"No regrets, no second guessing"
Posted by Thomas Nephew on January 4th, 2007
Washington threw itself a full dress funeral on Tuesday. I’m not complaining, I got the day off too. I’m also not one to criticize former President Ford unduly. When E.M. Forster once wrote that “I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country,” he could not quite have had Ford’s pardon of Nixon in mind. But maybe it was those very words that tipped the balance for the bluff, loyal, plainspoken University of Michigan center so fervently eulogized in the Washington Cathedral and in the pages of our national newspapers. Perhaps Forster’s thought is a reason not to take issue with a president’s defining choice — but then it’s all the more reason to question his choice of friends.
I was resolved to not pay any attention whatsoever to the proceedings in favor of enjoying an unexpected extra day of vacation. But then, as I was driving a rental car back to National Airport — pardon me, Reagan National Airport — I switched on the radio and heard Henry Kissinger croak that Gerald Ford left the presidency with “no regrets, no second-guessing, and no obsessive pursuit of his place in history.”
“No regrets, no second-guessing.” A message all Washington might well prefer these days, and a message almost — no, certainly — calculated to appeal to Kissinger’s latest presidential client, so famously resistant to regrets, admitting mistakes, learning, call it what you will. When I watched the PBS recording of the cathedral service, it seemed to me that Tom Brokaw’s less calculating eulogy line — “When he entered the Oval Office — by fate, not by design — Citizen Ford knew that he was not perfect, just as he knew he was not perfect when he left. But what president ever was?” — got Bush’s pursed-lips-of-disapproval reaction, whether at being reminded of his own controversial elevation to the presidency, his fallibility, or both, I can’t say.
A state funeral is no different from any other in reminding those attending of their mortality. So it’s no surprise it serves as a solemn occasion for the political class of the republic to pluck from the recently deceased’s life those lessons most soothing and flattering to themselves, or distracting to others. And so we were treated to endless paeans to Ford’s “bipartisanship,” to the “healing” he brought about by pardoning Nixon, to the “civility” of the bygone era, and to his supposed lack of political ambition — even if the facts tend to speak otherwise,* or if the eulogists were singularly inappropriate. Thus David Broder’s predictable simpering about Ford’s “standard of civility”; Richard Ben-Veniste’s odd worries about the “specter” of legal action against Nixon “as our country moved into its bicentennial year”; Ron Nessen’s hackneyed, vague contrast of the golden Ford era with “these days of angry, divisive, polarized, downright nasty Washington rhetoric”; and in a particularly rich homage, Richard Cheney’s evocation of Ford’s courtesy — rarely has hypocrisy’s definition as the tribute vice pays to virtue been so perfectly demonstrated.
Above all, that “healing” pardon of Nixon also short-circuited a crucial legal opportunity — no, necessity — to prove that even a president is not above the law. Whatever Ford’s motives may have been, it was a negative lesson learned all too well by Ford staffers like Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld — somewhat less averse to the “obsessive pursuit of their place in history” than their revered leader. Given their role in other Ford decisions like fighting the Freedom of Information Act, it’s hard to believe their advice on the matter was a simple matter of friendship — although they may well have pitched it that way.
So popular headlines like “Healer of Wounds” seem wide of the mark to me. I can’t recall where I read this over the last few days, so the metaphor isn’t mine, but one might fairly say Ford bound up a festering wound of executive lawlessness, leaving an infection that flared up over and over again over the next decades. Following Ford’s installment with Nixon’s pardon was not a model of how a republic and democracy should be run; as Avedon Carol wrote the other day, “The original Ford solution is what brought us to where we are now - we can’t do that again.”
When someone dies, most people will want to follow the old dictum, “if you can’t say something nice about him, say nothing at all.” And I’m certainly not suggesting Betty Ford and her children should have been subjected to anything less than a warm remembrance of someone who was by all accounts a decent human being — perhaps decent to a fault.
But at this point, we as a country can’t afford to draw any more wrong conclusions, we can’t afford to make each and every occasion of state yet another opportunity to confirm our fondest dreams and delusions about ourselves. “No regrets, no second-guessing”? That’s got to be the worst advice this country and its president could possibly get right now. Thirty years after Ford left office, his alleged virtues have become antidemocratic vices: “healing” is overrated, “civility” conceals or invites contempt, and “bipartisanship” thwarts the political will of the people expressed at the ballot box. Maybe that’s a shame, but that’s the way it is, and pretending we’re somewhere else or something else will just make things worse.
=====
* Ford’s ambition and partisanship were not so small as to fail to wage a bitter primary fight with Ronald Reagan and an equally determined contest with Jimmy Carter. Regarding “bipartisanship,” Ford vetoed 48 bills passed by the Democratic Congress in his short tenure in office, the highest veto rate of any American president since Truman. While there are two sides to any partisan political fight, Ford also picked many he lost: the 12 Ford veto override votes by Congress were the the most per year in the postwar era, and fortunately included the Freedom of Information Act.
NOTES: Richard Cheney’s hypocrisy noted by digby (”hullabaloo”). See also comments by fellow hullabaleer poputonian.
UPDATE, 1/7: Amy Goodman (”Democracy Now” radio host) expresses similar thoughts in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (”Impeaching, Prosecuting Nixon Could Have Elevated the Nation“): “If those emerging power brokers [Rumsfeld and Cheney -- ed.] had witnessed a vigorous prosecution of Nixon and his co-conspirators, it could have elevated the country … and changed history. Perhaps a decade later, the Reagan-Bush administration would have thought twice about the Iran-Contra scandal, in which an unaccountable administration would defy Congress and illegally support the Contras in Nicaragua, who killed thousands of civilians. Perhaps the current Bush administration would not have dared to manipulate intelligence to invade Iraq, leading to the deaths of thousands of U.S. soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.” (Hat tip: Dad.)
Category: Post. Tags: ford.gerald, history, impeachment, pardon.
Thread RSS,
Comment, Trackback.
Print This
January 9th, 2007 at 6:38 pm
Why not just colonize the place officially and be done with it? We’ll homestead the desert and make it bloom!
August 18th, 2008 at 2:36 pm
[...] argued something like this myself (“No regrets, no second guessing”), on the occasion of Gerald Ford’s funeral:”So popular headlines like “Healer of [...]
October 10th, 2008 at 3:53 pm
[...] that Ford’s pardon of Nixon ended a national nightmare and somehow healed the nation. I strongly disagreed when this notion was revived on the occasion of Ford’s death in late 2006: …one might [...]