I’ve spent a good deal of time over the past couple of days reflecting on the passing of former President Gerald Ford. While I still vehemently disagree with his pardon of Richard Nixon, and while it’s still an unforgivable mistake, I can understand why Ford did it. Given the tenor of the times, Ford felt that if Nixon was being dragged from courtroom to courtroom, the country would grind to a halt until at least the 1976 elections, and perhaps beyond. It was not an unreasonable fear. Between the Vietnam War, economic upheavals, and a pronounced distrust of government fostered by Richard Nixon’s paranoid perfidy, Gerald Ford faced something of an uphill battle simply to get the nation’s attention. While I supported neither his politics nor his decision to pardon Nixon, I can appreciate that Gerald Ford was simply doing what he felt was needed in order to get us to look forward instead of remaining mired in the past.
In many respects, Gerald Ford was a good man forced into a situation he neither sought nor was prepared to deal with. He was by all indications a thoroughly decent and guileless man trying to do what he saw as his duty as best he could. In today’s heavily mediagenic Internet age, Gerald Ford would likely never have found himself running for President, as he did in 1976. He was a thoroughly uninspiring speaker cursed with a sleep-inducing monotone and no sense of how to play to the camera…and it showed.
It’s not often that one can use the words “decent human being” in the same sentence as “politician”. Yes, Ford was a staunch and loyal Republican, and possessed of some of the same unsavory convictions that goes along with the title. Even so, he was someone respected and genuinely liked by those on both sides of the aisle, and indeed by most everyone he met. There was no hidden agenda, no knife behind the back, and no dream of one day becoming the most powerful person in the world. That he eventually did become President was merely an accident of history.
I doubt that we will see anyone like Gerald Ford in the political arena any time soon. In an era when most Republicans have ceded control of their particular to far-Right ideologues and intolerant Christian zealots, Ford was a man who could work with, and be like by, anyone.
Gerald Ford never sought to become President, but he served to the best of his ability when he was called upon to do so. I may not agree with much of what he advocated, and I abhor his pardon of Richard Nixon, but I do admire for him for stepping up and doing what he thought was right to heal the rifts created by Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal. He should be remembered fondly for being a decent man who did what he thought was right under very difficult circumstances…not something the current mediocrity in the White House will ever be known for.
