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NEW YORK - As flags sunk across the land and the tributes for President Gerald Ford overwhelmed the airwaves yesterday, Americans, some too young to remember his tenure, reflected on what has famously been called his "accidental presidency".
Ford, who died on Wednesday aged 93 at his home
in California, was never elected to the job. It had never been in anyone's script - least of all his own - that he should arrive at the pinnacle of political power.
Ford was called a "plodder" by one senior Democrat congressman when he assumed office on August 9, 1974, minutes after President Richard Nixon fled the White House to avoid impeachment over the Watergate scandal.
He served only 896 days before losing the 1976 election to Jimmy Carter.
America was ambivalent about him then. At his death, however, it responded with respect and affection.
As the mourning period begins - a state funeral will be held on Sunday - a more apt epithet for Ford might be that his was less of an accidental and more of a "what-if" presidency and, indeed, a "what-if" life and political career.
At so many turns, fate and his own instincts might have propelled him and the country in an entirely different direction. Those turns included his determination as a very young man to forsake the chance to become a professional footballer and instead study law at Yale, where he first got a taste for politics.
When Spiro Agnew resigned in 1973 as Vice-President in a bribery scandal, Nixon needed to appoint a replacement and narrowed his choices down to four men, also among them Ronald Reagan and Nelson Rockefeller. He could easily have passed Ford over, but did not.
And let us not forget that in late 1975, two women tried to assassinate Ford. Either one might have succeeded if only they had been better shots.
But as political historians revisit Ford's legacy, one episode more than any other will attract their attention. What if Ford had followed the advice of every one of his Oval Office advisers at the time and decided not to forgive Nixon for the Watergate conspiracy?
His surprise announcement on September 8, 1974, just weeks after taking over the presidency, that he was indeed giving Nixon full pardon for his part in the affair and thus voiding all chance that he could be brought to trial for his crimes, drew vituperative reviews from nearly all corners. Many continue to argue that it was the main reason he lost in 1976 and that Carter came to occupy the White House.
Yet, as political leaders and old friends yesterday offered condolences to Ford's widow, Betty Ford, and to his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, it was apparent that that single act of clemency had come partly to define the portrait of himself that he left behind - a leader who was as practical and politically self-sacrificial as his predecessor was conspiratorial and controlling.
In pardoning Nixon, he had only one thing in mind - preventing the nightmare from replaying itself over months and even years as first the charges would have been brought against Nixon and then the whole judicial sequence would have followed with a trial, inevitable appeals and a likely prison time.
His decision spared the country all that, while possibly costing him a full second term.
Thus President George W. Bush yesterday recalled Ford as the man who had helped "heal our land" in the wake of Watergate.
It was much the same theme that was taken up by others paying tribute, including Vice President Dick Cheney, a former chief of staff for Ford, as well as Carter and Bill Clinton.
"Thirty-two years ago, he assumed the nation's highest office during the greatest constitutional crisis since the Civil War," Cheney said. "In that troubled era, America needed strength, wisdom, and good judgment, and those qualities came to us in the person of Gerald R. Ford."
Carter called Ford "one of the most admirable public servants and human beings" he has ever known.
Clinton said: "He brought Americans together during a difficult chapter in our history with strength, integrity, and humility. He was the same hard-working, down-to-earth person the day he left the White House as he was when he first entered Congress almost 30 years earlier."
Bringing Americans together may have been his purpose in pardoning Nixon, but it was not what happened at first. It was a bombshell decision that was intensely divisive. No one in his inner circle supported it, Democrats were disgusted and even Republicans reacted with shock.
The New York Times called it a "blundering intervention" and a "body blow to the President's own credibility". The Washington Post called it "nothing less than the continuation of a cover-up".
Even Ford's own press secretary resigned over it.
Alexander Haig, who was Ford's first chief of staff, recalled yesterday the rows that erupted inside the Oval Office the moment the question of a pardon came up. He admitted that he too refused to support it.
But Haig, like many others, has now changed his mind.
"The President held to his guns. It was a very lonely decision that he made to pardon President Nixon but he did it for the good of the country."
Whether Ford quite realised at the time the depth of the damage he was doing to himself is unclear, however.
"Sure, there will be criticism," his biographer James Cannon quoted him as saying during a White House meeting eight days before announcing the pardon. "But it will flare up and die down. If I wait six months, or a year, there will still be a firestorm from the Nixon-haters, as you call them."
In the event, when he told Americans what he was doing, his poll numbers plummeted.
Haig recalled Ford's disappointment the day he lost to Carter.
"He put his arm around me and said, 'Al, you know I never wanted this job and once I realised I could do it, it was too late'."
In the narrow rules of political advantage, Ford may have erred in forgiving Nixon. Yet, most Americans came to see wisdom and courage in the decision and he himself said many times he never regretted it.
For himself, he never indulged in the game of what-ifs.
- INDEPENDENT
