Two big mistakes

I have found an article that represents what I think about President Ford better than anything else I have read. It is entitled "Gerald Ford's Failure of Nerve" and it discusses his unwillingness for his July 2004 interview with Bob Woodward (in which Ford said the Iraq war was a "big mistake") to be made public until after his death. This is close to the conclusion:

I suspect Ford stayed silent because he didn’t want conflict. From all accounts he was a decent man who believed in compromise politics over slash and burn. So why create a firestorm if he didn’t have to? The same avoidance of controversy may have fed Ford’s decision to pardon Richard Nixon, as Ford talked of wanting to avoid “polarization,” “ugly passions,” and "years of bitter controversy and divisive national debate." Yet Nixon gained and regained office through spearheading an approach of “positive polarization” based on demonizing those who disagreed with him--an approach developed still further by key Republican strategists like Lee Atwater and Karl Rove. Ford’s pardon allowed America to evade seriously grappling with the destructive implications of this approach. It removed a chance to unequivocally reject the premise that, as Nixon said in May 1977, "When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal." The pardon created precedent and encouragement for further abuses, like Bush Senior pardoning his own defense secretary, Caspar Weinberger, 12 days before a scheduled perjury trial in which Weinberger was likely to implicate Bush in Iran-Contra. Or the illegal surveillance of ordinary citizens undertaken by both the Reagan administration and the current Bush regime. By pardoning Nixon, Ford removed the chance for our nation to learn from the most profoundly destructive actions of the Nixon administration, and avoid even skating close to their edge in the future.

That pardon really damaged our country. And we are paying for it today.