‘No one could believe it’ when Ford pardoned Nixon four decades ago
On Sunday, Sept. 8, 1974, Tom DeFrank was seated in the White House briefing room, waiting for an announcement from President Gerald Ford. DeFrank was a 29-year-old Newsweek correspondent who had been summoned to the White House with the press corps while the rest of Washington ate breakfast or went to church.
Ford was in the Oval Office facing a wall of television cameras. DeFrank and his colleagues were down the hall, listening to the president over a loud speaker as he gave his address. After 11 a.m., Ford announced he was pardoning Richard M. Nixon, the former Republican president and his old boss who had resigned weeks earlier in disgrace, accused of obstruction of justice and abuse of power for his role in the Watergate scandal.
If Nixon was indicted and subject to a criminal trial, Ford wrote in his pardon, “the tranquility to which this nation has been restored by the events of recent weeks could be irreparably lost.”
Reporters were stunned. “No one could believe it,” DeFrank said, recounting the event in an interview this past week. “It was a moment of high drama.”
It has become the presidential pardon all others have been measured against, largely because of the political fallout that ensued. Ford’s press secretary, J.F. ter Horst, resigned in protest. Many Americans were outraged, while others argued Nixon suffered plenty. It was also devastating for Ford, a Republican who lost a re-election bid in 1976 to Jimmy Carter, a Democrat.
“We have not seen, over the years, any presidential pardon that had the magnitude of when Ford pardoned Nixon,” said DeFrank, a longtime journalist who has covered eight presidents and in 2007 published “Write It When I’m Gone,” an account of his private conversations with Ford.
Not Bill Clinton’s 2001 pardon of Marc Rich, a fugitive financier charged with tax fraud whose former wife, Denise Rich, was an influential Clinton donor. Not the 1992 pardon of former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger by George H.W. Bush for his involvement in the Iran-Contra affair.
Nixon’s pardon, 44 years ago, is relevant once again, particularly as a debate has been revived over how pardons should be granted. President Donald Trump has granted them to former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio and conservative author Dinesh D’Souza, among others. Last year civil rights groups and others criticized Trump over his pardon of Arpaio, who was convicted of defying a court order to stop detaining suspected unauthorized immigrants.
In March, The New York Times reported that a lawyer for Trump discussed the idea of pardoning two former top advisers — including Paul Manafort, his former campaign chairman — with their lawyers last year, according to three people with knowledge of the discussions.
After Manafort was convicted of financial fraud last month, Trump publicly praised him. One of Trump’s lawyers said the president had discussed with him the political fallout should he pardon Manafort, adding that such a pardon was not under consideration. (His lawyers had cautioned him against even considering clemency for former aides under investigation by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, until the inquiry is over.)
And in June, Trump declared on Twitter that he has the “absolute right to pardon myself.” (Many constitutional experts dispute his position on his pardon power, an issue for which there has been no definitive ruling.)
Legislators were alarmed. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., asked Judge Brett Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court nominee, during his confirmation hearing Wednesday whether he believed the president had the power to pardon himself. Kavanaugh dodged the question.
Most historians agree Ford did the right thing for the country, which was reeling from the continuing Vietnam War, economic stagnation, an energy crisis and the political turmoil left over from Watergate. Nixon expressed sorrow at the time, saying, “No words can describe the depths of my regret and pain.”
But there was a downside, too. “It set a precedent that presidents are superhuman and not held to the rule of law like other people,” said Douglas Brinkley, the presidential historian who has written books about Ford, Nixon and Carter. Pardons, he explained, “are supposed to correct travesties of justice.”
Ford was Nixon’s vice president before he was named president Aug. 9, 1974, when Nixon resigned. The Watergate scandal had dragged on since 1972 after a break-in at the office of the Democratic National Committee in Washington. When the burglars were caught, the Nixon administration tried to cover it up by destroying records, committing perjury and paying hush money.
The public spectacle — which included witnesses paraded before Congress and conspirators sent to jail — left Americans exhausted and divided in warring camps. Ford told colleagues then that the nation could not come together until Nixon was removed from the political stage.
“Ford was spending 25 percent of his time dealing with leftover Nixon stuff,” Ron Nessen, who replaced ter Horst as Ford’s press secretary, said in an interview. He said Ford told him then, “The country has so many other problems. I need to spend time working on other things.”
Ford, an avuncular former congressman raised in the Midwest, appealed to both Democrats and Republicans. His decision, though, was unpopular. “It was a huge disappointment to reporters and the people who trusted Ford,” Brinkley said.
There was also a theory by historians that Nixon had picked Ford as his vice president because a pardon was assured. (His previous vice president, Spiro Agnew, admitted to tax evasion and resigned in 1973.) “I came away with the impression it was a done deal,” said Brinkley, who has read much of the correspondence between Ford and Nixon. Nessen, who was Ford’s press secretary for three years, has a different view, though, saying Ford carefully considered his decision before making it.
Whatever the reason, it kept Nixon out of court, unlike others in the White House who got caught up in the Watergate affair and went to jail. “There was not going to be a circus trial,” Brinkley said. “The idea of a president in an orange jumpsuit was too mind-boggling to people at the time.”
Greg Cumming, a staff historian at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California, said Nixon “was damaged” by the time he resigned. The pardon, he said, gave Nixon “a chance to stay out of the headlines.”