Columns

That pipe-smoker-in-chief

By PHILIP GAILEY
Published December 31, 2006

Gerald Ford was the first president I ever interviewed in the Oval Office, and I came away from the session a little disappointed. I had expected to be awed by the man and the office. Instead, I felt as if I had just had a relaxed conversation with a Michigan congressman, which is what Ford was before a series of extraordinary events catapulted him first into the vice presidency and then into the Oval Office. Not a trace of ego or pretense in the nation's 38th president. He came across more Jerry Ford than Mr. President, and I've liked the man ever since.

I don't remember what we talked about during his interview with a small group of reporters, but when it was over I struck up a conversation with Ford about pipe tobacco. He pulled a package of Half and Half out of his pocket and recommended that I try it. Half and Half - that's what my father smoked. It wasn't exactly the presidential moment I had expected, but it is one still vivid in my memory. It introduced me to the unassuming "accidental president" whose death at 93 last week brought forth an outpouring of tributes that remind us Washington has not always been the toxic political pit it has become in recent times.

Ford once told the Washington Post that he was "someone who enjoys having adversaries who are not enemies." Try to imagine those words coming from Newt Gingrich or Tom DeLay, two fallen Republican partisans whose slash-and-burn House leadership had little tolerance for the kind of moderation and civility that characterized Ford's political career. As the House Republican leader, Ford showed that partisanship could be civil and that at the close of the business day, Republican and Democratic leaders could put aside their political differences and enjoy a drink in the Capitol's hideaway offices. That was still possible when President Reagan and Democratic House Speaker Tip O'Neill were locking political horns by day and sharing Irish stories at the White House by night.

That Washington is no more. Leaders on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue treat each other as enemies, not political adversaries. Civility has given way to nastiness. Gerald Ford would be perfectly miserable in today's Washington political environment.

Ford will be remembered primarily for his decency and integrity and for his pardon of Richard Nixon for any and all Watergate crimes he may have committed. He was admired for the former and savaged for the latter, at least at the time. Ford lived to see many of his harshest critics come around and acknowledge that he had made the right call after all. At the time the country was torn apart by Watergate and the Vietnam War, and Ford decided to spare the nation the ordeal of a criminal prosecution of a disgraced former president.

In 2001, Ford was honored with a Profile in Courage Award at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, and two of his harshest critics on the pardon issue used the occasion to say they were wrong. Sen. Edward Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat and the brother of the martyred president, said he originally opposed the pardon. "But time has a way of clarifying past events, and now we can see that President Ford was right," Kennedy told the audience.

The late Washington columnist Mary McGrory was also at the JFK award ceremony. She, too, had a change of mind about the Nixon pardon. She wrote: "I myself contributed to the din with a series of screeds about unequal justice. But almost 27 years later, it looks a little different. What seemed then to be cynicism now looks more like courage. A most dubious decision acquired the patina of the only one possible."

Gerald Ford had his flaws, and he made mistakes. Before he pardoned Nixon, he defended him against Watergate conspiracy allegations. He kept Henry Kissinger, one of the architects of the Vietnam calamity, on as secretary of state when he should have replaced him. He chose Nelson Rockefeller as his vice president and then dumped him from the 1976 Republican ticket for Bob Dole to placate conservatives.

As political columnist David Broder wrote last week, Ford's legacy lies more in his "personal character," which helped get the country past its Watergate nightmare, than anything he accomplished in office - almost the opposite of what can be said about the man he pardoned.

[Last modified December 30, 2006, 21:39:46]