Critics of Ford's Nixon pardon now call it wise Americas - International Herald Tribune
By Scott Shane
December 29th, 2006
WASHINGTON — President Gerald Ford was never one for second-guessing, but for
many years after leaving office in 1977, he carried in his wallet a scrap of a 1915
Supreme Court ruling. A pardon, the excerpt said, "carries an imputation of guilt," and
acceptance of a pardon is "a confession of it."
Ford's decision to pardon Richard Nixon for any crimes that he might be charged with
while president because of the Watergate crimes is seen by many historians as the central
event of his 896-day presidency.
It also appears to have left him with an uncharacteristic need for self-justification, though
friends say he never wavered in his insistence that the pardon was a wise and necessary
act and that it had not resulted from any secret deal with his disgraced predecessor.
"I must have talked to him 20 times about the pardon, and there was never a shred of
doubt that he'd done the right thing," said James Cannon, a Ford domestic policy adviser
and author of a 1994 book about his presidency.
During one of their discussions, Ford pulled out the clipping from the Supreme Court
decision, Burdick v. United States. "It was a comfort to him," Cannon said. "It was legal
justification that he was right."
Over the last three decades, as emotions have cooled, many who were initially critical of
the pardon have come to share Ford's judgment that it was the best way to stanch the
open wound of Watergate — the break-in at the Democrats' offices in the Watergate
Building and the subsequent coverup of the role played by the Republicans and the Nixon
White House.
In 2001, a bipartisan panel selected Ford as recipient of the Profile in Courage Award
from the John F. Kennedy Library, singling out for praise his pardon, which Ford later
said he believed was a major factor in his failure to win election to the presidency in
1976. Ford, who died Tuesday at the age of 93, was defeated as the Republican candidate
then by the Democratic nominee, Jimmy Carter.
Few dramas in American political history remain more riveting than that of the exit of the
embattled Nixon and Ford's reaction, at first halting and then decisive, to the looming
possibility of a former president on criminal trial for months on end.
"At the time, I thought this was going to cause a problem with the public and the press,
and of course it did," said Robert Hartmann, a former Ford aide who recalled in an
interview the tense Oval Office atmosphere when the new president told top staff
members of his decision. "I thought he was right. But it's also important to be seen as
right and remembered in history as having done the right thing."
The contradictions raised by the pardon were evident when Ford announced it on Sept. 8,
1974.
"I deeply believe in equal justice for all Americans, whatever their station or former
station," Ford said. A moment later he made clear that Nixon would not face equal
justice.
"My conscience tells me clearly and certainly that I cannot prolong the bad dreams that
continue to reopen a chapter that is closed," he said, though the major Watergate trials for
Nixon's aides were still months away.
In the resulting firestorm, many Americans asked why, in return for a pardon, Ford had
not at least demanded an admission of wrongdoing from Nixon or a statement of remorse.
The pardon drama had begun a few weeks earlier, with a visit to Ford, who was then vice
president, from Alexander Haig, Nixon's chief of staff.
Haig informed Ford that White House tapes would soon prove Nixon's role in the
Watergate coverup and outlined several alternatives for Nixon's departure. He handed
Ford two pieces of paper — a description of the presidential power to pardon and a blank
pardon form.
Ford later said that he had given no definitive answer. But when he described the meeting
to his aides, they were alarmed at the implication: that Nixon, through Haig, might be
offering Ford the presidency in return for a pardon.
"We didn't want a situation where he'd agreed to a pardon and there would be an
appearance of a quid pro quo," said John Marsh, a former congressman who had become
a top aide to Ford.
Haig has often denied that he was making any kind of a "sleazy approach," as he put it in
an appearance on CNN.
"The president never, never was offered a deal," he said.
Ford, too, in his memoir and in interviews, said that he did not believe that Haig had
explicitly offered a trade of the presidency for a pardon. But his aides feared the meeting
would be viewed in the worst light.
"There was a strong naïve streak in Jerry Ford," Cannon said. "He didn't always see the
danger in things."
Cannon said that Ford later told him that he had destroyed the two papers Haig had given
him.
Nixon resigned a week after Haig's visit, and Ford was sworn in as president on Aug. 9.
An accumulation of policy troubles confronted the new president, Marsh recalled.
"We were coming out of the Arab oil embargo," Marsh said. "The economy was going
sour. We were in the wind- down of the Vietnam War, and that was a bad situation."
Meanwhile, he said, "Watergate was affecting everything."
At his first news conference, on Aug. 28, reporters pressed Ford on Nixon's fate, and his
answers were ambiguous. Until any charges were filed against Nixon, he said, "I think it
is unwise and untimely for me to make any commitment."
Afterward, Ford was furious at the way the news conference had gone, Cannon said.
"He felt he'd bungled it royally," Cannon added. "He told me he just sat there fuming for
two days, and then he decided on the pardon."
Why President Ford Pardoned Richard Nixon
October 17th, 1974
In this speech before the Congressional Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, of October
17, 1974, President Gerald Ford explains his decision to pardon former President
Richard Nixon for his role in the Watergate scandal. Nixon had resigned on August 9,
1974, and Ford pardoned his disgraced predecessor a month later, on September 8.
When Ford appeared before the subcommittee to explain the controversial pardon, he
asserted that his purpose in granting it was “to change our national focus. . . to shift our
attentions from the pursuit of a fallen President to the pursuit of the urgent needs of a
rising nation.” Ford noted that while Nixon had not requested the pardon, “the passions
generated” by prosecuting him “would seriously disrupt the healing of our country from
the great wounds of the past.” Ford declared that “the general view of the American
people was to spare the former President from a criminal trial” and that sparing Nixon
from prosecution would “not cause us to forget the evils of Watergate-type offenses or
to forget the lessons we have learned.”
EXCERPT
“My appearance at this hearing of your distinguished Subcommittee of the House
Committee on the Judiciary has been looked upon as an unusual historic event - - one
that has no firm precedent in the whole history of Presidential relations with the
Congress. Yet, I am here not to make history, but to report on history.
The history you are interested in covers so recent a period that it is still not well
understood. If, with your assistance, I can make for better understanding of the pardon
of our former President, then we can help to achieve the purpose I had for granting the
pardon when I did.
That purpose was to change our national focus. I wanted to do all I could to shift our
attentions from the pursuit of a fallen President to the pursuit of the urgent needs of a
rising nation. Our nation is under the severest of challenges now to employ its full
energies and efforts in the pursuit of a sound and growing economy at home and a
stable and peaceful world around us.
We would needlessly be diverted from meeting those challenges if we as a people were
to remain sharply divided over whether to indict, bring to trial, and punish a former
President, who already is condemned to suffer long and deeply in the shame and
disgrace brought upon the office he held. Surely, we are not a revengeful people. We
have often demonstrated a readiness to feel compassion and to act out of mercy. As a
people we have a long record of forgiving even those who have been our country’s most
destructive foes. Yet, to forgive is not to forget the lessons of evil in whatever ways evil
has operated against us. And certainly the pardon granted the former President will not
cause us to forget the evils of Watergate-type offenses or to forget the lessons we have
learned that a government which deceives its supporters and treats its opponents as
enemies must never, never be tolerated.”