Only two Presidents in American history assumed office in the midst of a Constitutional crisis. The first was Abraham Lincoln. The second was Gerald Ford.
In both cases, America proved lucky.
Both presidents needed to clean up after failed presidencies, steer the government during periods of remarkable antagonism between branches of government, and take extraordinary – and historic – measures to reassemble our national political culture. Lincoln is widely considered the greatest president in our history, but Ford is often forgotten. And yet, with talk of the impeachment of President Donald Trump gathering momentum, Ford’s clear and precise understanding of the difference between politics and law enforcement provides a useful primer for political action.
Gerald Ford was a remarkable political figure. If he’s remembered today, it’s for his doddering way of speaking at press conferences, or what comedians portrayed as his clumsy physicality. No master communicator, Ford could easily be lampooned for his ridiculous slogans (“Whip Inflation Now,” was such a joke that WIN buttons remain a collector’s item) and his seeming dim-wittedness.
But that was not Gerald Ford.
The only Eagle Scout elected President, Ford was far from being a butter-fingered lummox: he was named the most valuable football player on the University of Michigan football team, where he regularly played before 100,000 cheering fans. Two NFL teams drafted him, but strong in the classroom as well as the gridiron, he chose Yale Law School instead. Serving in the U. S. Navy in World War II, he rose from Ensign to Lieutenant Commander, where his light aircraft carrier, the USS Monterey, offered combat support in several Pacific battles. He was elected to the House of Representatives from Michigan in 1948, and in 1965 became House Minority Leader.
Perhaps most important, Ford was comfortable in his own skin. Unlike more recent Republican presidents, he didn’t fear the media. In the wake of Watergate, which had created bitter animosity between President Nixon and the reporters who revealed the coverup of the Watergate break-in, he named NBC News reporter Ron Nessen his press secretary, resulting in a new – and far more healthy – relationship between the White House and the nation’s journalists. Indeed, it was his willingness to give so much access, and remain so candid, that enabled cameras sometimes to catch him being clumsy and doltish. Yet he was secure, knowing that he was one of the most physically talented athletes ever to occupy the Oval Office, and that his Yale Law education and years in Congress made him one of the shrewdest, and most underestimated, political operators in Washington, D.C.
Because of his swift elevation from Congress, to the vice presidency after Nixon’s first vice president, Spiro Agnew, resigned, and then to the presidency when Nixon himself resigned, Ford knew – perhaps better than almost any modern president – the prerogatives of each branch of government. He understood that impeachment was primarily a political procedure of governance, not a criminal proceeding. Congress, Congressman Ford noted in 1970, was not bound by explicit legislation when seeking to remove the President. “An impeachable offense,” he explained, “is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.”
When Congress impeached Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, members explicitly justified their action by publicly specifying acts of unconstitutional, and even criminal, conduct. Yet, as Ford knew, impeachment is about politics, not law enforcement. The decision to impeach needs to be based in the public’s acceptance of a political, rather than legal, resolution.
When Gerald Ford pardoned President Nixon, he continued to act with a shrewd understanding of the Constitution. The United States Constitution gives the president the right to pardon, and n pardoning Nixon, Ford opened himself up to charges that he was protecting a criminal conspiracy. It cost him personally, as it insured that he likely would never be elected President by the American people, the majority of whom would never forgive him for allowing President Nixon to escape justice.
But while critics insisted that Ford’s pardon had made a mockery of the concept of equality under the law, Ford, once again, understood the difference between politics and law enforcement. When he assumed the presidency, oil shocks, inflation, Watergate, and the looming collapse of the South Vietnamese government all threatened the country. Ford’s chief concern wasn’t retributive justice, or even restorative justice; it was healing a fractured nation. A legal realist, he explained to Americans that his pardon of Nixon had nothing to do with guilt or innocence. Rather, finding an impartial jury to assess Nixon’s guilt would be impossible, and any trial of the former President would occasion a “long period of delay” in which “ugly passions would again be aroused…. Our people would again be polarized in their opinions. And the credibility of our free institutions of government would again be challenged at home and abroad.” “It is not the ultimate fate of Richard Nixon that most concerns me,” Ford claimed. “My concern is the immediate future of this great country.” The presidency, he concluded, required him “not merely to proclaim domestic tranquility but to use every means that I have to insure it.”
Perhaps this was, indeed, a ploy to continue covering up a criminal conspiracy, as cynics carped. But everything in Gerald Ford’s life up to September 8, 1974, points to the conclusion that he pardoned Nixon because he recognized that political solutions can be as powerful as legal ones in defending the American nation. Ford had just assumed leadership of an exhausted country riven with divisions so deep they seemed unresolvable. He used his Constitutional powers to act in a way that he believed might reunite the nation and move it forward. We too often forget Lincoln’s postwar peace plan included “malice toward none” and “charity for all” – including slave holders and the men and women who had killed so many fellow citizens in a treasonous rebellion. Lincoln’s martyrdom spared him the condemnation such reconciliation without retribution might have occasioned. Ford, on the other hand, lived a long life after the pardon. He carried its legacy to the grave.
Though the pardon still haunts his memory, it’s time we viewed Ford’s act through the prism of distance and experience. Like Lincoln, who tried to preempt postwar violence with generosity to slave holders and the men and women who had killed so many fellow citizens in a treasonous rebellion, Ford understood how charity and mercy can expedite political goals. These qualities of grace can provide useful cover for prioritizing ends over means without appearing too Machiavellian. If the example of President Ford’s pardon might ease Donald Trump’s exit from the White House, and help heal our divided nation, then even Ford’s harshest critics should reconsider his legacy.