Tyranny’s healer, democracy’s assassin: The true legacy of Gerald Ford

By Larry Chin
Online Journal
Jan. 02, 2007

Gerald Ford, like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan before him, is being posthumously deified. A real and dark history is being rewritten in a haze of nostalgic foolishness and distortion. In fact, Ford was a lifelong political criminal and a liar, like every modern US president. Ford fed, nourished and protected tyranny, laying the foundation for the unabashedly criminal empire of Bush, and decades of war and destruction.

Master of cover-up

Ford, a career-long Republican operative, played the key role in two of the biggest cover-ups in American history: the JFK assassination and Watergate.

As a member of the infamous Warren Commission, Ford purposely distorted irrefutable evidence of conspiracy and US government involvement behind the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, helping cement the lone assassin and “magic bullet” fabrications into place.

In the 1970s, as the deep criminality of the Nixon executive branch exploded in the face of the American people, Ford pardoned Nixon -- “shutting the door and sealing the book” on the Watergate crime, denying the American people another opportunity to see how their government really works. This rape of democracy has been characterized as “healing” and “moral leadership.” Worse, as revealed by recent Washington Post reports by Bob Woodward, Ford was not (as revised histories have declared him to be) an impartial man who simply acted on behalf of national interests. Ford was Nixon’s “true friend” and most trusted confidant throughout the scandal, and promised Nixon that he would do anything he wanted done, “morning, noon or night.” He delivered.

Viewed against the fact that the JFK and Watergate crimes were connected, Ford’s role atop cover-ups of both scandals becomes even more factually sinister. There is no doubt that Ford was a man who worked in the thick of the continuous 1960s-1970s milieu that made these operations possible. Ford knew that the same politicos (George H.W. Bush, Nixon, etc.), underworld figures, corporate executives, intelligence agencies, covert operatives and hit teams (the CIA “Plumbers” team of E. Howard Hunt; Frank Sturgis; Felix Rodriguez, etc.) at the helm of both crimes. There is a wealth of solid investigation on all of this, Mark Lane’s Plausible Denial, the work of Peter Dale Scott, and The Assassinations by Jim diEugenio and Linda Pease, to name a few.

With his diversions and damage control, Ford made it possible for all of these individuals to escape.

Godfather of national security

As president, the real Gerald Ford was hardly the bumbling idiot of Saturday Night Live Chevy Chase comedy skits. He was a Cold Warrior no less ruthless than Nixon himself, and with fellow Trilateralist Nelson Rockefeller beside him as vice president, and Henry Kissinger fully in control of foreign policy, US-led geopolitical terror continued throughout the world, from Cambodia and East Timor, to the Middle East (planting the seeds of the modern Middle East calamity and “Grand Chessboard” wars) and Latin America.

It was during Ford’s watch that George H.W. Bush became CIA director and gained the bulk of his power, and Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, James Baker and Brent Scowcroft came up through the ranks. This was the period in which criminal covert operations exploded under George H.W. Bush’s CIA, and the infamous semi-clandestine “40 Committee” chaired by Kissinger.

The modern national security system would not be possible without Ford. In response to the Church and Pike Committee investigations of the CIA, Ford, Bush and Kissinger mounted an aggressive counteroffensive to stop and reverse all reforms and new attempts at oversight. After declaring, “I will not be a party to the dismantling of the CIA or other intelligence agencies,” Ford promptly centralized intelligence operations, pushed for an Official Secrets Act that protected the CIA and FBI, and wrote executive orders authorizing foreign counterintelligence activities on US soil. This reshaped post-Church Committee intelligence system would become the ultimate weapon of George H.W. Bush, and later, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.

In recent days, the Washington Post released details of an interview with Bob Woodward on today’s war. A cover-up specialist and Republican to his last breath, Ford ordered Woodward to keep this interview secret until his death (and Woodward, himself a gatekeeper, complied). In this exchange, Ford admitted being “dumbfounded” by the George W. Bush administration’s domestic spying activities, and said that he “opposed going into Iraq.” It speaks volumes about the depths of the current administration that the proteges (Cheney, Rumsfeld) no longer heed the advice or follow the lead of the crafty politician who shaped them.

Hidden criminal legacy

While the political establishment and its corporate media hammer an ignorant American populace with final images of the president best known for his pratfalls and rustic, crusty manner, the real Gerald Ford and his dark history awaits those who bother to look it up.

Tyranny is tyranny, no matter how avuncular its face.

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