Rick Perlstein, author of the new bestseller on the run-up to our Reagan catastrophe, wrote piece on President Gerald Ford's horrid pardoning of Nixon and how it produced so many cynics--
published today at Salon. But he posted on Facebook that it had been killed by the 'NYT' because they said they "couldn't follow the argument."
It was an enormously unpopular act. Ford’s approval rating declined
from 71 to 49 percent, the most precipitous in history. This pardon was
proof, the people said, that the system didn’t work — America
was still crooked. Suspicions were widespread that it was the fruit of a
dirty deal between Nixon and Ford: the presidency in exchange for the
pardon. “The son of a bitch pardoned the son of a bitch,” was how Carl
Bernstein broke the news Bob Woodward on the phone.
Since then,
judgment on the pardon has reversed 180 degrees. First Woodward, then
Bernstein, came to conclude there had been no deal, and that this was
instead an extraordinarily noble act: Ford “realized intuitively that
the country had to get beyond Nixon.” After Ford died in 2006, Peggy
Noonan went even further. She said Ford “threw himself on a grenade to
protect the country from shame.”
They’re wrong.
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