Healed nation after Watergate

[thedrifter]

Healed nation after Watergate <br />
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By Finlay Lewis <br />
COPLEY NEWS SERVICE <br />
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December 27, 2006 <br />
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WASHINGTON – Former President Gerald Rudolph Ford, who led the country out of the Watergate era but lost...

[thedrifter]

Gerald R. Ford, 38th U.S. President and Nixon Successor, Dies <br />
<br />
Steve Geimann <br />
<br />
Dec. 27 (Bloomberg) -- Former U.S. President Gerald R. Ford, who pardoned his predecessor, Richard Nixon, and sought...

[thedrifter]

December 27, 2006 <br />
Gerald Ford, 38th President, Dies at 93 <br />
By JAMES M. NAUGHTON and ADAM CLYMER <br />
<br />
Former President Gerald R. Ford, who was thrust into the presidency in 1974 in the wake of the...

[thedrifter]

Posted on Thu, Dec. 28, 2006

GERALD FORD 1913-2006

A legacy built on decency
As 38th president, he ended our 'long national nightmare'
By Frank Greve And William Douglas
MCCLATCHY NEWS SERVICE


It took the earnest integrity of an Eagle Scout from Grand Rapids, Mich., to help Americans recuperate from the devious evils of the Watergate affair.

Gerald Rudolph Ford Jr., who died Tuesday night, was the nation's only un-elected president, radiant with decency, successful without seeming ambitious, "an ordinary man," according to biographer James Cannon, "called to serve America in extraordinary circumstances."

He was known for pardoning Richard Nixon, wearing Whip Inflation Now buttons and losing one of the closest presidential elections in history.

But later, historians recognized a different legacy for former President Gerald Ford: as a founding father of the human rights movement, for supporting the 1975 Helsinki Final Act.

Ford backed the Helsinki accord even though political conservatives at the time claimed that it was a land giveaway to the Soviet Union. The pact in essence recognized territorial gains that the USSR had made in Eastern Europe after World War II. But it also had a provision that the Soviet Union grudgingly agreed to: recognizing human and religious rights.

Experts and analysts who were remembering Ford yesterday said that clause provided a hammer that dissidents such as Poland's Lech Walesa, Russia's Andrei Sakharov and the Czech Republic's Vaclav Havel used to chip away at the Soviet Union until it crumbled.

Nobody's fool -- Ford graduated in the top third of his Yale Law School class -- he profited all his life from people who underestimated him. But Ford was a wooden speaker, more consensus-builder than leader, and, in the closest presidential election in 60 years, he lost in 1976 to Jimmy Carter.

It was the only election America's 38th president ever lost. But it was also his only campaign outside Michigan's 5th District, the optimistic, entrepreneurial, moderate Republican stronghold that Ford represented in Congress for nearly 25 postwar years.

Ford, then House minority leader, intended to retire in 1974 and had promised his wife, Betty, that he would. But Richard Nixon picked him in October 1973 as his second vice president. Nixon's first, Spiro Agnew, had been forced to resign in a plea bargain after Justice Department investigators determined that Agnew had taken kickbacks from Maryland contractors.

"Well, it would be a good way to end my career," Ford responded with characteristic, slightly ungainly modesty. He was the consensus choice, Nixon had determined, of Democratic and Republican congressional leaders. Ford succeeded Nixon on Aug. 9, 1974, after irrefutable, taped evidence showed that Nixon had, despite his denials, participated in the cover-up of a break-in at Democratic Party headquarters.

"My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over," said Ford as he took office. Ford had argued with his speechwriter that the phrase "long national nightmare" was too hard on Nixon, but it was just the right chord to strike, as were Ford's first White House days. After two weeks on the job, his Gallup Poll approval rating had soared to 71 percent.

Pardon that shocked America

Then, from his absolute conviction that it was "the right thing to do," Ford forfeited much of his popularity and his political future in a single stroke: He pardoned Nixon unconditionally. While Ford denied his pardon had been part of the bargain that induced Nixon to step down, that suspicion was widespread and persistent.

The political price was certifiably permanent. Ford lost to Carter by 49.9 percent to 47.9 percent in 1976. Six percent of voters interviewed in exit polls said Ford's pardoning of Nixon had made it impossible for them to vote for him.

Was there a deal? Ford's standing in history depends largely on the answer. Rep. Peter Rodino, D-N.J., who'd been chairman of the House Judiciary Committee investigating the Watergate affair, tried to clarify the ambiguous situation in an interview 17 years later with Ford biographer Cannon: "Nixon, being the kind of manipulator he was, knew that Ford was a feeling, humane and decent guy," Rodino reasoned, "and might have felt that a pardon was something he could count on from Ford. But Jerry Ford is not the man who would ever make a deal like that. Jerry was like a Boy Scout -- the truth is the truth. Any number of people felt there had to be a deal, but they didn't know Jerry Ford."

Rodino, who knew Ford, accepted his explanation that only a pardon could avert years of sordid, distracting humiliation that the trials of Nixon and his henchmen would have produced.

None of the other ups and downs of Ford's 895-day presidency -- the final helicopter withdrawal of U.S. Marines from Saigon, the big Whip Inflation Now lapel buttons, the beginnings in Helsinki of successful arms reduction measures -- defined the man as clearly as his pardon of Nixon did.

The early years

Over a lifetime, Grand Rapids defined him. Born Leslie Lynch King Jr. in Omaha, Neb., on July 14, 1913, he adopted his stepfather's name after his parents divorced and his mother moved to Grand Rapids and married Gerald R. Ford Sr.

He was handsome as a teen and popular in the city of 169,000, a Boy Scout in fact and values; his mother, a good Episcopalian and member of the Daughters of the American Revolution. The Depression had squeezed his stepfather, a varnish salesman to local furniture makers, however, to the point that college looked impossible for him. Thanks largely to a scholarship fund created from bookstore profits at South High School, where he'd been an all-state center on the football team, Ford graduated from the University of Michigan in 1935.

Although Saturday Night Live caricatured Ford as a klutz, and TV news clips showed him hitting his head on two aircraft doorjambs, Ford was, among presidents, the most accomplished athlete. The Green Bay Packers and Detroit Lions offered him post-college professional football contracts, Detroit's the better offer at $200 a game. Instead, he coached football and boxing at Yale for two years, and, on the second try, won admission to its law school.

The day after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, Ford shuttered his thriving Grand Rapids law practice and volunteered for the Navy. He served as a gunnery, and later navigation, officer on a carrier that won 11 battle stars in 13 months in the Pacific. A year after the war, at age 35, he defeated Grand Rapids' five-term House Republican incumbent. In 1948, he married Betty Bloomer Warren, a divorced former John Robert Powers model, two weeks after the primary. She'd been a Martha Graham dancer in New York, then fashion coordinator for Herpolsheimer's, a local department store.

Ford was the last living member of the Warren Commission, which concluded in 1964 that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone in assassinating President Kennedy.

Life after politics

The Fords retired to Rancho Mirage, Calif., and a home alongside the 13th hole at the Thunderbird Golf Club. A $1 million deal as an NBC commentator, a $1.5 million deal for his-her memoirs, and numerous corporate consultancies and board memberships made the Fords multimillionaires in their retirement. They built a summer home in Beaver Creek in the Colorado Rockies. Mrs. Ford co-founded the non-profit Betty Ford Center for substance abusers in 1982.

In later years, Ford often appeared at charitable events, particularly those requiring a bag of golf clubs. He swam twice daily well into his 80s.

In 1999, Clinton bestowed on Ford the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, for his handling of the Nixon resignation and the end of the Vietnam War

Ellie

[thedrifter]

When Greatness Isn't Called For
By Paul Beston
Published 12/28/2006 12:09:21 AM

During the 1976 presidential campaign, out in the streets of the Midwestern suburb where I grew up, kids would say (no doubt parroting the political views of their parents) that President Ford "may not be great, but at least he's honest." Even back then, that sense of Ford's integrity seems to have been fairly widespread, even though it coexisted with suspicions about his pardon of Richard Nixon. Greeted at the time with howls of outrage, the Nixon pardon is now widely regarded as an act of integrity and political courage on Ford's part. In the intervening years, and now in the obituaries marking his death at 93, Ford's integrity has been lauded as a defining trait.

At the same time, Ford was also a creature of Capitol Hill who knew how to play ball from many years serving in the House of Representatives. "His background is non-doctrinaire conservative," William F. Buckley wrote of Ford not long after he assumed the presidency, "but his most conspicuous overtures have been doctrinaire liberal." Therein lay Ford's reputation for bipartisanship (and if the background and the overtures were reversed, it would be called something else).

Ford was a Midwestern conservative in many respects, opposing the liberal spending policies of President Lyndon Johnson and supporting the Vietnam War. But he maintained touches of Eastern liberalism on social issues, had a typical politician's misunderstanding of economics, and generally adhered to the detente policies that were put in place by Nixon and pursued through Jimmy Carter's tenure.

Ford was certainly nobody's idea man. In another country's political culture, he might have been seen as a party apparatchik, exactly the kind that tends to be standing in the wings when a higher-up is ousted and a steady hand of continuity is needed.

Steadiness: that's another word you hear often about Ford. Having assumed the presidency under terrible circumstances and with a significant portion of the country wondering if he was up to the job, Ford proved his competence, and his modest demeanor must have had a calming effect. Indeed, to a young kid, it seemed that the mysterious Nixon had been succeeded by somebody's grandfather. In a nation that prizes vigor and identifiable achievements among its chief executives, steadiness is an odd thing to be remembered for, but then Ford came along at a very odd time.

In his remarks on Ford's passing, President Bush evoked that steadiness among other traits: "He was a true gentleman who reflected the best in America's character....For a nation that needed healing, and for an office that needed a calm and steady hand, Gerald Ford came along when we needed him most."

Bush also called Ford "a great man who devoted the best years of his life in serving the United States."

Steadiness and greatness are not usually thought of together, and thinking of Gerald Ford as a great man is more than a bit of a stretch. President Bush's well-meaning praise seems driven by personal sentiment as well as a recent tendency to laud the service of our public officials, especially our chief executives, regardless of the significance of their contributions. This tendency is symbolized by President's Day, the replacement for what were once holidays for Washington and Lincoln.

It is likely that President Bush would use the word "great" to describe at least one other former president -- his own father, with whom Gerald Ford shared several traits. Both Ford and George H.W. Bush exemplified a commitment to service and a gentlemanliness that is pretty much gone from our politics.

Ford was a more inside the Beltway version of the first President Bush, though perhaps without the same degree of political dexterity and certainly without the vast international rolodex. Bush the Elder did not have the extensive Washington legislative experience of Ford, but he did have his famously broad resume. Had he had been born a little earlier and attained the requisite seniority, it could have been he, not Ford, assuming the vice presidency in 1973 and then succeeding Nixon in 1974.

Both Bush and Ford were loyal Republican Party soldiers when the core of the party was not yet Reaganite. Both conducted what were in essence managerial presidencies. It was Bush the Elder's good fortune that the process he was called upon to manage was a momentous, and much happier, historical development than what fell upon Ford. Bush the Elder managed the Cold War's end skillfully, just as Ford managed to convince a nation that a presidential resignation was not the end of the Republic. These were worthy, but custodial, achievements by men who lacked vision but had the ability and character to make a contribution.

Sometimes a nation needs a break from greatness (both good and bad greatness) to catch its breath. A greater man preceded Gerald Ford, and a greater man than most other American presidents preceded George H.W. Bush.

Now the ex-presidents club has dwindled to three. How odd it will be if two years from now it is a foursome, with a father and son as bookends to a man who seems to haunt them both in different ways. But that is another story.

Ellie

[SuNmAN]

Its easy to rip on a President all day for their decisions and policies but it is definitely one of the most difficult jobs in the world today.

I betcha George Bush isn't getting more than 4 hours of sleep a day tops in recent years.

[thedrifter]

December 30, 2006
Recent Flexing of Presidential Powers Had Personal Roots in Ford White House
By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON, Dec. 29 — This year’s annual gathering of Gerald R. Ford administration alumni took place in June at the National Archives, where graying former officials socialized near a display of the Constitution.

Mingling with the retirees were two men still very much in power: Dick Cheney and Donald H. Rumsfeld, each of whom had served under Mr. Ford as White House chief of staff.

The setting had an apt symbolism. Since taking office as part of the Bush administration in 2001, both Vice President Cheney and Mr. Rumsfeld, who stepped down as defense secretary this month, have consciously sought to restore what they see as the constitutional powers of the presidency, which they believe were severely eroded under President Richard M. Nixon and President Ford. Some of their colleagues from three decades ago — evidently including Mr. Ford — have wondered if they have gone too far.

In the 1970s, reacting to the upheavals of Vietnam and Watergate, a Democratic-controlled Congress acted repeatedly to curb the executive, passing the War Powers Resolution, which requires consultation with Congress before entering into hostilities; approving amendments expanding the Freedom of Information Act and probing deeply and publicly into intelligence agency secrets.

Mr. Ford, a 25-year veteran of Congress, fought back, despite his conciliatory personal style and sense that his presidency in the wake of the Watergate scandal, was, in the title he would give to his memoir, “a time to heal.” He used his veto power 66 times in his two and half years in office, the highest rate among modern presidents, and Congress responded with override votes 12 times.

“He was an unelected president coming in a horrible time and facing a Democratic House and Senate,” said Max L. Friedersdorf, Mr. Ford’s top liaison to Congress. “In Congressional relations, the main job we had was trying to sustain those vetoes.”

In other ways, too, Mr. Ford tried to exercise his presidential powers. He pardoned Nixon without consulting Congress. He ordered the Marines to retake the American merchant ship Mayagüez after it was seized by Cambodian forces, informing Congress only afterward.

“Ford dug in his heels as best he could to stop the erosion of presidential power,” said John Robert Greene, a Ford biographer and historian at Cazenovia College.

Ringside seats for this constitutional combat went to Mr. Rumsfeld, a former Illinois congressman whom Mr. Ford chose as chief of staff in 1974 at age 42, and Mr. Cheney, a former political science graduate student who served as his deputy. When Mr. Rumsfeld was named defense secretary the next year, Mr. Cheney, just 34, took the top White House job.

“Ford treated Cheney and Rumsfeld in effect as his students, eager young men willing to learn the art of government at his side,” Mr. Greene said.

Just days after arriving at the White House, those pupils saw Mr. Ford suffer an important defeat. At the urging of a Justice Department official named Antonin Scalia, who would later join the Supreme Court, Mr. Ford vetoed the Freedom of Information Act amendments, which he believed infringed the secrecy of the intelligence agencies and the F.B.I.

Newspaper editorials denounced what they said was a violation of Mr. Ford’s pronounced policy of openness. A defiant Congress overrode the veto, by a vote of 371 to 31 in the House and 65 to 27 in the Senate.

“I think Ford, Cheney and Rumsfeld felt like Gulliver being held down by the Lilliputians,” said Thomas S. Blanton, executive director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University, who helped edit a collection of documents on the episode.

After leaving office in 1977, Mr. Ford kept up the battle, devoting his first major public addresses to a critique of the War Powers Resolution, which he called an unconstitutional and impractical invasion of presidential power. He said it had been passed amid the “boiling passions of Vietnam and Watergate,” which he said had encouraged “too much tampering with the basic machinery by which the United States government has run successfully for the past 200 years.”

That theme would be picked up repeatedly in later years by Mr. Cheney, who laid out his constitutional theories in the Republican minority report on the Iran-contra affair in 1987, and by Mr. Rumsfeld, who testified to Congress in 1995 about the problem of “legislative micromanagement of the executive branch.”

After President Bush took office, they could put such views into action. Mr. Cheney took a stand on the secrecy of his consultations with industry officials on energy policy. Mr. Rumsfeld expanded the Pentagon’s authority at home and abroad. Mr. Bush would cite his powers as commander in chief to justify the first eavesdropping on American soil without warrants since the 1970s.

Mr. Cheney has most explicitly linked such actions to a historic reassertion of presidential power. “In 34 years, I have repeatedly seen an erosion of the powers and the ability of the president of the United States to do his job,” he said in an interview on ABC’s “This Week” in 2002, referring to several 1970s laws.

In December 2005, after the disclosure of the National Security Agency’s eavesdropping without warrants, Mr. Cheney told reporters that the program was a proper assertion of the president’s authority. While the “the nadir of the modern presidency” had come in the 1970s, he said, “I do think that to some extent now, we’ve been able to restore the legitimate authority of the presidency.”

In all the intervening years, Mr. Ford maintained close and friendly relations with both his former chiefs of staff. When Mr. Bush selected Mr. Cheney as his running mate in 2000, Mr. Ford lauded the vice-presidential candidate in an Op-Ed article in The New York Times for “a towering intelligence and probity, razor-sharp judgment and a seriousness of purpose that is the antithesis of modern political spin.”

This year, when Mr. Rumsfeld came under fire from senior retired generals for his conduct of the war in Iraq, Mr. Ford issued a rare public statement defending his “creativity, vision and courage” and rebuking his critics.

But a private disillusionment appears to have been taking shape. In a 2004 interview with Bob Woodward, reported for the first time in The Washington Post this week, Mr. Ford singled out Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Cheney by name and sharply criticized the decision to go to war in Iraq.

“I don’t think I would have gone to war,” Mr. Ford said.

Of Mr. Cheney, he said, “He was an excellent chief of staff. First class.” But as vice president, he said, “I think Cheney has become much more pugnacious.”

Mr. Ford’s remarks echoed those of some of his former aides. Brent Scowcroft, Mr. Ford’s national security adviser, expressed puzzlement at his former colleagues in an interview last year with New Yorker magazine, declaring, “Dick Cheney I don’t know anymore.”

Carla A. Hills, Mr. Ford’s secretary of housing and urban development, said Friday that “many of the travails of this administration could have been avoided with more transparency and collegiality, which were hallmarks of the Ford administration.”

Some officials seem deeply torn. In an interview Friday, Mr. Friedersdorf, the former Congressional liaison, described his joy in speaking with both Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Cheney — “wonderful guys” — at the National Archives alumni gathering in June.

“I talked to the vice president about what a great place it was to get together — you could walk right up to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution,” Mr. Friedersdorf recalled.

But he added, “When I see them supporting the foreign policy of this president, the deficit spending, the eavesdropping, Guantánamo, I don’t recognize them.”

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Washington Remembers Gerald Ford
Ceremonies Begin In Nations Capital To Honor 38th President

(CBS/AP) With the thunder of cannon and the whistle of a bos'n pipe, the nation's capital honored Gerald R. Ford's memory Saturday in funeral ceremonies recalling the touchstones of his life, from combat in the Pacific to a career he cherished in Congress to a presidency he did not seek.

Lights bathed the granite arch of the World War II memorial commemorating the Pacific theater as Ford's nighttime funeral procession, bearing his wife, Betty, and the casket of the 38th president, stopped there in tribute to his years as an ensign and gunnery officer. The other arch, representing the Atlantic theater, stood in darkness.

An aircraft from the White House fleet brought Ford's body to Andrews Air Force Base from services near his adopted California home, where mourners streamed past his casket in quiet remembrance of the even-keeled man summoned to the presidency in a time of national trauma 34 years ago.

Vice President Dick Cheney, Ford's chief of staff long ago and an honorary pallbearer now, stood silently among the dignitaries attending the brief arrival ceremony, which was punctuated by cannon fire. The arrival opened the Washington portion of Ford's state funeral, with procession that took his casket from Maryland to Virginia and then over the Memorial Bridge — dressed in flags and funeral bunting — to the memorial, past the White House without pausing and on to the U.S. Capitol for the first service and a lying in state that continues until Tuesday morning.

Mrs. Ford sat stoically in the snaking line of gleaming limousines, clutching a tissue and dabbing her face on occasion, then walked slowly up the steps of the Capitol in the arm of her military escort, soon followed by the casket bearing her husband of 58 years. Another round of cannon fire rang out.

On the way to Capitol Hill, World War II veterans and Boy Scouts gathered by the memorial and saluted at the brief, poignant stop. Mrs. Ford waved through the window. A bos'n mate stepped forward to render "Piping Ashore," a piercing whistle heard for centuries to welcome officers aboard a ship and now to honor naval service.

The event, unfolding without words, recalled Ford's combat service aboard the aircraft carrier USS Monterey. In December 1944, when a typhoon struck the Third Fleet, Ford led the crew that battled a fire sparked by planes shaken loose in the storm, taking actions that some credited with saving the ship and many lives. He sought no award, and received none.

The Capitol commemorated a man whose highest ambition, never realized in an era of Democratic control of Congress, was to become House speaker.

History intervened; he became vice president when Spiro Agnew resigned in scandal, then president when Watergate shattered Richard Nixon's presidency. "A funny thing happened to me on the way to becoming speaker," he once cracked.

In Palm Desert, Calif., a 13-hour period of public viewing ended just as the sun rose over the resort community where Ford and his wife settled nearly 30 years ago. People waited up to three hours to pay their respects at St. Margaret's Episcopal Church.

When the doors were opened after a private service Friday, mourners started flowing in and filed past the casket all through the night and continued to come to pay their respects, reports CBS News correspondent Bill Whitaker.

Buses brought people to St. Margaret's from a gathering point at a tennis center five miles away. Mourners ranging from children to the elderly walked through quickly and then reboarded their buses — a process taking less than two minutes.

"It's so moving, especially with someone like Ford, who had such an important place in history," said Michelle Dhami, who came with her two young children.

Ford lied in repose for public viewing of the closed casket until late Saturday morning, when former first lady Betty Ford boarded a Boeing 747 and accompanied her husband's body to Washington. Two services were planned in Washington, and Ford was to be buried in Grand Rapids, Mich., on Jan. 3.

The emphasis for the ceremonies will be on simplicity, very much in keeping with Ford's style, reports CBS News chief Washington correspondent Bob Schieffer

Thus the funeral procession to the Capitol lacked the full trappings, by the design of Ford and his family. A motorcade was arranged instead of the horse-drawn caisson most familiar to Americans from the funerals of Ronald Reagan in 2004 and John Kennedy in 1963.

Ford, a man of modest character whose short presidency lacked the historic drama of JFK's and Reagan's, also was mourned without the riderless horse customarily included in the procession.

The thundering military flyover that is also part of a full-throttle state funeral in Washington will happen instead in Grand Rapids, Mich., where Ford will be entombed Wednesday on a hillside near his presidential museum. Ford represented the city in the House for 25 years.

Ford died Tuesday at age 93. He became president when Nixon resigned in August 1974 and then was defeated by Jimmy Carter in the 1976 election.

Six days of national mourning began Friday with military honors and a simple family prayer service at St. Margaret's, where the Ford family has worshipped for many years.

Barbara Veith, 69, said Ford's "everyman" persona drew her to the viewing.

"There is something personal about his passing even though we didn't really know him," Veith said. "He just kind of had an everyman quality to him though he was far from it — he was the president."

During his weekly radio address on Saturday, President Bush called Ford a "courageous leader, a true gentleman and a loving father and husband."

"Gerald Ford distinguished himself as a man of integrity and selfless dedication," Bush said. "He always put the needs of his country before his own, and did what he thought was right, even when those decisions were unpopular. Only years later would Americans come to fully appreciate the foresight and wisdom of this good man."

Bush was referring obliquely to Ford's decision to pardon Nixon, a step so divisive it was widely thought to have contributed to his defeat in 1976. In the years since, some critics of the pardon, as well as a number of historians, have come to see it as a wise move that spared the nation further pain from Watergate.

When they return to Washington from their Texas vacation on Monday, Bush and first lady Laura Bush plan to pay their respects to Ford while he lies in state at the Capitol. On Tuesday, the president will speak at Ford's funeral service at Washington National Cathedral before Ford's remains are taken to Grand Rapids.

The private family service on Friday was followed by a visitation for invited friends, including former Secretary of State George Shultz, former New York Congressman Jack Kemp and former California Gov. Pete Wilson.


Ellie