Democratic Smoke Signals
SCHORR, DANIEL
Washington Notebook By Daniel Schorr Democratic Smoke Signals “WATCH OUR SMOKE in the first 100 hours,” said the victorious Congressional Democrats, setting a closer goal line than any I...
...Known internally as “the family jewels,” the report found CIA improprieties like drug experiments on unwilling subjects, surveillance of domestic antiwar activists, and most explosively, the plots against foreign leaders...
...But for quick confirmation he needed someone from Congress, so he was thinking of Ford...
...That evening he telephoned Ford: “Gerry, I want you to be my Vice President...
...But on August 1, White House Chief of Staff Alexander Haig visited Vice President Ford for a confidential chat...
...When Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold bowed out, he said frankly that the odds were against him...
...He summoned the Vice President to hear an angry denunciation of Congress and the press...
...lower the price of Medicare prescriptions...
...It seems inconceivable that anyone today would go through the charade of wanting to research a historic wrong, but this is the age of the inconceivable...
...if elected, I will not serve...
...By the end of July 1974, Nixon was in serious trouble over the Oval Office tapes he was refusing to release...
...The two-day conference, staged by Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, attracted 67 delegates from 30 countries to Tehran...
...In this era of the multimillion dollar candidacy, a politician without an exploratory committee and a hefty treasury is making today’s version of a Shermanesque statement...
...President John F. Kennedy said that all the campaign promises he had made could not be kept in 100 days...
...And he told a news conference, “I’m totally opposed to political assassinations...
...The Wannsee mansion houses documents that make mass murder seem like an engineering assignment...
...Reporting that this was the greatest death factory ever devised, I showed the gas chambers where murder was efficiently processed at a rate of 60,000 a day...
...Although the House Judiciary Committee was well along in its impeachment inquiry, Nixon gave Ford no indication that he might be driven from office...
...Ford came into office at a time when Third World rabble rousers were perceived as a greater problem for the U.S...
...Haig produced a memorandum outlining how sweeping those powers are...
...than nuclear forces...
...if nominated, I will not accept...
...He had been spending a lot of time in Iowa and New Hampshire, early primary states...
...Representative Elizabeth Holtzman (D.-N.Y...
...Its targets were the Dominican Republic’s Rafael Le?nidas Trujillo, Chile’s Salvador Allende, South Vietnam’s Ngo Dinh Diem, Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, Indonesia’s Sukarno, Haiti’s Fran?ois Duvalier, and in particular Cuba’s Fidel Castro—a plot for which the CIA enlisted the Mafia...
...But maybe the conference served one useful purpose, since it forced world leaders to renew their humanist credentials...
...The Iranian effort was part of its antiIsrael campaign...
...The Vatican called the Holocaust an immense tragedy...
...And yet, President Ford remains remembered more for this one act than for anything else in his tenure...
...President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in 100 days, accomplished sweeping reforms and launched the nation into recovery from the Great Depression...
...The new secretary general of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, told Iran it was unacceptable to deny the Holocaust...
...Washington Notebook By Daniel Schorr Democratic Smoke Signals “WATCH OUR SMOKE in the first 100 hours,” said the victorious Congressional Democrats, setting a closer goal line than any I can remember...
...On the Democratic side, former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack was the first to announce his candidacy...
...This renders Ford’s Executive Order 11905, updated by subsequent Presidents, not very operative anymore...
...Perhaps his advisers made him aware that he had been set back by a couple of stumbles, like his intervention in the Terri Schiavo right-to-die drama...
...It undoubtedly contributed to Ford’s defeat in the 1976 election...
...In October 1974, President Ford appeared before the House Judiciary Committee...
...The Age of the Inconceivable I KNOWALITTLE about the Holocaust, having visited the lakeside Berlin mansion where the 1942 Wannsee Conference drew up the master plan with Adolf Eichmann for the extinction of Europe’s Jews...
...Show Us Your Money SOMETIMES it seems that a politician forgoing a Presidential race is more noteworthy than one who is already campaigning...
...Then there are Delaware Senator Joseph R. Biden, New York Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Connecticut Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Indiana Senator Evan Bayh, North Carolina ex-Senator John Edwards, Illinois Senator Barack Obama, Ohio Representative Dennis J. Kucinich, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, and former NATOCommander General Wesley Clark...
...It may also, as Ford said, have helped to end the long nightmare...
...In October 1973, as he later told me, the House Minority Leader was summoned to the Oval Office...
...He did in fact set a pretty good record...
...On the Democratic side, there were some raised eyebrows when Virginia’s former governor, Mark Warner, unexpectedly counted himself out of the race, saying this moment in his life was not the right time for him...
...And I showed the stagnant ponds where, if you ran your hands over the bottom, you picked up human ashes and fragments of bone...
...So you will understand why I was not entirely disinterested when I read this past December about people like David Duke of the Ku Klux Klan joining French, Canadian, Swiss, Austrian, and other Holocaust deniers peddling the idea that the mass murder was simply a myth...
...True, not in so many words...
...It had been ordered by Director James R. Schlesinger, who was looking for possible Watergate connections...
...implement some 9/11 Commission recommendations, including more money for the cities at highest risk of terrorist attack...
...He would have liked to name Treasury Secretary John B. Connally...
...Now a little Ford history that is not so widely known...
...But after 9/11, President George W. Bush issued a finding that makes exceptions to the murder ban for known terrorist leaders if capture is impractical...
...British Prime Minister Tony Blair called the conference shocking beyond belief...
...Ford asked about the Presidential pardon powers...
...Time was when a politician, coy about his intentions of running for President, was asked to make a Shermanesque statement— referring to the categoric declaration of Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman: “If drafted, I will not run...
...and reduce interest rates for student loans...
...At that early stage of the Watergate investigations, Nixon apparently didn’t dream he would not get to complete his Presidency...
...I also spent some time at Auschwitz in 1959, making a CBS documentary...
...An Executive Order signed by Ford banned political assassinations...
...Ford only learned the full extent of the conspiracies when he demanded to see a copy of an internal report by the CIA Inspector General...
...But Haig was in the position of being able to report to Nixon that the pardon had been discussed, and the Vice President had not said no...
...The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, said the Tehran meeting shows the danger of the situation Israel is in...
...When the then Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee announced that he was quitting Capitol Hill, he was assumed to have his hat in or near the ring...
...When the 110th Congress opened, House Democrats set the stage with the establishment of new ethics rules...
...Remembering President Ford IN A posthumously published post9/11 interview with Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, ex-President Gerald R. Ford, who died on December 26, reflected that since the 40-year standoff with the Soviet Union, American Presidents have had to face renegade governments and a different kind of enemy...
...asked if there had been a deal to trade the Presidency for a pardon...
...Ford said he had no ambition for higher office...
...Apparently nothing appalled the new President more than discovering that under his predecessors, from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Richard M. Nixon, the CIA had engaged in efforts to assassinate Leftist foreign leaders...
...He wanted Ford to know, however, that when he (Nixon) completed his second term, he intended to back Connally as the 1976 GOP standard bearer...
...The President further noted that he had to designate a successor...
...The President named a blue ribbon commission, headed by Vice President Nelson A. Rockefeller, to investigate...
...He wanted 1,000—1,000 days that ended with his own life...
...But don’t bet on it...
...The meeting ended with Nixon saying Ford would be hearing from him soon...
...Bill Clinton, not given to understatement, promised voters that if they elected him, they would have 100 days of the most successful Congressional record of any President in the 20th century...
...Ahmadinejad called for the Jewish state’s extinction in the same speeches he made denying the Holocaust...
...loosen restrictions on stem cell research...
...In the three decades since Ford pardoned Nixon, some of the anger has drained out of this singular controversy in our national history...
...Nixon informed him that Vice President Spiro T. Agnew was about to resign in disgrace...
...Haig said Nixon was in bad shape emotionally and might take some desperate step like pardoning himself—or he could be pardoned by his successor...
...So it caused some raised eyebrows at the end of last November when Senator Frist issued a written statement quoting the Bible—“To everything there is a season”—and said 2008 was not his season...
...promote alternate energy sources, while eliminating tax breaks and subsidies for the oil industry...
...The prospect of a pardon may have helped to ease Nixon out of the White House...
...Then, in much less than 100 hours, the House passed a series of bills that would raise the minimum wage to $7.75 per hour over the next three years...
...The early signals suggest that the Democrats may be able to keep their smoke rising...
...The White House declared the meeting an affront to the whole civilized world...
...European Union Commissioner Franco Frattini said anti-Semitism has no place in Europe...
...That leaves a list of possibles, including, on the Republican side, Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas, New York exMayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel, Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, Arizona Senator John McCain, Colorado Representative Tom Tancredo, Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, and the first Republican to announce his candidacy, California Representative Duncan Hunter...
...In a loud voice, Ford said there was no deal...
Vol. 90 • January 2007 • No. 1
