The Definition of Corruption

I have no comprehensive brief against President Ford, and even as a young liberal I agreed that pardoning Richard Nixon was the right thing to do. But if Bob Woodward's reporting is accurate, it was granted for exactly the wrong reason:

"I looked upon him as my personal friend. And I always treasured our relationship. And I had no hesitancy about granting the pardon, because I felt that we had this relationship and that I didn't want to see my real friend have the stigma," Ford said in the interview.

Earlier in this story Woodward writes This and other previously unpublished transcripts of their calls, documents and personal letters provide a portrait of an intensely personal friendship dating to the late 1940s but so hidden that few others were even aware of it. No argument there.

Comments

[Michael]

Hmmmmmnnn. CSPAN ran the entirety of Ford's address to the nation explaining the pardon, and it seemed pretty good to me. And I've never had a problem with the conventional wisdom that Ford took the political fallout for that because he thought it was the right thing to do.

If Woodward is not lying, then this taken together with the post-mortem-bush-bashing does change the way we see Ford. But then, Woodward got some interesting gems out of William Casey when he was newly dead, too. One wonders.

[Michael]

Oh, man! I always do things in the wrong order. If I'd read Hitch's takedown of the Ford era ("our short national nightmare") before I visited here, I could have come off much more smug and pithy.

Money quote:"To have been soft on Republican crime, soft on Baathism, soft on the shah, soft on Indonesian fascism, and soft on Communism, all in one brief and transient presidency, argues for the sort of sportsmanlike Midwestern geniality that we do not ever need to see again."

It's in Slate: http://www.slate.com/id/2156400/

[Douglas V. Gibbs]

Yet liberals have committed similars for years. . . Ford was a class act, if not anything else.

[Christopher Fotos]

Well, I felt a little guilty putting this up during the mourning period for President Ford, and indeed he seemed like a decent guy, and I agree the pardon was the right thing to do for the reasons given at the time. If I can put it this way, I don't want to highlight one act or event the motivation for one act as defining the entire career of President Ford. But pardoning someone because of a personal connection is a classic definition of corruption, alas. Oh well, a man does, and says, many things over the course of a long life.

[WattsESPERANZA]

Do you acknowledge that this is the best time to receive the loans, which would help you.