Not technically:
I know his pardon was constitutional. My point was that he mishandled the situation by allowing Nixon to escape prosecution for attempting to rig an election.
I do wish McGovern had offered the spot to Cronkite instead of Eagleton.
Eagleton ended up being perhaps the worst VP choice ever, but what the hell would have been accomplished by offering the job to someone who never would have taken it?
No need to apologize. The pardon clause is indeed a way the chief executive to put someone “above the law”, by nullifying the judicial process in its entirety. It’s a relic of monarchical privilege that has no place in a republican system of government.
But yes, it’s there.
He’d have been worse if he hadn’t had therapy. 
Like most other VP choices.
Cronkite said, when they told him about it years later, that he would have gladly done it, because he wanted to end the war so badly.
“But so are six guys with a truck.”
I always laugh when I hear this lame excuse. Can’t think! Can’t sleep! Can’t get anything done at work! All I do is think about the Nixon trial!
What hermetic beltway thinking. Nixon’s trial would have been troubling only to him and his family. Life goes on. The great complaint from the American public during the Watergate hearings was that they were preempting the daily soaps.
About which he was mistaken. Ideally, he should have pardoned RMN the day after he (RMN) reported for any incarceration he had been sentenced to.
I can’t possibly accept as valid any so-called “rehabilitation” that Nixon enjoyed, simply because this necessary nod to justice, however symbolic, was not deemed important enough to insist upon.
I once read he was the only president to have been a male model.
Unless you count Reagan’s Chesterfield Cigarettes advertisements.
Nah, that’s just movie-star endorsement. I think the writer meant maybe the more conventional catalogue-model variety.
letting Nixon go did a lot for the imperial presidency mode. he was allowed to free and was above the reaches of law and the courts. It was a bad precedent.
It would have reaffirmed the principle that nobody is above the law.
We seem to have reached a point where almost everyone in Washington gets vapors at the idea of investigating the Bushies to see if they indeed committed the crimes they appear to have committed, and prosecuting them where the seriousness of the crimes and the strength of the evidence demands it.
Either there’s one standard that applies to petty thieves and high officials alike, or there’s one law for the privileged, and another for everyone else. If the worst that happens to high government officials for committing crimes is that they lose their office, but never see a day in jail, there’s considerably less reason for them to lose sleep over what might happen to them if they’re caught. And if we don’t even bother to investigate them, they don’t even have to worry about getting caught.
Don’t forget the WIN Buttons! He did those too.
For a bad president!
Sorry.
But for what reason would Ford have given into this? Nixon was toast anyways and he was in no position to negotiate/bribe/coerce anything.