Here's the litmus test: When Ford dies, Democrats will treat Gerry almost

[billbuckhead]

like one of their own. I think this is for two reasons. First, Ford wasn't Satan incarnate. Secondly, we still could talk to Gerry Ford in his twilight years and with Reagan condition there wasn't this kind of completion process. On the other hand if this board was around when Nixon passed, I think we would be having the same conversation.

[Sporadicus]

1. Gerald Ford Doesn't Have the Baggage Reagan Had

but I'll still remind everyone that he pardoned Nixon and participated in that whitewash known as the Warren Commission Report. Regardless, he doesn't wear the taint of neoconservatism that Reagan possessed, and I venture that his passing won't engender such emotional responses across the political spectrum as that of Reagan.

[LTR]

2. Gerry Ford is a decent guy

He was fair, and pretty moderate.

He pardoned Nixon, but it was in order to keep the country from cannibalizing itself. He admits it probably cost him the election, but never regretted it, and would make the same decision today. I understand his reasoning for this.

Nixon would have been trashed mercilessly if DU was around when he died.

[Waverley_Hills_Hiker]

4. I would actually defend Nixon somewhat.

To be honest, he was a conservative and had this red-baiting anticommunist past.

But, as president, he did sign into law the environmental legsilation that created EPA (rather than veto it), and maybe the same with OSHA.

He did negotiate an end to Vietnam (even after widening the war to Cambodia and Laos..but Laos was already being used as a NVA transport route).

And he did respond to Chinas overtures, leading to that opening to China and visit to Peking. The doctrinaire anticommunist position would have been to rebuff this. Also, detente with the USSR got started during the Nixon era.

So, mixed bag. Nixon was pretty awful with Watergate and the plumbers and all that stuff. But in terms of policy there was a bit more 'there" there than with Reagan. Nixon was running his own show, not being run by his advisors and a right-wing political movement that put him into power. Nixon wasn't fronting for the far-right.

[Waverley_Hills_Hiker]

3. Reagan was Fords political enemy...he ran against Ford....

...ran against a sitting GOP president, in the primaries.

Thats where Reagan and his GOP hard-righters where coming from..they wanted to take Ford out.

Ford was a Republican, but he was also somewhat moderate and did work to try for political consensus, from what I recall.

This was alot different than Reagan and the take no prisoners right wing revolution that his supporterrs advocated.