About President Ford
How to say what must be said about President Gerald Ford as he is laid to rest and his legacy is being recounted in looping news coverage? Peggy Noonan does the best job I’ve seen yet, seeing and saying the good without overlooking what was seriously wrong.
There are three points about Ford that I’m not sure can ever be sufficiently appreciated.
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…
Second, Ford’s personal dignity–his plain Midwestern rectitude, his old-style, pipe-smoking American normality, and his characterological absence of bile, spite and malice–helped the nation over and through the great tearing of the fabric that was Watergate. This is often referred to, and yet it is hard to communicate what a relief it was. Whether right or wrong, hopeless or wise, a normal man was in charge. This was a balm, a real gift to the country.
Third, he did not understand, and so was undone by, the rise of the modern conservative movement. He did not understand the prairie fire signaled by the California tax revolt, and did not see it roaring east. He did not fully understand how offended the American public was by endless government spending and expanding federal power…
He was not at all alive to what would prove to be deep national qualms about abortion. He was not aware of its ability to alarm, to waken the sleepy Evangelicals of the South and the urban ethnics of the North, who’d previously been content to go with the Democratic flow. Ford was oblivious to this. He thought in his own stolid way that abortion was pretty much an extension of the new feminist movement, which he supported. How could a gallant fella not?
In all this he proved that it is not enough in politics to be good. You have to have vision. You have to be able to see.
This, I think, pinpoints a pervasive problem for politicians and leaders who switch from pro-life positions to pro-abortion, like Kerry, Kennedy, Lieberman, even Jesse Jackson. I have to believe that they just don’t see, and are not able to. I’d hate to think that they don’t want to.
There are a lot of politicians out there who would be great leaders, if only they realized that all the compassion and care in the world for the rights of all people begins with the most basic right to life.
