Former Pres. Ford Opposed the Iraq War

Technorati Tags: Gerald Ford, Iraq war, Bob Woodward, Pres. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld

Bob Woodward's WaPo piece about an interview he did with former President Gerald Ford in which Ford revealed his opposition to the Iraq war created a mini-uproar earlier today on Memeorandum. The controversy is not so much over the fact that Ford disagreed with Bush's decision to invade Iraq, as it is over the fact that Ford only agreed to the interview on the condition that his statements about the war not be made public until after his death.

Here is part of what Ford said in the interview:

In a four-hour conversation at his house in Beaver Creek, Colo., Ford "very strongly" disagreed with the current president's justifications for invading Iraq and said he would have pushed alternatives, such as sanctions, much more vigorously. In the tape-recorded interview, Ford was critical not only of Bush but also of Vice President Cheney -- Ford's White House chief of staff -- and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who served as Ford's chief of staff and then his Pentagon chief.

"Rumsfeld and Cheney and the president made a big mistake in justifying going into the war in Iraq. They put the emphasis on weapons of mass destruction," Ford said. "And now, I've never publicly said I thought they made a mistake, but I felt very strongly it was an error in how they should justify what they were going to do."

In a conversation that veered between the current realities of a war in the Middle East and the old complexities of the war in Vietnam whose bitter end he presided over as president, Ford took issue with the notion of the United States entering a conflict in service of the idea of spreading democracy.

"Well, I can understand the theory of wanting to free people," Ford said, referring to Bush's assertion that the United States has a "duty to free people." But the former president said he was skeptical "whether you can detach that from the obligation number one, of what's in our national interest." He added: "And I just don't think we should go hellfire damnation around the globe freeing people, unless it is directly related to our own national security."

Scarecrow, blogging at Firedoglake, blames Woodward for keeping his promise not to publish or reveal the interview until now:

Gee, that Bob Woodward fellow knows a lot of interesting stuff. Like things that, had he reported them earlier, might have stopped a war, or changed an election.
[...]
Of course, it's not uncommon or unethical for reporters to interview famous people about sensitive matters on the condition that the information will not be disclosed until much later, like after the person's death. I'm okay with that.

But when a reporter is in possession of information that is vital to the country, that might change whether we go to war or whom we elect for president, and the only reason for withholding the information is to protect the person interviewed from embarrassing his own party — well, there must be some other principle that applies, don'tcha think? And doesn't a reporter then have an obligation to work his butt off to obtain permission or find some ethical way to report what he knows when we need to know it? Just askin, cause this is getting to be a habit, and it's . . . uh, annoying.

Ed Morrissey, despite disagreeing with Ford's argument that further sanctions could have prevented the war, thinks that it would have been more courageous and principled of Ford if he had revealed his opposition when it could have made a difference:

... It seems more than just a little craven to issue such biting criticisms to a journalist like Bob Woodward, but then insist that they be released only posthumously. It's a shame, because Ford had real political courage -- no man could have survived the post-Watergate mess without it -- but this is a sad denouement. If Ford opposed it, he could easily have spoken out against the invasion, either before or after the interview, and yet he decided to keep his mouth shut until such a point when he did not have to face criticism himself for his statements. I think that's something on which proponents and opponents of the war could find agreement.

Steve Benen, posting at The Carpetbagger Report and at The Washington Monthly, thinks it would have been nice if Ford had shared his views on the war while he was alive, but doubts that events would have unfolded much differently even if he had.

Shakes, though, feels very strongly that Ford should have said something:

Maybe it would have made absolutely no difference if Ford had said this shit publicly instead of telling Woodward it could only be published upon his death. Then again, maybe it would have. It would have been nice if we'd had the chance to find out. What I'm not sure I understand is why Ford felt compelled to keep his thoughts private. Was he keen to protect himself against criticism, to protect the GOP, to protect Bush? None of the above sound to my sensibilities like justifiable reasons to keep one's mouth shut if there's even the slimmest of chances that speaking up could avert a war -- a war which has left hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead or displaced and has seen more soldiers die than the number of people killed on 9/11.

I've really no understanding nor admiration for anyone who is willing to let other people be courageous and risk death so that they can be cowards and avoid risking anything.

I certainly agree that Ford should have voiced his qualms about the war when he felt them -- but I cannot imagine that it would have made any practical difference if he had. Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, and Rice formed their own little cabal, and they were not listening to anyone who did not think along the same lines they did. Bush said time and again in the days and weeks before the invasion that his decision was not going to be influenced by anything that anyone said. Everything he has said and done since then only serves to demonstrate that on this point, if on no other, he was being truthful.

Frogsdong expresses what I feel in a comment on Shakes's post:

This may be my first disagreement with the Great Ms Shakes and her community (generally speaking).

I don't think it would have done anything. It wouldn't have averted a war because the interview was after the war started. Ford was not the first serious person with credibility to oppose the war. There were other Republicans who opposed it at the time, but also there were all those diplomats who signed that letter saying they opposed the war. I remember that one. The fact is that every statement of opposition to the war was handled the same way at that time: a swarm of the noise machine screamed loudly on all fronts and with every argument, serious or not (and usually they were not), the story became the noise machine, not the war, and that was that. Let's play post-event prognostication (a fun game for all ages). What would have been the response to the publication of this article in, say, August of 2004?

The noise machine would have screamed that Ford was: a) senile, b)crazy, c)stupid, d)insignificant, e)out of touch, f)playing football without a helmet again, g)a liberal (he was a moderate, Rockefeller Republican and pretty liberal on social issues), h)drunk, i)lying, j)the victim of misquoting by Woodward, k)all of the above and more.

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Gerald Ford Dies at 93

Technorati Tags: Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon, Vietnam

I have nothing much to say about former President Gerald Ford's death at 93, but others do. So here is a round-up:

Steve Benen thinks that Pres. Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon, which has earned him much criticism over the years, should take second place at this point to the fact that Ford was the last moderate Republican president:

As the GOP shifted further and further to the right over the last generation, Ford, who was not considered a particularly progressive Republican in the 1970s, looked less and less conservative. Indeed, the former president and his wife both acknowledged in the 1990s that they were pro-choice, and more recently, expressed their support for gay marriage.

Upon joining the Advisory Board of the Republican Unity Coalition, a group of moderate Republicans hoping to drag the party to the left by more than a few degrees, Ford said, "I have always believed in an inclusive policy in welcoming gays and others into the party."

I suspect that these positions will tarnish his memory in the eyes of some of today's Republican leaders and activists, but that's a shame. The GOP would be wise to honor Ford's tolerant, inclusive approach.

BooMan observes that, although Ford himself was a "flawed but good" man, he was surrounded by people -- both Nixon holdovers and his own appointees -- whose malign influence is still very much felt today:

Ford's brief stint as President came at a pivotal time in our nation's history and in many ways he failed to heal the nation and, in particular, the Republican Party. The reactionary tendencies of the Nixon administration were not so much uprooted as put on ice. Some of his most important advisors, like his Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, his Director of Central Intelligence George Herbert Walker Bush, and his chiefs of staff Alexander Haig and Dick Cheney, would come back to haunt the nation.

Matthew Yglesias contrasts Ford's reputation as the president who did nothing noteworthy to George W. Bush's obsession with being remembered by history for acts of greatness -- and concludes: "There are worse fates than mediocrity."

Joe Gandelman has his usual incredibly comprehensive sampling of commentary from the blogosphere, and from the media. He notes that both Ford and his wife, Betty, were well-liked on a personal level during his presidency -- and that even after Ford lost his bid to be elected in his own right (largely because of his Nixon pardon), Betty Ford continued to be enormously popular among the American people for her genuineness, candor, and openness about her family's problems with substance abuse and her own mastectomy.

Pam's House Blend has an interesting retrospective with many details about Ford's support for gay rights.

Bruce Kesler at Democracy Project opposed the movement in the early 1970s to give amnesty to draft evaders (he is a Vietnam veteran who was enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania in 1972). Kesler compares Ford's Nixon pardon to his stand on the amnesty issue, and also contrasts the latter to Carter's position:

Regarding the pardon of President Nixon, most see the need for this healing, with Nixon having paid the price of loss of office being seen as adequate punishment. Some on the Left see a lost opportunity to further damn the electorate that overwhelmingly elected him. These critics revile Nixon, and Ford, for seeking a "peace with honor" finale to the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. They ignore the consequences of their post-Watergate abandonment of U.S. pledges of aid to South Vietnam, including the death and concentration camps suffered by millions, and the encouragement to adversaries elsewhere against a weak-willed America that continues to this day.

To get a better appreciation of the arguments, one might consider the Ford and Carter approaches to amnesty and pardon for Vietnam era draft dodgers and deserters. Ford offered a healing plan that was consistent with America's post-war treatment of draft evaders and deserters, conditioned by pledge of allegiance to America and two-year's service. The Left held out for an unconditional pardon, which they largely got from Carter.

I was part of this debate at the time. In the March 3, 1972 The Daily Pennsylvanian, I wrote an op-ed in the University of Pennsylvania newspaper (where I was a post-Vietnam service grad student) opposed to unconditional amnesty. It caught the eye of Freedom House, where an expanded version was published in the March-April 1973 Freedom at Issue magazine. This caught the attention of the Los Angeles Times, who reprinted it in their Sunday, March 25, 1973 opinion section. (My piece was given twice the space as the opposing view by Jean-Paul Sartre!)

I noted that a Gallup poll in 1972 found only 7% in favor of unconditional amnesty. I showed that most of the unconditional amnesty supporters came from a "premise of intolerance. Not only are the evaders and deserters to be welcomed back, but they are to be welcomed as heroic resisters of a nefarious policy of purposeful genocide."

Tons of details about Gerald Ford's foreign policy at Informed Comment, where Juan Cole provides readers with news clippings from his files, with an emphasis, for obvious reasons, on Ford's policies in the Middle East. Here is a particularly interesting one:

January 18, 1975. The Economist reports that Ford warned that American support for Israel cannot be taken for granted.

' Asked if there were any limits on America's commitment to Israel, he replied:
It so happens that there is a substantial relationship at the present time between our national security interests and those of Israel. But in the final analysis we have to judge what is in our national interest above any and all other considerations. '

The Economist noted that many Americans felt that Israel could hardly expect to get peace if it continued to sit on land it occupied from Arab states in 1967, and implied that they could not see why they should pay various sorts of price for Israeli expansionism and intransigence.

Bulworth at No More Mister Nice Blog mentions Ford's 30-year friendship with Jimmy Carter:

... Ford's one of those Republicans I always wanted to like. I don't remember Watergate (I was eight) or his pardoning of Nixon, but I have vague memories of the 1976 election. Even at that age, I was the lone Democrat in my elementary church school class mock Ford/Carter election. In later years Ford went on to co-author a number of op-eds with former President Carter, the latter of whom grew to regard the former warmly, despite their past competitive history.

And like Carter, Ford will probably be remembered more for his post-presidential life than for his actual White House stay, surviving as he did to live three decades after his presidency ended.

Will Bunch quotes Jim Naughton, a former editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer: "He may have been the nicest man ever to serve in the White House."

The Glittering Eye has an excellent round-up of reaction on the left side of the blogosphere, including many I did not hit in this post.

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