us the most bitter division over the years. The conservatives on the right have never gotten over the '60s and for years tried, and may still be trying, to roll us back to the '50s or even the 1890s. There is still a tremendous and bitter division in this country over such things as the Viet Nam war, the place of religion, sexual matters, abortion, permissible infringements on civil liberties, economic regulation versus almost wholly unregulated capitalism, and, most importantly of all because it has the most profound impact of all, militarism and world wide interventionism. The pardon stopped none of this bitterly fought division and may even have implicitly encouraged the crucially important warmongering and imperialistically interventionist segment of it by making clear that Presidents and their top men would never pay any criminal penalty for any of it. And, as a fillip, it is no little irony that Ford, who claimed he pardoned Nixon to heal divisions, raised to their first stint in truly high places a number of people who have been instrumental in kindling or throwing gas on profound divisions or who gave us a child who did so (and who, but for the father, couldn't have been elected dogcatcher). I speak of course, of Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the first George Bush.

Ford's horrid act of making plain that evil men would not be punished has repercussions even as I sit writing this. Knowing there will be no punishment, not only have our top officials committed indubitable crimes in Iraq and throughout the world in connection with their so-called war on terror, but one is hard pressed to doubt that, notwithstanding the electoral verdict of November 7th, George Bush will soon be sending more troops to Iraq, probably tens of thousands more. This will not be a crime because Congress passed on authorization of war which allows it, but it will nonetheless be a truly terrible thing to do. But what will stop the true believer, the pretender-in-chief, the man who gets his orders from a higher father than his earth bound father? He knows that, as the Nixon pardon shows, and as also shown by the failure to prosecute Johnson or Nixon or Rusk or McNamara or Kissinger or Bush himself or Cheney, etc, there is no true price, and certainly no criminal price, to be paid for anything he does. If you ask me, the price that we as a people have been and will continue to pay, at least in part because of the pardon, far exceeds any supposed, and heavily nonexistent, benefit from it.

* * * *

The week that I write this, C-Span is carrying tapes of a conference on Viet Nam held at the John F. Kennedy Memorial Library last March. There were academics speaking at the conference who as much as said, based in part on documents that only recently have seen the light of day one gathers, that Nixon and Kissinger prolonged the Viet Nam war for years, and caused the deaths of perhaps another 25,000 or 30,000 Americans plus uncountable number of Vietnamese, so that the ultimately pardoned-by- Ford Richard Nixon would be reelected in 1972. If you ask me, this is, in effect, and even if not intended as such, an accusation of mass murder for political purposes, and it probably is not incorrect. But on one panel, consisting of Theodore Sorenson, Jack Valente, Kissinger, and Alexander Haig, Kissinger (and Haig too, but especially Kissinger) showed no remorse whatever, apologized for nothing at all, used his large, McNamarish -- type, if evil, brain to bring up, one after another, purported facts and claims supposedly supporting everything he did, and leveled defacto accusations of bad faith and ignorance at members of the immediate audience who thought him wrong, evil, or just plain a schmuck (all of which could include me in my living room watching him on tape many months after the conference). The only man of the four who seemed to have truly learned from the horrid experience of Viet Nam was Jack Valente. Yet Valente, admirable as he otherwise seemed, made one want to puke at the end by sympathizing with Kissinger, who many of us think the epitome of an evil genius, and by calling him a great man. So, as the conference at the Kennedy Library showed, today we have a guy like Kissinger (and to a lesser intent Haig) who, because we follow Ford's pardoning precedent and do not prosecute the evil doers at the top, gets to write books, speak at prestigious venues and make a bundle of money -- in the millions no doubt -- instead of preceding or following Saddam to the gallows or at least spending decades in the slammer. The latter fates are the types which, at least morally if not legally, and, for all I know, legally -- speaking too (and sometimes I am sure legally speaking too) would have been appropriate for Kissinger, his Democrat and Republican colleagues at the top with regard to Viet Nam over the course of ten years, and for the top officials of today's American government who have given us torture, kidnapping, crime, and massive deaths in Iraq and throughout the world during the last six years. Yet somehow (he says tongue in cheek) none of this seems to have made it into the mainstream media in connection with Ford's passing and the consequent discussion of the pardon. What a surprise, eh?


Lawrence R. Velvel is the Dean of the Massachusetts School of Law and editor of the blog Velvel on National Affairs. He can be reached at velvel@mslaw.edu.

No time to heal

Ford's posthumous condemnation of the Iraq war shows that the struggle for the soul of the GOP begun in the Nixon years is as relevant now as ever.

By Sidney Blumenthal

Jan. 3, 2007 | During the holiday interregnum between the election of the new Congress and its swearing in, the death of former President Gerald R. Ford at the age of 93 evoked nostalgia for his interim "time to heal" (the title of his memoir) after the resignation of President Nixon. Like all nostalgia, it was distorting and disabling. Surprisingly, the one shattering the false mood was none other than Ford himself, speaking from the grave. Beyond the River Styx he could hardly silence the broadcasters attempting to outdo one another in reaching for high notes of banality. But he left behind words cautioning against the abuse of history, especially by those who served as his aides, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, who twisted the lessons of his presidency to provide the underpinnings of George W. Bush's policies. Ford's condemnation demonstrated the continued relevance of the contentious politics that enveloped his administration and revealed just how little healing has occurred among the divided Republican elites since Richard Nixon's fall.

His last testament was a final act of political finesse. Obeying the unwritten protocol of former presidents not to criticize a sitting one (a sketchy rule never upheld by Herbert Hoover or Jimmy Carter), he vouchsafed his commentary to a reporter guaranteed to publish it for maximum exposure and thus, Ford must have known, damage. Having suffered a stroke in 2000, Ford must also have known that his remarks on Bush and the others would appear while Bush was still in office and therefore of more than historical interest.

"I don't think I would have gone to war," Ford told Bob Woodward in an interview conducted two and a half years ago. "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 ... I don't think, if I had been president, on the basis of the facts as I saw them publicly, I don't think I would have ordered the Iraq war."

Ford also agreed with Colin Powell's assessment of Cheney as having a "fever" about invading Iraq. "I think that's probably true," he said, adding that Cheney had become "more pugnacious."

Ford's judgments are best understood as reflections on his own presidency. He describes Bush with a disdain he reserved previously only for one other man he believed had contempt for facts -- Ronald Reagan. If he was anything, Ford was consistent, and he was consistently hostile to Reagan's right-wing politics, which he grasped had metastasized into Bush's radicalism. Even worse, two of his formerly close staff members were chiefly responsible for the "justifying" of a disastrous policy, "a big mistake," contrary to "the facts."

Nixon chose Ford as his vice president after Spiro Agnew pleaded nolo contendere to bribery charges and resigned. Nixon still had faith in his own obstruction of justice. He never anticipated that he himself would be compelled to resign rather than face certain removal from office in the Watergate scandal. When he did, the pins of his political act collapsed onto Ford. Nixon's style had been to play both ends of the Republican Party against the middle, which he could then claim to occupy. He convinced conservatives and moderates that he was really one of them even as they rightly suspected him of cynical manipulation. When he imploded, the Republican center that he had come to personify was incinerated too. Ford was left to stir the ashes.

As the first unelected vice president, he was the first person to accede to the presidency as the result of a Senate confirmation, not the people's vote. Throughout his brief term he struggled for legitimacy. His pardon of Nixon a month after assuming office heightened his crisis. Saving the country from a drawn-out criminal trial of the disgraced Nixon, he thought he would be relieved of the burden of the past -- "I had to get the monkey off my back," he wrote in his memoir -- but instead he sacrificed himself. His popularity plummeted, never to rise above 50 percent again. The absence of legitimacy impinged on his ability to fend off the Republican right.

Upon becoming president Ford had called for "recovery, not revenge." But revenge was already in the air. Gov. Reagan of California refused to call on the new president when he traveled to Washington, a calculated snub. Ford's selection of Nelson Rockefeller as vice president triggered Reagan's decision to run against him for the Republican nomination. Within the Republican Party, Ford's nomination of Rockefeller received far more disapproval than his pardon of Nixon. The governor of New York was the symbol of moderate Republicanism, a hate object for decades. Reagan's motive, however, was ultimately personal pique -- he was "disappointed that he had been passed over himself," according to his biographer Lou Cannon. Reagan thought of himself as the rightful heir apparent and Ford as nothing but a "caretaker."

Ford had a dismally low regard for Reagan, dismissing the threat of his potential challenge. "I hadn't taken those warnings seriously because I didn't take Reagan seriously." Ford considered Reagan "simplistic," dogmatic and lazy. Reagan, for his part, argued that Nixon's 1972 mandate was not a Republican victory but an ideological one for junking the old Republicanism and that Ford was betraying it. "The tragedy of Watergate," Reagan said, was that it "obscured the meaning of that '72 election."

Reagan accused Ford of fatally weakening national security. He opposed Ford's pursuit of détente with the Soviet Union through Strategic Arms Limitation Talks that led to treaties reducing the production of nuclear weapons and Ford's signing of the Helsinki Accords in August 1975, which held the Soviet Union for the first time to standards of human rights. Reagan's critique appeared against the backdrop of the collapse of South Vietnam and the scene on April 30, 1975, of helicopters evacuating U.S. personnel from the roof of the U.S. Embassy.

Ford's battles with the Democratic Congress made him seem impotent. He issued 65 vetoes of major pieces of legislation, including appropriations bills intended to ameliorate the harsh effects of a recession.

In April 1975, the Senate Operations Committee under the chairmanship of Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, released 14 reports on the abuse of intelligence. It chronicled "excessive executive power," "excessive secrecy," "avoidance of the rule of law," "rogue" operations and even spying on domestic politics. "Whatever the theory," the report concluded, "the fact was that intelligence activities were essentially exempted from the normal system of checks and balances. Such executive power, not founded in law or checked by Congress or the courts, contained the seeds of abuse and its growth was to be expected."

Meanwhile, Donald Rumsfeld -- moved from White House chief of staff to secretary of defense as his deputy, Dick Cheney, was promoted to the chief of staff job -- created a Team B of hawks within the Pentagon who attacked the CIA's National Intelligence Estimate for supposedly underestimating the Soviet Union's military strength. Rumsfeld began making speeches assailing détente, claiming that the Soviets were flagrantly violating treaties negotiated by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, another hate object of the right who was long associated with Vice President Rockefeller. The CIA officially responded by calling the Team B report "complete fiction." And CIA Director George H.W. Bush said that Team B set "in motion a process that lends itself to manipulation for purposes other than estimative accuracy." Nonetheless, Rumsfeld's inflation of the Red menace, based on faulty data, turned up the flame under Ford. Rumsfeld had his own motive: He wanted to be named vice president, a nomination that in the end went to Sen. Bob Dole, considered acceptable to Reagan.

In anticipation of the contest with Reagan, in December 1975, Ford pressured Rockefeller to announce he did not want to run as his vice president. Ford later confessed that dumping Rockefeller was the "most cowardly thing I've ever done," Barry Werth reports in his recent book on Ford's presidency, "31 Days: The Crisis That Gave Us the Government We Have Today." "I was angry at myself for showing cowardice in not saying to the ultraconservatives: it's going to be Ford and Rockefeller, whatever the consequences."

Rockefeller advised Ford: "I'm now going to say it frankly ... Rumsfeld wants to be President of the United States. He has given George Bush [another potential vice-presidential choice] the deep six by putting him in the CIA, he has gotten me out ... He was third on your list and now he has gotten rid of two of us ... You are not going to be able to put him on the [ticket] because he is defense secretary, but he is not going to want anybody who can possibly be elected with you on that ticket ... I have to say I have a serious question about his loyalty to you."

Had Ford run with Rockefeller it's possible he would have lost the GOP nomination to Reagan. Reagan would likely have been buried in a landslide -- and perhaps the right wing along with him. If Ford had been the nominee, it's very possible he would have won the election because with Rockefeller on the ticket he would probably have carried New York.

In the Republican primaries, after faltering initially, Reagan seized on Ford's agreement to turn over the Panama Canal to Panamanian administration as a "giveaway." "We bought it, we paid for it, it's ours, and we're going to keep it!" He won the primary in North Carolina, revived his chances and marched into the convention just short of the delegate votes he needed. There he proposed a series of platform challenges to détente, including a denunciation of the Helsinki Accords as "taking from those who do not have freedom the hope of one day getting it." The Ford camp at the convention, led by Cheney, accepted all of these planks.

When Ford barely gained the nomination (James A. Baker, a friend of George H.W. Bush's, served as his delegate counter), Reagan gave the most grudging acknowledgment. At the convention, on the final night, only when Ford persistently pleaded with Reagan, who was sitting in a skybox, to address the convention did he do so. Reagan delivered a speech that ended with an unreferenced quotation from the hero past of the Republican right, Gen. Douglas MacArthur: "There is no substitute for victory." It could not have been a more stinging ideological rebuke of Ford. Afterward, Reagan gingerly campaigned for the Republican ticket, declining Ford's request to join him on the stump in California. After his narrow loss, Ford told interviewers that Reagan's "divisive" candidacy and subsequent behavior had cost him the election. Thus the "time to heal" ended.

Ford was the last regular Republican to serve as president. Reagan became president campaigning against Jimmy Carter on almost exactly the same charges of weakness and appeasement that he had leveled against Ford, down to the Panama Canal Treaty, which Carter signed. Reagan's running mate, George H.W. Bush, had already made compromises, as a congressman opposing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, for example, to lend him the coloration of a Texas Republican. Swallowing Reagan's program, including what Bush had earlier called "voodoo economics," was essential to his rise. Yet his son traced the causes of his father's defeat in 1992 to his remaining moderation. George W. Bush's running mate agreed. That Cheney, Ford's chief of staff and the elder Bush's secretary of defense, bolstered and encouraged these impulses provided Bush with conclusive proof of their correctness.

Cheney and Rumsfeld, since their days in the Nixon White House, had observed the imperial presidency besieged. Under Ford, they saw it reach its low ebb, and they were determined to restore the presidency as they imagined it should be -- unchecked by an intrusive Congress, shielded from the press, and unobstructed by staff professionals in the intelligence community who did not clearly understand the present dangers that required just such an executive.

After the 2000 election, Vice President-elect Cheney held a dinner at his house where he held forth that the new administration would finish off Saddam Hussein, a job that the elder Bush had left undone, opening him to charges of softness. Rumsfeld, appointed by the new president as secretary of defense at the suggestion of Cheney, named one of the key members of the Ford-era Team B, Paul Wolfowitz, as deputy secretary. At the first meeting of the National Security Council with Bush, Wolfowitz raised the question of invading Iraq.

Ford's posthumous dissent on Iraq has carried no more weight with President Bush than those of Ford's (and the elder Bush's) national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft, and James Baker, or even the quiet repudiation of the late Jeane Kirkpatrick, theoretician of the Reagan doctrine. Ford stands for the side of his father that Bush associates with defeat.

But as Bush prepares to announce his escalation of the Iraq war, he and Cheney made a final use of Ford, eulogizing him for his pardon of Nixon, which they turned into a metaphor for their own will in the face of crumbling support. "The criticism was fierce," said Cheney. "But President Ford had larger concerns at heart." Bush hailed him for his "firm resolve" and "character." "In politics," Cheney said, "it can take a generation or more for a matter to settle, for tempers to cool." This is no time to heal. Let history sort it out.