Say Anything Blog

Michael Barone had a column today about President Ford who was laid to rest today:

Ford came to office when the postwar consensus on foreign and economic policy was in ruins. The nation seemed on a downward trajectory at home and abroad. By dint of hard work and with the help of top-flight appointees, he helped to steer us toward a different course.

In 1973, Ford was thinking about retiring from Congress: He might have gone on to play golf in Rancho Mirage, Calif., and ski in Vail, Colo., entirely out of the public eye. History had other ideas. When Vice President Spiro Agnew was pushed to resign, Richard Nixon needed to appoint a loyalist who could be confirmed by a Democratic Congress: Ford filled the bill.

When Nixon was forced to resign, Ford was suddenly president. The postwar consensus was gone. Since 1968, there had been fierce debate about Vietnam. Most Democrats wanted to slash defense spending, while conservatives grumbled about Nixon’s detente with the Soviet Union and opening to China. Nixon’s Keynesian economic policies, and the oil shock of 1973, produced a sharp recession and high inflation—stagflation. Experts told Americans that the days of low-inflation growth were over and that America was in retreat in the world. The trajectory would be ever downward.

Ford did not succeed in turning that around instantly. But he put into place policies that in time directed those trajectories upward. His negotiations with the Soviet Union and our European allies produced the Helsinki Accords, which ratified the status quo in Eastern Europe but also contained human-rights provisions that in the 1980s helped to delegitimize the Soviet empire.

The Reagan challenge—and Ford’s own dumping of Vice President Nelson Rockefeller—showed that the Republican Party was shifting to the right, away from the postwar consensus. But Ford’s rally in the general election, from 25 points behind in the polls to only a 50 percent to 48 percent defeat, showed that the Republican Party had greater residual strength in the wake of the collapse of the postwar consensus than most people thought.

Ford was ridiculed as a bumbler, though he was a gifted athlete, and was dismissed as a lightweight, though he entered the White House with a considerable command of foreign and domestic policy. He healed the nation and, more importantly, proved that it was possible to get America off its downward trajectory and heading upward again, as it did in the 1980s. Something to remember in these pessimistic times.