An embarrassingly predictable opinion.

Cheney hails Ford's pardon of Nixon

"Ford's decision to pardon Richard Nixon, so divisive at the time that it probably cost him the 1976 election, was dealt with squarely in his funeral services by his old chief of staff, Vice President Dick Cheney.

"'It was this man, Gerald R. Ford, who led our republic safely though a crisis that could have turned to catastrophe,' said Cheney, speaking in the Capitol Rotunda where Ford's body rested. 'Gerald Ford was almost alone in understanding that there can be no healing without pardon.'"


With all due respect to Vice-President Cheney (which at this stage is little), the notion that pardoning Nixon served anybody but Nixon himself is, to put it kindly, grotesque. It buried information that the American public deserved and needed to know about the extremes of corruption to which a popularly elected president can sink. It allowed a truly twisted individual to lapse into semi-respectable retirement instead of facing internment in a prison or mental institution, whichever the judge found more suitable. It rendered Nixon's assertion "If the president does it, it's not a crime" into a functional truth. It healed nothing -- unless a thin layer of dirt may be said to "heal" a landfill by masking it. It was a great misfortune for America, no matter how idiotically well-meant the intention, and will forever doom Gerald Ford's legacy as one of mediocrity.

Ford, we are willing to allow, was not a bad man, and perhaps, in a low-key way, might have made a decent administrator if by accident he should have ascended to the office at a different juncture. The unfortunate truth is that he was the wrong man at the wrong time. So be it. Rest in peace.

On a related note, we recently screened the 1984 Robert Altman film Secret Honor, a fictional presentation of an evening alone with Richard M. Nixon. The movie, adapted from a play, has a certain stagey quality, and the filming process (16mm blown up to 35mm) lends a slightly 1970s detective-show look to the photography. That said, Phillip Baker Hall gives one of the most mesmerizing performances we have seen in cinema. His Nixon -- inarticulate, at times raving, frighteningly volatile -- runs the gamut from madly comic to horrifyingly touching. The film blends a great deal of fact with a tiny amount of invention, but so powerful is the result one wonders why the invention was necessary: the facts are insane enough. Conspiracy buffs will enjoy the references to such topical subjects as Bohemian Grove and the future President Goerge H. W. Bush, Nixon buffs will amuse themselves by counting all the bases covered, and no one can fail to be impressed by Mr. Hall's brilliant, repulsive, terrifying conviction, in the greatest tragic role written by our times.


"Now the dogcatcher is king!"
--Secret Honor

"Thou hast seen a farmer's dog bark at a beggar? An the creature run from the cur, there thou mightst behold the great image of authority. A dog's obeyed in office."
--King Lear