Despite all his faults, Bob Woodward still owns the Watergate story. He proved it again Friday morning (the Friday before New Year's--burying the lede, anyone?) with a blockbuster piece about the long, mutual, and secretive personal friendship between Gerald Ford and Richard Nixon. Ford told Woodward he considered himself Nixon's "only real friend"--Bebe Rebozo, eat your heart out. But here's where this week's highway of blather came to a distinct dead end: the pardon was not about healing the nation:
"I looked upon him as my personal friend. And I always treasured our relationship. And I had no hesitancy about granting the pardon, because I felt that we had this relationship and that I didn't want to see my real friend have the stigma," Ford said in the interview.
So all those Washington political-media types who spent this entire week peddling the "healing" story to the nation owe us an apology for their uninformed intonings, right?
