Posted on 12/28/2006 9:36:03 AM PST by ARealMothersSonForever
WASHINGTON - Former President Gerald R. Ford questioned the Bush administration's rationale for the U.S. invasion and war in Iraq in interviews he granted on condition they not be released until after his death.
In his embargoed July 2004 interview with The Washington Post, Ford said the Iraq war was not justified, the Post reported Wednesday night.
Ford "very strongly" disagreed with the current president's justifications for invading Iraq and said he would have pushed alternatives, such as sanctions, much more vigorously, the Post's Bob Woodward wrote. The story initially was posted on the newspaper's Internet site.
"I don't think I would have gone to war," Ford told Woodward a little more than a year after President Bush launched the invasion.
In the tape-recorded interview, Ford was critical not only of Bush but also of Vice President Cheney — Ford's White House chief of staff — and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who served as Ford's chief of staff and then his secretary of defense.
"Rumsfeld and Cheney and the president made a big mistake in justifying going into the war in Iraq. They put the emphasis on weapons of mass destruction," Ford said. "And now, I've never publicly said I thought they made a mistake, but I felt very strongly it was an error in how they should justify what they were going to do."
In an interview given with the same ground rules to the New York Daily News last May, Ford said he thought Bush had erred by staking the invasion on claims Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.
" Saddam Hussein was an evil person and there was justification to get rid of him," he observed to the Daily News. "But we shouldn't have put the basis on weapons of destruction. That was a bad mistake. Where does (Bush) get his advice?"
In the Daily News interview, Ford was more defensive about Cheney and Rumsfeld. Asked why Cheney had tanked in public opinion polls, he smiled. "Dick's a classy guy, but he's not an electrified orator," Ford said.
The former president did not like Bush's domestic surveillance program.
"It may be a necessary evil," Ford conceded. "I don't think it's a terrible transgression, but I would never do it. I was dumbfounded when I heard they were doing it."
Woodward wrote in the Post that his interview took place for a future book project, though the former president said his comments could be published at any time after his death.
In another interview released after his death, Ford told CBS News in 1984 that he initially was against using the phrase "long national nightmare" in his first speech as president following Richard Nixon's resignation, concerned that it was too harsh.
Ford said he reconsidered and sought his wife's advice. "After thinking about it and talking to Betty about it, we decided to leave it in and, boy, in retrospect, I'm awfully glad we did," he said.
In the Daily News interview, Ford, a few weeks from his 93rd birthday, showed frustration with the toll health problems had taken on him, saying he thought doctors were too strictly limiting what he could do.
At one point, he offered to share some butter pecan ice cream, his favorite dessert, with his guest, correspondent Thomas M. DeFrank.
Asked what his doctors would think about that, the former president said, "We have it anyhow."
___
Your sentiments mirror Darlene Superville of the Associated Press-
"By DARLENE SUPERVILLE, Associated Press Writer
Wed Dec 27, 10:36 PM ET
WASHINGTON - Gerald R. Ford was a man of limited ambition who, through bizarre circumstances never before experienced by the country, achieved an office that others win through the greatest determination and calculation. The nation's 38th president, Ford wanted only to become speaker of the House. History had another place for him.
Ford was comfortable in the House, representing a Michigan congressional district for 25 years, rising to Republican leader and working toward his dream of one day running the chamber, when President Nixon called.
He needed a new vice president; scandal had chased Spiro Agnew from the office.
Ford wasn't Nixon's first choice, but the president agreed that the amiable Republican would be the easiest to win confirmation by both houses of Congress. So it went, and Ford became vice president in December 1973.
Yet eight months later, the scenario got even stranger.
The scandal of Watergate drove Nixon to become the only president to resign.
Ford, who died Tuesday at 93 at his home in the California desert, again was left to fill a void.
And so the man who did not covet the presidency, who never had sought national office and who wanted only to become the "head honcho" of the House, became president by chance — unlike many since who have devoted huge amounts of time and money in pursuit of the Oval Office.
"I have not campaigned either for the presidency or the vice presidency," Ford told the nation in his inaugural address on Aug. 9, 1974. "I have not sought this enormous responsibility, but I will not shirk it."
Charles O. Jones, a political scholar at the Brookings Institution, said Ford "truly was an accidental president and he ought to be judged that way." Ford, he said, had the least political capital of almost any president because he wasn't elected.
"He had to come in entirely depending upon the difference of himself and Nixon," Jones said Wednesday.
What little capital Ford did have was quickly spent when, just a month after taking office, he granted Nixon a federal pardon for all crimes committed as president — further angering the country.
"It wasn't handled well," Erwin Hargrove, who taught political science at Vanderbilt University, said Wednesday. "He could have prepared the path for a pardon. He did it too abruptly."
Many believe the pardon contributed to Ford's loss to Democrat Jimmy Carter in 1976.
By then, Ford had come to enjoy being president. He once told Congress he would not run for a full term in 1976 even if he succeeded Nixon, but changed his mind within weeks of taking the oath of office.
"The Oval Office is large, comfortable and inspiring," Ford wrote in "A Time To Heal," his autobiography. "I knew there were many far-reaching things that I as president could do, but I never sat in the chair behind my desk and said, 'I'm a powerful man. I can press a button or pull a switch and such and such will happen.'"
He occupied the White House for 895 days. During that time, the Vietnam War ended and Ford inked a pivotal arms control treaty with the Soviet Union, regarded as a major foreign policy achievement on his watch. But it was not to last. Years later, Carter withdrew the pact from Senate consideration after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Ford promised to compromise and cooperate with his former colleagues in Congress, but relations between them were not always smooth. He vetoed 66 bills, and Congress overrode him on 12 of those.
There also were two attempts to assassinate him in September 1975.
His lack of stature as president was evident a year later during the presidential campaign, when he survived an intraparty challenge from Ronald Reagan, who was more conservative than Ford, only to lose to Carter.
On his first day in office, Ford made his own breakfast. He spent his first night as president at his ranch-style home in Alexandria, Va., taking the unusual step of directing the motorcade to obey red lights along the way.
But the perks of White House living grew on Ford once he finally moved in.
"What I hadn't expected were the little touches that so often brightened my day," he wrote in the autobiography. "The crew of Air Force One quickly discovered that I love strawberries. So when I flew somewhere, they usually had a bowl for me. They knew that I like to smoke a pipe, and they made sure the tobacco tin was always full."
Ford got a taste of national politics at Yale University, where he studied law and worked as a volunteer in Wendell L. Willkie's 1940 Republican presidential campaign. After service in the Navy in the Pacific during World War II, he returned to Grand Rapids, Mich., aspiring to do little more than play "lots of golf," enjoy life and build his law practice.
But his stepfather was the local Republican chairman, and then-Michigan Sen. Arthur H. Vandenberg was looking for a fresh young internationalist to replace the area's isolationist congressman.
Ford beat Rep. Bartel Jonkman by a 2-to-1 margin in the Republican primary and went on to win the general election in 1948 with more than 60 percent of the vote, a feat he would repeat 12 more times.
Ford rose through the House leadership ranks, becoming the minority leader. And he worked hard to turn it into a majority, and himself into House speaker. Eventually, he realized his dream would not come true — Democrats would control the House through 1995 — and he promised to run again in 1974 and retire two years later.
Then history intervened."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061228/ap_on_go_pr_wh/ford_accidental_president
So does the MSM love Ford or hate him?
The interview conducted and edited by the completely unbiased Woodward, and only made public when Ford is dead and can't respond?
Transcript of Live Chat with Gerald Ford
To my knowledge, every sitting president has, whenever he thought it was necessary, called on former presidents to be helpful. President Carter, when he was in the White House, asked for my help on at least four foreign policy issues. For example, I supported him and helped to get some votes in the U.S. Senate at the time of the Panama Canal Treaty and the recognition of the People's Republic of China. I respect former President Carter's desire to help President Clinton in foreign policy, but I think it mandatory that Carter carry out the Clinton policies. Former President Carter should not in any way whatsoever undercut the foreign policies of President Clinton or his Secretary of State. Any deviation from White House foreign policy would be harmful, not helpful.
FWIW.
I think it could be a wide, smooth, and gold-paved path out of Iraq. Use it so, or the political emeny will use it in their typically kitchen-table intelligent way.
To paraphrase a ladt that called Rush's show in the last hour, he has done the only good things a conservative can do in the eyes of the Left:
1. Bash Bush.
2. Die.
I don't want us out of Iraq.
We did not go into Iraq because we thought he had weapons of mass destruction, we went in because he had violated UN resolution after UN resolution and to enforce the 1991 Gulf War cease fire agreement. I am so sick of the MSM and other liberals re-writing history.
Saddam was blocking inspectors, he was firing on US and British aircraft trying to enforce the no-fly zone, and would not account for know weapons and weapon materials. After 9/11 the entire country (including Dave Letterman and Dan Rather) were in agreement that we could not risk another known enemy of the US to defy our sovereignty and risk our security.
Thomas DeFrank of the NY Daily News says differently. Ford told Bush he supported the war:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1759333/posts
Forget the messenger. He is scum, but at least he waited for the body to begin cooling. He should have waited until the funerals are over, which would be a week or so, but he has no apparent concept of history.
We should be dealing with the Ford opinion. It's there, it's big, and it's up for grabs.
Thanks for serving, Air Force brother. What's your exact specialty? I was a Crew Chief on KC-135s and the wife was a weather observor.
Detente was a foreign policy disaster - appeasement under another name. That policy showed a complete lack of world-historical vision.
The domestic madness of price controls, government kowtowing to the AFL-CIO and the Republican expansion of LBJ's already disgustingly bloated and inherently immoral social programs is also unthinkable in a post-Reagan world.
According to DeFrank:
"Ford was a few weeks shy of his 93rd birthday as we chatted for about 45 minutes. He'd been visited by President Bush three weeks earlier and said he'd told Bush he supported the war in Iraq but that the 43rd President had erred by staking the invasion on weapons of mass destruction."
We should be dealing with the Ford opinion. It's there, it's big, and it's up for grabs.And it's obviously won over your heart and mind.
I strongly suspect you were already strongly predisposed.
This is a message you wanted to hear. Well, Merry Christmas. You got your wish.
That was caused by the left starting immediately after WW II on their "Nuclear Guilt" campaign.
It's been taught by the NEA ever since that American is guilty of crimes against humanity.
We are the evil ones in the world and only turning our government over to the enlightened left will redeem ourselves.
Their "Nuclear Guilt" campaign continues to be successful.
Actually, I don't believe this is one of Woodward's posthumous interviews. Ford was famous for not wanting to criticize his successors, he may have felt that doing so from the grave was not such a big deal. Me, I would have figured that criticism is criticism.
Doesn't matter. We are going to leave Iraq, maybe with a military liaison forever, but our patrol soldiers will be out of there in four years, probably not less. We should use the Ford opinion rather than let the Dims have it for free.
Uh, I don't see any criticism by Ford against the war. The MSM is spinning it that way, but if you read closely, he is pretty much saying that there was plenty of justification for whacking Saddam besides the WMD reason.
Nor did Bush evr say that WMD was the ONLY reason for ridding Saddam.
Ahem.... did you miss something?
" Saddam Hussein was an evil person and there was justification to get rid of him," he[Ford] observed to the Daily News."
They want to love him for being a squishy liberal who always hated conservatism, but they can't completely forgive him for pardoning Nixon.
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