I've come to accept Ford's reasons for pardoning Nixon [View All]

I know this will probably be an unpopular view on DU, and for years I felt that Nixon should have been tried and convicted before a pardon was even considered. But in retrospect I think that Gerald Ford did the correct thing on September 8, 1974 when he pardoned Richard Nixon. Ford certainly didn't do it for political reasons. His approval rating fell from 71% to 49%--the single biggest drop in Gallup history. The Republican party lost more than 30 seats in Congress that November, and many analysts believe that the pardon was the deciding factor in Ford's narrow defeat in 1976.

Ford was convinced that as long as Nixon was a national obsession that the country could never get on with the very real work that had to be done. Inflation was high. There was a recession with high unemployment. The country was still struggling with Vietnam. There were gas shortages and high prices at the pumps. Ford was spending, he estimated, 30 percent of his time dealing with problems related to Nixon and his papers. Ford had said in his inaugural address, "Our long national nightmare is over..." but clearly it wasn't not until the Nixon problem was resolved. Nixon's lawyers were going to drag it out in the legal system for years. In his speech announcing the pardon Ford said, "Nixon is an American tragedy in which we all have played a part. It could go on and on and on, or someone must write the end to it. I have concluded that only I can do that, and If I can I must."

Compassion also played a part in Ford's decision. People may not remember it, but Nixon was a very sick man following his resignation. In October, 1974 he was hospitalized for weeks and nearly died due to a blood clot which broke off and traveled to his lungs. He was depressed and people thought he might even be suicidal.

In the end Ford believed that Nixon's acceptance of the pardon was, finally, acknowledgement by Nixon of wrong doing. Of course Nixon never admitted more than "mistakes."

But over time even liberal historians such as Doris Kearns Goodwin and Arthur Schlesinger have acknowledged that the Nixon pardon was a selfless and courageous act by Ford and in the end the correct one. Nixon historian Stephen Ambrose, in 1974, was a long-haired University Professor who protested Ford's action and later came to accept it as "wise and courageous."

Even Jimmy Carter in the first sentence of his Inaugural address seemed to suggest that Ford had indeed done much to end the divisions in the country that Nixon had reaped, "For myself and for our country I'd like to thank my predecessor for all he did to heal our land," said Carter.