...we're currently being treated to dozens of stories that feature some riff on the angle of "Ford stepped in after Nixon and healed America." Not surprisingly, Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States posits a different view.
Zinn points out that, for starters, Nixon's resignation was designed to avoid an inevitable impeachment, which would have dragged sordid details into the public eye - including Nixon's ultra-cozy relationship with the corporate world, and his secret, year-long bombing of Cambodia. Ford then took over, and as Zinn puts it, "Nixon's foreign policy remained. The government's connections to corporate interests remained. Ford's closest friends in Washington were corporate lobbyists." And, of course, "One of Ford's first acts was to pardon Nixon, thus saving him from possible criminal proceedings and allowing him to retire with a huge pension."
How would Ford compare today? Based on one of Zinn's anecdotes, at least, Ford seems like he suffered from the same type of militaristic myopia that plagues the neo-cons currently running our show. Even with American troops finally home from Vietnam, he continued to cheerlead for victory, and to ask for money to support the South Vietnamese:
On April 16, 1975, Ford said: "I am absolutely convinced if Congress made available $722 million in military assistance by the time I asked - or sometime shortly thereafter - the South Vietnamese could stabilize the military situation in Vietnam today." Two weeks later, April 29, 1975, the North Vietnamese moved into Saigon, and the war was over.
