Also see below:     
The New York Times | Gerald R. Ford    [

    Ford Disagreed With Bush About Invading Iraq
    By Bob Woodward
    The Washington Post

    Thursday 28 December 2006

    Former president Gerald R. Ford said in an embargoed interview in July 2004 that the Iraq war was not justified. "I don't think I would have gone to war," he said a little more than a year after President Bush launched the invasion advocated and carried out by prominent veterans of Ford's own administration.

    In a four-hour conversation at his house in Beaver Creek, Colo., Ford "very strongly" disagreed with the current president's justifications for invading Iraq and said he would have pushed alternatives, such as sanctions, much more vigorously. In the tape-recorded interview, Ford was critical not only of Bush but also of Vice President Cheney -- Ford's White House chief of staff -- and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who served as Ford's chief of staff and then his Pentagon chief.

    "Rumsfeld and Cheney and the president made a big mistake in justifying going into the war in Iraq. They put the emphasis on weapons of mass destruction," Ford said. "And now, I've never publicly said I thought they made a mistake, but I felt very strongly it was an error in how they should justify what they were going to do."

    In a conversation that veered between the current realities of a war in the Middle East and the old complexities of the war in Vietnam whose bitter end he presided over as president, Ford took issue with the notion of the United States entering a conflict in service of the idea of spreading democracy.

    "Well, I can understand the theory of wanting to free people," Ford said, referring to Bush's assertion that the United States has a "duty to free people." But the former president said he was skeptical "whether you can detach that from the obligation number one, of what's in our national interest." He added: "And I just don't think we should go hellfire damnation around the globe freeing people, unless it is directly related to our own national security."

    The Ford interview -- and a subsequent lengthy conversation in 2005 -- took place for a future book project, though he said his comments could be published at any time after his death. In the sessions, Ford fondly recalled his close working relationship with key Bush advisers Cheney and Rumsfeld while expressing concern about the policies they pursued in more recent years.

    "He was an excellent chief of staff. First class," Ford said. "But I think Cheney has become much more pugnacious" as vice president. He said he agreed with former secretary of state Colin L. Powell's assertion that Cheney developed a "fever" about the threat of terrorism and Iraq. "I think that's probably true."

    Describing his own preferred policy toward Saddam Hussein's Iraq, Ford said he would not have gone to war, based on the publicly available information at the time, and would have worked harder to find an alternative. "I don't think, if I had been president, on the basis of the facts as I saw them publicly," he said, "I don't think I would have ordered the Iraq war. I would have maximized our effort through sanctions, through restrictions, whatever, to find another answer."

    Ford had faced his own military crisis -- not a war he started like Bush, but one he had to figure out how to end. In many ways those decisions framed his short presidency -- in the difficult calculations about how to pull out of Vietnam and the challenging players who shaped policy on the war. Most challenging of all, as Ford recalled, was Henry A. Kissinger, who was both secretary of state and national security adviser and had what Ford said was "the thinnest skin of any public figure I ever knew."

    "I think he was a super secretary of state," Ford said, "but Henry in his mind never made a mistake, so whatever policies there were that he implemented, in retrospect he would defend."

    In 1975, Ford decided to relieve Kissinger of his national security title. "Why Nixon gave Henry both secretary of state and head of the NSC, I never understood," Ford said. "Except he was a great supporter of Kissinger. Period." But Ford viewed Kissinger's dual roles as a conflict of interest that weakened the administration's ability to fully air policy debates. "They were supposed to check on one another."

    That same year, Ford also decided to fire Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger and replace him with Rumsfeld, who was then Ford's White House chief of staff. Ford recalled that he then used that decision to go to Kissinger and say, "I'm making a change at the secretary of defense, and I expect you to be a team player and work with me on this" by giving up the post of security adviser.

    Kissinger was not happy. "Mr. President, the press will misunderstand this," Ford recalled Kissinger telling him. "They'll write that I'm being demoted by taking away half of my job." But Ford made the changes, elevating the deputy national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, to take Kissinger's White House post.

    Throughout this maneuvering, Ford said, he kept his White House chief of staff in the dark. "I didn't consult with Rumsfeld. And knowing Don, he probably resented the fact that I didn't get his advice, which I didn't," Ford said. "I made the decision on my own."

    Kissinger remained a challenge for Ford. He regularly threatened to resign, the former president recalled. "Over the weekend, any one of 50 weekends, the press would be all over him, giving him unshirted hell. Monday morning he would come in and say, 'I'm offering my resignation.' Just between Henry and me. And I would literally hold his hand. 'Now, Henry, you've got the nation's future in your hands and you can't leave us now.' Henry publicly was a gruff, hard-nosed, German-born diplomat, but he had the thinnest skin of any public figure I ever knew."

    Ford added, "Any criticism in the press drove him crazy." Kissinger would come in and say: "I've got to resign. I can't stand this kind of unfair criticism." Such threats were routine, Ford said. "I often thought, maybe I should say: 'Okay, Henry. Goodbye,' " Ford said, laughing. "But I never got around to that."

    At one point, Ford recalled Kissinger, his chief Vietnam policymaker, as "coy." Then he added, Kissinger is a "wonderful person. Dear friend. First-class secretary of state. But Henry always protected his own flanks."

    Ford was also critical of his own actions during the interviews. He recalled, for example, his unsuccessful 1976 campaign to remain in office, when he was under enormous pressure to dump Vice President Nelson A. Rockefeller from the Republican ticket. Some polls at the time showed that up to 25 percent of Republicans, especially those from the South, would not vote for Ford if Rockefeller, a New Yorker from the liberal wing of the Republican Party, was on the ticket.

    When Rockefeller offered to be dropped from the ticket, Ford took him up on it. But he later regretted it. The decision to dump the loyal Rockefeller, he said, was "an act of cowardice on my part."

    In the end, though, it was Vietnam and the legacy of the retreat he presided over that troubled Ford. After Saigon fell in 1975 and the United States evacuated from Vietnam, Ford was often labeled the only American president to lose a war. The label always rankled.

    "Well," he said, "I was mad as hell, to be honest with you, but I never publicly admitted it."

    --------

    Christine Parthemore contributed to this report.

 

---

    Go to Original

    Gerald R. Ford
    The New York Times | Editorial

    Thursday 28 December 2006

    Gerald R. Ford was an accidental president, his tenure brief, his legacy limited. Yet he was the right man summoned at the right time to begin the necessary process of healing a country exhausted by war abroad and scandal at home. Elevated to the nation's top job when Richard Nixon was forced by threat of impeachment to resign, he was everything his predecessor was not - transparent and largely content with life as he found it. His many friends saw him as plain old "Jerry," a get-along, go-along product of the House of Representatives whose self-assurance and modest ambitions perfectly suited a country that wanted little more than a few months' rest.

    Mr. Ford's unplanned and largely unsought rise up the American political ladder was assisted not once but twice by scandal. In 1973, when Spiro Agnew resigned the vice presidency after a scandal unrelated to Watergate, Mr. Nixon sought advice from senior Congressional leaders about a replacement. The advice was unanimous. "We gave Nixon no choice but Ford," House Speaker Carl Albert recalled later.

    Which was fitting, because Mr. Ford was in essence a creature of Congress - more precisely, of the House of Representatives, a place of perpetual compromise that encourages neither the vision that sometimes attaches to the Senate nor the managerial skills that come with being a governor. Michigan voters elected Mr. Ford 13 times, and of his 25 years in the House, he served eight as minority leader. He saw himself as a negotiator and a reconciler, and the record shows it: he did not write a single piece of major legislation in his entire career.

    As president, Mr. Ford would have had little room in which to pursue lofty ambitions even if he had them. Domestically, he was bedeviled by inflation and then recession, and his effort to cure both embroiled him in constant combat with his old friends in Congress. Abroad, he had his hands full maintaining American power and sustaining détente with the Soviet Union, in the aftermath of the collapse of Vietnam and Cambodia.

    But he judged, correctly, that his primary mission was to quiet national passions inflamed by war and Watergate - to end, as he put it, "our long national nightmare" - and in so doing to restore a measure of respect to the presidency itself. To that end he made several small gestures largely forgotten now but symbolically important at the time. He announced that he would be lenient to draft resisters, he opened the White House to people on Mr. Nixon's "enemies list," and he crisscrossed the country endlessly, speaking to groups large and small in an effort to open up an office that Mr. Nixon had all but closed to public inspection.

    Yet his wish to heal led him to do something that reopened the very wounds he was trying hard to close. On Sept. 8, 1974, barely 30 days into his presidency, Mr. Ford announced his decision to give Mr. Nixon a "full, free and absolute pardon." The reaction was immediate, intense and largely negative. Mr. Ford had expected criticism, but not the outrage that erupted in Congress, in many newspapers and among the public at large.

    This page, for example, condemned the pardon as "a profoundly unwise, divisive and unjust act" that in a stroke had destroyed the new president's "credibility as a man of judgment, candor and competence." The critics' fundamental point was that a nation in which the law applies equally to rich and poor, the meek and the powerful, cannot exempt anyone, least of all a president, from the requirements of justice.

    History has been more sympathetic to Mr. Ford's argument that to allow Mr. Nixon's prosecution to go forward, perhaps all the way to a trial, would have been profoundly destabilizing to a nation that was already in shaky health. In 2001, the trustees of the John F. Kennedy Library honored Mr. Ford with its Profile in Courage Award for the decision, which Senator Edward Kennedy, a onetime critic, described as essential to the restoration of national unity. When Senate and House leaders bestowed on Mr. Ford and his wife, Betty, a Congressional Gold Medal in 1999, President Clinton - who had his own experiences with prosecutors - said the critics had been "caught up in the moment," and that Mr. Ford's decision had helped "keep the country together."

    Our own bottom line continues to be the same: that the nation is strong enough to endure almost anything but burying the truth. Still, Mr. Ford deserves to be remembered for more than the pardon. Marking the end of a national nightmare is no small thing.