It’s always a momentous occasion when an ex-president dies. Invariably, the major news media provide us with a highly instructive look back at our political history — through a fun-house mirror, you might say. It’s a particularly odd phenomenon in the case of Gerald Ford because, as 
unremarkable a leader as he was, he seems like a freaking prince compared to the current numbskull-in-chief. (Who wouldn’t? Reagan? Polk? William Henry Harrison?) I had to laugh this week when it was announced that Ford had expressed his contempt for the war in Iraq in a recorded interview with Bob Woodward that was embargoed for release until after Ford’s death. So even as Bush tried to glom onto Ford’s relative popularity as an ex (and essentially forgotten) president, the guy was dropping a bomb on him from beyond the grave. Ouch! Dubya’s becoming more than a bit like that Bifflestick guy in Li’l Abner who always had a dark cloud over his head.
What about the Ford presidency? Well, he had a defense secretary named Don Rumsfeld and a chief of staff named Dick Cheney, for one thing. He also had a secretary of state named Henry Kissinger, who was very busy over Ford’s brief tenure. None of the various news timelines thought to make mention of it, but it was during Ford’s presidency that Indonesia invaded East Timor and began a brutal occupation that continued for the next 25 years and resulted in the deaths of 1/3 of that nation’s population. The invasion began practically the moment Kissinger and Ford flew out of Jakarta after meeting with Indonesian dictator Suharto and giving him the green light to proceed. Other highlights of the Ford era include the “dirty war” against South American dissidents pursued by various tin-pot dictators the U.S. had helped to install — a bloody campaign of torture, disappearance, and assassination that stretched from the Chile to Washington’s Embassy Row, where former Chilean Ambassador Orlando Letelier and his American associate Ronni Moffitt were blown up in their car by agents of Pinochet in 1976. Then there was Ford and Kissinger’s backing (in coordination with apartheid South Africa) of madman Jonas Savimbi and his UNITA rebels in Angola, resulting in probably half a million casualties over the following 20 years.
Devil’s in the details. Still, even with all that, Ford’s brief tenure seems statesmanlike in retrospect, at least by U.S. standards. But how much praise can we heap upon a president — or anyone, for that matter — for what he didn’t do? Is absence of a vice a virtue? Is Ford a man of integrity because he didn’t trash the Constitution, the Geneva Conventions, and a raft of international treaties all in a row? Is Ford to be honored because he didn’t order illegal surveillance of Americans or authorize the detention and torture of individuals on the basis of secret evidence (or lack of same)? Is Ford a Lincoln because he didn’t start a major war on patently false pretenses by knowingly deceiving the American public? Perhaps all in politics is relative… or maybe it’s like that old Richard Farina title: we’ve been down so long, it looks like up to us.
Saddamned to hell. Guess they were in kind of a hurry to execute Saddam after all. I’m sure he wasn’t expecting a square dance. Still, they will be burying a lot of crucial history with him… and maybe that’s the idea. Breathe easy, unindicted co-conspirators.
luv u,
j
