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Saturday, December 30. 2006

He Got My Vote

Gerald R. Ford
38th President of the United States

It’s a melancholy day in sunny Sandy Eggo. We had a massive storm a few days ago, with the wind blowing rain in sheets across the ground and against the walls of this building. One of the trees behind this building, in the little park created by the developers, is bent almost completely over, dangerously close to coming down. Someone’s going to have to come out and take it down before it comes down.

No matter. Chuck Berry, the real king of rock and roll (as much as I like that old Elvis), is on the stereo. I had been listening to Mahler’s Third Symphony, but the mood of the music is too evocative of the general mood and I had to play something just a bit more upbeat.

You see, Gerald Ford passed away Tuesday, December 26, at the spry age of 93. He lived longer than any other president, outliving Ronald Reagan by mere months.

Newsies on television always say he’s most remembered for giving Richard Nixon a pardon after Watergate forced the Orange County Lumberjack from office, but when I think of President Ford, my thoughts are of him stepping up to the plate when Spiro Agnew was driven from office over a campaign payola scandal, and then stepping into the presidency on August 9, 1974.

Rarely spoken of, Ford was an All-American center for the University of Michigan was scouted and almost recruited by
the Green Bay Packers!

On that day I was employed by the U.S. government, exhausted and terrified at MCRD San Diego, getting reconstructed as a U.S. Marine. The drill instructor, can’t remember his name at the moment, came into the squad bay, sat the entire platoon on the floor and then proceeded to tell us Richard Nixon was no longer the Commander-in-Chief and had been replaced by Gerald R. Ford. That was the extent of our news, and if the president hadn’t been in our chain of command, there’s a good chance the training command would have kept that information from the recruits.

The other great memory I have of President Ford was in the early months of 1975, after Congress had cut off funding for the government of South Vietnam and North Vietnam began winning in a walk. Ford, along with his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, were lobbying not only to re-establish funding for South Vietnam, but send in American troops as well, per the 1973 Paris Peace Accords.

We in the 2nd LAAM Battalion were set to head for the war, only to be waiting while the debate raged between the executive and legislative branches of government. Ford thought the U.S. should honor its treaty commitments. Congress felt otherwise, at least with this treaty. You see for them — and most of my fellow Americans, the Paris Peace Accords was a graceful way to exit Vietnam and never return.

North Vietnam gambled that the U.S. would not honor the treaty if they invaded the South … and the gamble paid off. Now, 30 years later, I look at April 30, 1975 as one of the darkest, most painful days of my life. I wore the uniform of a country that would not honor its commitments.

Billy Preston, George Harrison and President Ford.
Gotta ask the question:
Did they fire up a doobie in the Oval Office?

We didn’t lose the war in Vietnam through any fault of his, but he’s been tagged as the first president to lose a war. That is a complete fabrication of knee-jerk historians looking for quick and easy answers for every problem and/or situation. No, we shouldn’t have been there in the first place, we shouldn’t have chosen to support the colonialism of the French in 1945, but we did and we were there and we made a commitment to rejoin the fight if North Vietnam invaded the South. And that is the fact.

Gerald R. Ford was one of the most decent, honest men to hold the office of president and that’s how I’ll remember him: not the guy who lost Vietnam or gave Richard Nixon a pardon. He’s the man who insisted we honor our commitments abroad. And that’s why I voted for him in 1976, the only time a Republican got my vote in a presidential election.

Posted by Tim Forkes in NEWS and POLITICS at 07:17 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

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