The New York Times wouldn’t run Rick Perlstein’s op-ed on the lasting damage from Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon because they said it didn’t make sense to them, but Salon ran it. And Perlstein’s argument makes perfect sense to me.
The Ford pardon was actually my introduction to politics, as it made my father so angry that my little almost-five year-old brain needed to understand what had happened. The president of the United States had just committed a grave injustice by demonstrating that our laws only apply to regular folks. Our former president had broken the law repeatedly and lied about it to everyone’s face. He had obstructed justice. And nothing was going to be done about it. Nixon got a pass.
That this incensed my father so, was an important building block to my own moral sensibilities. It’s why, twelve years later, when the Iran-Contra Affair hit, that I felt it was so vitally important that there be no repeat of pardons. But there was a repeat of pardons, on Christmas Eve 1992. And the man issuing the pardons was the man who was probably most responsible for the crimes.
Standards eroded over time. During Reagan’s presidency, his administration set a record for people resigning in disgrace. By the time Dubya was in office, no one ever resigned no matter how obvious their corruption, criminality, or conflict of interest. They resigned under Reagan because he was operating in an environment with pre-existing expectations. Public servants who were exposed as unethical were expected to resign.
That’s no longer the case. At all. Witness Senator David Vitter of Louisiana.
What set this all in motion was Ford’s decision to spare Nixon from justice. When Nixon was removed from office, it proved that the system worked. Too bad it was the last time it would work.
I read Sean Wilentz’s The Age of Reagan this summer, and early on, he said this might have been the age of Nixon if it wasn’t for his fall. It was Nixon that engineered the electoral re-alignment that made the Solid South solid Republican. In looking at the cast of actors who served Nixon, it is the cast of future outrages: Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush, Bork, Richardson and on and on.
So with respect to Wilentz, the era of 1968-2008 is perhaps better understood as the Age of Nixon – of his politics, of his disregard for the rule of law, or his advancement of the imperial presidency. Reagan was the smiling mask on the Nixonian serpent.
(And as I recall, the 2004 GOP convention was a resurrection of Nixon, was it not?)
If you want to date the Age of Nixon, you need to start with his arrival in DC in 1946 and the subsequent competition between him and Joe McCarthy for the authentic red-baiter. Eisenhower agreed to him being Vice President in part to get him out of Congress and into a a position on Ike’s side. Ike was not as lucky with McCarthy, who fortunately burned himself out. In retrospect the Kennedy and Johnson years will be seen as an eight-year interruption in the Age of Nixon.
Part of Nixon’s anger was at the press, which never bought much of his shtick until they feared his red-baiting and then were not at all interested in letting him down gently in 1974. The Lewis Powell memo was intended to be an antidote for this poisonous relatioship.
It was John Tower’s and Strom Thurmond’s alliance with Barry Goldwater that laid the groundwork for the Dixiecrats bolting to the Republican Party. Nixon’s Southern Strategy was aimed at soaking up a lot of George Wallace’s support behind a “viable” candidate. And George H. W. Bush having tried to take down Ralph Yarbrough in 1964 was running for re-election to the Congress for the seat he won in 1966, the year Ronald Reagan won as governor of California.
Fortunately for Nixon, Richard Daley and the Democrats obliged with their disastrous convention in 1968.
The dirty tricks are yet with us. And the heirs of Nixon’s frustration with Dick Tuck bedevil us in the denizens of Breitbart and the ever-more-sleazy James O’Keefe.
It was Nixon as much as any Republican who scared the bejeepers out of Harry Truman.
Yes, and to take it back a bit farther, both McCarthy and Nixon were products of the old China lobby (Chiang-Kai Shek) in convergence with home-grown right-wingers, of whom Barry Goldwater was but one.
Those Soong sisters created some huge political problems, didn’t they.
… and brothers. They sure did, and they haven’t gone away. Like the John Birch Society –> Koch Brothers, and a big part of the narcotics business, to cite just a couple of examples.
No, ideologically, Nixon was much closer to Rockefeller than to Reagan. You probably don’t remember Nixon proposing the negative income tax, which would have been a vast improvement on the humiliating process of qualifying for AFDC.
Nixon was actually the last post-Depression Liberal. More liberal than Jimmy Carter, and MUCH more Liberal than Bill Clinton.
Nixon was a very capable man who tried to do his best for his country as he saw it. But he had huge (pathological really) character flaws.
Nixon didn’t give two shits about domestic policy and had a liberal Congress to deal with.
I was referring to the politics of the age. Nixon created the electoral coalition that led to Reagan. He created the politics of division that led to Reagan. He picked off working class white voters that led to Reagan.
As for dating it to 1946, there was still a long period of relative liberalism from ’46-’66.
Politics of division began before Nixon. Goldwater, Mccarthy.
There were still a lot of Southern Democrats in Congress even when Clinton took office as well. The arc of conservative power came out of the anti-New Dealers in 1946 but they could not show their true philosophy until after Goldwater made Buckleyism fashionable. And Nixon was their rising star, which is why Eisenhower felt obligated to accept him as Vice President. It was not until 2002 that the GOP had an absolute chokehold on Southern political office and most Southern states became one-party states again. And it was not until 2010 that the GOP had a lock on all Southern legislatures.
What opened that trend was the Eisenhower-Nixon vote in 1952 when many Southern Democratic voters split tickets among Democrats and Dixiecrats and voted Eisenhower-Nixon at the top of the ticket. A lot of the “anti-communist” (i.e. Chamber of Commerce types) became the core of support for Nixon in 1960 and the foundation of the first Republican parties in the South since Reconstruction. They first ran state and local candidates under Barry Goldwater’s banner in 1964, but they were longing to vote for Nixon. The Southern Strategy was a relatively easy sell because of that history.
Have to go with hawesq on this — Nixon didn’t give two shits about domestic policy. Like Ike he followed whatever deals GOP and Dixiecrat members of Congress could extract from liberal Democrats.
Your ability to say, Nixon was a very capable man who tried to do his best for his country as he saw it. But he had huge (pathological really) character flaws. may explain your current FP blindspots. Can you not see that Nixon and his anti-communist cohorts were essentially anti-New Dealers and anti-working men and women? That their anti-communist hysteria was the strategy they used to begin the dismantling of the New Deal. Starting with Taft-Hartley. Took them over thirty years before it could become a frontal assault once they found a decent pitchman. Demonstrating that Americans are truly suckers.
Not all enemies are evil. Some are merely misguided.
Nixon opened China. I’m kind of sorry he did that, although it would have been OK without Clinton’s most favored nation status.
Anyone that uses race, sexism, religion, and/or boogiemen to win elections is an unacceptable person to hold public office. Nixon, and at least half of Congress today, are unacceptable.
btw — who made China a boogieman? The GOP is excellent at creating monsters that only they are permitted to slay or kiss up to at a later date. A shame USians keep falling for that old trick.
China did. As I indicated, opening China was a good thing. Wholesale transfer of manufacturing to China and transfer of engineering to China and India were not good things. (Well, they were good for China and India).
You’re wrong. It’s was the political party that screamed, “Truman lost China” that made that country a US enemy.
The neo-liberal trade deals have not been good public policy, but in the short run Americans can buy more crap with their crappy paychecks. The major loser is the global environment, but you and I aren’t the ones that will pay the biggest price for that.
Oh. I thought you were asking what I had against China.
Korean War didn’t help.
I agree this was the turning point for the rule of law.
Since the Nixon pardon, no one is ever accountable.
“Since the Nixon pardon, no Republican is ever accountable.”
FIFY
The real question is: Why did Ford issue a pardon to Nixon?
The correct answer is that it was part of the negotiations to remove him from office. Those were the days when Gen. Haig was running around the White House playing at being the President and lots of people in the WH were afraid of Nixon being drunk and pushing the nuclear button.
Nixon wouldn’t agree to resign without the promise of a pardon. It was felt that getting him out of office before he could any damage was very important, so agreed to the deal.
At least that’s how it was related to me when I spent considerable time at the WH mere days before Nixon finally announced his resignation.
vel contra see Jonathan Bernstein yesterday….
I agree, except on one point. Yes, Ford bears the responsibility in the sense that, technically, the Nixon pardon was his decision. But come on, Ford was only a stooge, an empty suit, both before and after.
Long before he became president, Ford stood out as an idiot. I was always amazed by the aura of respect that surrounded him, until I realized he was a classic “go along to get along” guy without an original thought in his head, a “useful idiot”. That was also long before I learned what Lyndon Johnson had said of him:
“[Gerald Ford] is so dumb he can’t walk and chew gum at the same time…. He’s a nice fellow, but he spent too much time playing football without a helmet.”
There was something far more insidious than Gerald Ford at work here, and that’s where the emphasis should go.
The point of the Nixon pardon wasn’t even to help Nixon, it was to preempt all investigations into his numerous shady connections. It emanated from the same forces that got him removed in the first place.
The importance of the fact that Cheney got his big break under Ford was underscored in Bruce Montgomery’s excellent though little-noticed book Richard B. Cheney and the Rise of the Imperial Vice Presidency, which I read in 2009, when it was as yet the only book on Cheney available.
What most people never mention is that Nixon selected Ford himself.
Talk about going along to get along.
“By the time Dubya was in office…”
What shocked me (that is, after I got over the shock of the SCOTUS case that put him in office) was how many of his first string players were veterans of the Nixon administration. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme…
Now a stand-alone post.
Is Morality In Government Possible? If Not, We Might Just As Well Give Up Now.
Later…
AG
I want to know more about the Times not running Perlstein’s piece. Anyone know where Booman’s getting that?