OK, you don't like that Ford pardoned Nixon

so what is it that you think should have happened that would have benefitted the country more than the pardon?

let's do more than pay lip service to the idea that no one is above the law.

...others went to jail for their crimes associated with Watergate, Nixon should have been in the cell next to them.

Ford let the country down and again we have a president who thinks he's above the law. Maybe if Nixon had been tried we wouldn't have a POTUS that thinks he's above the law now.

Ford fucked up.....big time.

Cheers

if certain groups never abide by them or fear the punishment thereof. Not sure, but I'd be willing to bet the founders would have demanded a trial.

You know, bums like Cheney and Rumsfeld who should have never been allowed to continue in public service to go on and commit the atrocites that are going on today. That would have been good for the country, far better than letting everyone off the hook.

how, exactly.

They may very well have been involved somehow. We'll never know because this guy let them all go and didn't investigate anything.

I admit to being ambivalent about what Ford did. But I liked these two grafs from an article in Salon today:

There are rare moments when political reality almost replicates patriotic mythology -- and Ford's first weeks in office in August 1974 fall into this star-spangled category. Ford's words from his White House address after taking the oath of office still resonate: "My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over. Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws not men." Ten days into his presidency, already conscious of the looming conservative threat from Ronald Reagan, Ford went before the Veterans of Foreign Wars to announce a limited amnesty program for Vietnam draft evaders. Then. on Sept. 8, Ford announced the boldest decision of his presidency -- his pardon of Richard Nixon. "I think it was the right thing to do," Ford told his wife, Betty, according to her autobiography, "The Times of My Life." She added, "He's never changed his mind, though we both believe the pardon, more than anything else, cost him the 1976 election."

Indeed it did -- as I can testify from my personal vantage point working for the Jimmy Carter campaign against Ford in the 1976 election. Yet these days only the most stubborn and unyielding Nixon haters still question whether the cleanse-the-air pardon was justified. America is simply not a banana republic in which former presidents should face the prospect of prison or ruinous civil judgments after leaving office. Ford paid the ultimate political price for his courageous decision to restore a veneer of civility to our politics even in the face of the intemperate passions let loose by Vietnam and Watergate. According to terHorst, who resigned as White House press secretary in protest over the pardon, Ford told him at the time, "I'm not concerned about the election of 1976 or the politics of it."

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/12/28/gerald_ford/

That and my anger at what they did to Clinton (who didn't get pardoned you'll remember) and the fact that we had no idea Cheney and Rummy were such shits and the fact that what Bush has done is so far worse than what Nixon did (hell, what Reagan did was so much worse than what Nixon did)...I've mellowed.

I think Ford was right but I'm still pissed about it. And if that doesn't make any sense to you, don't worry, it doesn't make any sense to me either.

but Liddy and his other henchmen do? That's a wonderful statement to the people of the country.

because by the time he waved that V from the helicopter, the man looked and acted severely mentally unbalanced. Was that a factor in the pardon? I wish that he had been tried, but honestly, by the time he resigned his behavior was so bizarre that it was difficult just to watch and listen to him.

talk about looking and acting severely mentally unbalanced.

that should not be a factor in a pardon, unless (maybe) the pardonee was crazy when they committed the crime for which they are being pardoned.

fitness to stand trial and criminal insanity are two VERY different things.

some kind of personality disorder and I have to mute the bastard out half the time.

I'm not saying that I think Nixon shouldn't have gone to trial, but he was chewing on a carpet at some point, wasn't he? Right or wrong, I'm just wondering if that was a factor in the pardon.

thanks for clarifying, sometimes i'm too dense for my own good.

:toast:

change my mind. I've come to accept Ford's opinion and so has such people as Stanley Kutler the author of "The Wars of Watergate" and UW Professor, who was certainly no fan of Nixon's. He believes the pardons were right exactly for the reasons Ford gave, though he does think that Ford could have done more to prepare the nation. Also, Sen. Kennedy initially opposed the pardon, but also changed his mind.

Many have come to view it as the right thing to do, but I still don't know how or why people have come to this conclusion.

Honestly, how was the precedent set by Ford - that an outgoing president accused of criminal activity could simply be pardoned, be good?

Wouldn't a trial have been exactly the image the US would have wanted to portray to the world? That in this nation of laws, no man is above the law, no matter how powerful?

I think Ford set a terrible precedent, and the ability for the media and the historians to just accept this as "healing the nation" is stunning. For all people claim Ford healed the US, nothing really changed. The US was forced out of Vietnam. The economy eventually worsened to the point of ending Carter's presidency...and brought about the disastrous policies of Reagan...

It's this same precedent that will allow Bush, or anyone else to be accountable for their crimes.

As it is much of what actually happened under that regime has been swept under the rug, or as the saying goes these days, has disappeared down the memory hole.

Think that would benefit the country?

The trial assures that the truth, or some semblance of it, will come out. I never heard of a "preemptive" pardon before Ford's pardoning of Nixon, and I think the whole idea of preemptive pardons enables disregard of the law by the executive. That tyranny-enabler, John Yoo, uses the idea of the unlimited pardon as the basis for his theory of the President being beyond the law, or so I remember reading. Preemptive pardons should be impossible for anyone to grant. Pardons only for convicted criminals should be clarified as the only possibility, probably by the SCOTUS. Where's the harm to society to let the trial go forward?

IMHO, the pardon did more harm than good, in regards to this Earth shattering need for "healing".

Have you considered posting a thread on your observations? I'd love to see one that lays it all out.

Or is there some further precedent for this? In my estimation, if pardons could only be issued to convicted criminals that would drain a lot of the infection. The pardoning of a criminal is the common-sense interpretation. Are governors, for instance, commonly pardoning persons not yet under indictment?

To effect this, clearly a constitutional amendment would do, but easier would be a "clarification" by the judicial system that pardons can only be applied to those convicted.

Ford's pardon of Nixon is part of the reason why.

Presidents in the US should never feel that they are kings, above the laws that govern mere men. I would have thought that this concept didn't need to be argued, that it was obvious to the most casual observer, but apparently that is not the case.

Not only did we end up with a sonofabitch who thinks he's above the law; we elected a bunch of thugs who abused the power of impeachment during Clinton's term.

That is why we must impeach each and every crooked officeholder involved in this corrupt misadministration.

criminal investigations that we are calling for now of the current administration

rather seen a trial. It seems similar to if a person is sick, and is prescribed an antibiotic: it is important for them to take the full dose. If they do not, the infection mutates, and comes back stronger. In the case of the series of crimes we call "Watergate," I think President Ford tossed out the medicine, and that infection came back stronger in the group of crimes we call "Iran-Contra."

I'm confident Nixon would have been convicted. It is possible he would have served time, though that is not why I favored a trial. I wanted the legal process to have the opportunity to uncover as much of the criminal infection that made our system of government ill during that era.

In my case, I found Ford's behavior as a member of the Warren Commission far more disturbing than his pardoning of Nixon. At the same time, I can separate my feelings towards Ford as a politician and an active participant in the republican party, with the passing of an elderly man. I can accept that progressive democrats can hold a wide range of sincere beliefs about him, and that they may have feelings ranging from utter contempt to respect.

it was Nixon. End of Story.

but he resigned before he could be impeached, so the point is moot.

Followed by a full and fair trial. Or vice versa.

I was but a callow youth during the time in question, but even my nascent sensibilities of justice were heartily offended by Ford's pardon, and the overwhelming feeling that a deal of some sort had been cut to let Nixon off scot-free.

are just citizens.

that he or she is subject to the laws.

however the pardoning of nixon paints the perfect de tocqueville picture of unsophisticated americans fawning and kowtowing to someone ''king-like'' that we call the president.

we also learn the lesson that some people really are above the law.

but what else do unsophisticated bumpkins deserve?

He believed it was best for the country not to know what happened behind the scenes in the Warren Commission, but then wrote about it in his book Portrait of the Assassin. To get him off the hook for revealing Classified info, the government would later release the executive sessions of the Commission, which provided a smoking gun for the case that the Commission covered-up and avoided important aspects of the case. He made a similar mistake as president. After Nixon took his dive, Ford wanted to know what the CIA had been up to all those years. He sat down and read the "Family Jewels". He then let it slip to his friends in the media that their investigations of domestic spying was just the tip of the iceberg and that if they kept digging they'd uncover something really scary "like assassinations." Of course, word of this off the record conversation slipped out. Ford then created the Rockefeller Commission in order to throw the investigations off track. Too late. Congress jumped on the bandwagon and actually opened up some doors via the Church and Pike Reports. As a result, Ford's legacy is a mixed bag. He both tried to keep the secrets and helped expose the secrets. I think, in retrospect, he was a normal guy sitting on the throne of people far more devious than himself, and that his proximity to men like Nixon, Hoover, Bush, Rumsfeld, and Cheney had an effect on his personality. In the eyes of these men, it was patriotic to lie, deceive, and distort, etc... Ford devoted himself to winning the approval of these men and, as a consequence, was not much better than them... Even so, he seemed like a nice guy.


To see why the Warren Commission was wrong, and take a look at the medical evidence they so carefully avoided, please go here: http://homepage.mac.com/bkohley/Menu18.html

ford was at the cusp of a new conservative politics that cheney and rumsfeld represent today.

that politics was in it's nativity -- with a whole host of characters that we've all become familiar with today -- that marriage of straussian political philosophy and religious fanaticism.


paul weyrich and william f buckley are back there as well.

he was a creature of DC politics, Nixon was not going to appoint someone who would turn around and screw him. Had Ford not pardoned Nixon(and I am not saying it was the right decision)his own GOP would've roasted him and rode him out of DC, and became a pariah(though that would be a profile in courage)He took a gamble either way.

Punishing a criminal for his crimes?

(I can't believe this is even a question.)

Giving Nixon a pardon did just the opposite. It gave the lie to that treasured myth about "equality under the law".

You pose a very fair question, cali.

I lived during that time and followed every inch of the story from the first day of the break-in at the Watergate.

I am confident that had charges been filed against Richard Nixon, there would have been a greater chance of him at least admitting his criminal involvement in Watergate rather than let Bob Halderman and the rest take the fall and the legal stigma the rest of their lives. Ford could have pardoned him later.

That said, there's no way on earth that anyone can convince me that Agnew wasn't removed from office (never had happened before) paving the way for a friendlier and more respected Gerald Ford to become President without the deal of the pardon having been arranged before.

Gerald Ford was chosen to be Vice President ONLY so that he could in turn become President.

in the form of trials and, if appropriate, convictions for those who apparently committed crimes against our democracy.

Though the Bush administration should go to trial as their crimes are so numerous, deep, and devastating in so many uncountable ways.