The DC Confessional Booth: Woodward Does Ford

Here's how to have it both ways in Washington while avoiding your civic duty: Turn your back on your professional responsibility when it might take some guts, but make sure a story comes out later that demonstrates how right you were all along. Am I referring to Bob Woodward, who suppressed an interview for two years that might have changed the course of history? Or do I mean Gerald Ford, who wants to be remembered well now that he's gone?

I mean both.

I think the world of Marty Kaplan, but I think he's wrong to reserve his criticism for Ford in the matter of this interview. Woodward bears responsibility, too, although Ford's moral transgression is greater. There are no words strong enough to describe the shame that should follow a former President who knew a war was wrong, yet remained silent out of partisan loyalty even as young Americans continued to die.

Gerald Ford's proper epitaph, had this interview not come to light, would have been: "He obstructed justice, but he was a nice guy." His Nixon pardon didn't "heal the nation," pundits notwithstanding. It outraged a nation that was hungry for justice after being lied to and manipulated. That's why he lost in 1976.

Until Ford came along, pardons were only granted after a proper trial had brought the facts to light, and the perpetrator had been convicted. Ford's Nixon pardon inaugurated the new Republican role of the pardon - as a tool to prevent investigation, hide the facts, and obstruct justice. It created a new technique to enable criminal behavior, in the knowledge it could be concealed after the fact.

After Nixon came the Reagan pardons of Iran/Contra figures, which suppressed America's ability to learn how deep the scandal and conspiracy ran. Among other things, it left prosecutor Lawrence Walsh complaining in frustration that he was unable to investigate the suspicious behavior of our current President's father.

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And this, in a conspiracy that involved funding terrorists (in South America) by cutting a deal with the Iranians who we're told are our blood enemy.

Gerald Ford was a likable guy, and refreshingly unpretentious. But he helped conceal crimes, allowed those crimes to go unpunished, and permitted many more to occur after the fact. Now we learn that he also remained silent when he could have prevented massive loss of life and damage to our national security. That's a disgrace.

Which brings us to Bob Woodward. "I don't fault (Woodward's) cone of silence," Marty writes, citing the quotes famous people often give to obituary writers for publication after their death. But Bob Woodward is no obituary writer. He is the dean of insider journalists, and the "enabler" of hypocritical governance.

I considered the Woodward interview at great length after I read it. Part of me thought that it's useful to know, even in retrospect, that Ford thought this war was a mistake. It adds to the historical record - but at what cost? Woodward and his journalistic ilk have created an environment where their fellow Washington insiders can encourage and promote a tragic mistake like Iraq, through their silence and their support for the Republicans in '04, then magically wipe their own records clean with a well-timed interview.

Call it "confessional booth" journalism - except that, with Woodward, you never have to promise to "sin no more." An example: One well-placed interview with Woody and Colin Powell can regain his stature as a man of integrity, despite repeating statements to the UN and the American people that were demonstrably false at the time. Who's next with the interview-as-exoneration? Rumsfeld?

If it weren't for the reassuring presence of Woody's confessional booth, maybe Colin Powell and his colleagues would have been forced to make the decision they should make: either to do the right thing, or to serve an unjust cause and suffer the condemnation of history. But thanks to Woodward and his kind, they can have it both ways.

In fact, Woodward's confessional booth serves the same purpose as Ford's pardon-in-advance technique: It allows the powerful to do wrong with the comforting knowledge that all can be smoothed over further down the road.

Marty writes:

For all we know, Condi, Tony and the rest of them may already be whispering sweet somethings into Bob's ear. It may be verbal Viagra for him. But for them, it's too late. The I-fought-it-from-the-inside tales they tell Bob, or their memoirs, or their biographers, will undo no damage they have done. Their reputations, like their conscience, are already beyond salvage.

Would that it were so. Those confessional interviews, if they take place, will restore each and every one of these malefactors to a state of punditocratic grace. There, washed of the blood they helped spill, they will be free to once again comment as honest and fair dispensers of wisdom from every TV screen in the nation.

They, and not those who rightfully opposed their deceit and malfeasance, will sit at Woodward's left hand and shape public opinion ... about the next war. On television, as it is in Washington.

Forever and ever, amen.

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