Some Things Used to Be Bigger Than Keeping Your Jo

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Some Things Used to Be Bigger Than Keeping Your Job

Now we'll see if Sean Spicer keeps his .



Getty + Alex Wong

By Charles P. Pierce

Jan 23, 201

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It was quite a weekend for official mendacity. Kellyanne Conway went sailing off into a truthless land into which not even Richard Nixon ever set down his polished cordovans.

And she did so in defense of Sean Spicer's very public episode on madness on Sunday evening. I think "alternative facts" is going to be sticking around as a meme, as the kidz call them, for quite a while now. But the real story of this weekend actually was something that happened in 1974.


In August of that year, the White House tape finally emerged that drove Nixon from power and placed in his stead Gerald Ford, an earnest congressional lifer whose record indicated that he would not be a crook, which pretty much was all the country was looking for in a president back then. Ford staffed his administration with people around whom he felt comfortable and, after six years of having an antisocial paranoid in the Oval Office, the country was OK with that, too.

Ford picked as his press secretary one Jerald terHorst, a longtime Detroit newspaperman who was at that moment writing a biography of Ford which, I would imagine, needed extensive rewrites. terHorst had the job for only a month.

This is what happened.

On September 8, Ford pardoned Nixon for "for all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 20, 1969 through August 9, 1974."

This, as many people including me have argued, was a capital mistake and kickstarted the process of infantilizing the American public into people who would not be able to cope with impeaching Ronald Reagan over Iran-Contra, or probing too deeply into the events leading up to the attacks of 9/11, or bringing true justice down on the torturers and Wall Street brigands of the first decade of the 21st century.


This was (and continues to be) a bipartisan project—although, curiously, the endless investigations into Bill Clinton's finances and his extracurricular activities, to say nothing of the wringer through which his wife was put over the past three years, were exempt from these considerations.

Apparently, the American people were strong enough to see a president impeached over blowjobs, but not over selling missiles to terrorist states. So it goes.


Getty + Dirck Halstead

Anyway, back to 1974. It took terHorst less than a day to resign in protest against what Ford had done. His grounds were that he had stood in front of the White House press corps for a month and denied that a pardon would be forthcoming.

Now, Ford had taken his legs out from under him and terHorst felt that he could not in good conscience continue to be a spokesman for an administration that had done so, even though he was a longtime personal friend of the president, and even though his departure would make Ford's decision look even more dubious.

This is part of what he wrote in his letter of resignation:

So it is with great regret, after long soul-searching, that I must inform you that I cannot in good conscience support your decision to pardon former President Nixon even before he has been charged with the commission of any crime.

As your spokesman, I do not know how I could credibly defend that action in the absence of a like decision to grant absolute pardon to the young men who evaded Vietnam military service as a matter of conscience and the absence of pardons for former aides and associates of Mr. Nixon who have been charged with crimes—and imprisoned—stemming from the same Watergate situation.

These are also men whose reputations and families have been grievously injured. Try as I can, it is impossible to conclude that the former President is more deserving of mercy than persons of lesser station in life whose offenses have had far less effect on our national wellbeing.

And, after this, Jerry terHorst went back to being a newspaperman, and a damn good one.

(Truth be told, it was a good season for resignations on principle. Almost a year earlier, Attorney General Eliot Richardson and his deputy, William Ruckelshaus, had quit rather than fire Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox. )

It's important to remember that terHorst came from a generation of reporters whose background was a great deal closer to the people who read his newspaper. He went to Michigan State on an agricultural scholarship. (Hoorah, once again, for land-grant schools!)

He fought as a combat Marine in some of the worst parts of the war in the Pacific. Then he began his career. And all of this informed his decision that, no matter how close he was with Gerald Ford, there was a line he could not cross without losing who he was.

And that's what the big story of this weekend was—that once, in Washington, there were people unwilling to sell their consciences so cheaply, and that there were people who knew that there were things bigger than The Job or The Boss. As it happens, terHorst and I had a mutual friend in the late George Reedy, who was the dean of the journalism school at Marquette when I was there. He and terHorst had been running buddies in Washington back in the day.

In 1971, at the height of the Vietnam fiasco and its attendant deceptions, George wrote this in The New York Times:

''The public's business—at the highest level of life and death—was being determined as though it were none of the public's business…

We can survive leadership that makes mistakes, even when the errors border on the catastrophic. But there is real question whether democracy can survive procedures which exclude the people from decisions."

That's still an open question, and god help us all if the answer is provided by the likes of Sean Spicer.

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