Hitchens on Ford
Ever the contrarian, Christopher Hitchens savages Gerald Ford’s reputation in “Our Short National Nightmare” at Slate. Hitchens begins by bemoaning the “piety and hypocrisy” endemic in presidential passings—the exemplar of which was surely conservatives’ orgy of mourning over Saint Reagan in 2004—in our “sickly national farewell” to our thirty-ninth president, and then begins to set the record straight:
You may choose, if you wish, to parrot the line that Watergate was a "long national nightmare," but some of us found it rather exhilarating to see a criminal president successfully investigated and exposed and discredited. And we do not think it in the least bit nightmarish that the Constitution says that such a man is not above the law. Ford's ignominious pardon of this felonious thug meant, first, that only the lesser fry had to go to jail. It meant, second, that we still do not even know why the burglars were originally sent into the offices of the Democratic National Committee.[…]
The Ford epoch did not banish a nightmare. It ended a dream—the ideal of equal justice under the law that would extend to a crooked and venal president. And in Iraq and Indonesia and Indochina, it either protracted existing nightmares or gave birth to new ones.