Demonstrate

GERALD R. FORD IS coming to Boston today. The Harvard Republican Club invited him to accept its man-of-the-year award at Harvard, but because he's addressing a Middlesex County Republican Club fund-raising dinner tonight, the presentation will take place at the Harvard Club in Boston this afternoon.

A coalition of groups here has called for a demonstration of opposition to Ford and the Nixon administration. Apart from his apparent non-involvement in the Watergate scandal, Ford has by his own account been an official representative of Nixon's administration and Nixon's most pernicious policies ever since he became vice president. During his 25 years in the House of Representatives, Ford stood for the same sorts of priorities the Nixon regime has always held. As a young congressman, Ford quickly won a reputation for trying to slash government expenditures--except for those involving space and "defense" programs. During his campaign to succeed Charles Halleck as House minority leader, Ford promised a new, more constructive approach to formulating Republican policies in Congress. But his own views, it soon became clear, had not changed very much--he could just implement them better. He supported moves to water down major civil rights legislation. He pressed for the impeachment of William O. Douglas, the Supreme Court's staunchest defender of civil liberties, primarily because Douglas had written an article for a magazine considered pornographic. Ford opposed Democratic bills to increase minimum wage levels; during his vice-presidential confirmation hearings last year, the AFL-CIO totaled up his 25 years of voting and came to the conclusion that he voted against workers' interests 94 per cent of the time--the third best anti-labor record in Congress. And as a self-proclaimed "internationalist," Ford consistently supported the Indochina war.

Of course, none of this has been getting too much attention lately. About the only thing for which people are still criticizing Ford is his alleged lack of intelligence, a criticism that has been made for years. Lyndon Johnson reportedly once remarked that Ford was too stupid to walk and chew gum at the same time, because in college, Johnson explained, Ford had played football on too many occasions without wearing his helmet. When Eugene McCarthy spoke at the Law School Forum here two years ago, he apologized for having supported legislation that Ford came out for five years later. "When you're only five years ahead of Gerry Ford," McCarthy said, "you know you're behind the times."

Though such jokes are not altogether reassuring when applied to a possible future president, they are probably unfounded, and even if they were not, they'd miss the essential point. Presidents need not be intellectuals. They should be decent people, and it's on these grounds that Ford has apparently won widespread popularity. In fact, dismayed by the indictments of most of President Nixon's top aides, some trend-setters have been hailing Ford as the best idea since the Model T. "GOP Begins to Rally Around Ford; Growing Crowds Hail New Boldness," said the headline in yesterday's New York Times. Massachusetts Governor Francis W. Sargent was the latest liberal politico to announce that the country would be better off with Ford as president.

Maybe it would--marginally. Ford's record seems to be relatively free from the sort of petty personal corruption which Nixon has apparently engaged in. And Ford does not take as contemptuous an approach to Congress as his boss in the White House, even though in his younger days he once described Congress as a "weak, wet noodle." But the very absence of serious personal objections to Ford makes it especially important to oppose his politics. All the more so now that media coverage of opposition to Nixon is focusing nearly exclusively on the ways Nixon's men carried out their goals--burglaries, wiretappings, that sort of thing--and far too little on the even more reprehensible goal those means were designed to reach: seemingly unanimous support for inequality at home and repression, potentially genocidal repression, abroad.

THERE IS NO REASON to think Ford has forsaken this goal. As recently as last year, he played an essential role in railroading Republican support for funds for the bombing of Cambodia; when Congress finally voted to stop the bombing, it was almost exclusively with Democratic votes. "Ford may be a plodder," the 1974 Almanac of American Politics noted, citing the votes on Cambodia, "but he is nevertheless an effective, competent minority leader." After his appointment as vice president, Ford continued to defend his record on civil rights (citing his support for the Philadelphia Plan to hire more blacks as a partial counterbalance) and on foreign policy, which he says should be bipartisan and so presumably exempt from far-reaching criticism. "That bipartisanship deteriorated in 1971 and '72 as far as Vietnam was concerned," Ford complained to U.S. News and World Report, citing his own support for President Johnson's Vietnam policy "as to objectives" (tactically, he thought the war should be fought more vigorously) as a presumably healthier attitude. "But now that we're over that hump, I feel it's essential that we re-establish the bipartisan approach," he added hopefully.

A bipartisan agreement to carry out the Johnson-Nixon-Ford foreign policy support for right-wing dictatorships--like those in Chile, Greece and South Vietnam--would be a terrible thing. He would primarily serve the interests of the big corporations, those which Ford seems most concerned with, as in his recent proposal to end the energy crisis by deregulating the price of natural gas.

Ford has a right to speak and defend his views, but students have a right to picket and express theirs. They should use that right today. It is important to show that cleanliness is no substitute for godliness, that sanitized imperialism and inequality still merit opposition, and that opposition to this country's present leadership extends beyond opposition to this country's present leader.