It’s Time To Give Gerald Ford Our Respect
Public apologies today are as rare as “please” and “thank you.” When a never-wrong political establishment confronts an infallible media, an apology from one or the other is like a sugarplum in July.
In the December American Heritage, Richard Reeves breaks the mold with “I’m Sorry, Mr. President,” a reconsideration of his writings about Gerald R. Ford, who did “a better job than I had predicted or imagined. I know better now than I did then that presidents should be judged on the one, two or five big things they do.”
The one huge decision Ford faced, whether to pardon his predecessor, Richard Nixon, probably defeated him in the 1976 presidential election. After Watergate’s shocks and firestorms, Ford’s steadiness and calm reassured Americans. But in September of 1974, amid a blissful honeymoon with press and public, Ford pardoned Nixon. As Reeves writes, “We had suddenly dared to trust - and felt betrayed again.”
Reeves recalls Ford’s belief that “it would have been impossible to govern the country if there had been open charges against Nixon, that the television-focused attention of the nation would have followed the disgraced president from courtroom to courtroom.”
In 1974, indignation and wrath railed against Ford’s action. In the era of O.J. Simpson, Reeves concludes, “He was right. Whatever his failings as a leader, and they were many, he was right about the big one. We have turned out to be a television nation that has trouble focusing on anything else for months when we can watch a stone-faced old football player accused of murdering his wife.”
Reeves wrote a book 20 years ago, titled, after one of the president’s self-deprecating remarks, “A Ford, Not a Lincoln.” When New York magazine excerpted it, “The cover was a faked photo of Bozo the Clown in the Oval Office; the headline was ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, the President of the United States.”’ Reeves thinks this was “cruel, unnecessarily so … he had become president by accident, done the best he knew how and, we now know, muddled through a very dangerous time.”
Readers may wonder why apologies don’t occur more often. Those who enjoy the daily corrections box know that in the fact-oriented press, recanting judgments and opinions is rare. I’ve apologized in print to Barry Goldwater, George McGovern and Barney Frank. I presume they liked it more than I did.
I caught Ford on the telephone just before he was heading to Vail for a family Christmas. “I was pleased,” he said. “I always admired Reeves for his very able professionalism. He was tough and reasonably fair. But it’s nice to have a change of heart.”
The 38th president was the only one not elected, so he might not have been prepared for the contumely that accompanies presidential politics. Leaping from the House to the White House was not easy, he recalled.
“The White House press corps was more exposed nationally. As a result, the competition was very, very aggressive and that brought about those stories and headlines,” he said. In the House, where he served as minority leader, the press corps was smaller and “we sort of protected one another.”
He’s 83 now, and “two total knee-joint replacements” have forced him off the ski slopes, but he recalls happily that “I skied for 41 years all over New England going back to wooden skis and leather bindings.”
Although he recalls some of the “unpleasant things written about 25 years ago,” Gerald Ford’s advice to his successors is simple and serene: “I understood, I didn’t always like it, but you have to be mature and realistic about it.”
For that judgment alone, many in my trade may echo Dick Reeves and his graceful apology, which concludes, “I know that he did his best and did what he thought he had to. You have my respect and thanks, Mr. President.”
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