As one who lived through it all and is old enough to have a memory of same – I have to disagree. Maybe it is the rusty memory but I do think history will judge Ford well for the Nixon decision. Nixon was a rat bastard who deserved to spend the rest of his life in prison BUT the nation and world did not need the spectacle of a disgraced American President tried, convicted and sent to prison.
Remember the times - Vietnam spasming to its tragic ending, OPEC flexing its muscle, the MLK and Robert Kennedy assassinations still fresh, threats of communist expansion, high unemployment, interest rates and runaway inflation. Nope, America wasn’t the happy place it is today ;). IMHO Ford’s decision was the correct one and he made it knowing he might very well pay for it on election day. So I credit Ford with NOT doing the politically expedient thing to salvage the election. We could use a little more of that from our politicians these days.
I’m not a denizen of Great Debates, so take it easy on me.
I’m a (at least 3d generation) yellow dog Democrat.
One of my earliest “current event” memories is the Watergate hearings interrupting my normal afterschool TV routine.
All that all being said, Gerry Ford is probably my favorite president from my lifetime. Why?
I believe pardoning Nixon was the right thing to do. It was highly charged and contentious situation. Trying Nixon would have made for 3 to 5 more years of bloody political fights over the same damn issues. Nixon had already had a stake driven through his heart. He was utterly politicaly humiliated and dead. Realisitically, even if Nixon had been convicted of a crime, he wouldn’t have been jailed. Further humiliation and financial penalties were the only likely options even the event he was found guilty of everything he was accused of. Watergate was also the most carefully scrutinized political phenomenon of the day. So it was fairly certain that the “truth” would come out, with or without the intervention of the legal system.
Given that, there was little to be gained by continuing to prosecute Nixon. He’d already been thoroughly discredited. To this day, Nixon’s name stands for political dishonesty and ruthlessness. What would a criminal sentence add to the conviction of the court of history?
Of course, it was a hugely unpopular move at the time. I believe Ford fully understood this. He knew he was sacrificing his political future when he pardon Nixon. But he did it anyway. Because it was the right thing to do for the country. He knew it would make it twice as hard to win election in '76, but he did it anyway.
And that’s why I respect him, even if don’t agree with many of his other positions. When it was important, he chose to do what was right for the country rather than further his own personal interest.
SO now we hijack onto the legacy of “stupid schmuck.” I disagree that pardoning Nixon was the right thing for the country, but if Ford knew (or even thought) that doing so would severely damage any chance he had to win in '76, then he had to decline to run (for the office he’d supposedly never wanted in the first place) and cede the nomination to a good strong Republican not tainted by having pardoned Nixon. As I said, a very stupid schmuck.
Actually, I think it did. Perhaps then certain other Presidents might not feel like they are above the law and beyond all consequences. And the world would perhaps have trusted us a little more afterwards. And the Republicans would look less like amoral scum.
From Springfield Elementary’s President’s Day pageant:
We are the mediocre presidents.
You won’t find our faces on dollars or on cents!
There’s Taylor, there’s Tyler, there’s Fillmore and there’s Hayes.
There’s William Henry Harrison, ``I died in thirty days!’’
We… are… the… adequate, forgettable, occasionally regrettable
Caretaker presidents of the U-S-A!
He’ll be remembered for being the only President (so far) unelected to at least vice president, and for the Nixon pardon. Also the runaway inflation Carter gets blamed for was going on during his administration. Anyone else old enough to remember those absurd WIN (Whip Inflation Now) buttons? I was twelve, and I remember thinking “This is stupid.”
Ford really shouldn’t be let off for his pardon of Nixon. The nation wasn’t “tearing itself apart.” Instead, a lot of rich and powerful folks in Washington D.C. were very very anxious and nervous about the case itself and the precedent it might set for Washington bigwigs.
And it set a terrible precedent, one that continued with the pardoning of traitors like the Iran Contra conspirators.
Americas strength was supposed to be PRECISELY that even Presidents can be tried, convicted, and sent to prison. Instead, we seem to be playing more and more into the idea that Presidents are very special people deserving of royal treatment.
They are servants of the people whom we elect to do the nation’s official business for pragmatic reasons. When they break the law, they should be as liable as anyone else.
I think the depth of the country’s preoccupation with OJ and Monica was largely due to the more intense news environment of the times - cable news, televised trials, and in the case of the Lewinsky scandal, the Internet. Back in 1975, we had the newspapers and the evening news.
I think the chattering classes would have been on the edge of their seats during a Nixon trial, but after Nixon’s resignation, my sense at the time was that most of the country was ready to move on, Nixon trial or no Nixon trial.
But I think the deeper repercussions of the Nixon pardon are like this: first of all, it really did place the President above the law - it effectively said that dethroning was punishment enough for the Great Man.
Second, if no Nixon pardon, the pardons to the Iran-Contra figures would have been much closer to unthinkable. And the absence of trials and convictions in Iran-Contra gave a number of them the ability to resurface in the Bush Administration, where some of them still serve (if ‘serve’ is the right word).
If there is a place for pardons in the case of high political figures (which I doubt), my opinion is that they should not be given without reasonably specific confessions, to prevent a whitewashing of the record down the road. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard that ‘Nixon didn’t really do anything that bad…’
IMHO, Ford should definitely not have pardoned Nixon in the face of Nixon’s failure to admit to anything specific in the case of Watergate.
Indeed. Who’d’a thunk it? I was definitely in the vast majority that didn’t expect the Helsinki accords to be of any use at all. Sometimes it’s a pleasure to be wrong.
Nitpick: Chester A. Arthur, John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, and Andrew Johnson were all unelected. Ford was the only president who never was elected as president nor selected as vice president, coming into the position after Agnew.
I was just a kid then but I remember it well, not that I understood it in any depth. As I recall, the impeachment hearings were televised live and were shown on all of the networks whenever they were happening. It seemed like that was all that was on TV at the time.
Yeah, they were elected on the same ticket as the President to be the Vice President. They were not elected to the the Presidency, but achieved it on the deaths of their superiors. Most Vice Presidents, if they become President at all, are elected in their own right after being VP. I seriously doubt that many people then or now voted for a ticket based in any substantial way on the VP nominee.
Jerry Ford was a good, decent man who took office just when that’s what the country needed. He was the first President whom I really remember - in part, because he was an Eagle Scout, just as I aspired to be at the time. I agree that in a hundred years he won’t be remembered all that well. He had a respectable career as a Congressman (although the William O. Douglas impeachment was a big mistake, IMHO).
A mixed legacy. Once in the White House, he set a tone of decency, common sense and integrity that worked wonders. Vietnam fell on his watch, but things had fallen apart so badly by the time he took office that there really wasn’t much he could have done. He handled the Bicentennial observances with dignity. The image of him as a klutz was basically unfair (thank you, Chevy Chase!). He handled America’s economic problems ineffectually, at best.
I strongly believe that the Nixon pardon was a mistake. I’m sure that there was no quid pro quo and that Ford did it out of the best of intentions, to spare the country the ordeal of a long court battle, as he said. But Theodore Roosevelt correctly said, “No man is beneath the law, and no man is above it.” A former President can be - and ought to be - held just as responsible as anyone else for criminal activity, even after impeachment and conviction OR resignation. Nixon’s crimes were so momentous, and so dangerous to the republic, that he should have been tried.
Rest in peace, Jerry. You weren’t the best President, but you were far from the worst, and you served your country with honor.
I dunno . . . I suspect a Nixon trial would have been rather disappointing. It almost certainly would have been limited to the matters touched on by the Watergate hearings – the electoral “dirty tricks” and attempts to cover them up. His real crimes – bombing Cambodia, backing the Chilean coup, using his power to harass those on his “enemies list” – would have gone uninvestigated and unpunished. It would have been like nailing Al Capone for his taxes.
An even worse aspect of this same area of his legacy: Saddam Hussein became the military strongman of Iraq starting in about 1976, without apparent significant intervention by Ford-appointed CIA director, George H.W. Bush. A different choice for that position might change today’s situation drastically.
Not that it matters, but the Veep is elected by the Electoral College, not the voters per se. In theory, the EC could vote for a ticket’s Prez and reject the Veep (in early elections, the Prez and Veep might even be of different parties, hence Adams and Jefferson), but it’s since become moot.
And incidentally, Nixon was Veep from 1953-1961, ran for Prez in '60, lost, ran again in '68 and won, and I doubt he was the first to accomplish this not “right after” being VP.
Letting Nixon off was a serious mistake in my mind. It created the idea that some men are above prosecution. I do not accept that the nightmare was over. If you are poor the mantra is dont do the crime ,if you cant do the time. Justice in Nixons case was perverted.
He should have been prosecuted to prove no man is above the law. The precedence is Bush can escape justice to save us from the truth. We apparently can not handle the truth. Our dark overlords can save us from such an unpleasant experience.