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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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 Posted: Fri Jan 12, 2007 6:31 pm Post subject: Ford Rates His Peers... |
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| GRAND RAPIDS, Michigan (AP) -- In 25 years of interviews with his hometown paper that could only be released upon his death, former President Ford once called Jimmy Carter a "disaster" who ranked alongside Warren Harding... |
CNN |
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Ya-ta Boy
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
Location: Established in 1994
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| Posted: Fri Jan 12, 2007 8:04 pm Post subject: |
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| I agree with several of his assessments, especially about Reagan. I'm not buying his rating of Eisenhower. No way Ike outranks FDR. |
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regicide
Joined: 01 Sep 2006
Location: United States
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| Posted: Fri Jan 12, 2007 11:11 pm Post subject: The Timely Death of Gerald Ford |
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| Gopher wrote: |
| Quote: |
| GRAND RAPIDS, Michigan (AP) -- In 25 years of interviews with his hometown paper that could only be released upon his death, former President Ford once called Jimmy Carter a "disaster" who ranked alongside Warren Harding... |
CNN |
For those of you who are not Ford apologists, you may be interested in this article.
Published on Sunday, January 7, 2007 by the New York Times
The Timely Death of Gerald Ford
by Frank Rich
The very strange and very long Gerald Ford funeral marathon was about many things, but Gerald Ford wasn�t always paramount among them.
Forty percent of today�s American population was not alive during the Ford presidency. The remaining 60 percent probably spent less time recollecting his unelected 29-month term than they did James Brown�s �Papa�s Got a Brand New Bag.� Despite the lachrymose logorrhea of television anchors and the somber musical fanfares, the country was less likely to be found in deep mourning than in deep football. It�s a safe bet that the Ford funeral attracted far fewer viewers than the most consequential death video of the New Year�s weekend, the lynching of Saddam Hussein. But those two deaths were inextricably related: it was in tandem that they created a funereal mood that left us mourning for our own historical moment more than for Mr. Ford.
What the Ford obsequies were most about was the Beltway establishment�s grim verdict on George W. Bush and his war in Iraq. Every Ford attribute, big and small, was trotted out by Washington eulogists with a wink, as an implicit rebuke of the White House�s current occupant. Mr. Ford was a healer, not a partisan divider. He was an all-American football star, not a cheerleader. He didn�t fritter away time on pranks at his college fraternity, Delta Kappa Epsilon, because he had to work his way through school as a dishwasher. He was in the top third of his class at Yale Law. He fought his way into dangerous combat service during World War II rather than accept his cushy original posting. He was pals with reporters and Democrats. He encouraged dissent in his inner circle. He had no enemies, no ego, no agenda, no ideology, no concern for his image. He described himself as �a Ford, not a Lincoln,� rather than likening himself to, say, Truman.
Under the guise of not speaking ill of a dead president, the bevy of bloviators so relentlessly trashed the living incumbent that it bordered on farce. No wonder President Bush, who once hustled from Crawford to Washington to sign a bill interfering in Terri Schiavo�s medical treatment, remained at his ranch last weekend rather than join Betty Ford and Dick Cheney for the state ceremony in the Capitol rotunda.
Yet for all the media acreage bestowed on the funeral, the day in Mr. Ford�s presidency that most stalks Mr. Bush was given surprisingly short shrift � perhaps because it was the most painful. That day was not Sept. 8, 1974, when Mr. Ford pardoned his predecessor, but April 30, 1975, when the last American helicopters hightailed it out of Saigon, ending our involvement in a catastrophic war. Mr. Ford had been a consistent Vietnam hawk, but upon inheriting the final throes of the fiasco, he recognized reality when he saw it.
Just how much so can be found in a prescient speech that Mr. Ford gave a week before our clamorous Saigon exit. (And a speech prescient on other fronts, too: he called making �America independent of foreign energy sources by 1985� an urgent priority.) Speaking at Tulane University, Mr. Ford said, �America can regain the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam� but not �by refighting a war that is finished as far as America is concerned.� He added: �We, of course, are saddened indeed by the events in Indochina. But these events, tragic as they are, portend neither the end of the world nor of America�s leadership in the world.�
All of this proved correct, and though Mr. Ford made a doomed last-ditch effort to secure more financial aid for Saigon, he could and did do nothing to stop the inevitable. He knew it was way too late to make the symbolic gesture of trying to toss fresh American troops on the pyre. �We can and we should help others to help themselves,� he said in New Orleans. �But the fate of responsible men and women everywhere, in the final decision, rests in their own hands, not in ours.�
Though Mr. Ford was hardly the unalloyed saint of last week�s pageantry, his words and actions in 1975 should weigh heavily upon us even as our current president remains oblivious. As Mr. Ford�s presidential history is hard to separate from the Bush inversion of it, so it is difficult to separate that indelible melee in Saigon from the Hussein video. Both are terrifying, and for the same reason.
The awful power of the Hussein snuff film derives not just from its illustration of the barbarity of capital punishment, even in a case where the condemned is a mass murderer undeserving of pity. What really makes the video terrifying is its glimpse into the abyss of an irreversible and lethal breakdown in civic order. It sends the same message as those images of helicopters fleeing our embassy in April 1975: Iraq, like Vietnam before it, is in chaos, beyond the control of our government or the regime we�re desperately trying to prop up. The security apparatus of Iraq�s �unity government� was powerless to prevent the video, let alone the chaos, and can�t even get its story straight about what happened and why.
Actually, it�s even worse than that. Perhaps the video�s most chilling notes are the chants of �Moktada! Moktada! Moktada!� They are further confirmation, as if any were needed, that our principal achievement in Iraq over four years has been to empower a jihadist mini-Saddam in place of the secular original. The radical cleric Moktada al-Sadr, an ally of Hezbollah and Hamas, is a thug responsible for the deaths of untold Iraqis and Americans alike. It was his forces, to take just one representative example, that killed Cindy Sheehan�s son, among many others, in one of two Shiite uprisings in 2004.
The day after Casey Sheehan�s slaughter, Dan Senor, the spokesman for the American occupation, presided over a Green Zone news conference promising Mr. Sadr�s woefully belated arrest on a months-old warrant for his likely role in the earlier assassination of Abdel Majid al-Khoei, a rival Shiite who had fiercely opposed Saddam. Today Mr. Sadr and his forces control 30 seats in the Iraqi Parliament, four government ministries, and death squads (a k a militias) more powerful than the nominal Iraqi army. He is the puppetmaster who really controls Nuri al-Maliki � the Iraqi prime minister embraced by Mr. Bush � even to the point of inducing Mr. Maliki to shut down a search for an American soldier kidnapped at gunpoint in Sadr City in the fall. (And, you might ask, whatever happened to Mr. Senor? He�s a Fox News talking head calling for a �surge� of American troops to clean up the botch he and his cohort left behind.) Only Joseph Heller could find the gallows humor in a moral disaster of these proportions.
It�s against the backdrop of both the Hussein video and the Ford presidency that we must examine the prospect of that much-previewed �surge� in Iraq � a surge, by the way, that the press should start calling by its rightful name, escalation. As Mr. Ford had it, America cannot regain its pride by refighting a war that is finished as far as America is concerned and, for that matter, as far as Iraq is concerned. By large margins, the citizens of both countries want us not to escalate but to start disengaging. So do America�s top military commanders, who are now being cast aside just as Gen. Eric Shinseki was when he dared assert before the invasion that securing Iraq would require several hundred thousand troops.
It would still take that many troops, not the 20,000 we might scrape together now. Last month the Army and Marines issued an updated field manual on counterinsurgency (PDF) supervised by none other than Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, the next top American military commander in Iraq. It endorsed the formula that �20 counterinsurgents per 1,000 residents� is �the minimum troop density required.� By that yardstick, it would take the addition of 100,000-plus troops to secure Baghdad alone.
The �surge,� then, is a sham. It is not meant to achieve that undefined �victory� Mr. Bush keeps talking about but to serve his own political spin. His real mission is to float the �we�re not winning, we�re not losing� status quo until Jan. 20, 2009. After that, as Joseph Biden put it last week, a new president will �be the guy landing helicopters inside the Green Zone, taking people off the roof.� This is nothing but a replay of the cynical Nixon-Kissinger �decent interval� exit strategy concocted to pass the political buck (to Mr. Ford, as it happened) on Vietnam.
As the White House tries to sell this flimflam, picture fresh American troops being tossed into Baghdad�s caldron to work alongside the Maliki-Sadr Shiite lynch mob that presided over the Saddam hanging. Contemplate as well Gerald Ford�s most famous words, spoken as he assumed the presidency after the Nixon resignation: �Our Constitution works; our great republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule.�
This time the people do not rule. Two months after Americans spoke decisively on Election Day, the president is determined to overrule them. Our long national nightmare in Iraq, far from being over, is about to get a second wind.
� 2006 The New York Times |
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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Sat Jan 13, 2007 12:22 am Post subject: |
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Regicide: while Ford's judging past presidents certainly calls for similarly direct judgments on his own presidency, and I do not fault you for bringing criticism against him here (as opposed to slandering the man earlier), I do remind you that you were warned to shorten your links and not hang your paper here like this.
Post a teaser or a summary. Link it. And if any of us want to read the rest of it, we will open it. If so, great. If not, then not.
But, in any case, please stop force-feeding us these excessively long articles. |
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regicide
Joined: 01 Sep 2006
Location: United States
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| Posted: Sat Jan 13, 2007 1:15 am Post subject: |
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| Gopher wrote: |
Regicide: while Ford's judging past presidents certainly calls for similarly direct judgments on his own presidency, and I do not fault you for bringing criticism against him here (as opposed to slandering the man earlier), I do remind you that you were warned to shorten your links and not hang your paper here like this.
Post a teaser or a summary. Link it. And if any of us want to read the rest of it, we will open it. If so, great. If not, then not.
But, in any case, please stop force-feeding us these excessively long articles. |
I too, hope the "surge" does not become escalation. A lot of brave soldiers are fighting and dying in Iraq, and I truly hope that there is meaning to their deaths.
It is natural to look back at the Ford Presidency because of his recent passing. Although never elected President, Gerald Ford was involved in many significant events that shaped the United States.
Last edited by regicide on Sat Jan 13, 2007 9:24 pm; edited 2 times in total |
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alffy
Joined: 25 Apr 2006
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| Posted: Sat Jan 13, 2007 1:33 am Post subject: |
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You know, my opinion of Ford has only grown since his passing. I only wish the guy had had the balls to speak his honest opinions while he was alive.
I have always thought he was a bit underrated as a President. While my opinion on his Presidency has remained unchanged (overall ineffectual, but necessary), my thinking regarding his intelligence has increased tremendously.
Too bad for us he was the last of his kind: a Republican President with a truly moderate political ideology. Since Ford, you might say, the Republian Presidents have been rather extremists (possibly with the exception of Bush, 41, but then he had his own issues). |
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regicide
Joined: 01 Sep 2006
Location: United States
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| Posted: Sat Jan 13, 2007 1:39 am Post subject: |
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| alffy wrote: |
You know, my opinion of Ford has only grown since his passing. I only wish the guy had had the balls to speak his honest opinions while he was alive.
I have always thought he was a bit underrated as a President. While my opinion on his Presidency has remained unchanged (overall ineffectual, but necessary), my thinking regarding his intelligence has increased tremendously.
Too bad for us he was the last of his kind: a Republican President with a truly moderate political ideology. Since Ford, you might say, the Republian Presidents have been rather extremists (possibly with the exception of Bush, 41, but then he had his own issues). |
Last edited by regicide on Sat Jan 13, 2007 9:25 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Manner of Speaking
Joined: 09 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Sat Jan 13, 2007 2:57 am Post subject: |
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| Frank Rich wrote: |
| It�s against the backdrop of both the Hussein video and the Ford presidency that we must examine the prospect of that much-previewed �surge� in Iraq � a surge, by the way, that the press should start calling by its rightful name, escalation. |
regicide, thanks for the article. You know, in the last few days I've been struck by the semantics of this word "surge". I had never heard it used in the context of troop allocations before, and as an English teacher it's interesting to examine the implications of its use. In everyday usage we normally think of the word 'surge' as 'a sudden increase in something', such as an energy level (e.g., a surge protector for computers), with the implication (usually) that the sudden increase will eventually subside, or stabilize. 'Surge' has the sound of some natural, anonymous material whose movements or vicissitudes are generally beyond the control of man. Or perhaps a rapid movement forward - a 'troop surge'.
'Escalation', however, has all kinds of other, interesting implications. It implies an increase in scale ('es-scale-ation'), a deliberate choice of action, a deliberate decision to become more involved in some conflict at a greater, deeper scale. A.k.a. Vietnam.
This 20,000 troop "surge"....how long will it last? How long will those soldiers be in Iraq, and how deeply involved will they be in what is emerging to be a swampy mess? Is the President of the US to be believed when he says they will be out in October? |
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Ya-ta Boy
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
Location: Established in 1994
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| Posted: Sat Jan 13, 2007 5:11 am Post subject: |
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I thought the title of the essay was not really indicative of the content. In fact, I think the essay is a little muddled. It starts out pretty critical of Ford, but by the middle it turns a corner and says some pretty positive things. The real thrust of it is a condemnation of Bush.
I too have been interested in the use of the word 'surge' instead of 'escalation'. My guess is that those old geezers in the White House didn't want the rest of us geezers outside the White House to have flashbacks to LBJ and RMN when they used the word escalation. They are desperate to avoid comparisons to Vietnam and are, like bureaucrats everywhere, convinced that if they can control the language, they can control the perception. And while it is true that they can do that to some extent, we are not all as stupid as they think and hope we are. Public reaction to the 'surge' is proof of that. |
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Ya-ta Boy
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
Location: Established in 1994
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| Posted: Sat Jan 13, 2007 5:11 am Post subject: |
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If you want to re-read my post, I think it is a more efficient use of space if you scroll back and re-read it rather than have me post the same thing here for you to read again.
Last edited by Ya-ta Boy on Sat Jan 13, 2007 5:21 am; edited 1 time in total |
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Ya-ta Boy
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
Location: Established in 1994
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| Posted: Sat Jan 13, 2007 5:11 am Post subject: |
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I can understand why people would want to read my posts twice to make sure they got the all the meaning, but perhaps three times is not necessary.
Last edited by Ya-ta Boy on Sat Jan 13, 2007 5:19 am; edited 1 time in total |
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Ya-ta Boy
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
Location: Established in 1994
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| Posted: Sat Jan 13, 2007 5:13 am Post subject: |
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4 repeats are perhaps 3 more than necessary to get my point across.
Last edited by Ya-ta Boy on Sat Jan 13, 2007 5:17 am; edited 1 time in total |
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Ya-ta Boy
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
Location: Established in 1994
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| Posted: Sat Jan 13, 2007 5:13 am Post subject: |
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5 repeats are a bit excessive.  Sorry. |
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On the other hand
Joined: 19 Apr 2003
Location: I walk along the avenue
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| Posted: Sat Jan 13, 2007 5:35 am Post subject: |
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YTB:
No worries. When the "submit" function is going at a glacial pace, I find the only way to get it to work is to hit the box a few extra times. But that then leads to the post being submitted as many times as you hit the box. |
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huffdaddy
Joined: 25 Nov 2005
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| Posted: Sat Jan 13, 2007 6:00 am Post subject: |
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| Ya-ta Boy wrote: |
| I agree with several of his assessments, especially about Reagan. |
To wit:
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| Reagan was "probably the least well-informed on the details of running the government of any president I knew," Ford said. In a separate interview, he said Reagan "was just a poor manager, and you can't be president and do a good job unless you manage." |
From what I've read about the Reagan administration, he pretty much told his Cabinet to figure things out. While his adminstration was successful in many areas, I don't consider Reagan the driving force behind that success.
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| I'm not buying his rating of Eisenhower. No way Ike outranks FDR. |
What do you expect from a Republican?
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| Ford considered John F. Kennedy overrated and Bill Clinton average. |
While I'd agree that JFK is somewhat overrated politically, it would be hard for him to not be. I'd compare Clinton favorably to Nixon. Masterful politicians who are often reviled, despite their cross-over policies. And both had their fatal flaws that besmirched their administration and legacy. |
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