Meeting. And i had the luxury of time, two fulltime assistants. We looked at all the contemporary coverage of the pardon, got all the memoirs, got the legal memos from the ford library. I kept going back to interview ford. And to try to piece together what happened. I interviewed him in colorado a number of times, where he had a home, and many times at his main home at rancho mirage, california. I remember the last interview asking him, why did you pardon nixon . He said, you keep asking that question. I said, but i dont think youve answered it. And then he said, astonishingly, ok, im going to tell you. And he then said what happened is that al haig, nixons chief of staff, came and offered me a deal. He said, if you guarantee that the president will get a pardon, he will resign and you get the presidency. And ford said, however, i rejected that deal. I knew i was going to become president. Nixon was finished. So theres no way he could work that deal in the way haig described. And passi
And obama said im sympathetic to this. He said go read my nobel prize acceptance speech. I had seen the nobel prize acceptance speech. Ever seen something and read it and not understood it . Well, it happens to me too often. So i went home and got out the speech. And there, in plain english, obama says, yeah, wars sometimes necessary, but then he said it is always an expression and manifestation of human folly. And i realized at that point he just does not like war. And the problem is, when you are involved in a war as commander in chief, youve got to really be tough. A couple of years ago, i was having breakfast with a world leader, head of government of one of our closest allies. And i asked about obama. He said, obama is so smart and i like him. But then he said, but no one is afraid of him. And my heart sank because i realized that the distaste, the disgust for war looms so large with obama that he has not conveyed the message of fear. Which is what a leader must do. What is intere
It was exactly in the tradition of my brothers book profiles in courage. And then gerald ford got up and talked about partial vindication. I remember watching this and thinking here i was convinced it was an act of maximum corruption, that the pardon was. And then it is examined many years later, dispassionately. And what looked like corruption actually is an act of courage. And that is sobering for somebody in my business. You can say, oh, yeah, this is the following this war made no sense. This was a good war and so forth. And the decades go by and it may look quite differently. Jimmy carter, as somebody using lincoln in december 1979, as he was gearing up to run for reelection, in one of his speeches, carter said, at the height of the civil war, lincoln said, i have but one task and that is to save the union. Then carter went on to compare his responsibility in getting the 50 iranian hostages out as the same problem. He said he would devote his concerted efforts to that. And you loo
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