Wednesday, December 27, 2006
Gerald Ford
Having been born in the earliest days of the Reagan Administration, I always had to remind myself that Gerald Ford was, indeed, still alive. What a quaint curiosity his 2 1/2 year tenure was. While Jimmy Carter has always been, pretty unfairly, something of a national joke (not to mention a rare puzzle, a pro-abortion evangelical Democrat from Georgia who did not pursue the same path as Zell Miller), one wonders what Gerald Ford thought about that: "Shit, I lost to THAT guy?"
Sandwiched between Republicans Nixon (who until around 2002 was arguably the worst president we've ever had) and Reagan (who clobbered what remained of the postwar liberal consensus), with Carter in there, Ford's presidency doesn't seem to have swung much in the glare of hindsight, whereas Carter's now a peacebroker and homebuilder and even Nixon now appears to be the last real liberal. To label Ford a mere placeholder invites anti-intellectualism and unearned forgiveness. Not only did he okay Indonesia's butchery in East Timor (where up to 200,000 people--a third of the entire country--died in a Kissingerian burst of 'stability'), but he pardoned Nixon, too. (Let's also not forget that two of the very worst public servants in recent memory--Cheney and Rumsfeld--spawned in the Ford Administration).
I know the prevailing wisdom about the pardon episode basically aligns with Ford's sentiment that "our long national nightmare is over," but I fail to see how a man unelected to either the presidency or the vice presidency who exculpates his former boss of grievous wrongdoings for 'the sake of the country' isn't very much to blame for the cynicism and apathy that have never left the body politic in the subsequent 35 years. No, there wasn't a conspiracy or a backroom deal, but the appearance of dirty maneuverings is all it takes. No one seems to remember that once upon a time you could believe your government wasn't just lying to you, all the time, in every way. Ford's lost re-election bid, and its direct traceability to the pardon, have exonerated him in the eyes of history as a decent man who prudently did the right thing even at the cost of his own political future. No--Ford was both wrong and stupid. People demand vengeance in the guise of justice when a mentally retarded citizen commits a crime, but when an imperial and pathologically secretive president breaks laws all over the place, it's best to avoid future embarrassing headlines and put the matter behind us without a criminal investigation? Nixon should have been prosecuted. Period.
As far as the man's inherent decency, well, don't expect the respectful tones of an obituary to plumb the psychoanalytic workings of good old-fashioned Midwestern conservatism and its blue-eyed work ethic. But at least the Times acknowledged the troubling contradiction between a man who would give a poor child the shirt off his back and then dash back into the Oval Office to veto a school lunch program (or whatever they said). What are we really to divine from this? That Ford was a singular example of cognitive dissonance? Or incuriousity? Or that his compassion was deep and genuine but simply myopic?
Isn't this one of the systemic problems with conservatism as a philosophy? That in spite of all the protestations from illiberals of all stripes that they actually care about the poor, the marginal or the oppressed, "caring" requires actual follow-through and more than patchwork, remedial forms of addressing poverty and disenfranchisement. Specifically, it requires marshaling the forces of a government that is, for better or for worse, inextricably tied into a vast matrix of socioeconomic forces that, if left unchecked, demonstrably ravage the lives of those who don't already possess the different forms of capital required to get ahead. It's anecdotally pleasing to remember Gerald Ford as a real swell guy who would strip himself bare in the event that shirtless moppets swarmed the South Lawn, but it's not simply Ford-the-individual acting in isolation when we stop to ponder why conservatives reflexively stop short of using government as a force for good, instead preferring to bankrupt it and staff it with cronies and then point to the resulting disaster as proof of government's inherent inefficiency and utopian pointlessness.
Gerald Ford was probably very nice. But like everyone in government who isn't doing whatever possible to equalize the results of a capitalist polity, he shouldn't get a pass. And he had 29 years to use his influence as a venerable and post-political statesman for any number of causes he might have adopted. Carter builds homes. Clinton's coordinating efforts to combat HIV and AIDS. Ford golfed.
Sandwiched between Republicans Nixon (who until around 2002 was arguably the worst president we've ever had) and Reagan (who clobbered what remained of the postwar liberal consensus), with Carter in there, Ford's presidency doesn't seem to have swung much in the glare of hindsight, whereas Carter's now a peacebroker and homebuilder and even Nixon now appears to be the last real liberal. To label Ford a mere placeholder invites anti-intellectualism and unearned forgiveness. Not only did he okay Indonesia's butchery in East Timor (where up to 200,000 people--a third of the entire country--died in a Kissingerian burst of 'stability'), but he pardoned Nixon, too. (Let's also not forget that two of the very worst public servants in recent memory--Cheney and Rumsfeld--spawned in the Ford Administration).
I know the prevailing wisdom about the pardon episode basically aligns with Ford's sentiment that "our long national nightmare is over," but I fail to see how a man unelected to either the presidency or the vice presidency who exculpates his former boss of grievous wrongdoings for 'the sake of the country' isn't very much to blame for the cynicism and apathy that have never left the body politic in the subsequent 35 years. No, there wasn't a conspiracy or a backroom deal, but the appearance of dirty maneuverings is all it takes. No one seems to remember that once upon a time you could believe your government wasn't just lying to you, all the time, in every way. Ford's lost re-election bid, and its direct traceability to the pardon, have exonerated him in the eyes of history as a decent man who prudently did the right thing even at the cost of his own political future. No--Ford was both wrong and stupid. People demand vengeance in the guise of justice when a mentally retarded citizen commits a crime, but when an imperial and pathologically secretive president breaks laws all over the place, it's best to avoid future embarrassing headlines and put the matter behind us without a criminal investigation? Nixon should have been prosecuted. Period.
As far as the man's inherent decency, well, don't expect the respectful tones of an obituary to plumb the psychoanalytic workings of good old-fashioned Midwestern conservatism and its blue-eyed work ethic. But at least the Times acknowledged the troubling contradiction between a man who would give a poor child the shirt off his back and then dash back into the Oval Office to veto a school lunch program (or whatever they said). What are we really to divine from this? That Ford was a singular example of cognitive dissonance? Or incuriousity? Or that his compassion was deep and genuine but simply myopic?
Isn't this one of the systemic problems with conservatism as a philosophy? That in spite of all the protestations from illiberals of all stripes that they actually care about the poor, the marginal or the oppressed, "caring" requires actual follow-through and more than patchwork, remedial forms of addressing poverty and disenfranchisement. Specifically, it requires marshaling the forces of a government that is, for better or for worse, inextricably tied into a vast matrix of socioeconomic forces that, if left unchecked, demonstrably ravage the lives of those who don't already possess the different forms of capital required to get ahead. It's anecdotally pleasing to remember Gerald Ford as a real swell guy who would strip himself bare in the event that shirtless moppets swarmed the South Lawn, but it's not simply Ford-the-individual acting in isolation when we stop to ponder why conservatives reflexively stop short of using government as a force for good, instead preferring to bankrupt it and staff it with cronies and then point to the resulting disaster as proof of government's inherent inefficiency and utopian pointlessness.
Gerald Ford was probably very nice. But like everyone in government who isn't doing whatever possible to equalize the results of a capitalist polity, he shouldn't get a pass. And he had 29 years to use his influence as a venerable and post-political statesman for any number of causes he might have adopted. Carter builds homes. Clinton's coordinating efforts to combat HIV and AIDS. Ford golfed.
