| Marcus Raskin's |
||
|
“I would characterize him as totally ill-equipped by background, experience and record to provide the kind of leadership this country needs right now. This country is ready for leadership. We’ve had 6 years without leadership—4 or 5 years of corruption [under Nixon] and a year now of a bit of incompetence and indifference [under Ford].” (Robert S. Strauss (Chairman, DNC), Dallas Times Herald, 5/16/75, p. 15) “He is not by any means a spellbinder on the stump. He cannot fashion dreams with words. He has no more charisma than does Mr. Nixon, which is to say he is as plain as bread. He is not creative . . .” (Wall Street Journal, 12/7/73, p. 12) “Ford’s political speeches are about as blah as the rubber chicken dinners he has packed away by the ton . . .” (Newsweek, 10/22/73, p. 38) “Agnew without alliteration, that is Ford tripping over the stumps of dead ideas, giddy with a gaseous sort of attitudinal meanness, which his friends here in Washington apologize for by saying he is dumb but decent. The difference between malice and mental retardation in Mr. Ford’s case is 50 points on an I.Q. test, the results of which are locked up in the White House safe with the truth about Kissinger, and Erlichman’s notes.” (Washington Post, 6/14/74, B4). “Ford reading a speech can be a painful experience. He fumbles words. He drifts from his text and loses his place. He butchers gags and blows punch lines. He enjoys a pre-prandial drink with the boys, like any politician on the road, and occasionally shows it in his post-prandial speeches.” (Newsweek, 11/24/75, p. 32). “Gerald Ford is not our first duplicitous President and will not be our last . . . Ford’s Record for duplicity has matched and . . . surpassed Nixon’s.” (The Man Who Pardoned Nixon. Clark Mollenhoff (Reporter and former Special Counsel to President Nixon). New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976) Quotes compiled by Sushila Nyak. Thanks to Andy Plenge for his transcription help. Institute for Policy Studies Home Page
|
GERALD
FORD For an inattentive public, a phrase or an image may cast a pall over a man's life and accomplishments. That image fixes in our minds, much to the disservice of the person who carries that image or phrase as if it were his shadow. This was surely the case with Gerald Ford, another accidental president who performed well in his short term of office but received little credit for it. Like later President Bill Clinton, Jerry Ford did not carry the name of his biological father. His birth name was Leslie King, Jr. ; he received the name of his adoptive father, Gerald Ford, upon his mother's marriage in 1916. Ford grew into an open, friendly and trustworthy young man. These were the qualities which helped him to rise in American politics. He was not recognized as a schemer or opportunist, yet he was promoted in politics by Richard Nixon, who prided himself on these very attributes. Where, for example, Ford was open, Nixon was closed, where Nixon saw schemes and conspiracies Ford saw honest differences of point of view. Where Ford stuck by Nixon until his resignation, Nixon was prepared to sacrifice his staff and colleagues to protect himself. Ford was nominated by Richard Nixon in 1973 to replace Spiro Agnew who resigned the vice presidency to avoid criminal and impeachment charges for bribery while in office. Ford had been a well-liked Party regular whom Nixon thought would be an insurance policy for himself in two ways. One was that Ford would keep congressional Republicans loyal to Nixon in a period when Nixon's administration was beginning to unravel as a result of the Watergate scandal. The second was that he was not thought of as "presidential material" and the Democrats would not press against Nixon for fear of getting Ford. The phrase maker, Lyndon Johnson, had said that Ford couldn't walk and chew gum at the same time. In his more biting moments, Johnson had also said that Ford couldn't find his ass with both hands. The media had a merry time photographing him stumbling down the stairs of an airplane ramp, and hitting a golf ball which careened off the head of a luckless bystander. But there was much more to Ford than the pundits and politicians claimed. Even Johnson had recognized this, for he chose Ford to be a member of the seven man Warren Commission on the assassination of President Kennedy. Johnson knew that Ford was seen by the who Republicans as a moderating influence. His presence on that controversial Commission was intended to quiet down the public doubts and fears which existed among conservatives after the Kennedy assassination. Ford played exactly the same moderating and legitimating role in the wake of the Nixon resignation. He brought down the public's temperature. Ford, a football-playing graduate of the University of Michigan who took his law degree at Yale, had been a popular member of Congress. He came to Congress in 1949 after serving almost four years in the Navy, emerging with the rank of Lieutenant Commander. He retained the affection of those who favored Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee, as well as more liberal members. After sixteen years in Congress, Ford was chosen minority leader in 1965. Ford's views were well within the mainstream of the Cold-War Republican party. He favored a strong defense and supported the war in Vietnam. He championed the cause of balanced budgets and talked about the importance of a smaller federal government except in military expenditures. As the minority leader in the House, he called for an impeachment investigation of Justice Douglas, supposedly for reasons of his conflict of interest. The circumstances surrounding Ford's vendetta against Douglas are murky. It was undertaken at a time when President Nixon's candidate for the Supreme court, Judge Carswell, had been rejected by the Senate as a racist and unfit. (A few years later the broken Carswell was charged with soliciting in a men's public toilet. ) At first this action seemed to have been undertaken at the behest of Nixon, but then Nixon changed his mind and Ford interrupted the investigation after there was a considerable public outcry about it. As president, Ford presided over several crisis situations. The first was his attempt to end the turmoil in the wake of Watergate. A month after taking office, Ford granted an unconditional pardon for Nixon in his time in office. This meant that there was no chance of future criminal actions against Nixon as they related to his presidency. Some have said that the Ford decision to pardon Nixon cost him the election of 1976. It is not likely that Ford could have won in any case, for if the substantial number of those who continued to support Nixon in the nation felt that there was a chance of further indictments they would have surely allowed their support to wither if his administration brought in more indictments. The Democratic party had won a decisive victory at the polls in 1974, building as they did on the antiwar movement and disgust with the corruption evidenced by Watergate. This sentiment continued through the presidential election of 1976, where Jimmy Carter, who campaigned against Ford as the outsider against the Washington insider, painted Ford as part of the Nixon / Washington entourage which needed to be replaced. Whether Ford had an explicit or implicit arrangement with Nixon about the pardon is almost beside the point politically, although deep legal ramifications are present if a vice president excuses a president his possible felonies thereby being able to obtain the office of president as part of a very crass deal. Given his own understanding of government, that stability and domestic tranquility is a high purpose Ford would have surely pardoned Nixon if he believed this would add to the restoration of tranquility, even if it meant that he would lose the 1976 election. During his term of office, Ford was faced with finding a way out of the Vietnam war. Congress had no interest in its continuation, and the Department of Defense had concluded that large scale military appropriations did not change the capacity of the South Vietnamese army to confront the North Vietnamese and the National Liberation Front. The war came to a final end April 30,1975 as United States embassy personnel scrambled onto helicopters and airplanes to escape the North Vietnamese army. This scene was covered on world television to the chagrin and relief of those who had become emotionally invested in the war. Ford pursued a policy of detente with the Soviet Union. In this he followed the lead of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in pressing for the Helsinki Accords, which appeared to recognize a Soviet sphere of influence, while maintaining non-interference in the internal affairs of East European nations. The accords also included a greater recognition of human rights. The Accords, however, did not stop the United States in "interference" through the AFL-CIO, Catholic church and the CIA, all of which aided the Polish Solidarity movement and the Czechoslovak Charter 77 movement. The support for the Solidarity movement in Poland came during the Carter and Reagan administrations, but it was during Ford's term of office that changes were noted. Polish politics plays an important role in American electoral politics, especially in Michigan and Illinois. In 1976, Ford correctly pointed out in the campaign that major changes were occurring in Poland and that the Polish people were moving away from the communist state apparatus. Ford's statement was hooted down by opponents in the press as another example of a man who didn't know what he was talking about. A few years later the communist ruler, General Jaruszelski, was thrown out of power. Ford's political stance on domestic policy would later be thought of as hardly dissimilar from the course followed by two Democratic presidents, Carter and Clinton, even being to their left. The middle nineteen seventies was the highpoint of of public interest lobbyist and consumer advocate Ralph Nader's influence on Congress. Nader worked with the Democratic majority in Congress to craft bills on consumer protection. These were signed into law over President Ford's signature. Ford also signed Democratically-sponsored legislation for campaign reform for limits on expenditure, and the extension of the Voting Rights Act for seven years, which was now to include legal protections for minorities other than African-Americans. He appointed John Paul Stevens to the Supreme Court, who, in the climate of the nineteen nineties, is thought of as a liberal on the Court. As a result of hearings in the House and Senate on the CIA, Ford took care to corral the CIA with a series of guidelines prepared by his Attorney-General Edward Levi, which were framed in terms of protection of civil liberties. Indeed, after losing to Jimmy Carter, Ford became a co-chair of People for the American Way, a liberal minded organization concerned about the protection of free speech. Ford retired to a life of ease, although in 1980 he considered running with Ronald Reagan as his vice president. The arrangement could not be worked out because Ford wanted substantial control over foreign policy. Some thought this was an attempt on the part of Kissinger and the Rockefeller wing of the party to keep control over major aspects of policy because they feared the rightist and untested tendencies of Reagan. Ford's wife, Betty Bloomer before their wedding in 1948, was a dancer and an independent spirit. As First Lady, Betty Ford announced that she had breast cancer, which brought women's health issues onto the national health agenda. She also had a problem with alcohol and prescription drugs. Again, her willingness to bring her personal problems into the public arena as medical problems helped to change public attitudes towards alcoholism. Ford left the presidency finding that his own role in the
Republican party was increasingly circumscribed as the party courted
reactionaries who called themselves revolutionary. |
|