So many people fondly remember voting for Gerald Ford, it's a wonder Jimmy Carter was ever elected. Then again, as Vanessa Redgrave gets to say in Roger Michell's new movie Venus, on the occasion of her husband's funeral, "Everybody wants to be your friend once you're dead.'' (Or in Ford's case, everybody except Bob Novak.)
Part of the appeal is that once you're dead, you cannot complain about what any of your new friends might have to say. Nor, however, can you be made to explain such riddles as why on earth you didn't accept Henry Kissinger's resignation.
(In a 2004 interview embargoed until after his death, Ford confided to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post that the secretary of state he inherited from Nixon was maybe just a hair high maintenance: "Over the weekend, any one of 50 weekends, the press would be all over him, giving him unshirted hell. Monday morning he would come in and say, 'I'm offering my resignation.' Just between Henry and me. And I would literally hold his hand. 'Now, Henry, you've got the nation's future in your hands and you can't leave us now.' Henry publicly was a gruff, hard-nosed, German-born diplomat, but he had the thinnest skin of any public figure I ever knew...I often thought, maybe I should say: 'Okay, Henry. Goodbye,' " Ford said, laughing. "But I never got around to that.")
Which is a shame. Literally, in my view, not least because of Kissinger's support of another former president who died this month, the brutal Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Yet instead of being called to account, Kissinger continues to advise our current president on our current war. (And is Bush asking his opinion so he'll know what not to do? Alas, no.)
You might think that if anyone were to fail to make any new friends beyond the grave, it would be Augusto. But silly you; The New York Times reports that, "Now that he's dead, General Pinochet's supporters have been emboldened to suggest that statues and memorials be erected in his honor. The mayor of the Santiago borough where General Pinochet lived has announced plans to name a street after the former leader - though he had to abandon his initial plan to put the name on the street where President Michelle Bachelet, herself a former political prisoner under General Pinochet, now lives.''
(The Post was early to the party, with a December 12 editorial about how Pinochet made the trains run on time, a piece I briefly hoped might be a parody: "Augusto Pinochet, who died Sunday at the age of 91, has been vilified for three decades in and outside of Chile, the South American country he ruled for 17 years. For some he was the epitome of an evil dictator. That was partly because he helped to overthrow, with U.S. support, an elected president considered saintly by the international left: socialist Salvador Allende, whose responsibility for creating the conditions for the 1973 coup is usually overlooked. Mr. Pinochet was brutal: More than 3,000 people were killed by his government and tens of thousands tortured, mostly in his first three years. Thousands of others spent years in exile...''
But hey, on the other hand, he was a big tipper, according to his doorman, and such a lovely dancer: "It's hard not to notice, however, that the evil dictator leaves behind the most successful country in Latin America. In the past 15 years, Chile's economy has grown at twice the regional average, and its poverty rate has been halved. It's leaving behind the developing world, where all of its neighbors remain mired.'')
This perhaps is the sort of soothingly "balanced'' historical perspective that President Bush is angling for on Iraq, but we mortals can't wait that long. Which, paradoxically, is why Bachelet, whatever her intentions, is wrong to indulge Pinochet's apologists; revisionism is never harmless. Because history is never really over, either.