WEEKLY PUZZLER: "Why Is Gerald R. Ford the Greatest Recent US President?"James S. Henry

Some cynical pundits may have been surprised at the outpouring of grief associated with the passing of Gerald R. Ford, the 38th President of the US, who died of natural causes at the age of 93.

Ford had been an ex-President longer than than any one except Herbert Hoover, and had survived two assassination attempts. So some people may have just assumed that he was one of the handful of Yale Law graduates who are truly immortal,  and were shocked to discover the truth. 

However, the pundits would be correct to point out that Ford was not high on the standard roster of reknowned US Presidents. 

To begin with, of course, he was never actually elected President. His Presidency was the product of our felicitous criminal justice system. He ascended to the Vice Presidency in 1973 by replacing one felon, and then to the Presidency in 1974 by agreeing to pardon another one.

There were also,  to be sure, relatively few truly memorable positive acts by President Gerald Ford -- and many of those are best forgotten, as we'll see below.

Despite these concerns, we believe that a very strong case can be made for the proposition that Gerald R. Ford was one of our finest -- if not the finest - recent Presidents. This is not so much because of what he did, as what he did not do -- especially in comparison with other, much better-known post-war US Presidents.

FORD'S POSITIVE ACTS

President Ford certainly did not have a long list of positive accomplishments. Our own list of favorites includes:

• The nationwide distribution of (practically worthless ) "WIN Buttons" to help fight inflation in 1975.  Other than that, Ford's economic policy amounted mainly to sitting back and watching while the US Federal Reserve raised interest rates to provoke the sharp 1974-75 recession.

• Presiding over a national "swine flu" vaccination program that killed more people than the diseases itself.

• Ordering the US Marines to invade Cambodia to secure the release of the Mayaguez, a merchant ship that the Khmer Rouge had seized. Unfortunately the ship had already been released by the time the Marines arrived on the wrong island, at a cost of 41 US soldiers killed and 50 wounded.

• Presiding over "Operation Frequent Wind," the embarrassing final American rapid retreat from Saigon, abandoning the city to the tender mercies of the North Vietnamese;

• Ordering the (largely unattractive) "conditional" amnesty program for Vietnam draft resisters, to counterbalance the unconditional pardon for Richard Nixon's unconditional pardon;

• Signing the "Helsinki Accords" with the Soviet Empire, which implicitly acknowledged the Soviet Union's control over Eastern Europe -- though Ford would deny that control in his televised Presidential debates with Jimmy Carter.

• A long series of rather regrettable personnel decisions that would come back to haunt the nation, including (1) keeping Henry Kissinger on as Secretary of State;  (2) appointing George H.W.Bush to be CIA Director; (3)  appointing Donald Rumsfeld to serve as his Chief of Staff, and then promoting him to be Secretary of Defense; (4)  appointing the young Dick Cheney to succeed Rumsfeld as his Chief of Staff, which did not  hurt Cheney's future career advancement.

Ford did, however, have a remarkably real, candid, and humane wife -- who should have set a standard for all future First Ladies, but did not.

THIRD WORLD MEMORIES

Third Worlders may remember the Ford Administration in a different light, because of several other acts that most Americans have long since forgotten. These include

(1) The "greenlighting" of Indonesia's invasion of East Timor by Ford and Kissinger, at a Jakarta meeting with President Suharto in December 1975. This tidy decision may have helped to contribute to the eventual loss up to 200,000 East Timorese lives. 

(2) Kissinger's mediation of border disputes between the Shah of Iran and Saddam Hussein in 1975. This helped to stabilize both dictatorships, and eventually helped to antagonize large portions of both the Iranian and the Iraq populaces.

(3) The failure of George Bush's CIA's to warn Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier about the Pinochet government's assassination attempt against him in June 1976 -- and the failure to indict Pinochet himself after the fact.

(4) The "neutral or worse" policy that Ford and Kissinger basically maintained toward South African apartheid, even after the Soweto riots of June 1976.  They also quietly backed the arming of the UNITA guerillas in Angola, which ultimately just served to provoke a Cuban intervention and a very costly civil war.

A COMPARATIVE ANGLE

Despite all these questionable policies,  from another angle Ford's Presidency may deserve much higher ratings than most pundits have been wiling to give it. Indeed, it may have been one of the best Presidencies ever.

Consider, for example, all the damage that Ford did not do, especially compared with other more recent Presidents. 

• He did not gratuitously invade other countries (other than Cambodia - just once - a small task force that landed on the wrong island). (Contra Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, and Bush II).

• He actually withdrew US troops from a war that was going nowhere. (Contra  Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon (first term), and Bush II).

• He did not use atomic weapons. (Vs. Truman) 

• He did not threaten to use atomic weapons. (Vs. Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy,and  Nixon.)

• He did not admit the Shah of Iran to New York Hospital, on advice of David Rockefeller and against the advice of US embassy officials in Tehran, provoking a hostage seizure (Vs. Jimmy Carter)

• He did destabilize Afghanistan, leading to a Russian intervention and a militarization and radicalization of Islamic forces that we are still paying for today (contra Jimmy Carter)

• He did not position short-range nuclear weapons in Western Europe that  would come very close to precipitating World War III. (Vs. Reagan)

• He did not overthrow elected Third World governments. (Contra Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II). 

• He did not promote magical "supply-side" economic theories that promised cost-free tax cuts,  nor did he sponsor irresponsible tax cuts for the wealthy. (Vs. Reagan and Bush II).

• He did not try to capitalize politically on his own religious beliefs, nor did he adopt the weird social agenda of a particular religious community. (Vs. Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II).

• He did not refuse to enforce environmental laws, or to acknowledge their importance. (Vs. Reagan and Bush II)

• He did not systematically dismantle US civil liberties. (Vs. Bush II)

• He did not refuse to "talk with our enemies. (Vs. Bush II).

• He did not chop US foreign aid to developing countries. (Vs. Clinton and Bush II)

• He did not shag interns or other women who were not his wife in the White House or elsewhere. (Vs. Kennedy, Johnson, and Clinton).

• He did not grant pardons to convicted felons whose ex-wives contributed heavily to his Presidential library.  (Vs. Clinton)

SUMMARY -- THE GREATEST PRESIDENT EVER?

In short, the fact that Gerald Ford lived so long has given us a change to appreciate him anew.  In hindsight, from the perspective of the many transgressions and near-misses that he managed to avoid, he looks pretty successful.

He was also, by all reports, a good guy -- not an egomaniac or a conniving bastard, and a  sportsman.  Someone  you could trust with your girlfriend, wife, or daughter. Someone you'd actually like to hang out with.  In contrast to  almost all of the others, except perhaps Ike and Ron Reagan.

(c) SubmergingMarkets, 2007