WASHINGTON REPORT: On Pardon and the Dole
Getlein, Frank
WASHINGTON REPORT ON PARDON AND THE DOLE In the newsroom where I work there was no particular surprise at Ford's choice of Dole as his running mate: hack calls out to hack across the void, after...
...What did cause general consternation, however, were the assurances, pouring out of all three networks, that Dole was a famous wit, known for his snappy comebacks and one-line zingers, the Mort Sahl of the heartland right wing...
...The route markings are everywhere: most of the Nixonians who didn't go to jail, for example, either stayed in their jobs or got promoted...
...The second gathers its strength in Plains, Ga., no less unlikely, perhaps, but with fair promise of success...
...More likely still, no overt agreement, written or oral, would have been needed...
...As Temporary King, Ford had the chance to be real king, but he blew it out of misplaced loyalty to the patricide and incestuous rapist of San Clemente...
...This is where we get into myth...
...This is too bad, in a way so many other things being so much more important in the day-to-day future of the country...
...asked a producer...
...Robert Dole, as a vigorous defender of The Criminal King, fits into the pattern solidly established by The Temporary King, quite possibly outlined in advance and recalled from time to time by the Mayor of the Palace, even by The Criminal King, whose taxes remain unpaid and whose every wish or comfort has been assiduously attended to by The Temporary King...
...The Pardoner's Tale that he was doing it for the sake of the country has not gone down with the country: that's why Ronald Reagan was able to come so close to taking the nomination of his party away from an incumbent President whose views, after all, are really much the same as Reagan's, though usually expressed in the protective fuzz picked up over the years of House politics as obfuscation...
...WASHINGTON REPORT ON PARDON AND THE DOLE In the newsroom where I work there was no particular surprise at Ford's choice of Dole as his running mate: hack calls out to hack across the void, after all...
...Though not of the royal blood that is acquired in the very processes of presidential politics, as it was acquired by Nixon, in however tainted proportions, though not come to his high office by the ritual trials of endurance and cleverness, The Temporary King enjoys all the privileges and perquisites such blooded and trial-proven champions enjoy...
...yet the American people who have chosen The Pardon as an issue know well, if perhaps obscurely, what they are doing...
...The order of nature in our Republic was deeply violated by The Criminal King...
...Dole funny...
...In his person, we, too, fly about the country in Air Force One, visit holiday resorts on whim, hop over city traffic in magical helicopters, command the performances of leading artistes in our living rooms, savoring it all a little more from the knowledge that it is free, we have all this with neither qualification nor exertion...
...A military politician as practiced and successful as Haig would certainly arrange any such prior agreement so that The Temporary King had no scrap of paper, no tape casette of record in his possession, that any such record was in the control of the Mayor of the Palace to be used for enforcement of the Delivery in 30 Days...
...For once it is classical myth, instead of the more customary homemade myths of The Frontier, Yankee Ingenuity, Southern Cavaliers and Luck-and-Pluck Free Enterprise, Way back there in the Sacred Grove, under the Golden Bough, the king commits his crime, unnatural, incestuous, patricidal crime preferred, and the king must die...
...In the meantime, it is worth remembering that The Temporary King serves another purpose as well...
...With Dole on the ticket, the Ford campaign is now manifestly the continuation of the Nixon defense and aggrandizement the Ford administration has been...
...The phrase suggests a deal...
...The Folk will be cleansed, The Temporary King destroyed by his own choice in reparation for the unnatural crimes of his creator...
...Actually, it's irrelevant...
...He said Nixon was innocent...
...Beneath the Golden Bough, the altar and the blade await November...
...You don't survive in the House power structure as long as Ford did, you don't flourish in military politics as brilliantly as Haig has, without learning to understand a lot of things, especially slightly shady things, without having to speak them or hear them...
...Was there one...
...More likely, there would be no record at all, the merely implied threat of undocumented disclosure being leverage enough for enforcement if things came to that...
...Ritual atonement is what goes on in the Sacred Grove, beneath the Golden Bough...
...After his first big act, The Pardon, The Temporary King continued on the true, Nixonian course...
...The Pardon really is an issue in this election and will possibly be the determining one...
...FRANK GETLEIN...
...In the myth, The Temporary King enjoys all the privileges and perquisites of kingship for a magical period a year and a day is popular...
...Nixon, in fact, committed precisely that awe-striking mythic crime, forcible incest upon our Great Mother, the Constitution, patricide against the Father of the Fatherland, the Government of Laws...
...The question of a deal is irrelevant finally because there obviously was a deal whether there was a deal or not...
...The spectacle has been good for us, but we cannot afford it indefinitely...
...then he's put to death, at once cleansing the Folk of crime and sparing the real king from undertaking that sacrifice himself...
...This undeserved bounty poured upon mediocrity, common enough in monarchies, is rare in republics...
...Since in Nixon's original choice of Vice-President, crook had called out to crook across the void, it became necessary to bring in a substitute and successor...
...The first failed at Kansas City, in part because of its unlikely embodiment in Reagan...
...To put it right, so that all things might be whole again, required the ritual sacrifice of the criminal...
...Sure, said a reporter, don't you remember...
...Haig, whose last active military command had been as a field-grade officer, became Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization...
...Aesthetically, Dole completes and strengthens the circle that would have been weakened and left open by Reagan, blurred and broken by Howard Baker, not to mention Lowell Weicker, whom, to be sure, no one did...
...The most spectacular promotion was reserved for the Mayor of the Palace who had arranged the transition and the deal or non-deal that brought The Temporary King to power or at least to the appearence of power...
...Barring an honest memoir by Haig, a distinct improbability, we shall never know...
...The ceremonies of that sacrifice, ordinary and extraordinary, were in their stately motion toward that end when, abruptly, with no acknowledged consultation outside the old gang, The Temporary King dismantled the machinery, halted the progress, decreed the crime would never be atoned, the balance of nature never restored...
...Against this, the Folk have taken two recourses...
...Jerry Ford arrived on the scene in yet another familiar role from beneath the Golden Bough: The Temporary King...
...Besides having a name too easily confused with Schweiker, Weicker, like Baker, was on the wrong side in Watergate: he wanted to find out the truth...
...It is that history of Dole as last ditch, hard line, stone-waller for the Nixon gang, rather than his abilities as a stand-up comic or his equally legendary style as a thumb-in-the-eye, knee-in-the-crotch campaigner, that makes his appointment by Ford peculiarly satisfying from both an aesthetic and a mythic point of view...
...Worse still, Ford had merely to do nothing to have qualified as real king...
...In so doing, he acts for all of us...
...Instead, before his formal accession, while Nixon was still nominally the real king and Al Haig, perfidious Pentagonian, was Mayor of the Palace, Ford took to the hustings in support of a palpable lie, that Nixon was innocent...
...That was a funny line all right, and Dole, like Ford, said it again and again that memorable summer two years ago, until he'd squeezed out all the laughs and it stopped being all that funny...
...Worst of all and absolutely ensuring that he would play The Temporary King all the way to repudiation and ritual execution by the Folk, Ford pardoned the criminal king in a magical time period of our own, 30 days, as in Payment Due in 30 Days...
Vol. 103 • September 1976 • No. 19
