Maybe so, but I personally was sick of the whole lynch-mob atmosphere during the Watergate hearings.
The Watergate business dragged on and on. It was one droning, self-important, pompous personage after another. The ugliness of the Left really impressed me at the time ... and I was not a conservative in the '70s.
To me it was a relief that Ford pardoned Nixon. Even at my young age I was able to see that this was a phony, ginned-up prosecution. We didn't know yet about the vicious young Hillary, who was helping lead the charge; but there were plenty of her ilk hanging around the proceedings, baying for Nixon's utter destruction.
Ford did it because he was a typical RINO suck-up, covering the tracks of the Stupid Party.(Ford) did it because he thought it would be best for the country.
Ford did it because it was best for the country. Congress would have behaved as a Special Prosecutor, and Nixon would have had all the justice Scooter Libby got. Of course, Ford then should have withdrawn from consideration for the Republican nomination, leaving the field open to Ronald Reagan. But that would have been anathema to Ford; even in 1980 the GOPe ran Anderson as a third party candidate . . .And of course had Ford done so, Reagan possibly could have been defeated by Carter in ’76 - after all, in 1976 America didn’t know what a lashup the Carter Administration would prove to be. Nor could Reagan have been in office in the mid-late ‘80s, when he was needed.