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Thursday, December 28, 2006

In the midst of all the accolades for Gerald Ford, let us not forget....
Posted by Jill | 6:41 AM
...that he was the man who gave us Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney:

He chose Nelson Rockefeller as his vice president (over George H. W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, who both campaigned vigorously for the job), met with blacks and women, proposed partial amnesty for Vietnam-era draft resisters, and hewed to Mr. Nixon’s realism in foreign affairs. The press corps extended him the benefit of the doubt, finding him refreshingly open and honest after Mr. Nixon, and his approval ratings soared — literally, from nowhere — to 70 percent.

Then, one Sunday morning a month after moving into the Oval Office, he pardoned Mr. Nixon before the former president was indicted. With a pen stroke, a very different Ford presidency emerged. Though he said he was forgiving Mr. Nixon because the televised spectacle of a former president in the criminal dock would stir up “ugly passions,” the pardon instantly and inevitably looked like the last cynical act of the Watergate cover-up — Mr. Nixon’s hand-chosen successor giving him a free pass.

The pardon was a political disaster for President Ford. His approval ratings plummeted, inviting attacks from not only the Democrats, but also the Republican right, which rallied around Ronald Reagan.

President Ford spent the remainder of his presidency trying to stave off the intraparty challenge that had suddenly emerged. Two weeks after the pardon, he appointed Mr. Rumsfeld as White House chief of staff, and Mr. Rumsfeld chose Dick Cheney, then 33, as his deputy. A year later, President Ford fired Defense Secretary James Schlesinger and replaced him with Mr. Rumsfeld, put Mr. Bush in charge of the C.I.A., forced Nelson Rockefeller off the 1976 ticket, and promoted Mr. Cheney to chief of staff. In that role, Mr. Cheney instituted a more centralized, secretive, Nixonian approach to presidential power, as he and Mr. Rumsfeld moved to replace President Ford’s restraint and realism with a swaggering, messianic view of American might. If it all sounds familiar, it is.


It's astounding to think about it, really -- that Dick Cheney had been trying to turn this country into a centralized dictatorship for twenty-four years before being given the opportunity to decide that he, in fact, was the most qualified vice president for the inexperienced wastrel son of a former president. That's an awfully long time to bide waiting for the opportune moment.

Compared to what we have in the White House now, Gerald Ford looks like a great president by comparison. But then, I can think of few presidents short of Warren G. Harding who don't look great by comparison. And you could make a very valid argument that in the still-fresh aftermath of the Vietnam Police Action, healing the Watergate wounds by putting Watergate behind us was paramount over any other consideration. But when we realize that Dick Cheney was at work long before most of the soldiers fighting in Iraq today were born, and when we remember how Republicans have operated ever since according to a doctrine of getting revenge for Nixon, it becomes clear that modern-day conservatism, as embodied in the Republican Party, isn't conservative at all, and that so-called libertarians who have embraced it as the "less government" party have allowed themselves to be duped for a quarter-century.

All that said, I think it's interesting that Gerald Ford, having lived to the ripe old age of 93, decided that a world without James Brown was just not one in which he wanted to live. Bob Herbert has more.
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