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January 04, 2007

Ford's Pardon Was a Wise Political Decision, Too

By Jay Bryant

Among the many heartfelt and sincere comments which have been uttered about President Ford these past few days, few have been more ubiquitous than this: that his pardon of Richard Nixon turned out to be a wise decision and good for the nation, but it cost him the Presidential election in 1976.

From Bob Schieffer to the humblest reporter, from eulogists including President Bush and Vice President Chaney, this analysis has surely become general and accepted knowledge by now: Ford sacrificed his own election in order to spare the nation the agony of a lengthy series of Nixon indictments, trials and appeals.

It fits the image of a man who "never sought the Presidency," but it's wrong.

To be sure, what we now call exit polls in 1976 showed clearly that the pardon was one of the principal reasons why voters chose Carter over Ford. But it is an enormous leap from that to saying that the pardon cost him the election, principally because it makes the untenable assumption that everything else would have been the same if he had not issued the pardon.

Or look at the point from the other side of the statement. If the pardon was wise and good, and saved the nation all that agony, why would anyone suppose that none of it would have happened prior to Election Day, 1976?

Indeed, it would have gone forward. The wheels of justice do not grind that slowly, and the hotheads in the overwhelmingly Democratic Congress, abetted by their bloodthirsty allies in the press, would have made sure it was as nasty as it could be.

In that poisoned atmosphere, Ford wouldn't have had a chance in 1976.

Nor would he have had a chance to make good on the memorable claim from his inaugural address: that with him as president, our long national nightmare was over.

The pardon was good for the country. It also gave Ford a chance, and saved the Republican Party.

Let's not forget just how low the Republican Party had sunk in the wake of Watergate. A poll commissioned by the woman Ford named Chairman of the RNC in 1974, Mary Louise Smith, revealed that only 19% of Americans identified themselves as Republicans at the time. In a two-party system, that's pretty close to being dead, and indeed there was much talk about dissolving the party, or at least changing its name.

If the Watergate scandal had persisted through 1975 and 1976, the dissolution of the party would almost certainly have happened, as die-hard defenders of Nixon battled reformers for the hearts and minds of those 19%-ers, and the Democrats rolled to a landslide victory.

One can speculate further on the details of what might have happened - whether Ronald Reagan would have defeated Ford in the convention that year, or left the party altogether to form a new organization, whether such an inviting proposition as the Democratic nomination would have been would have changed their dynamics as well, perhaps making someone other than Carter the nominee. But that's just speculation.

What we know is that Ford was able to campaign in an atmosphere of national healing, with things getting better week by week as the country celebrated the bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence confident that once again the greatness begun by the founders in Philadelphia had survived, and returned to something approaching normalcy. The President started thirty points behind Carter; he lost by one -- a few thousand votes in Mississippi and Ohio.

Ford's decision to pardon Nixon was both right for the country and politically smart, too.

Perhaps one of the reasons eulogists and others prefer to think otherwise at this moment is that they feel it somehow demeans Ford to suppose he may have used political calculation in making his decision. But the fact that the decision was politically smart does not mean it was done for political reasons. Most good decisions are politically smart. If you think about it, they must be, or the country surely would have collapsed long ago.

It so happened that I was with Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan at Ford's home in Rancho Mirage in October of 1978 when they met for the first time since their nomination battle at the 1976 convention - the former and future Presidents, two old rivals burying the hatchet. Ford, largely by his pardon decision, had returned the Republican Party to respectability; Reagan would soon return it to power.

The event, which was built around Ford's registering to vote in California for the first time, remains a cherished personal memory for me. It never would have happened if Ford had not pardoned Nixon.

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