Found On Road Dead
Dec. 27th, 2006 10:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogGerald R. Ford 1913-2006
I largely came of political age during Ford's short but important administration. His Presidential career would have been more impressive except for two mistakes, one of them necessary, both of them premature.
Pardoning Nixon is the one everyone will be mentioning. Yet I see that, and even saw it then, as a needed part of the healing we so badly needed. Just as sometimes some must die that others might live, Nixon needed to live, in a sense, so his legacy of divisiveness could die. I would have preferred more openness in the process, and to have that pardon come after actual indictments had been handed down, but I've never believed there was a quid pro quo in the deal. Rather, it seemed that Ford, long a conciliatory Congressman, simply did what he thought was right. Unlike the current occupant of the White House, nobody died for his mistake.
Ford's other negative legacy was in being merely ahead of his time in being the first President to act- sometimes literally- with constant knowledge of the television cameras being on him. Had he been a little more adept at it, or had he had a Karl Rove to mind him, he might have played it to his advantage, much as Reagan and Clinton did in their ascents. Instead, his airplane-climbing gaffes became the thing folks remembered him most for, even before Chevy Chase made them an even more comic foil in the first season of Saturday Night Live. Ford brought back the national debates that Nixon had shunned, and his verbal slip-up at one of them cost him much of the respect his career entitled him to. But even more than those efforts, he tried like nobody did before him- but like everyone has done since- to play to the cameras. Unfortunately, his writers and his sense of timing didn't work. His goofy "Whip Inflation Now" campaign, complete with WIN buttons, came across as a tacky advertising campaign. And when his press secretary, a former NBC reporter, hosted Saturday Night Live, his filmed intros should have gotten him points for being a good sport, but instead made him seem a bit more of a buffoon. That wasn't fair then, and I hope his legacy will rise above it now.
----
Friends of mine came up with the following parody right after the resignation. It's sung to the tune of the finale from Godspell:
Long live Agnew,
Long live Agnew,
Long live Agnew,
Nixon, too.
Preeeee-pare ye the way of Jerry Ford!
Preeeee-pare ye the way of Jerry Ford!
----
Finally, if my words, or theirs, weren't enough to express my genuine admiration for the healing he brought, I'll leave you with another guy left uncharacteristically speechless at the time: Garry Trudeau. For this was his strip from the morning after Nixon's resignation in August of 1974:
Hold that image in your mind. My hope is, you'll be thinking of it again about 755 days from now.
I largely came of political age during Ford's short but important administration. His Presidential career would have been more impressive except for two mistakes, one of them necessary, both of them premature.
Pardoning Nixon is the one everyone will be mentioning. Yet I see that, and even saw it then, as a needed part of the healing we so badly needed. Just as sometimes some must die that others might live, Nixon needed to live, in a sense, so his legacy of divisiveness could die. I would have preferred more openness in the process, and to have that pardon come after actual indictments had been handed down, but I've never believed there was a quid pro quo in the deal. Rather, it seemed that Ford, long a conciliatory Congressman, simply did what he thought was right. Unlike the current occupant of the White House, nobody died for his mistake.
Ford's other negative legacy was in being merely ahead of his time in being the first President to act- sometimes literally- with constant knowledge of the television cameras being on him. Had he been a little more adept at it, or had he had a Karl Rove to mind him, he might have played it to his advantage, much as Reagan and Clinton did in their ascents. Instead, his airplane-climbing gaffes became the thing folks remembered him most for, even before Chevy Chase made them an even more comic foil in the first season of Saturday Night Live. Ford brought back the national debates that Nixon had shunned, and his verbal slip-up at one of them cost him much of the respect his career entitled him to. But even more than those efforts, he tried like nobody did before him- but like everyone has done since- to play to the cameras. Unfortunately, his writers and his sense of timing didn't work. His goofy "Whip Inflation Now" campaign, complete with WIN buttons, came across as a tacky advertising campaign. And when his press secretary, a former NBC reporter, hosted Saturday Night Live, his filmed intros should have gotten him points for being a good sport, but instead made him seem a bit more of a buffoon. That wasn't fair then, and I hope his legacy will rise above it now.
----
Friends of mine came up with the following parody right after the resignation. It's sung to the tune of the finale from Godspell:
Long live Agnew,
Long live Agnew,
Long live Agnew,
Nixon, too.
Preeeee-pare ye the way of Jerry Ford!
Preeeee-pare ye the way of Jerry Ford!
----
Finally, if my words, or theirs, weren't enough to express my genuine admiration for the healing he brought, I'll leave you with another guy left uncharacteristically speechless at the time: Garry Trudeau. For this was his strip from the morning after Nixon's resignation in August of 1974:
Hold that image in your mind. My hope is, you'll be thinking of it again about 755 days from now.