Pardonez Ma Affaire

Fifty years ago today, President Gerald R. Ford pardoned his predecessor, Richard Nixon, for crimes he committed or may have committed during this five-and-a-half-year Presidency. 

Once reviled by the nation, this decision to pardon Nixon was meant to heal the country after nearly a decade of acrimonious tumult over Vietnam and especially Watergate, but many Americans would come to believe that it was the right thing to do because it spared the U.S. a divisive trial of a former President that would have exacerbated the raw feelings over the scandals of the Nixon administration and precented the country from dealing with the sputtering economy and an oil shortage.  Ford would even receive a Profile In Courage award from the John F. Kennedy Library for issuing the pardon, aware that his decision would cost him his bid for a full presidential term in his own right in the 1976 election.   

Now, however, the pendulum has swung back.  Many people now believe that a trial of Richard Nixon was necessary to make it clear once and for all that a President is not above the law.  But the pardon not only let Nixon off the hook for crimes he committed or may have committed, it paved the way for a future President to do something criminal and claim the right to do it ("If the President does it, it's not illegal - Richard Nixon).  Taking note of the Ford pardon of Nixon in 1974 was a 28-year-old hotshot real estate hustler from Queens named Donald J. Trump.

Trump has managed to convince nearly half the country - including six Supreme Court justices - that he should have immunity for official acts, and he now plans for a second administration in which he aims to do anything, no matter how illegal, to stay in power, enrich himself from his office, and silence dissenters who call him on it.

And he'll get away with it.

The United States sucks big at time at holding Presidents to account for high crimes and misdemeanors, and the justice system has allowed Trump to get away with everything he's already done - even his sentencing on the hush money case has been pushed back to after the election.  The mainstream media also suck in holding Trump to account for his carious offenses and also for his promises to rule as a dictator - "Oh, its just Trump being Trump" - because Trump stories have become mere entertainments like the latest Cardi B "music" video or some godawful teen flick whose title ends in a numeral.  If we don't hold Trump to account at the ballot box, he'll be President again and amuse us to death.

Gerald R. Ford's decision to pardon Nixon now looks as wrongheaded as it did in 1974.   Our long national nightmare was only just beginning. 

No Peace. No Honor.

Fifty years ago yesterday, the Paris Peace Accords went into effect, ending U.S. military involvement in Vietnam.  President Richard Nixon made the announcement (above, pictured) on, of all days, January 23, 1973 - the day after the death of his predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, who had placed American combat troops in Vietnam in the first place.  Nixon said that the agreement, which left the Republic of Vietnam in the south intact and to live to fight another day against the Marxist Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the north, allowed Americans to end their involvement in the war and walk away after they, as Walter Cronkite had put it in 1968, "lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could."  Nixon called this agreement "peace with honor."

Don't you believe it.

Though the service personnel who fought in Vietnam were indeed honorable people who served their country and in many cases became genuine heroes, such as future U.S. Senators John Kerry, John McCain, and Jeremiah Denton, but there was neither peace nor honor when the American cease-fire went into effect.  The Republic of Vietnam, which was the purported democracy we were supposed to be defending, was a corrupt government that did not represent the will of many if not most people in South Vietnam.  Furthermore, the existence of any government in Vietnam south of the 17th parallel was illegitimate; the Republic of Vietnam had refused to participate in nationwide elections in Vietnam after the French defeat and the fall of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, effectively ending France's colonial rule in Indochina.  Many observers agreed that had free and fair elections been held then, the communist leader of North Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh, would have won in a landslide.  There was nothing honorable in supporting an illegal regime.

And peace? Maybe peace for the United States, but the fighting between North Vietnam and South Vietnam continued until April 1975, when the North Vietnamese army finally reached and occupied the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon (now called Ho Chi Minh City), forcing the collapse of the Republic of Vietnam, the unification of Vietnam under the Communist north, and the hurried escape of the American diplomatic corps from Saigon. 

Nixon said he had a "secret plan" to end the war, but the plan was a no-brainer.  It was simply to let South Vietnamese soldiers do their own fighting while American soldiers simply withdrew after training and advising the South Vietnamese. A ten-year-old could have figured out what the secret plan was.   

Today, many Americans still disagree on how the war ended.  Conservatives say that Nixon ended the war by having Henry Kissinger negotiate a settlement over it.  Progressives say peace activists ended the war by protesting against it. And then there is the third side, which writer John Strausbaugh once pointed out, the cold hard truth: The North Vietnamese ended the war . . . by winning it.  

Watergate - Fifty Years

By all accounts, Richard Nixon knew nothing about the planned break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington before the operation was executed - and thwarted - on Saturday, June 17, 1972.  When told about it, President Nixon is said to have thrown an ashtray across the Oval Office and called the burglary "the dumbest thing I've ever heard of." 

But - and you knew this was coming - Nixon oversaw "dirty trick" operations against the Democrats that were far better planned and far more successful, having already knocked Maine senator Ed Muskie out of the 1972 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination and assured himself of getting the arch-liberal South Dakota senator George McGovern as his general election opponent, and once Watergate blew, he needed to cover up the burglars' connection to the White House to control the damage.  And of course, the cover-up was worse than the crime.  As for the investigation itself . . . there are documentarians who can explain it and put it into perspective far better than I can in a silly blog.

I can, however, say this - though President Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon after Nixon's resignation, Nixon still lost the Presidency and was publicly shamed, making the return to respectability as an elder statesman a long and arduous one - and it's said that he had great remorse for what he did in the last days of his administration.  Nixon hardly got away with anything he did wrong.  Donald Trump, on the other hand, not only escaped punishment for his crimes as President, he's been escaping crimes he committed as a private citizen all of his life.  And the January 6 insurrection - the select committee hearings for which resume in the House today - had hardly diminished his power; rather, it's enhanced it, like a severe summer thunderstorm.  Even as the House 1/6 select committee lays out a compelling narrative of Trump and how he planned to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, Republicans are nominating Trump toadies to run for governorships or secretaryships of state, who hope to get elected and control the means of counting votes in the 2024 election to ensure a Trump victory even against the will of the people.

Donald Trump learned something invaluable for his own survival - as long as you have a devoted fan base on your side, nothing you do can bring you down, and nothing anyone else does to you can stop you.  Richard Nixon wasn't that type of politician.  Also, Trump was a celebrity businessman who took his cue from celebrity entertainers on how to survive when he realized that any press - even bad press - is good press.  Nixon was too thin-skinned to let bad press roll off his back.  

Now would be a good time for America to learn the lessons of Watergate before Trump gets away with hijacking our democracy.  Because once he does hijack it, it's game over. 

Five Dollars Postage?

Would you pay five dollars for a stamp?

As shown above, the United States Postal Service does issue five-dollar stamps and has issued them for over 120 years, since back when it was the United States Post Office Department (more about that distinction in a moment or two), but they've always been for large postage amounts for things like packages.  Could you imagine using a five-dollar stamp on a standard first-class letter?

Well, you could, if Trump gets his way - and, what the man wants, he usually gets.  Congress attempted to appropriate a $25 billion grant to keep the Postal Service afloat after reports have strongly suggested that it could run out of money in June, in part because of the coronavirus pandemic. Instead, Trump personally made sure that the Postal Service would only get a $10 billion loan - a loan, as in, it has to be paid back - instead.  A loan of 40 percent of a proposed grant money doesn't make a ton of sense - especially since that loan has to be paid back with interest -  unless Trump's plan is to . . . privatize the Post Office.

And that's precisely what folks say Trump has exactly in mind.

Until July 1971, a taxpayer-supported Post Office Department existed and relied far less on postal rates to cover its operating costs.  But after the 1970 postal strike - which necessitated in having the Army run the postal system for a time - President Nixon took the initiative to convert the post office into a self-sustaining government agency, funded entirely on revenue from its services, with the Postmaster General to be appointed under a board of governors rather than the President.  But since the 2006 passage of a Republican-supported law requiring the Postal Service to pre-pay retirement funds for its workers, the agency has been under duress, even as increased electronic-mail usage had been gaining at the expense of postal mail.  It should be noted, by the way, that the Postal Service had trouble in its first decade providing service commensurate to price.  In 1971, when the Post Office Department became the Postal Service, the first-class letter rate was six cents; by 1981, after ten years of runaway inflation and increasing energy costs due to two oil crises,  that rate had tripled.   

Even so, 55 cents to mail a letter today - note that it took 38 years for the rate to go up threefold from 18 cents - is still a good bargain, compared to other countries.  Germany, a country the size of Montana with 83 million people, has higher postal rates than the United States, a country of 327 million people in an area a thousand-odd miles wide and three thousand miles long.  The Postal Service is a national treasure.  But without proper funding, it can't do its job. And without the funding it needs from the government, a subsequent shutdown would allow Trump to swoop in and hand it over to private operators who could charge what they want and make people pay more for all of its service - parcel post, certified mail, registered mail,, even first-class mailings.   Five dollars to pay a bill or send a greeting card?  If it makes someone rich, well, yes, er're going to have to pay five bucks to mail the most basic card or letter.  There may not even be universal postal service, because there's no money in that..

And stamp collecting - already an expensive because of the supplies and minimum number of stamps in one issue that you have to buy if you collect them mint - will only get more dear.

And now people are talking about voting by mail?

We can't let the post office go toward full privatization, something Nixon envisioned when the current system was set up nearly fifty years ago as a precursor to that possibility.  We need to make sure the public mails stay public.  I've already written my congressional representatives about the issue.  You should too.

Abort Tape

Recently unearthed tapes from the presidency of Richard Nixon showed the President making some surprising and shocking statements on Vietnam and abortion. (The Roe v. Wade decision was handed down by the Supreme Court two days after Nixon's second term began.) Most of the tapes refer to Vietnam. Some of the tapes depict Nixon on the phone with Bob Hope heralding the Vietnam cease-fire - announced a week into his second term - as the) as "peace with honor." In actuality, as he admits in other taped conversations, Nixon readily admits that South Vietnam would eventually fall to the Communists after the Americans were gone - which it did two years later.

On abortion, Nixon admitted to the practice being necessary in cases of rape. But get this. He also said it was necessary in cases of interracial pregnancies.

What?

Nixon made all of these comments thinking they would never be heard.