Wednesday, October 30, 2024
Miles from the Mainstream
D. R. ZUKERMAN, proprietor
When Cleverness Was
Confused As Wisdom

JANUARY 4, 2007 --

That would have been something -- our first King as President, if the father of Leslie King had not left his family, with Leslie getting a name change to Gerald R. Ford, by his step-father.

As things developed, Congressman Ford became Vice President, then President
by a curious congressional king-like anointment process, not in the manner provided by the Framers who definitely did not want the US to have a king.

What a curious time that was -- the mid-1970's, when clear thinking was supplanted by anti-Nixon hysteria.

This writer recalls that soon after the Ford
Succession, some Nixon-hater declared that there can be no revisionism on the Nixon resignation.

Perhaps, however, history will see the second Nixon term as the occasion
when political hyperbole and hysteria were the Order of the Day.

How else to explain the phrase "Saturday Night Massacre" to refer to firing some officials, not firing on them?

Ascended President Ford immediately assured the country that its "nightmare" had ended. LPR is still waiting for someone to explain just who had the
nightmare.

LPR does not doubt that Mr. Ford was way more capable than partisans seized of Demo-hubris would ever allow. But his "legacy" seems to instruct that at one point in our history, a junta removed an elected president and installed its own.

The fact is, in 1973 and 1974 "The System" did not work; it was monkeyed with. And the junta succeeded in forcing from office a man who was hardly an "Imperial President" -- imperial presidents don't get forced from office -- but, rather,
a man who was betrayed by his staff, advisers and party to the glee of his political enemies.

Yes, LPR clicksters, a president who has an enemies list can in fact have enemies.

LPR has no doubt Jerry Ford was an able and amiable fellow.

This writer once wrote to then-Congressman Ford, and received a reply that could well have been signed by him, not by one of those automatic signature
devices.

The left may continue to grumble about the Nixon pardon -- see, for example the lead editorial in The New York Times,
December 28 (LPR suspects that nothing would have satisfied the Nixon-haters short of Elizabethan-style execution for Mr. Nixon, including his head on a pike
at The Washington Post.)

And the left may celebrate the Vietnam denouement that occurred on Ford's watch.

 But that tragic ending sent a message to the world that America does not stand by its imperiled friends.

An op-ed article in The New York Times, December 28, by Robert Drury and Tom Clavin recounts Lt. (jg) Ford's heroism in saving his ship, the aircraft carrier Monterey, during the typhoon in the Phiippine Sea that, the writers note, capsized three three U.S. destroyers, and badly damaged 12 other ships, taking
the lives of 793 sailors.

As it happens, that typhoon was the occasion for the fictional removal of Lt. Cmdr Philip F. Queeg as skipper of the destroyer U.S.S. Caine. Herman Wouk
wrote "The Caine Munity," some twenty years before the Nixon Resignation.

In retrospect, however, Wouk offers some insight into the matter of Richard M.
Nixon.

The executive officer of the Caine was
acquitted at his court-martial and no other officer was prosecuted.

Subsequently, however, the Navy determined that the removal of Queeg constituted "irregular relief" and
reprimanded the two officers, including Queeg's exec, Lt. Stephen Maryk, for "improper performance of duty."

The Navy officer who defended Maryk at his court-martial, Lt. Barney Greenwald, told the celebrating officers, after the acquittal, "Queeg deserved better at my hands." LPR is not aware that any member of the Washington establishment has yet said as much about President Nixon.

Borrowing that awful question of Bill O'Reilly's: " What say you -- John Dean et al.?"

For LPR, observations about Queeg, in a letter by Lt. Willis Seward Keith, who avoided court-martial when Maryk was
acquitted, offer insight on the events that brought Gerald R. Ford to the presidency.

Writing to his former girl friend in hopes of getting her back, Keith said: "We transferred to Queeg the hatred we should have felt for Hitler and the Japs who tore us off the beach and imprisoned us on a wallowing old ship for years. Our disloyalty made things twice as rough for Queeg and for ourselves; drove him to his worst outrages and made him a complete psychological mess."

Keith went on to write, of Lt. Thomas Keefer, who he now saw as the instigator of the "mutiny," -- "He's too clever to
be wise…" The passing of Gerald R. Ford calls to mind a time in Washington when clever people were considered wise.

LPR's concern, in that regard: things have not much changed.