Our long national nightmare -- still going strong
The man who coined Ford's most hopeful phrase was among the first to learn that Cheney and Rumsfeld would use Watergate as an excuse to expand executive power.
By Matt Welch, assistant editor of The Times' editorial pages.
January 7, 2007
WHEN President Ford announced in his brief and sober inaugural address that "our long national nightmare is over," it wasn't just an attempt to lay the turbulent Nixon presidency to poetic rest. It was also a bit of wish-casting about the nation's deep partisan divisions heading forward. As the man who coined the phrase, Robert T. Hartmann, once said of the speech, it was intended to "bridge — but also divide — the past and the future."
But the future didn't cooperate, as Hartmann himself was soon to discover bitterly during his tenure as Cabinet-level counselor to the president. Two other Ford administration heavyweights — Nixon holdovers Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney — outmaneuvered Ford's most trusted lieutenant in launching what would become a career-long struggle to maintain and expand the powers of the executive branch against what they saw as a feckless Congress and media. This constitutional blood-feud continues to fundamentally shape the way the United States is governed today.
"At the end of the Nixon administration, you had the nadir of the modern presidency in terms of authority and legitimacy," Vice President Cheney told reporters in December 2005, in defense of the National Security Agency's possibly illegal wiretapping of American citizens. In January 2002, Cheney told ABC's Cokie Roberts: "I feel an obligation, and I know the president does too … to pass on our offices in better shape than we found them to our successors. We are weaker today as an institution because of the unwise compromises that have been made over the last 30 to 35 years."
The Bush-Cheney administration has systematically limited or flouted many of the post-Watergate laws introduced by the reform-minded Congress of 1974. The NSA wiretapping program, for example, circumvents the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that Cheney and Rumsfeld (along with then-CIA Director George H.W. Bush) lobbied against during the Ford era. The Presidential Records Act, prompted by Richard Nixon's attempts to destroy his files and recordings, was gutted by President George W. Bush in 2002, when he gave all his predecessors unlimited veto power over what had been automatic declassifications. And the Freedom of Information Act, which was greatly strengthened in 1974 over Ford's veto (even though he had supported the update as a congressman), was limited by then-Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft in October 2001, when he instructed federal agencies to err on the side of nondisclosure.
Activities that shocked the country 32 years ago are now being codified into law, at the behest of the Ford administration veterans....
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-op-welch7jan07,0,4372894.story?coll=la-home-commentary 
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
