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President Ford and the Media's Revisionist History Lowell Ponte The death of former President Gerald Ford, 93, gave the mainstream media an opportunity to teach history to Americans too young to remember the 1970s. Needless to say, the liberal media has opportunistically put its own distorting, brainwashing revisions of history into its stories about Ford. This column is a correcting lens to undo that distortion. Ford, who in person was far harder and tougher than the compromising stumbler depicted in the press and on "Saturday Night Live," was appointed vice president and then assumed the presidency during a brutal ideological era. Recall the context of Ford's presidential rise and fall: Democrats had controlled the Congress by one-party rule, not unlike Mexico's authoritarian PRI, since the early 1950s. Ford, a Republican representative from Michigan, spent more than two dozen years in this Democrat-dominated body, his last nine there as a leader of the minority. Democratic control of Congress depended on perpetually re-elected racist lawmakers from a segregated South whose voters, remembering Abraham Lincoln and post Civil War Reconstruction, vowed to "vote for a yellow dog" before they would vote for any Republican. But in 1964, Republican presidential candidate Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona, although losing in a landslide as Americans voted for the party of assassinated President John F. Kennedy, shattered the "solid South" on which the Democratic Party depended. Goldwater won Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina. In 1968, Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon, who narrowly lost (because of stolen votes, according to some analysts) to Kennedy in 1960, decisively beat Vice President Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota by 301 electoral votes to 191.
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Nixon carried such traditionally Democratic states as Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, Florida, and North and South Carolina. Third-party candidate Alabama Gov. George Wallace won 46 electoral votes — too few to give the Democrats victory — but Wallace took the remaining Southern states. The Democratic Party continued its slide to the radical left, pushed by then-young radical activists who control this party today. Their fury, directed at the Vietnam War to which their President Kennedy committed the first 16,000 armed troops, should have been aimed at the Democratic Party itself. In 1972 the Democratic Party's radical left wing seized party control. Its presidential nominee was anti-war South Dakota Sen. George McGovern. In that November's election, McGovern lost 49 of the 50 states, carrying only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. President Nixon was re-elected with 520 electoral votes to 17 (with one Nixon elector in Virginia voting instead for Libertarian Party candidate John Hospers . . . and leaving this third party only 16 votes short of the once-mighty Democratic Party). It was an overwhelming democratic repudiation of the left. For leftists who had spent decades infiltrating and taking control of America's mainstream media, this humiliation by an anti-communist president was intolerable. If Nixon and conservative Republicans could not be defeated at the ballot box, the media determined to remove him by coup d'etat. Seizing on the Watergate burglary, a genuine crime but the kind of lawbreaking that Democratic presidents had engaged in routinely since the reign of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the liberal media waged a relentless campaign of propaganda by smear and innuendo against Nixon. "This is day 137 of the Watergate scandal," became a nightly countdown, or count-up, on Walter Cronkite's "CBS Evening News." Each day's allegations were typically trivial or mere hearsay, but the liberal media's aim was to conjure and blow lots of smoke and then imply that where there is smoke there must be fire.
Even one one-hundredth this much media pressure would have destroyed Bill Clinton's presidency. But Clinton was a Democrat, and the mainstream media never attacks Democrats as it routinely does Republicans. Media threats cut off President Nixon's congressional supporters, and faced with impeachment, the president resigned. Vice President Gerald Ford became president and gave Nixon a full and complete pardon to end what he called "our long national nightmare." (The left had tried to destroy Nixon ever since he, as a young congressman, brought down its comrade — now proven beyond any doubt to have been a communist spy — Alger Hiss . . . and without Ford's pardon, leftists in Congress would have hounded Nixon to the grave.) Since Ford's death, even the centrist Fox News Channel has reported that he lost overwhelmingly in 1976 against Democratic presidential candidate Jimmy Carter, the liberal Georgia governor put forth by the liberal media. (Time magazine lifted Carter from the national status of a nobody with four flattering cover stories.) In fact, in 1976 Carter won rather narrowly — 297 electoral votes to Ford's 240 (and one a Washington state elector cast for Ronald Reagan). A switch of only 29 Electoral votes would have elected Ford. Carter, whose liberalism was spoken with a Southern accent, won by recapturing the South. But the disaster of the media coup against Nixon and the ascent of Carter continues to plague America today. Carter, remember, withdrew U.S. support from the shah of Iran.
The fall of our and Israel's ally the shah begat the theocratic Islamist dictatorship that has inspired and backed Islamist terrorism against us. It led to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, out of which emerged the trained terrorism of al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden.
In other words, Carter is responsible for 9/11 and the nearly 3,000 Americans who died in the World Trade Center other terrorist attacks that day. Carter's toppling of the shah also led to the Iran-Iraq war, which caused nearly a million needless deaths and led to the huge military of Saddam Hussein, who offered $25,000 to any family whose child became a suicide bomber and killed Israelis. As Carter's new book "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," makes clear, in 1976 Americans were tricked into electing an anti-Semitic incompetent as our President. Carter's record inflation stole half the life savings of every American family. But the nightmare of Carter's presidency was replaced in 1980 by the glorious sunrise of President Ronald Reagan.
Rest in peace, Mr. Ford.
Editor's note:
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