What's a prez to do? Ford and the pardon

At the time it seemed the prudent thing to do. Two years later it looked impolitic but honorable. Two generations later a lot of people wished he hadn't.

Most presidents have a while to get their bearings in the White House before needing to make momentous decisions. For Gerald Ford, the biggest decision of his presidency was made almost at the time of his accession, arguably before. More than a few thought it the price of his attaining the office.

This was ironic, whether or not true. Most of those who sought the presidency would have paid a great deal to achieve or retain that pinnacle of American political power. Theodore Roosevelt said he would have given his right arm not to have taken himself out of the running for re-election in 1908. But Ford was cut from different cloth. He was a solid Republican from down-to-earth western Michigan. He had done good work in the House of Representatives, reaching his party’s top post there. Yet he lacked the fire, the hunger, to drive himself for higher office.

This was exactly what made him appealing to Richard Nixon. The Watergate posse was closing in, and Nixon needed a new vice president. The one he entered office with, Spiro Agnew, had been forced to resign upon implication in a scandal in his previous job as governor of Maryland. Until passage of the Twenty-fifth Amendment, vice presidential vacancies had gone unfilled until the next election. No longer. Now Nixon got to choose, subject to confirmation by Congress. He wanted someone reliable. He wanted someone untouched by scandal. He wanted someone who would not outshine him.

And he wanted someone who would keep him out of prison. This part he couldn't advertise. He really couldn't even talk about it. The walls had ears and Congress had subpoena power. Nixon had convinced himself, as people in comparable positions often do, that he hadn't done anything wrong. He was the victim of a political witch hunt. He didn't intend to do time for less than his predecessors had gotten away with. Not if he could help it.

The best way to help it was to choose the right man to be the next president, the next holder of that magical power of presidents: the power to pardon. The man he chose didn't have to be above reproach, at least not for the purposes of a pardon. In this regard a president was like the pope. Many popes had been anything but saints, but according to Catholic teaching, the power they derived from Peter, the first pope, to bind and loose was undiminished by any of their human frailties. God took care of that. In Nixon's case, it was the Constitution that would take care. The Constitution places no limits on a president's power to pardon. The president might be a paragon of virtue or an utter scoundrel. Either way, his pardon was the same.

Naturally it would look better to choose someone the country respected. At the least, Nixon had to select a person who could pass congressional muster. Jerry Ford was the guy. Lyndon Johnson, noting Ford's football career at the University of Michigan, derided his intelligence by saying he had played too many games without his helmet. Nixon wasn't as dismissive as that. But neither did he think Ford the sharpest pencil in the box. Ford had been smart enough to do his job in the House, and smart enough not to overestimate his chances of advancing further. Nixon had heard that Ford was planning to call it quits.

All the better, Nixon thought. He'll be thinking of his legacy, of what he can do for the country. He'll realize that the Watergate obsession has lasted long enough. The country has real problems to deal with. 

Nixon decided to roll the dice. He didn't know what Ford would do. But he thought there was a good chance Ford would do the right thing.

Ford accepted the offer. Congress confirmed, and in December 1973 he became vice president.

The murk of Watergate continued to rise around Nixon. In the summer of 1974 the Supreme Court ruled against him on a critical point of evidence. In August he resigned. Ford became president.

“My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over,” he said on taking his oath of office. "Our Constitution works. Our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men." Yet justice must be tempered by mercy. “As we bind up the internal wounds of Watergate, more painful and more poisonous than those of foreign wars, let us restore the golden rule to our political process, and let brotherly love purge our hearts of suspicion and of hate.”

He paused a month for passions to cool. Then he preemptively pardoned Nixon for any crimes in connection with Watergate.

The nation must move on, he said. “My conscience tells me clearly and certainly that I cannot prolong the bad dreams that continue to reopen a chapter that is closed. My conscience tells me that only I, as President, have the constitutional power to firmly shut and seal this book. My conscience tells me it is my duty, not merely to proclaim domestic tranquillity but to use every means that I have to insure it.”

He knew his step would be controversial. Yet he was willing to accept responsibility. “I cannot rely upon public opinion polls to tell me what is right. I do believe that right makes might and that if I am wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.”

If the angels were swearing, no one on earth heard them. But more than a few people swore at Ford for obstructing justice himself. Nixon was a crook and should be made to answer for his crimes, they said. Ford must have made a sweetheart deal with Nixon to win the presidency.

Others said he had done the right thing. The nation did have to move on.

Ford took heart sufficiently to run for president in his own right in 1976. He was challenged for the nomination but carried the convention. He lost a close contest to Jimmy Carter, whose principal recommendation was that he had been nowhere near the scene of the crime during the Watergate affair.

Some thought Ford's pardon of Nixon cost him the race. Perhaps it did, though the condition of the economy worked against him as well. Ford never expressed regret for what he had done.

And there the matter rested for almost half a century, until Donald Trump raised the issue by claiming that a former president couldn’t be prosecuted for actions taken while in office. Nixon would have been a good test case, not least since the evidence of his actions was so overwhelming. His lawyers would have had to plead presidential immunity. The Supreme Court would have had to rule.

And the fate of Donald Trump would have been clearer, one way or the other.