Gerald Ford and the eve of self-destruction

It tells you something that I know more about James Brown than I do Gerald R. Ford, who passed away December 26--Boxing Day in England--at the age of 93.

Many teens shrug off politics as part of a general antipathy toward anything existing outside their peer group. I was 17 on August 9, 1974, the day Ford was sworn in as the 38th president of the United States following Richard Nixon's resignation, and I loathed politics. I was much more into pursuits of self-gratification that, with time, have a habit of devolving into pursuits of self-destruction. I had already tried marijuana, drank Rheingold Chug-a-Mugs, was smoking cigarettes regularly, and never met a drug, short of heroin, I wouldn’t sample.

One could argue that Nixon’s political career devolved from one of self-gratification in his service to the public to one of self-destruction in his abuse of presidential authority. And in that sense, our respective life paths wouldn’t have been entirely dissimilar.

But I’d never say that the events of Watergate and all that followed had any direct impact on my behavior. It was the 1970s after all, a time of rampant hedonism and “It’s your thing, do what you wanna do.” It was the culture that impressed this impressionable teen. (The death of a close friend from a rare blood disease didn't help any either.)

In retrospect, I’m taken aback at how little these words, spoken by Gerald Ford at his inaugural, meant to me at the time:

"My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over. Our Constitution works. Our great republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here, the people rule."

Many newspapers reproduced that quote this week in obituaries for the late president. How 2006 not to include these words that immediately followed:

"But there is a higher power, by whatever name we honor him, who ordains not only righteousness but love, not only justice but mercy.

"As we bind up the internal wounds of Watergate, more painful and more poisonous than those of foreign wars, let us restore the Golden Rule to our political process and let brotherly love purge our hearts of suspicion and of hate."

Pundits and commentators say Ford’s defining moment was his pardon of Richard Nixon, an act of selflessness in service to the perceived long-term welfare of the country that would cost Ford himself the presidency. The American public could not forgive Ford his singular act, a refusal that I believe contributed mightily to the momentum that has evolved our culture from the naive and often dangerous hedonism of the 1970s to our current climate of irony, self-loathing, and despair. Gone forever, it seems, is any shared notion of selflessness before a higher power. And that may well be what's at the root of our widespread national malaise.