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January 02, 2007

Special Report Roundtable - January 2

FOX News Special Report With Brit Hume

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GEORGE H.W. BUSH, FMR U.S. PRESIDENT: And of course, when the lie that was Watergate was finally laid bare, once again we entrusted our future and our hopes to this good man. The very sight of chief Justice Berger administering the oath of office to our 38th president instantly restored the honor of the Oval Office and helped America begin to turn the page on one of our saddest chapters.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HUME: That was a moment from the services at the Washington National Cathedral today honoring former President Ford, the late former President Ford, the president Bush -- the first President Bush among them several who eulogized him, his son being another. Some thoughts now on Gerald Ford the man from Fred Barnes, executive editor of the Weekly Standard; Bill Sammon, senior White House correspondent with the Washington Examiner; and Mara Liasson national political correspondent of National Public Radio -- FOX NEWS contributors all.

Well, we've heard much about him, Fred, but let's hear tonight, first from you since you were a White House correspondent who actually covered former President Ford.

FRED BARNES, WEEKLY STANDARD: Well, I covered him. I enjoyed it. I liked him. He liked reporters. He was easy to get along with in the world between the world of White House reporters and presidents has changed dramatically since then. I think he was the last president who really enjoyed the company of reporters, was interested in them, had friends in the Press Corps, and that just changed. It didn't make any difference whether you were a Democrat or Republican, it's just a different world now with the, you know, the instant news cycle and so on.

When I think of Ford, I thought of the stuff that we've heard over the past few days, the people that captured him the best and why he was a good president, as it turned out.

Denny Hastert, Saturday night, called him a "rock." President Bush today, called him today a "rock of stability." And it wasn't just that he was a cheerful guy who could get along with people, which, of course, he could, but underneath it was some real solid -- he was emotionally solid. He was a very stable person. He wasn't intimidated by the office. You know, he hadn't trained to be president, hadn't expected to be. Yet, when he got in there he wasn't frightened by the duties and responsibilities he had. He carried them out very strongly.

He was sort of an old fashioned traditional Republican, not a Reaganite at all, but -- and this was sort of the last gasp for that kind of Republicanism, but Bush carried it out extremely well.

HUME: Ford.

BARNES: And so -- Ford did. And so we look back now and correctly think a lot more of his presidency, and President Ford, than we did in 1977 when he left office.

BILL SAMMON, WASHINGTON EXAMINER: The thing is, we could all find policies with which we would disagree with Ford. In fact, this town is full of people, Democrats and Republicans, who would differ with Ford on policy, but it's almost impossible to find anybody that has anything bad to say about his character, and that's not true of all ex-presidents. I mean, you look at Clinton, you look at Nixon, there's plenty of people that'll talk about their character, but everybody says...

HUME: A lot complain about Jimmy Carter, as well.

SAMMON: Yeah, but with Ford it was that solid Midwest -- you know, I spent three-quarters of my life in Ohio. I sort of -- I can appreciate a guy from Michigan who's kind of an unassuming fellow like Ford. And I think the best line that Bush had -- current President Bush had in his eulogy today is that Ford became president, "because America need him, not because he needed the office." And I think that says something, because most presidents are, you know, you think of Al Gore who would be president, you know, sort of being trained to be president since he was a teenager, or others who have lusted after that job, and here's a guy who ended up getting the job, not wanting it and...

HUME: Yeah, he wanted speaker of the House, didn't he?

SAMMON: Yeah, that was his highest ambition. And he gets trust into the presidency and some people may say, well, it was a one-term presidency or whatever, but he actually now, we're starting to see that he did some good.

MARA LIASSON, NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO: Oh, I think that his history has treated him very kindly. And one of the threads that ran through almost all the eulogies today was how different he was than Nixon. And of course, the explicit comparison was that he was someone whose character was solid and decent and as Henry Kissinger said he wasn't obsessing about his place in history. Tom Brokaw said he came into the office with no hit list, no desire for vengeance at all. And I think that was his character in contrast to Nixon I think was the theme today.

HUME: You know, this is a poisonous political atmosphere in Washington, and perhaps it -- and by some measurements it may be worse than it was back in that moment when he came to the presidency, but it's worth remembering what it was like in that moment. In those days, of course, the White House was open to vehicle traffic in a way that it was briefly today when that motorcade passed. But you could drive past the White House in those days.

I remember one day during the height of that whole Watergate, Nixon crisis, there was a man in a jailbird suit standing outside the White House who had a Nixon mask on holding a sign that said, "honk if you think he's guilty," and it was such cacophony of horn honking that the Nixon's had had enough of it and went to Camp David. Now, that's a poisonous atmosphere, folks, I mean that was an example of what it was like then, and that was the atmosphere into which he came to power, if you will, and it sort of subsided there at least for a while when he first arrived on scene.

BARNES: Yeah, well it did. And he -- another example, though, is the Saturday Night Massacre, remember in '73, when Nixon fired his attorney general, and then his replacement attorney general and so, the person was Elliot Richardson, and then Bill Ruckelshaus -- and people remembered it was like Pearl Harbor in their lives. They remember exactly where they were when they heard about the Saturday Night Massacre, and that really meant something.

You know, the revisionism about Ford as president has really been led, I think, by a guy named Fred Greenstein of Princeton who came up with the six things to judge a president in a non-partisan and non-ideological way, things like vision, organizational ability, political skill, communications and so on, and he found that when he rated presidents back to FDR, Ford came out a lot better than he expected.

HUME: Well, he certainly wasn't afraid to have really good people around him.

BARNES: No, no he wasn't that. But here's what he said, Ford had, and the most important thing in a president is emotional intelligence. In other words, you're not distracted. You can focus on your job. You're not paranoid, as Richard Nixon was. You don't have the problems that Bill Clinton had. You can concentrate on your job and do it. You know what your duties and responsibilities are. You're comfortable with them. And Ford was brimming with emotional intelligence.

SAMMON: At the level of presidency, people look for not just what somebody's policy positions are, but they look for what kind of a person that president is, and you know, here's a guy who turned down offers to become a professional football player out of college to go off to law school. Here's a guy who, on his honeymoon, you know, as Bush pointed out today...

HUME: He went back and campaigned.

SAMMON: Yeah, right, I mean, he went up to Ann Arbor to go to a pre- game brunch with his new bride. I mean, this is a regular guy and I think that tells us something about his character.

LIASSON: I don't know. Betty Ford might have had some complaints about that one. But look, he clearly was a regular guy and he did provide exactly the kind of stability and healing that the nation needed at the time...

HUME: And if fact, he was celebrated in his first days in office by the fact that he was guy who -- there was no official vice presidential residence in those days, he lived right here in Virginia, where he was known to put his own toast in the toaster and bring it and butter it.

(CROSSTALK)

I remember at the time, it seems kind of absurd now, and maybe that's not how we want to see presidents, but that's how we wanted to see someone at that moment.

(CROSSTALK)

LIASSON: That's right. And look, his most famous act, which was pardoning Richard Nixon, which was controversial at the time, much more so than he has said it he even thought it would be -- was seen as exactly the right thing, even by Nixon's most hardened enemies.

HUME: But not at that moment.

LIASSON: Not at the time. But over the history...

HUME: Well, we'll get back -- we're going to talk about his presidency and what the challenges he faced -- the political atmosphere in which he operated when we come back. Stay tuned.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: President Ford assumed office at a terrible time in our nation's history. At home America was divided by political turmoil and racked by inflation. In southeast Asia Saigon fell just nine months into his presidency. Amid all the turmoil, Gerald Ford was a rock of stability.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HUME: Probably worth noting here that when Saigon fell, it fell after the United States Congress had cut off the funding for the support of the south Vietnamese as it continued to try to hold off the Vietcong insurgency. That was one of the -- that was a function of a Congress that, in 1974, won shortly after President Ford took office, gave the Democratic party a huge majority. So as we talk about the Ford presidency and what he was able to achieve and unable to achieve, it's worth noting that he existed in an atmosphere in which he had very little hope, Fred, I think it's fair to say that any of his legislative initiatives were really going anywhere.

BARNES: Well that's true, but he -- you know, the economy changed dramatically from 1974, when he came in and if it wasn't in recession it had just come out of it or we were just going into it. But he -- in 1977, when he left office, when I think inflation was about a third of what it had been, and interest rates were down and growth was up to something like six percent in 1976 so, the economy had improved a lot and of course, you know, one of the things Wall Street loves in Washington is gridlock. And here was a president who was dedicated to cutting spending, to holding down the spending that Congress passed. And what did he veto? Sixty-six times?

HUME: Fifty-six times, overridden a dozen.

BARNES: Overridden only a dozen times. But he was in that regard an old fashioned traditional Republican who favored about spending cuts to produce a balanced budget. He wasn't challenging all these new deal and great society programs, he just want to spend less on them. There was a name for that, but you remember what Barry Goldwater called those people, dime store new dealers, and Ford was actually one. That's an epithet, and he didn't really see what was coming along, this different kind conservatism that was idealistic on foreign policy and wanted to defeat communism and wanted to cut taxes dramatically to spur economic growth and didn't worry that much about spending.

SAMMON: Well, you know, when the Democrats cut off funding for the Vietnam war, Ford had people like Cheney and Rumsfeld working for him, and don't think that they're still not worried about that happening with Iraq as we...

HUME: I sense that you've got something there. I sense that this administration, to some extent, is haunted by the memory of what happened there.

LIASSON: Oh, there's no doubt about that. I think that especially Vice President Cheney's view of the proper balance of power between the executive and legislative was really formed when he worked for Gerald Ford and felt that Congress was usurping a lot of the powers that were traditionally -- that should be in the executive branch and I think he's worked very hard to change the balance into the one he sees better.

HUME: Is it fair to say that Ford successfully or not fought to restore some of those powers?

SAMMON: Well, I talked to Cheney about this and he says that the powers reached a low point during the Ford administration because of the aftermath of Vietnam, because of the aftermath of Watergate, and all of these restrictions were put into place to Iraq weaken the power of the presidency, the executive authority. And Cheney and Bush had very consciously tried to use their years in office to swing the pendulum the other way. Some would argue that it's gone too far.

But you know, Brit, I was, two and a half years ago I was in the National Cathedral for Reagan's funeral, and I remember looking down at the five ex-presidents, now it's down to three, and I remember all the pundits saying maybe Reagan was right about tearing down the wall or the evil empire and maybe we were wrong about him. And now I can't help but be struck, I was at the funeral service over the weekend at the capitol rotunda and I heard people saying, you know, as we heard today, you know, maybe Ford was right about the pardon; the press and the Democrats all said he was wrong at the time. And it -- you can't help but wonder if, you know, a quarter of a century or whatever from now, people are going to say the same thing about George W. Bush -- maybe he was right to try to democratize the Middle East and liberate 50 million people.

BARNES: You know, there's a different worry about the Vietnam syndrome. It's not just presidential powers, it's what happened in Vietnam after USA pulled out and you had several hundred thousand people killed, you had a million boat people, you had re-education camps. It was a nightmare.

HUME: There were dominos and they fell.

BARNES: Indeed.

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