Was it Gerald Ford or Jimmy Carter that united the nation after Watergate?

[kentuck]

I know that we hear about all the great things tha Gerald Ford did to "unite" the nation, but the nation was even more divided when he pardoned Richard Milhous Nixon. The people were not looking for someone to pardon the criminals - they were looking for an honest and trustworthy man. That's mostly why Jimmy Carter was elected. We needed people to believe in their government once again. That was Jimmy Carter's greatness - not Gerald Rudolph Ford's. Does anyone else remember it differently?

[chelsea0011]

1. "United the nation"? Oh, I thought they were saying Ford ignited inflation.

[peekaloo]

2. LOL! You must have channeled Emily Litella!

:D

[chelsea0011]

6. She was a hoot of a character.

[ChazII]

3. Guess we will have to wait

until Pres. Carter's funeral.

[deutsey]

4. I was only in 5th grade, but I remember people seeing Ford pretty

much as a joke.

[T Wolf]

5. Exactly.

And if not for the corruption of the Amerikan political system and the betrayal of so-called Democrats and brain-dead Raygun's deal with the Iranians, Jimmy Carter could have been an incredibly successful President.

He is the only POTUS with any dignity and class and honor in the past 50-60 years.

[Rosemary2205]

7. Carter has said more than once it was Ford.

Carter said from his inauguration on that he agreed with the Pardon and that if Ford hadn't done it, he'd have been unbeatable by anyone in that election. He also said the same thing in a 2004 Frontline bio about Gerald Ford.

[YOY]

9. Jimmy's humility is amazing

I don't want to think about his passing, but I will be a hell of a lot sadder when that bleak day comes.

[NashVegas]

8. I Don't Feel We Were "United" At All

We mostly just shut up about it and watched All the President's Men.

[SteppingRazor]

10. None of the above

But it was Ford that, through his pardon, succeeded in dividing the nation. Partisanship has only accelerated and become more volitile since the Nixon/Ford era. I believe the pardoning of Richard Nixon did not heal wounds. It only covered them with a dirty bandage, allowing them to fester.

[kentuck]

11. But, don't you think a lot of people voted for Carter because...

they thought he was an honest and trustworthy man and that we needed that at that time in our history.

[SteppingRazor]

15. Eh, maybe... but there's a big difference between voters going for Carter...

because they thought of him as honest and Carter "uniting a nation." I don't think Carter was able to do that -- his one term in office being perhaps the most obvious proof of this. And, while I like Carter and I think he has a fine legacy, I don't think people went to Carter because they thought of him as honest, necessarily. Truth to tell, a ham sandwich could've won on the Democratic ticket in 1976. The chances of a Republican being elected in the first post-Watergate presidential election were almost nil.

[kentuck]

17. That's not the way I remember it...

But who am I to question the TV or the "great" historians?

[SteppingRazor]

18. Well, which part don't you agree with?

Certainly, Carter served one term. As you say downthread, that could be a result of external forces during campaign season more than anything else. But as for the 1976 election, I don't think there's any question that it was the Democrats to lose. Ford was damned if he did, damned if he didn't, as far as the pardon goes. If he pardoned Nixon, he left most of the country angry that justice wasn't done. If he sent Nixon to trial, the depredations of the Republicans would be played out every night on the news for the next 3-5 years -- or however long the whole nastiness of a Nixon trial would take. With that loathsome scandal still fresh in the midns of voters, the Republicans probably would've done even worse in the '76 election than they did.

So, either way, the '76 election was a gimme for Democrats. We can certainly talk about '80, but I don't see any way that Republicans could've salvaged their chances in '76 -- barring similarly weighty scandals in the Democratic Party, of course.

[kentuck]

19. I remember the WIN buttons of Gerald Ford...

I remember the first long gas lines when Ford was President. I remember that Ford was President when the troops were lifted out of Saigon. I remember that Jimmy Carter initiated energy polices that benefitted Ronald Reagan during his entire terms. And they criticized Carter for the inflation during his terms that were actually created before he took office. That's what I remember.

[leftofthedial]

12. Carter

Ford just swept the shit under the rug, leaving everyone wondering what that stink was and accusing one another of flatulence

[AndyTiedye]

13. The MSM is Spreading This "Ford United the Nation (by Pardoning the Crook)" Meme Because…

…they are setting the stage for a bunch of pardons.

I am sure Al Capone would have preferred to "put all this behind us"
rather then spending so many years here:

[Solo_in_MD]

14. Both...its not a instanteous process

However, it was clearly the pardon that made it so Carter could win, which in turn lead to Regan.

[kentuck]

16. The two "Teds" had more to do with Carter's defeat than did Reagan...

Ted Kennedy challenged him in a primary battle and Ted Koppel droned on night after night about "Day 400" or whichever, until they beaten down any opposition Reagan might have had in 1980. He may have won anyway but that did not help. Reagan was a fraud.

[Solo_in_MD]

20. That and other factors...

As others have noted here, if Ford had not pardoned Nixon, Ford would have won. Even Carter has pointed this out.

Also Carter took over in a helluva mess, not He was widely perceived as ineffectual, but in retrospect I am not sure if Christ himself could have done any better. At the end of his term, "Morning in America" sounded pretty good to most people.

While it is just an intellectual exercise, consider if Ford had won and the Democrats retook the Whitehouse afterwards...which would have meant no Regan...

[TahitiNut]

21. Neither.

Different people have taken different license from the Nixon pardon. Some have used it as a banner under which to "forgive and forget" - and some merely forget. I feel confident that Iran/Contra would not have happened if Nixon had been prosecuted. Lest we forget, Iran/Contra was an exercise in "unified Executive privilege" - where Congress had passed legislation prohibiting aid to the Contras, the Reagan White House had asserted their authority to unilaterally conduct foreign relations. It was, of course, a Constitutional conflict. The "Imperial presidency" (a common characterization of the Nixon administration) isn't merely about the trappings of Empire ... it's about the unrestrained authority of the Executive to operate outside the boundaries of the United States without commensurate and corresponding checks and balances from the Judicial or Legislative branch.

We're seeing this again and again. It's the Political Viagra of the Cheney/Bush cabal. Gitmo? They claim the courts have no authority over extraterritorial activities. Same for abu Ghraib. Same for most of the foreign predations of this regime. Signing statements? It's about the claim that the Legislative Branch has no authority to impose it's will on a "coequal" branch of government. It's an obscenely corrupt interpretation, but it's there.

There were MANY people, including Viet Nam veterans, widows and parents of the dead in Viet Nam, and others, that viewed Carter's unconditional pardon of the "draft expatriates" as a violation of trust and as a besmirching of the service of those who, while they profoundly disagree with the war, chose service instead of emigration. There's is SOME validity in that posture, imho.

Again, however, the effect upon the "nation" is what the nation makes of it ... and each individual within it. The disagreements-in-principle with those pardons can be exploited for the purposes of greater power and wealth or used as a banner under which the "nation can heal."

Personally, I disagreed and disagree with both pardons, mostly in their "unconditional" application.

I believe FOrd's pardon of Nixon is an indication of how a professional politician regarded the self-imposed plight of another professional politician - seeing the potential indictment and prosecution as too extreme for someone of the political class. It was in Ford's very explanation of his reasons that we can find disagreement. It was NOT for "healing" but for the rationale that the DEMOCRATIC PROCESS itself was a kind of "punishment" for a politician in Nixon's position. I regard that as the primary rationale, not "healing." "Healing" was window-dressing. That's solely the responsibility of the citizenry (the body politic) and NOT some Executive playing pardon games.

That was Ford's error, imho. It was an error in perspective - one attributable to his being a life-long professional politician and NOT a citizen. It's the "inside the beltway" corruption of perspective - something that's a plague on our government, imho.

[paulk]

22. I agree -

and this whole "healing" garbage that the MSM has been pushing since Ford's death is nothing but grade A crapola. The pardon didn't "heal" anything - I would argue that it made things worse. It was blatantly partisan, and coming from an unelected party man like Ford only made it more so. The way you heal a wound is to clean it out - you don't put a bandaid on it and pretend it will go away. Ford's decision let the infection grow - and the results of that infection are still with us today in the Bush administration. Only now it's a full blown disease.

-------------

I also think you're on the right track concerning Carter and the reasons for his election victory.