The N&R’s Rosemary Roberts piles on, using Gerald Ford’s death as yet another opportunity to slam President Bush:
Ford’s death this week focuses needed attention on a president who faced problems in the 1970s not unlike the president who will succeed the divisive President Bush. Then and now, America needs a healer, and Ford was a sterling model.
But she misstates Ford’s role in America’s withdrawal from Vietnam:
Ford had to deal with the interminable and un-winnable war in Vietnam. The ending was not pretty. In the final hours, U.S. helicopters hovered over the American embassy in Saigon, evacuating South Vietnamese, some desperately clinging to the skids of helicopters. Ending the war in that fashion earned Ford, himself a decorated World War II veteran, the label of being “the only American president to lose a war.” In reality, the war was a lost cause from the start and required Ford’s courage to finally pull the plug.
Maybe it’s me, but a request for nearly a billion dollars in aid to Saigon, which was rejected by the Democrat-controlled Congress, isn’t exactly pulling the plug. I don’t know how Ms. Roberts voted in 1976, but if her columns are any indication, it seems likely she voted against the type of man she thinks we so desparately need today in favor of the candidate who would become the worst president in the history of our country.
