PRO PATRIA MORI
Three decades later, the old lie is still being repeated, by Republicans at least: Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon "to help the country heal and move forward." It was a selfless act of putting the nation before his own political career — I've read this no less than six times today.But history, if you read it, shows that it was nothing more than a shamefully naked partisan act, which brought down on Ford's head well-deserved and widespread condemnation.
Can you imagine if Al Gore had won the presidency (oh wait, he did!). Scratch that. Can you imagine if Al Gore had not been blocked from the presidency by a partisan Supreme Court and he went on to pardon Bill Clinton? Would Republicans hail that as helping the country to heal and move forward?
Uh, sure they would.
I mean, rest in peace, Gerald Ford. I have no problem with people being remembered fondly in their obituaries. But let's not distort history, shall we? Nixon was a criminal, and you were his apologist, whether or not you were also a good father and friend and all-around nice guy. Ronald Reagan knew about the Iran Contra scandal and much worse. Johnson was an old racist and escalated the war in Vietnam and told repeated lies. Kennedy's well-documented, but well-covered-up womanizing was the least of his wrongdoing. Honoring the dead has nothing to do with telling lies, and even if it did, couldn't people at least invent some new ones?
posted by kc @ 7:55 PM
14 comments
14 Comments:
Amen and amen, sister! Hallelujah!
But I have to say I understand just a wee bit. I was telling Mary this last night: I remember sitting in the living room months before my seventh birthday and hearing the president (it was Ford, but that was irrelevent to me then) talking confidently about how our long national nightmare was over.
Of course I know now what an SOB he was -- we had a local sidebar in today's paper about how many times he visited Oklahoma and how each time he did his best to make Jimmy Carter look less appealing than a plate of steaming horse shit -- but there's some residual sadness, too: Oh, the president has died.
I went through this with Reagan, too. It's an instinctive thing, not a thought-out thing. Given five seconds of thought, I was figuratively dancing on Reagan's grave. But my first, gut reaction is oh, how sad.
Having said that, as a journalist I would NEVER let my first, gut reaction dictate the presentation of the news, and I am as appalled as you at how much that is done. In a "know the enemy" move, I watched a bit of Fox News last night after work to see their take on St. Ford's death. It was as bad as I suspected.
Oh, I understand a wee bit sad. I wrote letters to President Ford when I was 9! I remembering asking him to send me stuff about the Panama Canal and to tell me about his pets. And Ronald Reagan was the first president I ever voted for. Yeah, people's lives can get tied up in sentimental connections, and that's not necessarily bad.
But to see newspaper after newspaper assume the position is nauseating. The KC Star had this in a headline: "He helped nation get over Watergate."
Um, OK. It also could have said, with more factual basis: "Presidential pardon seen as cronyism; nation enraged."
Remember how all the papers said stuff — MATTER OF FACTLY — like "Reagan ended Cold War," as if he were Gandhi. Please. The man's career was PREMISED on red-scare politics. Remember the Evil Empire? Remember the long stretches of not having news conferences, the era of nonaccountability?
I just don't see why a line forms to kiss ass when someone important dies. It's like this race to seem more reverent than the next paper. It's nauseating.
Not that you have to be irreverent. But, come on, we're not talking about Grandpa Joe's death and setting aside the fact that he was a grouchy bastard. We're talking about public, historic figures, and it seems to me that mourning, which is right and proper, is not incompatible with truth-telling in these cases. There's a medium that's in the best interest of history — and ethical journalism.
Canonizing people makes them less human, not more human.
And when have Republicans ever let ANYTHING go in the interest of the nation moving forward and healing? The GOP impeached a president over being less than forthright about a blowjob. How many years and millions of dollars did Kenneth Starr spend pursuing Clinton to the ends of the Earth? The hypocrisy of their now lauding forgiveness as a great virtue is stunning.
PBS, of course, had a segment on Ford last night. They ran a clip from some years after he was out of office, and one of the things he talked about was the pardon. A line he offered up was that his new administration was spending 25% of its time on Watergate issues, so he needed to get that all behind him.
I had never heard this particular take on the pardon before. At least it isn’t as obviously false as the “for the good of the nation” line. Still, if you are unable to cope with the process of having the former president investigated, then your own administration probably isn’t very competent.
Maybe by that time Ford had come to see utilitarianism as a more plausible excuse for cronyism than the patriotism line he had been peddling.
The thing that really gets me is that experts (psychologists and such) always say that the path to healing is not through sweeping a bunch of stuff under the rug (pardoning with no questions asked — shutting down further official inquiry) but through a full acknowledgment of what happened (investigation, reconciliation). I'm sure post-war Germany could have put all that Nazi unpleasantness behind it a lot faster if it hadn't bothered with those pesky war-crimes trials, and South Africa could have buried the ghost of apartheid a lot quicker if it hadn't had those tedious "truth and reconciliation" hearings that gave people a glimpse into the profound corruption of their racist government. What were they thinking?
The most honorable thing, of course, would have been for Nixon to have come clean all on his own — to have given a full accounting for the sake of history and in gratitude for the pardon. But he was not an honorable man. (At least he wasn't given a state funeral — at his own request, I believe).
Isn't the Watergate legacy that presidents can do whatever because the "ordeal" of holding them accountable will just be too hard on the nation? That is Goddamn convenient for the corrupt.
To go back to your earlier comment about truth telling at the time of someone's death -- Orson Scott Card wrote quite a bit about that in Speaker for the Dead. OSC is an arrogant writer who has trouble giving female characters enough depth, but despite all that I really take a shine to the idea of having a speaker for the dead. As explained in the book, when someone dies a neutral stranger, the speaker, comes in and researches the life of the dead person through interviews and whatnot. When that's done (it can take days or years), there's a sort of memorial service where the speaker gets up and tells everyone the whole truth about the dead person. It can be brutal, but also cathartic. It probably wouldn't be worthwhile for every death, but in many cases it would be much more appropriate than the typical "he was so wonderful and everyone will miss him dreadfully" approach.
Ooh, I like that idea for public officials, Sara, especially since so many of them are egomaniacs obsessed with how they will be remembered. Maybe a full accounting at the funeral would keep them more honest.
Isn't OSC a Mormon? That's neither here nor there, but I have a friend who's a philosophy professor, who became a little obsessed with Mormonism during a visiting professorship at Salt Lake City, and he got really into OSC.
Yeah, OSC is Mormon. I grew up Mormon, and read my first book of his at the home of a Mormon family I was babysitting for after the kids were asleep and I was bored. I was 14 and picked up the sci-fi looking novel from their bookshelf, then couldn't put it down. Ender's Game remains one of my all time favorite books. The others aren't nearly as good, but I like to read them anyway; they always give me a lot to think about.
Incidentally, OSC's the Alive Maker series, which starts with Seventh Son, is incredibly fun to read, and it's based closely upon the life of Joseph Smith.
As another aside, notwithstanding the Alvin Maker series, OSC's mormonism tends to hurt his creativity so that he comes off stifled and didactic.
And now your comment thread has gone totally off-topic. Sorry about that.
Oh, and I agree that a full accounting at the death of public officials would be great to hear or read. It seems, however, that there are enough obstacles to keep good people from seeking office. A no-holds-barred truth-telling funeral might just be another reason to avoid office. How many of us could stand such scrutiny, even at death? Frankly, I'd prefer not to have all of my misdeeds announced to the world.
I'll have to check out OSC. I think I've heard of Ender's Game.
As for the truth-telling funerals for public officials, I think the only fair game would be the telling of misdeeds relating to their public life.
I thought, and still do, that the Clintons' marital "arrangements" and "misdeeds" were nobody's business but their own.
Clinton's shameful "don't-ask-don't-tell" policy, however, would be fair game.
Some part of me would like to have a truth-telling at my funeral. For me -- well, my soul, I guess -- it would be cleansing. Something along the lines of, "Yes, folks, I was aware that I was always a know-it-all and sometimes a know-it-all bitch. It wasn't something I was proud of, but the know-it-all part was pretty much true, and I was working every day on limiting the bitch part." How great! People would come away from the funeral feeling ... if not sympathy, then at least empathy, as opposed to feeling like the entire thing was a farce, what with everyone being afraid to say anything that wasn't syrupy and laudatory.
Did anybody think the timing was funny at all for Edwards to announce his presidential candidacy? Maybe it's because he's a blue-eyed Southern idealist ... just like smilin' Jimmy Carter.
Karmic!
Some lady from the university called just now to inform me that "the university will be closed on Tuesday because President Bush declared a national day of mourning for President Ford."
Isn't it weird that they are personally calling all faculty? Like a note on the door or an e-mail would be too ....what? impersonal? Undignified?
I just said, "Oh, OK. Thanks."
Now if only our freakin' newspapers would close so that we, too, could mourn in the privacy of our own beds. Er, HOMES, of course, is what I meant to say.
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