RIP Gerald Ford

Gerald Ford died yesterday at the age of 93. Ford was America's only unelected President, that is the only one not only to not be elected Vice President, but also to not win re-election after finishing the term of his predecessor. Richard Nixon had chosen Ford as his Vice President after the resignation of Spiro Agnew. The later pardon of Nixon by Ford was immensely unpopular with Americans at the time and many if the press and public at the time posited nefarious back room dealings. Ford was widely believed to have gotten the job because he would pardon Nixon and that hurt him badly at the polls. Gerald Ford deserved better than that from the public and the pundits.

Did Nixon commit crimes and flout the Constitution during his term? Yes, yes he did.

Did Nixon deserve to serve time for those transgressions? Probably so.

Did Ford do the right thing in pardoning Nixon, thereby short circuiting any investigation of the above mentioned crimes? Yes, most definitely.

You see America in the mid-seventies was a country that had been knocked around pretty badly. We were in the process of losing our first war ever in Viet Nam. The economy was a mess with rampant inflation. To top it all off the President of the United States had been revealed as a cheap hoodlum who broke into opponents headquarters just because he could.

What this country needed then was a fresh start, a break from the past, and the best way to get that was to put Watergate behind us. Nearly everyone knew that Nixon was a crook and a liar who debased the office of President. The last thing we needed was months of investigations detailing all of his petty travesties. So Gerald Ford did the right thing and pardoned Richard Nixon and signed the death warrant on his political career in the process.

I think this is relevant today with more and more pundits starting to talk openly about impeachment for this President. Again, we are in a dangerous place with serious problems to address. There is no need to drag the village idiot before Congress to have his incompetence displayed to the world. Instead let us take a page from Gerald Ford's play book and let him fade quietly away to his corporate boards and his dude ranch in Crawford.

Gerald Ford understood instinctively that sometimes we don't have the luxury of demanding justice at any price. Sometimes we have to trust that justice will later in the fullness of time and history will sort out the sinners from the saints. Happily in Gerald Ford's case that is exactly what happened. He is remembered now as a man that took a job he did not aspire to and then took a hit that he did not need to take for the good of the nation. There are worse ways to be remembered.