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It was a grand day to be an American.
Gerald Ford had always been in my eyes an extremely partisan figure, often willing to make a fool of himself to promote the Republican Party's cause. He had spent the last eight months as Vice President, loyally asserting President Nixon's innocence and making a spurious argument that the House Judiciary Committee's vote to recommend articles of impeachment against Nixon was partisan (in fact, a third of the Republicans on the committee joined the Democrats in voting for three articles).
However, when the smoking gun tape was released days earlier, Ford knew the score. "The country will no longer be well served by my making any further comment on this issue," he said after a cabinet meeting the day after the tape was released.
And now Ford was taking the presidential oath of office, and I was relieved that he was President. "The long national nightmare is over." That was a relief for the whole nation.
Days earlier, Senator Barry Goldwater, a former Republican standard bearer, led a delegation of GOP Congressmen to the White House to tell Mr. Nixon that he had no chance of surviving the impeachment process. Most Republicans were now prepared to vote for impeachment and removal.
I had studied American history since second grade. When I was in eighth grade, I had an old fashioned teacher who made me memorize every word of the Constitution with all its archaic spelling and punctuation; the document ran through my blood. I understood checks and balances, separation of powers and individual rights. Because of that, years later, I understood how Richard Nixon had subverted the Constitution and why he had to go and how it would be done.
And it was done that way. And he was gone. The system worked the way it was designed.
It was a grand day to be an American.
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