Posted on 12/28/2006 5:40:18 AM PST by alisasny
Last lunch with a legend
Speaks candidly about the WMDs and war in Iraq
BY THOMAS M. DeFRANK DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF
Thomas DeFrank, the Washington bureau chief for the Daily News, is seen in this 1996 photo talking to Gerald Ford. The men struck up a friendship that lasted three decades. Below, the two chat on Air Force One.
Daily News Washington Bureau Chief Thomas M. DeFrank interviewed Gerald Ford more than three dozen times during the late President's retirement years. He saw Ford in November at his California home and spent more than two hours with him May 11 for this, his final interview.
RANCHO MIRAGE, Cal. - Jerry Ford was a politician of rare amiability, but this day he was hopping mad.
"They won't let me go in the pool and swim," the former President fumed as I joined him in the study of his Sand Dune Road home. "It's terrible."
Fighting a nasty cough and more frail than I had ever seen him, Ford was furious with his doctors. An accomplished skier, a man who once religiously swam laps twice a day had just been beached.
"I go in and I paddle back and forth at the shallow end," he railed. "It's terrible. It worries me that I'm under these limitations."
Ford was a few weeks shy of his 93rd birthday as we chatted for about 45 minutes. He'd been visited by President Bush three weeks earlier and said he'd told Bush he supported the war in Iraq but that the 43rd President had erred by staking the invasion on weapons of mass destruction.
"Saddam Hussein was an evil person and there was justification to get rid of him," he observed, "but we shouldn't have put the basis on weapons of mass destruction. That was a bad mistake. Where does [Bush] get his advice?"
Ford was predictably defensive about Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, his two White House chiefs of staff. Asked why Cheney had tanked in public opinion polls, he smiled. "Dick's a classy guy, but he's not an electrified orator."
But he didn't like Bush's domestic surveillance program. "It may be a necessary evil," he conceded. "I don't think it's a terrible transgression, but I would never do it. I was dumbfounded when I heard they were doing it."
Ever the political junkie, the guy who used to travel 250 days a year as House minority leader said he couldn't wait for a rematch between Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani in 2008. For years he'd been telling me Hillary would run and make "a darn good candidate." As for Rudy: "Giuliani is an electrifying guy and he can be tough. That would be a great contest between Hillary and Rudy."
We had been meeting in the desert regularly for more than three decades, beginning with a memorable, still-unpublished 1974 interview when he was vice president. Ford had always been extraordinarily generous to me, and a strong professional relationship had developed. Yet today was a first: Unexpectedly, he asked me to stay for lunch.
As he struggled out of his easy chair, his frailty became more apparent. It's only a few feet from his study to the dining room of the Fords' one-story ranch home, but he couldn't walk without a nurse at one elbow and Betty at the other.
We worked our way through the vichyssoise and poached chicken salad. As shop talk gave way to small talk about friends, families and halcyon days of yore, Ford was still brooding about his doctors.
"Do you want some butter pecan ice cream?" he asked with a grin, harking back to the days when Air Force One never left a tarmac anywhere in the world without an ample supply of his favorite dessert.
What do the doctors say about that, I wondered.
"We have it anyhow," he roared, relishing another barb for his medical Torquemadas.
Toward the end, Ford showed a sentimentality I'd rarely seen in him. We reminisced a lot about the Air Force Two days, when just five reporters and a vice president desperate to hold his beloved Republican Party together amid the wreckage of Watergate hurtled around the country in a twin-engine Convair propjet so slow we dubbed it Slingshot Airways.
He talked about how he regretted that his "magnificent" mother hadn't lived to see her son Leslie King become the 38th President. He misted over when he remembered how much he loved his adoptive father, so much that he took his name, Gerald R. Ford.
"When I wake up at night and can't sleep," he mused in a voice suddenly far away, "I remember Grand Rapids."
Suddenly, the hairs on my arms stood on edge, as they have done again each time I remember that powerful moment. Now I knew why he'd finally invited me to lunch.
In his typically gentle, understated way, Jerry Ford was telling me goodbye.
Originally published on December 28, 2006
So Ford DID support the war in Iraq. I knew that Woodward was lying. It's not the first time and it won't be the last.
I actually tend to agree with Ford if this claim is correct.
If one reads Woodward's words carefully, it's obvious the man used Ford's quotes to his advantage. I can't decide which is more disgusting - that or his his timing.
Impossible to decide. And on top of that, because of what Woodward is saying, there are people who are revising their opinion of Ford and not to his credit, and Ford cannot defend himself. What a despicable worm Woodward is.
Once a scavenger, always a scavenger.
Except if you really look at Bush's pre-war speeches, Bush used 4 points to support the war and the one concerning weapons of mass destruction was not that Saddam had nukes, but that he was working to get nukes, which was true. It was only to the UN where we really pushed the issue of weapons of mass destruction.
Me to.
And that was because it was the only way Blair and Britain would have come along. Despite all the valour shown by the British soldiers it turned out to be a bad bargain.
.
Make that 'me too'.
"But he didn't like Bush's domestic surveillance program. "It may be a necessary evil," he conceded. "I don't think it's a terrible transgression, but I would never do it. I was dumbfounded when I heard they were doing it."
Last time I heard the DSP is a deliberate misstatement of the DBM concerning the Data Mining technique of linking phone numbers to phone numbers.
Domestic listing is not happening without court order.
Sort of a give away.
If Journalism, as an industry, had any integrity left, they would pillory Woodward. He has been shamelessly printing lies for decades, but they do not denounce him. Instead, they hold him up as an icon as to what a good Journalist ought to be: in short, an anti-Republican activist.
Yep ... Sure sounds like Woodward lied
Very nice article about President Ford .. Thank you for the ping, Peach
Let's hear it for professional journalism.
They're not called presstitutes fer nuthin'....
Saw this fellow interviewed on a couple shows last night.He seemed the perfect person to have on to talk about Ford given the circumstances.Of course, his information didn't lead the morning shows this morning, Woodward's did.They are so transparent it is pathetic.
Morning,Bah!
I was just watching CBS where some info babe was interviewing Ford's pastor about the funeral. They segued to Harry Smith who immediately reported Ford said in an interview two years ago he was against the War in Iraq. Then he mentioned the weapons of mass destruction thing.
The overall biggest push was about WMDs. I think that was a tactical PR mistake.
As far as the congress was concerned there were far more than four points, however the only one remembered by anyone, is WMD's. Selective memories, don't you just love it?
Morning, HC.
Woodward lied! Tell me it ain't so! /sarc
Exactly. The tapes are just a few seconds long and need to be examined in the entire context of Woodward's interview. Examination of even those excerpts make clear that Ford was criticizing the administration's JUSTIFICATION of the reasons for the war, rather than the war itself.
Thanks for finding this piece. It makes drinking my first cup of coffee a little more pleasant.
The audio excerpts can be found here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/27/AR2006122701599.html
More importantly, WMD is the only rationale under UN governance that would have provided a rationale for the invasion of Iraq the Sovereign. The UN had amply demonstrated a willingness to help Saddam via its oil for food program. The UN actively supports human rights violators so emphasizing this problem at the UN would have been pointless in gaining UN support.
Moreover, in speeches to the American public Bush did emphasize human rights abuses. It was the media that hyped the WMD issue. It was not the Bush administration. The media never cared to quote the various other legitimate rationales for the war.
FNC just played a portion of that tape and not the WHOLE comment by President Ford
Yep!
His timing. Woodward is a ghoul.
I'm so sick and tired of this one note arse getting away with profiting from others' deaths with impunity.
Joe Scarborough is the biggest pond scum of all since he still tries to carry the conservative Republican banner while being one of the biggest Bush haters on cable tv.
So the audio tapes I heard this morning, clearly in President Ford's voice, condemning the war.......were somehow not really President Ford????????
No, it's President Ford .. the problem is the media isn't playing the WHOLE context of his comment
Clearly Ford had his motives and that's his right, but he's wrong on a lot of issues now and then.
On July 28, 2004, former president Gerald R. Ford sat down for an interview with The Washington Post's Bob Woodward. The interview was conducted at Ford's Beaver Creek, Colo., house; the former president agreed that his comments could be published any time after his death. Below are audio excerpts from the interview:
LISTEN: Ford says he does not believe the United States should intervene militarily overseas unless it is directly in America's national interests.
LISTEN: Ford says that, based on the facts as he understands them, he does not think that he would have ordered the Iraq war if he had been president.
LISTEN: Ford says he believes that President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld erred in justifying the Iraq war as one aimed at eliminating Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.
LISTEN: Ford says that while he never publicly criticized the Bush administration's war in Iraq, he does think they made a mistake in how they justified the war.
"... Bush's domestic surveillance program."
And .. they still can't get it right - IT'S A TERRORIST SURVEILLANCE PROGRAM.
If people are not calling terrorists or receiving calls from terrorists .. then your calls are not included.
In case you missed it - here's how it works. They have a computer (not a live person listening to your calls to grandma) that is PROGRAMMED with the phone numbers WHICH WERE FOUND ON CELL PHONES ON THE BATTLEFIELD IN AFGHANISTAN AND IRAQ. Okay .. the computer is listening to calls to and from those numbers. Even then, the computer is only listening for KEY WORDS .. BOMB, ATTACK DATE, MEETING PLACE, etc.
Nobody is listening to all "domestic" calls to see if you give your secret recipe for apple pie to John Smith.
If you live in the city where this story was written - please send my email to the author of this article so he can be informed of the truth - IT'S NOT A DOMESTIC SPYING PROGRAM.
I'm really getting sick and tired of this MSM selective reporting all in an attempt to discredit the current administration.
DeFrank's interview was May 11, 2006.So, thats Ford's most recent on-the-record comments.
Given that they all knew that he had criticized the war to Woodward, it explains their sudden love affair with the man they loved to hate.
I believe this reporter.
Firstly, he seemingly has no axe to grind, as does lib-wimptoid Woodward, who never met a Republican leader he couldn't take out of context.
Secondly, while I agree with your point about WMD's, the GWB administration DID offer a half-dozen reasons as to why it was necessary to take out Saddam Hussein.
The WMD aspect was pushed to the top of the list by the network-media, I believe, for two reasons.
First, it was a 'sexier', more overt reason to invade, if I can use that term, ESPECIALLY in light of the ANTHRAX attacks on WashDC, and NY media figures only months before.
Secondly, the GWB officials knew there was no way they could ever PROVE definitevly that the mid-east terror swamps such as Iraq needed to be drained (do you recall THAT phrase being used by White House officials over and over? I do)
Only that it absolutely NEEDED to be accomplished if the US was ever to get a handle on the training, financing, and protection of GLOBAL terrorist cells and networks.
I am certain that if the US had simply fixed the Afghanistan problem, and then left Saddam Hussein to his own lunacy, Saddam right NOW would be leading and fomenting a huge coalition of crazed Mid-East Islamo-nut countries determined to push terror into the US mainland, while invading Israel at the same time. (remember the scud attacks on Israel)
GWB simply POPPED THE BOIL that was exemplified by Saddam's financial and defacto support of Islamo militarism.
Certainly we still have Iran to deal with, but THAT problem began to grow FAR before the 9/11 attacks were even conceived by Osama bin Ladin.
If the good Iraqi's can ever get the mental fortitude and strength needed to retain a stable country, then GWB's action in 2003 will look to be a stroke of world fortune.
As long as good Iraqi's (with help from the US) does not give up, that remains a strong possibility, despite tribal hatred between Shia and Sunni's.
Which was a very wrong move, and I said so at the time. In fact, the UN, of all places, was where he could most have staked it on the violation of UN resolutions.
Exactly. I don't think President Ford was for the war and probably didn't want the US to stay but it's beyond pathetic that this idiotic MSM would use an honorable deceased man to spread more hatred of our current President.
"condemning" the war.
You are injecting thoughts and motives into the words of 93-year old Pres. Ford, words he did not even use.
Ford simply said that with the facts as are NOW understood, he doesn't think HE would have voted to invade Iraq when HE was president.
How is that condemning?
Secondly, I just have to wonder if Woodward is PROUD of himself in getting a 93-year-old man to conjecture (without having all the facts and 30 years after being out of office) about one of the most complicated issues of 2006.
What would you call saying that you would have found other ways, such as more sanctions.....if you want to spin, go ahead.
They did the same thing during Reagan's funeral...
I kept asking people that paid more attention than I did how they treated Reagan during his presidency...and it was NOTHING like the way the MSM and Dems treated him during that week of his memorials and funerals.
Sickening...
The only thing we can trust about Woodward is that we can't trust him.
Suggesting the outpouring of affection for Reagan was somehow contrived.
We know all about advance teams contriving, coercing, etc. Mastered by slick willie.
Bingo!
He doesn't care one whit about the truth. All he cares about is his own notoriety.
Leftists are all garbage. Woodward is king of the pile.
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