I'm no historian, but as best I can remember it, Ford took office to almost universal plaudits, palpable relief, and gushing gratitude for not being Richard Nixon. Within little more than a month, though, the era of good feelings came to an abrupt halt when Ford preemptively pardoned Nixon. The rest of Ford's term was bumbling, a surprising amount for public consumption. Lyndon Johnson's observation (“Jerry Ford is so dumb he can't walk and chew gum at the same time”) was widely cited, even though the quote had been sanitized (what Johnson really had said was, “Jerry Ford is so dumb he can't fart and chew gum at the same time”).
Ford promoted an ineffectual economic program he termed “Whip Inflation Now” (WIN). He appointed the relatively liberal New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller as his vice president, outraging conservatives who only grew more apoplectic when Vietnam fell. Ronald Reagan challenged Ford in the 1976 presidential primaries, and even though Ford was the incumbent, Reagan came very close to unseating him. A few months later, after a debate with Carter in which Ford bewilderingly argued that Poland wasn't really under communist control, the Georgia Democrat dispatched him to a comfortable retirement in Palm Springs, where he remains to this day.
But even presidents who seem inconsequential can leave significant legacies that don't become fully apparent until decades after they exit the White House. Not until the presidency of George W. Bush has the extent and nature of Ford's legacy really become clear. For in his abbreviated term as president, Ford made the careers of three men who have turned out to be the alpha and omega (two alphas, one omega) of the Bush years.
He made a rising young administrator in the Nixon cabinet, Donald Rumsfeld, his chief of staff in 1974. In 1975, when Rumsfeld moved to the Pentagon to become the nation's youngest secretary of defense, Ford appointed a still younger White House staffer, Dick Cheney, to succeed him. Together, the two worked on moving Ford to the right -- convincing him, for instance, to dump Rockefeller as his 1976 running mate in favor of the more conservative Bob Dole. As well, we now know from some of Cheney's recent comments that he (and surely Rumsfeld, too) chafed at serving a president during a nadir of presidential power -- the inevitable consequence of the revelations of Nixon's abuses of power.
For Dick and Don, the past six years have been payback time. Their government-within-a-government -- and their government has been the one with real power -- has stayed as invisible as possible (only recently have we come to know of the clout of Cheney's onetime counsel, now chief of staff, David Addington) and, as a matter of both practice and principle, cut Congress, the State Department, the professional military and intelligence services, and all other potential meddlers out of the access-to-information and decision-making loops. For Dick and Don, the frustrations of the Ford years have been compensated for by the abuses of the Bush years.
But remember the omega. In late 1975, when longtime liberal Justice William O. Douglas stepped down from the bench, Ford, upon the recommendation of his attorney general Edward Levi, nominated an appellate court justice from Chicago, John Paul Stevens, to succeed him. Stevens was a nominal Republican with no record of political activity, but he'd won a reputation as an accomplished jurist and a brilliant lawyer before that. That December, the Senate confirmed him by a 98-to-0 vote. And over the next two decades, Stevens, much like Eisenhower appointee William Brennan and Nixon appointee Harry Blackmun -- Republicans all -- moved leftward to a position, in his case, of moderate liberalism.
But it was not until the George W. Bush ascendancy that Stevens became the national voice of both the constitutional order and the democratic expectations of the American people. Amid the array of grotesque and tortured majority decisions that elevated Bush to the presidency on the evening of December 12, 2000, it is Stevens' thundering dissent, and only his dissent, that is still quoted, and will be quoted 100 years from now. Confronted with the most blatant example of partisan decision-making by a court in American history, Stevens insisted on judicial impartiality, and made his indignation evident that such a point actually needed to be articulated. In doing so, he produced the only memorable prose on a night of otherwise bad writing and execrable law. He began by defending the Florida Supreme Court, which had ordered a recount that his own colleagues had just blocked, but it's clear by the end of the passage, which concludes his dissent, that he's talking about much more than that. “What must underlie petitioners' entire federal assault on the Florida election procedures,” he began,
is an unstated lack of confidence in the impartiality and capacity of the state judges who would make the critical decisions if the vote count were to proceed. Otherwise, their position is wholly without merit. The endorsement of that position by the majority of this Court can only lend credence to the most cynical appraisal of the work of judges throughout the land. It is confidence in the men and women who administer the judicial system that is the true backbone of the rule of law. Time will one day heal the wound to that confidence that will be inflicted by today's decision. One thing, however, is certain. Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.Last week, it was Stevens himself who restored that confidence. The majority opinion in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, which Stevens authored, returned the checks and balances to American government that have been missing over the past half-decade, as Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld increasingly wielded unchecked executive power with the complicity of the Republican Congress. There was no legislation, Stevens told the president, that enabled him to set up his military commissions. Nor were there any legal niceties, Stevens told his onetime fellow Fordians, that enabled our military to ignore Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which guarantees humane treatment and certain judicial rights to prisoners of war even if the war -- like the war on terrorism -- is not between nations.
Gerald Ford, of course, is no more responsible for the growing authoritarian bent in Cheney and Rumsfeld than he is for Stevens' unwavering adherence to an independent judiciary and the rule of law, even in a post 9-11 world. But Ford is one lucky former president that Stevens, in his mid-80s, has emerged as the leading voice and most effective force in defense of the American democratic system. Instead of just having a forgettable presidency and bequeathing the nation two of the most dangerous thugs ever to hold high office, Ford can say that, taken in its totality -- factoring its omega in with its alphas -- his legacy is at least self-negating. He, and we, had better hope it stays that way.
Harold Meyerson is editor-at-large of The American Prospect.
