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January 17 - January 23, 2018
Less than ten minutes after Ford issued the pardon, Nixon accepted. Nixon staff released a written statement saying “I have been informed that President Ford has granted me a full and absolute pardon for any charges which may be brought against me for actions taken during the time I was the President of the United States. In accepting this pardon, I hope that his compassionate act will contribute to lifting the burden of Watergate from our country.” For the rest of his life President Ford carried in his wallet a quote from a 1915 Supreme Court decision saying a pardon “carries an imputation of
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Every day of the life that was left to him, Richard Nixon also had to bear the burden of the knowledge that his pardon did not protect him from anything he did before the presidency, and that what he did to win the presidency was his greatest crime.
He delivered the most memorable quote in the Senate investigation when he testified that he told Nixon “there was a cancer growing on the presidency.” John Dean cooperated with the investigators and testified for the prosecution in some of the Watergate trials.
Vice President Rockefeller watched the 1976 campaign from the sidelines as President Ford never found a satisfactory answer for voters to the question that would nag him for the rest of his life: Why did he pardon Richard Nixon? In 1981, Gerald Ford told Henry Kissinger, “Sometimes I wish I had never pardoned that son of a bitch.”
Ronald Reagan’s winning campaign slogan in 1980 was “Make America Great Again.” Donald Trump chose those exact words as his winning slogan thirty-six years later.
When President Barack Obama nominated Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court, Buchanan said, “If Kagan is confirmed, Jews, who represent less than two percent of the U.S. population, will have thirty-three percent of the Supreme Court seats.”
The first time Richard Nixon set foot in Washington after resigning the presidency was to attend Hubert Humphrey’s memorial service in the Capitol Rotunda.
one police officer put it: ‘What happened didn’t have anything to do with police work.’”
Abigail once said, “I have never been sure in my own mind whether it was the strain of political life or the very particular strains of the 1968 campaign or just the 1960s. I really probably think all those things entered into it. Although I would never undo 1968, I believed in it as much as Gene did.”
Abigail and Gene never divorced.
The McCarthy campaign in New Hampshire, as far as I could tell, was limited to the candidate’s sitting in the lobby of the Sheraton Wayfarer sometimes alone, sometimes affably chatting with some of the older reporters who recognized him. The winner of the Democratic presidential nomination that year, Bill Clinton, was a former junior staffer on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when Gene McCarthy made his first decision to run for president, the decision that changed history.
That night, Ted Kennedy issued this statement: “Gene’s name will forever be linked with our family. In spite of the rivalry with Bobby in the 1968 campaign, I admired Gene enormously for his courage in challenging a war America never should have fought.
What if Bobby Kennedy had left the stage on the other side of the room and walked away from his assassin instead of toward him on that last night of his life in Los Angeles?
Gene McCarthy hadn’t run, Bobby Kennedy would not have run and would not have been assassinated on the night of the California primary. President Johnson would have run for reelection. Election night would have come down to Johnson versus Nixon.
The last word about Gene McCarthy should always be that no one did more to stop the killing in Vietnam than Senator Eugene McCarthy. “If I have to run for president to do it, I’m going to do it.” SENATOR EUGENE MCCARTHY, AUGUST 17, 1967
