Charlie talks about press secretary Sean Spicer and his "very public episode on madness," and Trump spokescobra Kellyanne Conway's defense of Spicer's lies. But the focus of his narrative was the 1974 story of Gerald Ford's first spokesperson, Jerald terHorst, a longtime personal friend of Ford's, who resigned his position after only a month, when Ford pardoned Nixon "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."
Since terHorst had spent the entire month denying at press conferences that a pardon would be forthcoming, it took him less than a day to decide that in good conscience, he could not continue. This was a shining example of courage and integrity -- a statement of principle that was widely admired. (This was about a year after a couple of other courageous resignations on principle, by Attorney General Eliot Richardson and his deputy, William Ruckelshaus -- known as the Saturday Night Massacre -- when they quit rather than fire Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox.)
Pierce argues that Ford's pardon of Nixon "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.
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