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Ah, the 1970s! More precisely, the mid-1970s, an interval -- from Nixon's resignation on Aug. 9, 1974, to Jan. 23, 1977, when Carter installed Zbigniew Brzezinski as his national security adviser -- when people thought America might head down a different path.
A Maryland-based former weapons designer with a nose for conspiracy suggested to me the day after New Year's that Karl Rove masterminded the hoopla over Ford's passing -- the postal holiday, the solemn elegies -- all as a way of associating the beleaguered presidency of G.W. Bush with the supposedly popular Ford. If so, chalk it up as another clunker from Karl, whose magic touch has brought his employer to the lowest presidential popularity ratings in the history of the Republic.
At the start of the first viewing day, so the wires services reported, only 20 people were mustered at Capitol Hill to view Ford's casket in the Rotunda. On that day. George Bush excused himself from the state memorial, staying home in Crawford, Texas, presumably watching reruns of Saddam's execution.
On that day, too, almost 500 of the 535 members of Congress had prior commitments. They had to scramble to find enough pallbearers after Donald Rumsfeld missed his plane. Even Justice John Paul Stevens, whom Ford installed on the Supreme Court and who has long been its most liberal member, did not initially feel impelled to show up.
Few speak well of Ford. The neo-cons think he was weak. The libertarians regard him as a statist. The liberals and the left can't get over his pardon of Nixon. Enthusiasts for the man from Grand Rapids, Mich., seem pretty much confined to Dick Cheney and me.
On the grounds that he didn't have the time and maybe not even the inclination to do too much harm, I've always regarded Ford as America's greatest Twentieth-Century president, with the possible exception of Warren Harding, a very fine man. Ford reached the White House without vote fraud. He presided over a Keynesian binge. On his benign watch the pork barrel did its noble duty. Nonmilitary appropriations rose by 7.2 percent, in contrast to Nixon's 4.3, Carter's 2.2, Reagan's 1.3. On his watch, with funding cut off by Congress, the United States quit Vietnam. The arts florished.
Ford belonged to the age of detente. The neoliberal age and the Second Cold War really began with Carter. Had Ford beaten back Carter's challenge in 1976, the neocon crusades of the mid- to late 1970s would have been blunted by the mere fact of a Republican occupying the White House. Reagan, most likely, would have returned permanently to his slumbers in California after his abortive challenge to Ford for the nomination in Kansas in 1976.
His most heinous act? The OK to Indonesia to invade East Timor, which produced very extensive slaughter. Ford and Kissinger were in Jakarta on Dec. 6, 1975, and Ford told Gen. Suharto, "We will understand and will not press you on the issue. We understand the problem and the intentions you have." This was what Kissinger had told him to say in an advisory memo a few weeks earlier. Ford probably thought East Timor was a putting green. Anyway, what does it take to be America's greatest president, if it comes down to the height of the mountain of corpses you leave behind? The bar isn't that high.
© Creators Syndicate
Comments? Send a letter to the editor.Albion Monitor January
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