GAVEL GAMUT
By Jim Redwine
www.jamesmredwine.com
(Week of 08 September 2025)
RICHARD NIXON
It is 4:30 a.m. and I just spent the last three hours watching a PBS special on Richard Nixon. It may be that years of working the night shift followed by several hours of college classes makes normal sleep abnormal for me. At least I prefer that explanation to what my father told me when I asked him why he was up and down most nights, “Son, when you get old you just can’t stay asleep”. Regardless, I am awake and the PBS documentary reminded me of a Gavel Gamut article I wrote in about January of 2007 about Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. That article is set out below. Gentle Reader, I trust you remember it.
What almost twenty more years has done to my impressions of the turbulent Sixties and Seventies is soften some edges and made others more acute. Once again, just like my sleep habits, I prefer to ascribe those changes to factors other than my age. Anyway, I was intrigued by President Nixon’s self-imposed catastrophe wrought by a series of his seemingly inexplicable wrong decisions that changed Americans’ views of our own country and our role in the world. Most perplexing to me was how unnecessary and silly many of Nixon’s Watergate cover-up decisions were. Nixon was highly intelligent and disciplined. He was a tireless worker from a lower economic class family who knew right from wrong. Yet, he chose the easier wrong over the harder right at virtually every stage of the “Third-Rate Burglary” that brought about his own demise and our country’s imbroglio. It is a fairly obvious allegory of the old, “For want of a nail, a horseshoe was lost”.
One take away I got from the PBS special was how my view of Nixon’s frailties was softened by today’s events, such as the Jeffrey Epstein scandal and President Trump’s comments about it or, perhaps, the bombing of Iran or the sinking of the Venezuelan drug boat. I kept watching President Nixon digging a deeper hole for himself and the rest of us as my thoughts conjured up President Trump. Nixon went from winning every state but Massachusetts to resigning in disgrace. As a side note, Nixon’s first Vice-President, Spiro Agnew, had resigned in disgrace only a year before.
I do not predict nor am I soliciting any contemporary resignations, but the lessons of history should be heeded by those who lead us. Maybe some type of epiphany is called for. I know I had to reevaluate what I thought I had learned when I lived through similar times. Perhaps President Trump who is about my age was up watching the special too.
PARDON ME, PRESIDENT FORD
(Week of January 8, 2007)
President Gerald Ford died December 26, 2006. In a life filled with public service, he will always be best known for his pardon of President Nixon in 1974.
President Nixon personally chose Gerald Ford to replace the disgraced Vice-President Spiro Agnew who resigned in 1973 amid disclosures of bribery while Agnew was Governor of Maryland.
Vice-President Ford served under President Nixon until Nixon resigned in August of 1974. One month after President Nixon resigned, President Ford issued him a full pardon for any crimes he may have committed while president.
At the time, I and most Americans were calling for a complete investigation of the Watergate debacle and especially Nixon’s involvement in it. It was a time of a media feeding frenzy and blood in the water.
President Ford took the unprecedented step of going personally before Congress and flatly stating that President Nixon and then Vice-President Ford had no deal to pardon Nixon if he would resign.
I recall how dubious I was when President Ford stated that he issued the pardon only to help our country to start healing from the loss of confidence caused by Watergate.
Yet, after a few months I began to have second thoughts about my initial reaction to the pardon. I began to see how much courage it took for President Ford to go straight into the anti-Nixon firestorm sweeping the United States.
As a country, we were almost paralyzed by the partisan fighting at home and the War in Viet Nam. We needed a new direction and a renewed spirit.
Surely President Ford with his twenty-two (22) years in Congress knew he was committing political suicide by not giving us our pound of flesh. Still, he put his country first. Of course, the country rewarded his sacrifice by booting him from office and electing President Jimmy Carter to replace him.
But during the campaign of 1976, when President Ford came to Evansville, Indiana on April the 23rd, I took my son, Jim, out of school and we went to the Downtown Walkway to cheer the man who put country above self.
For while William Shakespeare may almost always get his character analysis right, when it came to President Ford, “The good he did lived after him.” Julius Caesar, Act III, sc. ii.
Even President Carter, one of America’s most courageous and best former presidents said of President Ford:
“President Ford was one of the most admirable
public servants I have ever known.”
And when it came to the pardon of President Nixon, Senator Ted Kennedy, while admitting that he had severely criticized the pardon in 1974, said that he had come to realize that:
“The pardon was an extraordinary act of courage
that historians recognize was truly in the national
interest.”
So, President Ford, since even your political opponents came to appreciate your courage and goodness, I am confident that you have long ago “pardoned” all of us who doubted you back when we needed your leadership.
For more Gavel Gamut articles go to www.jamesmredwine.com
