The forgotten president

On a world news topic, ex-President Gerald Ford has died aged 93, the only president to contest only one election for the job and lose it. He was appointed by Richard Nixon after the previous vice-president had resigned on corruption charges (was there anything wholesome about the Nixon administration?) and when Nixon himself faced the inevitable and stood down to avoid a reckoning, Gerald Ford stumbled forth from the shadows. The delirious, fantastical stupor that Nixon had sunk into in his final year in the Oval Office, is eerily reminiscent of the last days of Caligula. Upon the assassination of the increasingly mad emperor, the praetorian guard engaged in open combat with Rome's police force and urban populace. One guard, ransacking the imperial residence, found Caligula's uncle, Claudius, cowering behind a curtain (Claudius had neglected to conceal his feet poking out). The club-footed, stammering patrician was hauled out from his hiding place to the praetorian camp where he was acclaimed emperor and the praetorians no longer faced the likelihood of being disbanded, as the senate was defeated by this action. Contemporaries regarded Claudius as weak and idiotic though he possessed a keen intelligence. The same was thought of Gerald Ford though it was true in his case. In a televised debate with his presidential opponent, Jimmy Carter, Ford said that Eastern Europe was not under Soviet domination and never would be under his watch - it took a whole two weeks for his advisers to make him accept the absurdity of the statement. Ford did achieve some worthwhile milestones though. He did not intervene to save South Vietnam as it was finally overrun by communist North Vietnam in 1975 (thus giving us one of the most enduring televisual images of the helicopter-assisted rooftop retreat from the US embassy) though Nixon grumbled from the wilderness that he would have done. This corrected two decades of American mendacity and venality in Indo-China (before the next bout that is), after they had cancelled national Vietnamese elections in the south of the country when it seemed the communists would win and so opened the setting for the Vietnam war. He also pragmatically (as seen at the time), unwittingly (with hindsight), confirmed the borders of Europe in a final settlement of World War Two at the Helsinki Conference, recognising what was already de facto and pressing the Soviet Union for human rights reforms. Nixon had said of Ford as a politically unthreatening vice-president that he couldn’t fart and chew gum at the same time (later amended by the press to the more family-friendly, but in some ways more critical, walk and chew gum at the same time) and during his three years in office Americans felt their country was going backwards, while the USSR seemed more confident than ever. Of course, the USSR had intractable problems that would eventually undermine it, but no-one knew that at the time. As part of the political turmoil, Ford also contributed to the last great flowering of Hollywood, as art often tends to be heightened in politically uncertain epochs. The comparisons with Claudius, however, can not be stretched too far. Claudius was wise enough not to deify Caligula. Ford gave the hated Nixon a full and unconditional pardon. A narrow majority of Americans now believe that was the right thing to do, to allow the country to move on (although the rehabilitation of Nixon's record by the rabid right and notoriously conservative radio talk shows has probably much to do with it), though then it crushed Ford's poll ratings and political survival became impossible. Now Gerald Ford is gone and Reagan too, Carter is now the undisputed pater patriae, father of his country, though his record has terrible moral blemishes itself. The Cold War produced this.