« Haditha Charges are to be Announced | Main | You know Your Country is in Trouble When »
December 28, 2006
Decency
I think I saw about a few dozen headlines / op-ed pieces about how "decent" Gerald Ford was.
I won't comment on the Watergate era. But how is it decent to know that a war is wrong, to know that innocents will die by the thousands, to know that, as an ex-president, you would wield some inluence by joining the dissent before the war and yet "embargo" your remarks until after your death?
President George W. Bush and his top advisers made a "big mistake" in their justification for invading Iraq, Gerald Ford told journalist Bob Woodward in an interview embargoed until after the former president's death...
In a four-hour tape-recorded interview in July 2004, Ford "very strongly" disagreed with the justification for the 2003 invasion of Iraq advocated and carried out by key Bush advisers and veterans of his own administration -- Vice President Dick Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld -- reported Woodward.
"Rumsfeld and Cheney and the president made a big mistake in justifying going into the war in Iraq. They put the emphasis on weapons of mass destruction," Ford said.
"And now, I've never publicly said I thought they made a mistake, but I felt very strongly it was an error in how they should justify what they were going to do."
..The interview and a subsequent conversation in 2005 were done for a future book project, although Ford, who became president in 1974 after Richard Nixon resigned over the Watergate scandal, said his comments could be published any time after his death, Woodward wrote.
Maybe this does go back to the Watergate pardon: don't rock the power structure regardless of the costs borne by others. Get along (with the powerful). Keep quiet (if the powers-that-be would like you to). Duck and turn your back.
If this is decent, what do they call cowardly?
Posted by zeynep at December 28, 2006 12:21 PM
Comments
I agree completely. Still I (and probably others of my generation) remember the Ford Administration (not Ford himself) with a certain nostalgia, because--for reasons having nothing to do with Ford himself--the Executive branch was weaker than at any time, probably, since FDR's first election in 1932. What people like Kissinger deplored as "Vietnam syndrome" was in fact the high-water mark of popular, and Congressional, resistance to the White House's desire to intervene militarily around the world without any restraint. It was the time when the Church Committee revealed the CIA's dirty history in Guatemala, Iran and elsewhere; it was the time when the US refrained from getting directly involved in the Angolan civil war on the side of the South Africans and their UNITA proxies, because Congress simply wouldn't go along. Even a weakened White House, of course, is dangerously powerful; but compared with what came before, and still more with what's come since, the reign of King Gerald the Dithering seems like a vanished Golden Age.
Posted by: rootlesscosmo at December 28, 2006 02:01 PM