Now You Tell Us, Jerry
By Nicholas von Hoffman

Now that he is safely dead, good guy Jerry Ford has come out against the war. One more voice, once more too late. His name is now appended to the list of retired generals, ex-CIA-ers and the recently deceased who say that they were against Bush’s war but kept quiet when it counted.

Two years ago Ford told a Washington Post reporter what he really, really, really thought about going to war in Iraq but said his opinions might not be published until after he had shuffled off the mortal coil. Now, when it does not make much difference, his position is being widely quoted: “Rumsfeld and Cheney and the President made a big mistake in justifying going into the war in Iraq…. I’ve never publicly said I thought they made a mistake, but I felt very strongly it was an error…. If I had been President…I don’t think I would have ordered the Iraq war.”

Ford was, by most accounts, a genuinely nice guy, although giving him two, three, four, ten, who knows how many funerals all over the country seems excessive for a man even his admiring obituaries call “the accidental President.” Beloved by other politicians, newsies, his wife, his children and their pets, as a President Jerry was pretty much a nebbish, a guy Nixon put in the job because he knew he would hew to the party line and stifle any deviant ideas, should one occur to him.

While he was President it was generally believed that thoughts came to Jerry slowly and not so very often. As we can see from his remarks on the war, he did sometimes generate a thought or two. But until the end he was a party man, and party loyalty prescribed no public criticism, not even in the face of an impending national train wreck.

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