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Today I was sitting down, taking a break, and I had the TV on. Not that unusual, but I'm normally on the Science Channel, or G4. Today I was on Fox and the broadcast was interrupted for the motorcade taking President Gerald R. Ford to the Ford Museum for his last memorial.
This isn't something that happens every day, nor does it happen every year. For some reason, though, whenever a president is laid to rest my mind sees another funeral from my youth.
I was four years old when John Fitzgerald Kennedy was shot and killed. I remember leaving my house to go down the street to Janie Martin's house to ask her mom if her TV showed something else. No, she told me, it was the same thing. Sadly I went home, knowing that I wanted to watch Sherrif John and was instead having to watch this thing I didn't understand.
I did understand one thing, though. John John's salute. I didn't really get the concept of death completely, and this was abstract for me at four years old anyway. The president wasn't the person who kissed my boo-boos or made me clean my room. The president didn't leave presents for me under the Christmas tree or color Easter eggs I would find. But the image of a little boy, solemn faced, offering a salute to the coffin made me uncomfortable. I guess I knew somewhere he was saying goodbye to one of his parents, because his mother was there beside him but not his father. The knowledge that this could happen to me hung there like, I don't know, the ghost of Christmas yet to come, skeletal as an idea yet fleshed out with the salute of a boy not too much older than I.
I have always admired Gerald R. Ford, in a passive sort of way, I think. He had a very rough time of things, especially after Nixon resigned. Ford pardoned him, stopping any investigations and legal proceedings. I know many people feel this was all worked out with Nixon before. I'm not going to conjecture that here. I just know that it was a very hard to come into a job where the big boss just quit because of a scandal that had never shaken the position before, or since. He had to make us trust him, and he had to make us believe that we could elect another president with confidence. The opinion was split on whether the pardon was appropriate or not, but in the end people made a choice, the nation went on, and the stigma of Watergate faded from a National scandal bordering on past-time to a history lesson.
Goodbye Gerry. You kept it together for us when we were divided. Rest in peace.
Sincerely,
Sandra
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