February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
Official Washington bid farewell to President Gerald Ford on Tuesday after several days of public mourning. The final salute comes today in the 38th president’s beloved Michigan.
Though he was sometimes the butt of less than kind humor during his brief tenure in the Oval Office, history, we believe, will be mostly kind to Ford.
As well as being seen as quite simply a decent man, he was not afraid to take tough decisions during his less than two-and-a-half years in office.
Certainly, his pardoning of President Nixon was no easy one to make. People have argued that it was the wrong decision for the right reason, or indeed the reverse.
But there appears to be a growing consensus that the reasoning behind the pardon was a justifiable desire to close the wounds in a country badly bruised by years of war and the Watergate scandal.
As Ford was taking his leave of the city where he spent his extraordinary political career, a new 110th Congress was poised to take up the reins from the departing 109th.
It is to be hoped that its members will not be averse to taking hard or controversial decisions. Better that than doing nothing and allowing history to simply drift.
We believe that Gerald Ford, a Capitol Hill stalwart before he became president, would surely agree with this sentiment