He needed pardoning

When James Earl Carter was elected President, I remember the political wags* saying his first act would be to pardon Ford for pardoning Nixon.

For example, Time magazine's cover story on the pardon in September 1974 declared that "Ford's first major decision raised disturbing questions about his judgment and his leadership capabilities, and called into question his competence." The cover carried suggestive sub-headlines like "Squandered Trust" and "Premature and Unwise." Such was the media's mood toward this man's actions in office.

Now that he's been cited as opposing the Iraq war, he's a hero. But what did he really think?

Washington Post bigfoot Bob Woodward highlighted that Ford had told him in a 2004 interview that he thought the Bush team made a mistake in making the primary justification for the war in Iraq the removal of weapons of mass destruction. Ford didn't say he opposed the war itself, although he did say he would have delayed war and tried to make sanctions work.

So the media shorthand became "Gerald Ford opposed the war," as NBC's Brian Williams incorrectly reported, and so many others have subsequently repeated. Another reporter has Ford firmly on the record supporting the war, even if with a caveat. Thomas DeFrank of the New York Daily News reported Ford told him in May that "Saddam Hussein was an evil person and there was justification to get rid of him, but we shouldn't have put the basis on weapons of mass destruction.

That was a bad mistake." On Sunday morning's "Face the Nation" with CBS's Bob Schieffer, DeFrank was unequivocal, stating he interviewed the former president no less than four times over a four-year period, and each time Ford came out in support of the war. ABC and NBC newscasts couldn't find one second of airtime to even mention DeFrank or his differing story line. Indeed, ABC went even further in the opposite direction. On Sunday's "This Week With George Stephanopoulos," Time magazine Washington Bureau Chief Jay Carney declared that it was "unpardonable" that Ford hadn't shared his allegedly antiwar opinions with Vice President Dick Cheney and then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, two men who had once served under him.

And here is Rich Lowry's piece:

With time, everything we thought we once knew about Gerry Ford has come untrue. He wasn't a corrupt tool of Richard Nixon pardoning away his predecessor's crimes in exchange for the presidency. He wasn't a failure. And he wasn't clumsy or stupid. All of these judgments were once part of the conventional wisdom about Ford, a conventional wisdom that dissolved as his presidency became more distant, and thus easier to see clearly. Ford's pardon of Nixon demonstrates the long-term advantage of doing the right thing, and what is often its short-term cost. The pardon put Ford's public-approval rating in a downward spiral from the 70s to the 30s. That is the very definition of a political disaster, and Ford had to take the unprecedented step of testifying before Congress as a sitting president to try to beat back accusations of a corrupt deal.

People forget just how bad Gerald Ford was supposed to have been, according to the news reports of the time.