Underrated Gerald Ford
NEW YORK --We make too much of Richard Nixon. And too little of Gerald Ford.
In our politics, journalism, history, and pop culture, Nixon is celebrated, plumbed, defamed, psychoanalyzed, defended, found wanting, and periodically reinvented. This week's 25th anniversary of Nixon's being driven from office via the 1974 impeachment threat triggered the usual media landslide: grainy footage of the jowly hero-villain, eyebrows gloomy, wattles wattling, the furtive glances, the excruciating body language.
Good old Gerry Ford, on the other hand, is almost an afterthought in national politics. Yet if you measured a president's greatness by the degree of improvement in the country's well-being during his stewardship, Ford's was a far greater reign than Nixon's -- or those of a number of other contemporary presidents, for that matter.
Did Ford hand over to his successor a country that was in far better shape than when he'd received it? Without a doubt. President Clinton did not overstate the case when he hung a Medal of Freedom around Ford's neck Wednesday. ``America was stronger, calmer, and more self-confident'' thanks to Ford, the accidental vice president who became president, assumed power after Nixon flew off the lawn in that dramatic helicopter liftoff.
``Our long national nightmare is over,'' said Ford simply on that momentous August afternoon. Said Clinton: ``America was, in other words, more like Gerald Ford himself,'' a man who ``represents what is best about politics and what is best about America.''
Beaming and modest -- ``Im not a Lincoln, I'm a Ford'' was his gag line -- the Michigander who had spent a quarter-century in the House Representatives smiled broadly. Along with a half-dozen other worthies, Ford gracefully accepted the honor, which was spawned in a different time.
The Clinton impeachment drive was a mockery of the serious and bipartisan Watergate impeachment that drove Nixon out. A second-term president, reelected in a landslide, 49-state victory (``Massachusetts -- the one and only!''), Nixon walked the plank at sword point after Senator Barry Goldwater told him: ``Go.'' By contrast, the Monica-driven Clinton saga was history reprised as farce.
Ford was a creature of the consensus-building, cooperation, coalitions, and compromises that characterized the postwar Congress. When he was picked by Nixon to replace the corrupt then-vice president Spiro Agnew, one of the first persons Ford phoned was his colleague, golfing buddy, and occasional sparring partner, Tip O'Neill.
His was not the rancorous House that Newt built. Getting along with the other side was a trait much prized then but now despised by the rule-or-ruin claque that took up Gingrich's fang-and-claw approach to demonizing the opposition into the enemy -- cultural, religious, regional, whatever it takes.
It is worth recalling, with a shake of the head, that the current majority leader of the US Senate, Trett Lott, was then a tyro Republican congressman who voted to exonerate Nixon. Since Lott led the charge to impeach Clinton, we can only assume that the congressman regards Monicagate as far more perilous to the Constitution than Watergate.
Because of his sagacity in appealing to the regional, cultural, racial, and class divisions that cleave America still, Nixon was able to thread his way through the political underbrush to the highest office in the land. That says something about the people who elected him, first narrowly in riot-torn 1968, then overwhelminglhy in '72.
Nixon, I argue, is the quintessential American politician precisely because he so accurately mirrored both sides of our civic nature -- the sunny side, that wants to spread peace, light, and the fruits of democracy, and our darker angel, the one who chisels the tax man, wants traffic tickets fixed rather than paid, and in his heart of hearts says ``screw the other guy.''
The devil is so much more fun than the blandly good, the regular, the predictable. And because Gerry Ford was so bland, regular, and predictable, he did not sufficiently provide the entertainment level that Americans had come to expect and then demand of their presidents, beginning with Kennedy.
Ford, the most athletic of all the presidents since Teddy Roosevelt, was lampooned on ``Saturday Night Live'' as a buffoon, a clumsy, oafish, boring middle American, bonking onlookers with golf balls, falling down on ski slopes, knocking his noggin into microphones. As we've seen recently, television comedians are better at telling their audience where we have been, not where we are going. Jay Leno had to have been the most dumbfounded man in America when the Clinton impeachment failed. His writers were the next to last to know.
Ford seems unruffled by the wraithlike grip Nixon still holds over the media. Had he not pardoned Nixon, Ford probably would have been reelected, just as Jimmy Carter probably ensured his own defeat when he refused to bomb Iran after the US hostages were seized. Though you'd never believe it from what you read and hear, presidents sometimes do what they think is the right thing, even when they know it will cost them dearly.
