Stop Me Before I Vote Again

What is it about the death of a President, no matter how vile, that makes so many Americans, even relatively intelligent ones, go all quiver-chinned and dewy-eyed? Amid all the treacle from every side about the late and unlamentable Gerald Ford, Dennis Perrin provides a much-needed and well-deserved dollop of vinegar:

The other legacy that Ford left behind is of course his backing and bankrolling of Indonesia's invasion and dismemberment of East Timor. On the eve of this invasion, Ford and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were in Jakarta, dining with the murderous Indonesian General Haji Mohammad Suharto, doubtless discussing what was to come. After all, over 90% of Indonesia's weaponry was supplied by the U.S., and there is simply no way that Suharto could have launched that invasion without Ford and Kissinger's approval.

Suharto did have the good manners to wait until his imperial sponsors had left Indonesian airspace before ordering the assault, which commenced on December 7, 1975. Within a few years, the Indonesian military and its proxies had slaughtered over 200,000 Timorese out of a population of 700,000 -- about a third of the overall Timorese population.

Think about those numbers for a moment. Try to imagine something similar happening in the U.S. For all of our national anguish and anger over what happened on 9/11, East Timor endured countless 9/11s on a steady basis. We paid for it and provided cover and excuses for it. And it was Gerald Ford's administration that gave Suharto the green light and the means to do the grisly job.

As someone born after Gerald Ford's presidency, my sense of his tenure is more shaped by history books than personal experience and memory. In hindsight, his decision to pardon his predecessor, Richard Nixon, appears to have been the right one, even if at the time it cost him politically. And although he was thoroughly a conservative, he seems to have been someone who treated his political adversaries with respect and genuinely fought to better America.

Perhaps I'm being unjust. Perhaps the problem is that pwoggies really believe all the pleasant lies they're told in civics class, and the Nixon pardon epitomizes the divergence between that Panglossian best of all possible worlds, and the dirty realities of actual politics.

In any case, I think the Nixon pardon was the best thing Ford ever did. Crazy as a bedbug, that Nixon, and crooked as a country road; but he and Johnson were the only interesting human beings ever to occupy the Oval Office in my lifetime, and I was deeply delighted, on a purely personal level, when Reynard slipped over the wall and left the hounds slavering with impotent rage.