DETROIT – Last week I was on trial, being grilled by one of Michigan’s toughest prosecutors as to whether I had done the wrong thing by pardoning a man who had lied and obstructed justice.
My attorney, a famous distinguished law professor, did his best to defend me, and I thought I was fairly eloquent myself, in my non-humble opinion. But the grand jury voted 19 to 18 for conviction.
Well, they didn’t convict me, exactly; they ‘convicted’ President Gerald Ford, who I was impersonating in a mock trial staged by the Macomb County Bar Association, and broadcast over local TV.
They didn’t select me to play Ford, by the way, because of my non-existent rugged good looks or my similar acting abilities, but because I know a fair amount about the era and had interviewed the former president about the pardon and why he did what he did.
Watergate, it seems, may always be with us.
Hard though it may be to believe, but in two months, it will have been half a century since five mysterious burglars were caught breaking into Democratic National Headquarters in Washington, D.C. Four were exiles from Communist Cuba, wearing suits and carrying wallets stuffed with money; the fifth had worked for the CIA, had the White House’s phone number in his pocket, and what followed was the mother of all scandals.
The next two years were probably the politically most tumultuous in our modern political history. No one old enough to remember will ever forget where they were when we all learned that President Richard Nixon systematically bugged himself, or when the “smoking gun” tape surfaced that showed he’d been in on the cover-up all along, or the day that Nixon finally resigned.
Then came the final shock; a month later, President Ford issued Nixon “a full, free and absolute pardon … for all offenses he has committed or may have committed or taken part in,” as president.
The reaction was swift, volcanic, and overwhelmingly negative. Two years later, Ford became the first incumbent President since Herbert Hoover to be turned out of office by the voters.
Incidentally, the vastness of the earthquake known as Watergate was so large that we sometimes forget that Ford ended up becoming President because of an entirely separate bizarre scandal. Late in 1973, prosecutors learned that Richard Nixon’s vice-president, Spiro Agnew, had been taking kickbacks from a Maryland contractor, even in the White House.
Agnew resigned to avoid prison, and Gerald Ford, a longtime congressman from Grand Rapids, Michigan who had no presidential ambitions whatsoever, was persuaded to become vice-president.
“Betty and I thought it would be a nice way to end my career,” Ford said when I interviewed him in 1995. Then House Minority Leader, Ford had planned to retire from politics in 1976; he’d become convinced that his real goal, becoming Speaker of the House, would never happen because Republicans couldn’t win a majority of seats.
Nixon nominated Ford, not because they were close, but because it was felt the minority leader would be the easiest candidate to confirm. Ford took office in December, and spent eight months making speeches defending Richard Nixon.
Then, at the beginning of August, 1974, the famous “smoking gun” tape surfaced that proved that Nixon was actually directing the illegal cover-up on June 23, 1972 — four days after the break-in. Within a few days, Nixon was gone, and perhaps the most accidental president in American history was in the Oval Office.
One month later, he issued the pardon. The political earthquake that followed permanently damaged Ford’s popularity and likely was a major reason he was narrowly defeated in 1976.
Though the vast majority of people condemned the pardon at the time, today, most experts accept that it was needed to end the nation’s obsession with Watergate; even U.S. Senator Edward “Teddy” Kennedy came to agree before he died in 2009.
When I asked President Ford why he did it, he told me what he had told others; that he was swamped with other crises, namely inflation, and all anyone wanted to talk about was Nixon.
While the men had been friends, he was bitterly angry when he found out that Nixon had lied to him, and at that point, he just wanted to be done with him and his scandals.
And then he reached into his pocket and took a little piece of paper out of his wallet. It contained a quote from a 1915 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Burdick v. United States.
“The offer of a pardon carries an imputation of guilt and the acceptance of a pardon a confession of it,” it said.
What remains baffling is why anyone would have wanted to bug the phones at Democratic National Headquarters in 1972. Nixon was heading for a landslide reelection.
The answer may be found in a spellbinding new book, Watergate: A New History, by Garrett Graff (Avid Reader Press, $35) likely the best single volume on the scandal.
Overlooked by most researchers was that the ‘burglars’ were attempting to bug the phone of an obscure Democratic official who could have been involved in providing sexual services including something that could potentially have embarrassed a key White House aide.
More than likely, we’ll never know everything about Watergate, and the what-ifs of history are endless. What we do know is that America, in a sense, lost its political innocence in those years.
Half a century later, we are still paying the price.
-30-
