I am simply bewildered by the attitude expressed by Kaplan, and to an even greater extent, the Bill Bennets who implied that Ford was some kind of traitor for having an opinion. This is not tax or trade or social policy, this is literally a life-and-death national security question. Ford's silence is not a sign of character, it is putting party and personal convenience before the national interest. And for a man who held the first Constitutional office, even by accident, this is a disgrace.

It seems when Scowcroft & Baker failed to discourage Bush from invading Iraq, the other ex-officio Republican grown-ups just crawled back to their board rooms. I can't think of anyone from that group who has gone on record as attempting privately to offer their counsel against the war.

Beyond Carter's reference to the "Jewish Lobby" in his interview with Russert, applying the word "apartheid" to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict guaranteed that his book would become useless. Even worse, it's now problematic to even refer to his great Camp David triumph as the prime example of what's possible through diplomacy. This was profound tone-deafness.

If you think Ford's silence was bad, imagine the hypocrisy involved in Bush Sr.'s pronouncements to date. No doubt the man who refused to invade Iraq in the first Gulf war thought it was dumb and was glad to have his hack, Baker, try to undo the mess. But when he speaks in public, it's all teary eyes about how sad it is for him to see the son of whom he's so proud attacked.  

John 

http://www.haberarts.com/

I think Ford should have spoken up while he was alive. If he did not because he was uncomfortable with the idea of a former President criticizing a sitting President, that is what he did, in effect, anyway.

When President Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon I was as livid as anyone I knew — but I now think, after listening to various historical accounts this week, that (a) there was if not a deal at least an understanding, but (b) getting Nixon out of the picture served the country better, immediately and in the long run, than letting the thing go on and on.

You could say that Nixon got petty punishment for what was, after all, a really petty crime. On the other hand, what could be worse than being forced to give up the presidency in shame?

Nixon somewhat remade himself but was never again in a position to really affect US wellbeing.

So, good call by President Gerald Ford!

Now, if he had only told us back in 2004 what he thought about the Bush administration’s Iraq decisions, maybe he could have helped shorten another long national nightmare.

Many problems with this line of reasoning.

1) You allege that Nixon committed a "really petty crime." How do you know that? Because justice was short circuited, the extent of Nixon's crimes is not known now, and may never be known.

2) "What could be worse that being forced to give up the presidency in shame?" Being forced to give up the presidency in shame, being publicly tried for your crimes, having those crimes openly exposed and being unable to spend the rest of your life pretending that those crimes never happened and establishing yourself as some sort of respected elder statesman who has five living presidents pay their "respects" to you after you are dead.

3) "Getting Nixon out of the picture served the country better, immediately and in the long run, than letting the thing go on and on." Yeah that worked really well, since here it is 30 plus years later and we are still talking about it. I don't see that there is any resolution of opinion or feeling about Watergate, Nixon or Vietnam, it was all just shoved under the rug, to be dealt with at some indefinite point in the future.

As a result the country has failed to deal with, or learn from, these conflicts for 30 plus years.

I brought up Carter because Gitlin did. And it was relevant to cite him as an ex-president who has not remained silent.

I'll have to find the YouTube clip, but I doubt I disagree very much with what Carter said and the Israel Lobby. In fact, I'll have a TPMCafe post on the subject soon, but I've agreed with an editor at a Jewish paper that I won't post until he publishes the piece in his next issue.

This is a matter of rhetoric, not substance. And on that score, I think Carter grievously miscalculated the damage he did to his own argument by using a word so loaded as Apartheid. Analogies only cloud an already complex issue. His position, as I understand it, stands on the facts.

Ford was over 90 years old. It's amazing that he was still sentient. Cut him some slack.

On Face the Nation this morning Daily News reporter Tom DeFrank threw a lot of cold water on the Bob Woodward interview.

Last week, Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward said Ford told in 2004 that he was very opposed to the war in Iraq and that he thought it was unjustified. ... "I was very surprised about it," DeFrank said. "Because I had four interviews with Gerald Ford after the war in Iraq began, '03, '04, '05, end in May of '06. And in every one of those interviews, he told me he supported the war in Iraq." ... DeFrank, who covered Ford when he was president, said he saw him on Nov. 14. The only point where his reporting and Woodward's intersect is about weapons of mass destruction, DeFrank said. ... "President Ford told me in May that he thought it was a big mistake for President Bush to have pegged the invasion of Iraq to the WMD issue," DeFrank said.

I think the Woodward 'scoop' is much ado about nothing. Former President Ford could be saying something along the lines of Andy Card or Paul Wolfowitz - that he disagreed with the way the Iraq War was sold to the American people (WMD) and thought that the human rights aspect or strategic consequences of having an unstable dictator in the Middle East was a better, more justified argument. I think Ford supported the Iraq War based on Wolfowitz' human rights rationale, not Cheney's scary (and false) WMD campaign. Remember this is the same Bob Woodward that wrote Bush at War and State of Denial - two books that may as well be about two completely different people. Has Bush changed at all in office or have the winds shifted and it's Woodward that has changed? I think Woodward's selective excerpt is less than clear and DeFrank is a more reliable source. Woodward's instincts are attuned to the the fat part of the book buying public depending on how the winds are blowing, not the plain truth.

I'm not addressing the merit of the strategic or human rights argument for invading Iraq - only pointing out alternatives to Woodward's version of Ford's comments. Wolfowitz and Cheney gave very different reasons for invading Iraq in the run up to the '03 invasion. Ford could agree with Wolfowitz, not Cheney - that's a lot different then opposing the Iraq War.

There is no respect due an ex-president or any other highly placed official that puts a personal relationship before the country when we are most in need of leadership. Persons who endorse such conduct are entitled to even less. We have far too many people in positions of power and influence elevating their personal agendas above that of the welfare of the nation. In fact, this is a common theme of today and is a fundamental feature of why we find ourselves in such a dire situation.

We need desperately for the media to take up its long abandoned mantle of critically examining the proposals of government, asking the hard questions and forcing a restoration of some integrity to the system. We must be greatly concerned that the media has grown so timid and fearful of government retribution. That is something one would expect in a facist state rather than a democracy. Journalism is the public voice. Without an uncompromising public voice we suffer a deadly silence.

thepeoplechoose

Reagan called the Clinton plan a “propaganda masterpiece,” as he denounced the program in vivid terms. “When candidate Clinton promised to get this country moving,” Reagan wrote last week, “most Americans thought he meant moving forward. Instead his Administration has gone backward on the economy, backward on reducing government and backward on its promises.” The simple truth, he declared, is that “this plan is bad for America.”

Rich Noyes 11/6/06 contained in the current Newsbusters , published by the Media Research Center
reporting on a 1993 statement which appeared
as an Oped in the NY Times and also Time magazine.

Frankly the KKK (Kaplan ,Kagan and Ken Adelman)
are so discredited by their 2003 Iraq predictions that it's a mystery that anyone bothers to print their current fulminations.
I suppose like one of Muriel Spark's girls
they're 'famous for being famous'.

"apartheid" is loaded... with meaning. it's not an analogy, it's a definition.

carter stands on the facts and he has changed the national debate. if you see these developments as negative, despite your obviously enlightened perspective, then you are running with the wrong crowd.

happy '07,
matthew emmons

little ole jim: There is no such thing as "the Jewish lobby." None. There are lobbies, plural, consisting (largely) of Jews. Some of them, generally unrepresentative of American Jewish opinion, take a hard line on Israel-Palestine conflicts--AIPAC is the best known of these. Some are liberal--Americans for Peace Now, for example. There are all kinds of Jews with all kinds of views. To speak of them collectively as "the Jewish lobby" is to presume a uniform Jew acting in lockstep with every other uniform Jew, a solid phalanx carrying out some quintessence of Jewishness --a classic anti-Semitic canard. That's what's wrong with the term--it's a fraud from the get-go.

Todd Gitlin

I think Nixon's crime was anything but petty -- it went to the heart of our democratic principle of fair elections -- and unfortunately, by pardoning him, Ford created a horrible precedent. The pressure would be overwhelming to pardon Bush for what are essentially war crimes if by some chance he were forced to resign.

You and others may be right that the pardon "moved the country past Watergate", and that may indeed have been a good thing, when viewed in isolation. But we have to balance that against the need for justice -- sometimes it isn't the best thing to fast forward through a necessary, if painful, national debate.

I continue to find it fascinating how the Nuremberg principles, devised outside a treaty by four winning powers and approved by the UNGA but not the UNSC or Charter, continue to be cited as authoritative -- while the Kellogg-Briand accords are ignored.

Ferencz is certainly entitled to an informed opinion, but he is an individual. I am willing to see aggressive war, basically defined as imperial expansion, criminalized. I am not willing to forswear the use of violence for settling disputes, for some disputes involve people who recognize no way but their own.

As William Lloyd Garrison put it, "With reasonable men I will reason, with humane men I will plead, but to tyrants I give no quarter." Even further, there must be a relationship between the threat of the tyrant and the supreme interest of the country offering a military solution, lest such a country appoint itself world government.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Apartheid" is both a definition and an analogy. As an analogy, it focuses attention on comparing white South Africans to Jewish Israelis, rather than the specific details in play in Israel & Palestine, which are more than complicated enough already.

Jewish Israelis are not the same as white South Africans, nor will the likely and/or optimum resolutions to the two conflicts resemble each other. It's a waste of time arguing over the comparison. It's just as useless a construct as "Islamofascism." Islamists resist modernity. Fascists embrace it, but in a way that is horribly and violently wrong-headed.

Arguing complex policy issues by analogy is a lousy habit of mind. I lay the blame squarely on high school history teachers and all those exam questions that begin with "compare and contrast."

Gitlin's post was about discrediting the tradition of silent ex-presidents. I agree. If ex-presidents are no longer fully informed, they at least understand the amount of complexity and ambiguity involved in any difficult foreign policy issue. They are perceived as being at least somewhat above the partisan fray. But having won the big election, they presumably know how to use persuasive language to present their opinions.

I think more of Carter's presidency than most. Camp David more than outweighs his failures, and his failures were more due to holding a weak hand than how he played it. Since leaving the WH, of course, he has set a very high standard for ex-presidents.

So I remain disappointed that he used inflammatory rhetoric like "apartheid," that will not persuade. And I don't see any signs that he has changed the national debate. I haven't seen, for instance, influential public figures rising to agree with him. Instead, he only made it more difficult for people who largely agree with him to cite his great accomplishment without having to deal with the inevitable digression inspired by his irrelevant comparison.

Perhaps we are put off by the fee-for-posting?

Right On, Right On, Right On! That wasn't character that embargoed the interview -- it was politics. Impure and simple! And Ford's pardon of Nixon had as much to do with political payback to a friend as it did "healing the nation," as Bob Woodward's article in the Dec. 29 WP clearly reveals: "I looked upon him as my personal friend. And I always treasured our relationship. And I had no hesitancy about granting the pardon, because I felt that we had this relationship and that I didn't want to see my real friend have the stigma," Ford said in the interview..... Jerry Ford: A nice guy, but just like all the rest. RIP

I had an inlaw who was an executive of a major manufacturing company in Ford's congressional district, and apparently knew him well while a Congressman. When my inlaw became head of their DC office, the friendship continued. Bill, my relative, could be quite cynical about politics, but always insisted Ford was one of the most sincere and honest people he knew, regardless of the politics involved

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

Thank you for the transcript, which underscores my point. Carter says "Jewish lobby" twice. No credit to Russert for bringing it up, but Carter is no marionette. He could have said "so-called 'Jewish lobby.'" He could have said "Israel lobby." He didn't.

Todd Gitlin