Politics: December 2006 Archives

Robert N. Going, who was set to run for a seat on the 1976 New York delegate slate as a Reagan supporter (and was a Reagan delegate in 1980; see his comment for explanation -- I've corrected this paragraph), says of the recently departed 38th president, de mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est.

Here's a selection of bona sententia in tributes to the Accidental President. The same three points frequently recur: a decent man, the right man for the hour, and, even if not a great president, certainly a good deal better than his predecessor and his successor:

• A National Review Online symposium: Steven Hayward writes: "Although Ford confronted the runaway Democratic Congress with his veto pen and behind the scenes took the first steps toward economic and regulatory reforms that reached full fruition under Reagan, he seemed rhetorically unequal to the challenge of standing up to liberalism."
• Larry Kudlow salutes Ford as a "good and gracious man," but was "one of a long line of American executives [from Johnson to Carter] who presided over the decline of the U.S. in both national security and economic terms."
• The editors of the Wall Street Journal: "He faced large liberal majorities in Congress that were emboldened by their ouster of Nixon and set to revive the Great Society. And he had to clean up the financial problems caused by a burst of inflation and wage and price controls. Ford navigated all of these traumas better than he gets credit for."
• Karol is grateful to Ford for pushing for the change in Soviet policy that allowed her family to emigrate.
• In a biographical sketch or Ford, John Steele Gordon writes that Ford left the White House better than he found it.
• Ford's gleeful firing of Secretary of Defence James Schlesinger displays a different facet of his character.
• Marvin Olasky has posted the text of Ford's speech to his son's graduating class at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary
• See-Dubya's salute: "Best President of the 1970s."

(Also at Hot Air, Allahpundit posts video of the first thing (I sheepishly admit) that came to my mind when I heard the news on the radio. This sketch from Saturday Night Live in 1996 is really a satire about the network news business, not about Ford; his name was just a hook on which to hang the concept: Dana Carvey as Tom Brokaw prerecording several versions of breaking news of Ford's death, just in case something should happen while Brokaw is on vacation. In the event, Ford outlived Brokaw's career.)

My own reminiscence: The first political convention I ever attended was the 1976 Oklahoma 1st District Convention at Nathan Hale High School. My dad was there as Wagoner County's lone delegate (our precinct was the only one in the county in District 1), and he was a Ford man. He also served that day as convention secretary. Then as now, the state and district conventions selected who would go to the national convention as delegates. But prior to 1998, Oklahoma didn't have a presidential preference primary, and national delegates weren't bound to a candidate; instead candidates for national delegate would announce their preference and run as a slate. The Reagan slate won the 1st District by a large margin that day. I was sad that Ford fell short in that skirmish, happy to seem him win the nomination at Kansas City, but sad again to see him lose to Jimmy Carter by such a close margin. At age 12 I didn't understand all the ideological issues in the '76 primary campaign. (I didn't discover National Review until the following year in the high school library.) He was the Republican incumbent, he was a decent man in a difficult time, and that was reason enough to support his renomination.

MORE remembrances, but not so kind:

Paul Greenberg on "Gerald Ford: The In-between President":

There is much to be said for mediocrity, and surely it will be at the state funeral now in the offing. There are worse things. Certainly few things are more perilous than man's eternal striving for greatness and the hubris it engenders. Look what happened to Woodrow Wilson and Lyndon Johnson, and is happening to George W. Bush.

At such times we are tempted to think, oh, yes, better someone who can wrap up an indecent defeat as decently as possible, the way Jerry Ford did in Vietnam. It wasn't his fault. He was just there in the White House at the time, like Zelig. Give us another Zelig, the people cry. A nice unknown quantity who will soothe things over - a Jerry Ford. (And now a Barack Obama?)

It's exhausting, always acting on principle, seeking to shape history rather than be shaped by it. There comes a time when the country just wants it all to be over, and that is the time when a Gerald R. Ford earns our gratitude, or at least gets it. And let it be noted that Mr. Ford was a good citizen even if he was First Citizen - no easy thing.

Much like Gerald Ford himself, most of us want to do the decent thing and overlook some other things in the interest of a little peace and quiet for now, whatever whirlwind we are sowing for later. Let it be said that Gerald Rudolph Ford was just the man for his time - a time not unlike this discouraging one, a time yearning for a return to a normalcy that never was.

Christopher Hitchens at Slate: "Our Short National Nightmare: How President Ford managed to go soft on Iraqi Baathists, Indonesian fascists, Soviet Communists, and the shah … in just two years":

Ford's refusal to meet with Solzhenitsyn, when the great dissident historian came to America, was consistent with his general style of making excuses for power. As Timothy Noah has suggested lately, there seems to have been a confusion in Ford's mind as to whether the Helsinki Treaty was intended to stabilize, recognize, or challenge the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. However that may be, the great moral component of the Helsinki agreement—that it placed the United States on the side of the repressed populations—was ridiculed by Ford's repudiation of Solzhenitsyn, as well as by his later fatuities on the nature of Soviet domination. To have been soft on Republican crime, soft on Baathism, soft on the shah, soft on Indonesian fascism, and soft on Communism, all in one brief and transient presidency, argues for the sort of sportsmanlike Midwestern geniality that we do not ever need to see again.