Beg Your Pardon
It's been called an act of great courage for helping the country heal the wounds of Watergate. The outcry that followed also probably cost Ford the 1976 election. But the issue demands further clarity: If the public was so outraged at the pardon, then how can historians say decades later it helped heal the nation?
To answer this question we reached out to our resident presidential historian, CBS News consultant Douglas Brinkley. He pointed us to an excerpt from his new book coming out later this month, "Gerald Ford: A Biography." Brinkley spoke to veteran journalist Bob Woodward, an early critic of the pardon decision, about his 1997 interview with the former president:
He emerged from his interviews with Ford convinced that pardon was not just justified but was downright heroic. "Ford was wise to act," was Woodward's conclusion. "What at first and perhaps for many years looked like a decision to protect Nixon was instead largely designed to protect the nation."Watergate was a poison that would not go away. There was more to it than I saw at the time. Over the years the periodic release of new Nixon tapes shows new criminality and smallness. Ford wanted to protect his presidency, a proper goal because the president is an extension of the nation. The only way out of the Watergate atmosphere was to move fast, to short-circuit the process."
This answer raises an interesting irony: Ford, who disliked much of the irreverence surrounding the office of the President, was one of its most decisive defenders.