Ford and Rockefeller
Sir: Your excellent editorials in the matter of Nixon have led only to a curious turn now that Nixon has resigned. Your editorial of August 17, was a bad hash.
For one thing: whether or not Nixon's abuses of the Constitution were worse than Johnson's, Kennedy's or Roosevelt's — and I believe they were — what he attempted was worse than his predecessors' darkest plans. Try the Huston Plan, or the staggering case he and St Clair made for Presidential immunity. It took J. Edgar Hoover and the Burger Court to stop these abominations. (And anyway, your expectation of a "standard of behaviour from Mr Nixon. . vastly superior to that of his immediate predecessors" was, on consideration of the man's career, so ridiculous I can't decide whether it was ingenuous or disingenuous.)
For another: given your sloppy notion of what 'Middle America' is, I am nonetheless unsure what you think of its putative impatience with "the technical, legal and constitutional aspects of the matter." I believe people everywhere in this country were plainly brought up short by a man who was evasive and obscure throughout the Watergate inquiry, and who was finally trapped as a liar.
I write from that judgement seat of moral opprobrium, New York, and I wish for the moment that our current regional President did indeed share the irritation about this area that you find in his fellow provincials. (And by the way, what President has not been from one region or another? Even a career militarist like Eisenhower cleaved to the Kansas of his youth.) Instead, Ford has picked as his possible successor the man who relieved. us New Yorkers of his own noxious presence a few months ago, but who now may return to us, and everyone else in High, Middle, or Low America, just a heartbeat, or a shudder, away from the Presidency he has so long coveted. And why did Ford do it? Old devil Eastern Establishment got him? Here, in the Rockefeller appointment, and not in his failure to dismiss Kissinger, was an appalling example of mishandled opportunity. May the appointment lose in Congress, even if that does sadden the New York Times, And may America be less credulous from now on, even if, oddly enough, they are thereby moved to elect Ford in 1976 — since by that time, Kid Chappaquiddick and the Senator from Boeing may be exposed as unfit competition. Thomas Cogan, Junior Apt. D-2, 155 Avenue C, New York, NY 10009
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