History Forum / General / British History / December 2006

Recte:

Bravo!

Gerry Ford was a Yale man of the Best Kind.

He graduated from the Yale Law School and also coached the football team.

DSH
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REVIEW & OUTLOOK

President Ford
History dealt him a weak hand; he played it well.

Thursday, December 28, 2006
The Wall Street Journal

The abiding cliché about Gerald Ford--who died Tuesday at age 93--is that he
was a decent man who steadied the country but held the White House too
briefly to leave a major imprint. We've always thought that view of his
Presidency is too diminishing, not least because he led the nation at a
dangerous time and resisted political furies that could have done the U.S.
far more harm.

"America's Suicide Attempt" is how the historian Paul Johnson describes the
1970s. And it is important to recall the bad temper of the times that Ford
inherited in becoming the 38th President. He succeeded Richard Nixon, who
had resigned over the Watergate coverup and amid an unpopular war in
Vietnam. 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.

It is true that Ford was something of an accidental President, the only one
in U.S. history never elected as either President or Vice President. Before
Nixon picked him to replace the disgraced Spiro Agnew as his Vice President,
Ford had been contemplating retirement from his Grand Rapids, Michigan,
House seat. But like another unlikely President from the Midwest, Harry
Truman, he had reserves of honesty and fortitude that served him well.

He made a particular contribution in pardoning Nixon, though he knew Nixon's
enemies would accuse him of a quid pro quo. The decision cost him dearly in
the polls and may have cost him the election in 1976, but it also spared the
country from years of division over a criminal trial that special prosecutor
Leon Jaworski seemed determined to pursue.

Congress had trampled over a weakened Nixon, and another Ford contribution
was restoring some measure of executive authority. Far more than Nixon, he
used his veto pen (66 times in 895 days), blunting liberal excesses after
Democrats picked up 46 House seats in 1974. He also deserves credit for
resisting the isolationism that was rampant as the Vietnam War wound down.

It was a rare period in postwar U.S. history when the public favored
spending less on defense.

Democrats exploited the mood in early 1975 to block Ford's funding request
for our allies in South Vietnam, as the North began its offensive. Ford
pleaded with Congress that "American unwillingness to provide adequate
assistance to allies fighting for their lives could seriously affect our
credibility throughout the world as an ally," but to no avail.

Yes, just as I have been saying here for several years. The Democrat
Congress abandoned our Southeast Asian Allies and followed a Cut & Run
Strategy in Southeast Asia.  The Islamofascists saw all that and drew the
obvious conclusions that America was weak, indecisive and unwilling to
expend blood and treasure in defeating determined, steadfast enemies. -- DSH

Saigon fell by April, and the boat people and massacres in Southeast Asia
soon followed.

Indeed.  -- DSH

Thus one irony of this week's praise for Ford as a unifying President: At
the time, he was mocked as clumsy and dull, and he was vilified for blocking
Congressional priorities. Any of this sound familiar?

Indeed.  -- DSH

Vietnam was a scarring American defeat, but it could have been worse had
Ford capitulated to the Congressional stampede. Instead, he fortified U.S.
relations with the rest of free Asia, and he sent in the Marines despite
liberal howls when the U.S. ship the Mayaguez was taken hostage by
Cambodia's Khmer Rouge.

Given the weak hand he inherited, it is perhaps understandable that Ford
continued the Nixon policy of pursuing détente and arms control with the
Soviet Union. But that strategy was already beginning to fail due to growing
Soviet adventurism abroad and conservative skepticism at home. Ford also
joined Leonid Brezhnev in signing the Helsinki Accords guaranteeing civil
liberties in the Soviet bloc; while criticized by conservatives, the
Helsinki pact probably helped to undermine Soviet moral authority over the
years.

Bingo! Which was NOT understood at the time. -- DSH

The Ford Administration's economic record is also better than its
reputation, sandwiched as it was between two of the three worst economic
Presidencies of the 20th century. Hoover's was the worst, then Nixon's
followed by Jimmy Carter's.

Ford is famous for having initially rebuffed New York City's bid for a
financial bailout, but New York's trouble was merely one symptom of the
financial woes caused by Federal Reserve Chairman Arthur Burns's monetary
blunder. Burns opened the easy-money spigots in Nixon's first term, leading
to 12% inflation, a spike in interest rates and wage and price controls, and
setting the stage for financial crises from Mexico to Britain, among other
places. Despite such early follies as the WIN program--"whip inflation
now"--and a failed proposal to raise taxes, Ford ran a strong Treasury under
Secretary William Simon, adopted sounder policies and left the economy
better than he found it.

In historical political terms, Ford was something of a transition
figure--from the traditional Republicanism of Eisenhower, with which Ford
identified, to the more energetic reform conservatism that would triumph
with Reagan. Arguably Ford's biggest political mistake was choosing Nelson
Rockefeller as his vice president over Reagan. The New York Governor was
deeply unpopular with the GOP base, and the selection left Ford vulnerable
to Reagan's primary challenge in 1976.

The Gipper came within a handful of delegates of taking the nomination, a
challenge that weakened Ford for the autumn race against Democrat Jimmy
Carter. In the event, Ford ran one of the better Presidential campaigns of
the modern era and came close to beating the former Georgia governor who had
run as a conservative himself.

Perhaps President Ford's greatest achievement was in demonstrating to a
nation angry and dispirited over Watergate and Vietnam that its political
system was resilient and the Office of the Presidency still worthy of
respect. In that sense his Presidency was a triumph of Ford's personal
character--not the first, or last, time America has been fortunate in the
leaders our democracy has produced.
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Hear, Hear!

A Good Man -- Gerald Ford -- A Good Man Indeed -- A Real American.

DSH

Lux et Veritas et Libertas

Fortem Posce Animum

Veritas Vos Liberabit

Is it true that President Ford was conceived through  a sexual assault?

"We would like to express our condolences to the family of former US
president Gerald Ford and the American people."

The Vietnamese Government
--

Julian Richards

www.richardsuk.f9.co.uk
Website of "Robot Wars" middleweight "Broadsword IV"

THIS MESSAGE WAS POSTED FROM SOC.HISTORY.MEDIEVAL

It comes out now, that Ford was smart enough to see that this Iraq "elective
war" was a bad idea.

My only criticism of him is that he voiced support in public, while he said
something different in private.