The "Real" Legacy of Gerald Ford - Part II

Yesterday I discussed how Gerald Ford became an accidental President at a time of "national crisis" and at the same time set up a second national crisis some 30 years later when he elevated two famously amoral and criminally incompetent backroom operators, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. Over at The Nation Jon Wiener picks up this aspect of the Ford legacy in Gerald Ford's Legacy: Cheney and Rumsfeld.

Gerald Ford is gone, but he lives on in two of his key appointees: Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. Their impact on America today is greater than Ford's, who died Tuesday at 93.

Ford appointed Rumsfeld his chief of staff when he took office after Nixon's resignation in 1974. The next year, when he made the 42-year-old Rumsfeld the youngest secretary of defense in the nation's history, he named 34-year-old Dick Cheney his chief of staff, also the youngest ever.

Those two Ford appointees worked together ever since. The Bush White House assertion of unchecked presidential power stems from the lessons they drew from their experience of working for the weakest president in recent American history. "For Dick and Don," Harold Meyerson wrote in The American Prospect last July, "the frustrations of the Ford years have been compensated for by the abuses of the Bush years."

And there is more:

Ford also named a new head of the CIA – a former Texas congressman named George H. W. Bush. Thus you could also credit also Ford with launching the Bush dynasty.

It was during Ford's presidency that the last Americans left Vietnam – that photo of them struggling to get into that chopper on the roof of the Saigon embassy remains our most powerful image of American defeat, and it shadows our current debate about how to get out of Iraq.

Gerald Ford may be gone but his legacy lives on. He accidentally came to posses the ring of power and handed it over to the forces of evil. The Dark Lord lives on in the form of the evil Dick Cheney.

Also see:
The "Real" Legacy of Gerald Ford