I had a real dilemma in 1976. I was originally from Georgia, and I felt a lot of pride that Jimmy Carter stood a chance of being the President.
On the other hand, I genuinely liked what I thought I knew of Jerry Ford.
A man who could in his first moments as president tell us he was a "Ford, not a Lincoln", that he was 'mindful of the fact he wasn't elected' and that "The long national nightmare is over" was someone I liked.
If he had not pardoned Nixon, he might have gone on to be an elected President. His own comment to his friend Tip O'Neill was that his being elected in his own right was secondary to getting the Nixon pain past us.
We look now on the moment with different lenses.
At the time, many of us thought that it was a major mistake to pardon Nixon. Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal (that will be published tomorrow 12/30/06) says words that should resonate with us today...:
The first is that when he pardoned Richard Nixon, he threw himself on a grenade to protect the country from shame, from going too far. It was an act of deep political courage, and it was shocking. Almost everyone in the country hated it, including me. But Ford was right. Richard Nixon had been ruined, forced to resign, run out of town on a rail. There was nothing to be gained -- nothing -- by his being broken on the dock. What was then the new left would never forgive Ford. They should thank him on their knees that he deprived history of proof that what they called their idealism was not untinged by sadism.
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