My Gerald Ford story

The Gerald Ford Presidential Library is on North Campus at the University of Michigan. During my involvement in student government, we created a monthly newspaper called, I think, the MSA (Michigan Student Assembly) Campus Journal, and we got on the press list for the University of Michigan Information Services Office.

In 1983, President Ford (retired) convened a conference at his library about the authority of the President of the United States to declare and conduct war. Featured guests included people like Alexander Haig, Walt Rostow, and others I can't remember. (Henry Kissinger didn't show.) We had press credentials so we could attend the conference. (Meanwhile, demonstrations protesting the various war criminals were outside the Library's doors.)

The point of the conference was that the The War Powers Act of 1973 was an unreasonable restriction on the executive authority of the President/Commander-in-Chief. (Hey, I thought the Constitution said that Congress has the power to declare war?)

Alas, our credentials didn't get us into the private dinners. Apparently the first night of the conference Walt Rostow gave a presentation at dinner about how the Vietnam War was lost because of the press. (Sound familiar? Where's all the news in the press about "the good things" that are happening in Iraq?)

One of the participants in the conference was a professor from the communications (journalism) department. He retired from being an editorial writer at the New York Times to run the Knight Fellows program at UM (an in-career fellowship program for active journalists). He wrote editorials there during the Vietnam War, and Rostow's talk angered him greatly.

So his time presenting during the next day's conference was spent giving a well written and delivered screed about the U.S. Government, the Vietnam War, and checks and balances in government, the kinds of checks and balances and accountability which the conference was critizing. It was a fabulous speech that I wanted to publish in our little newspaper.

So I went up to him afterwards, as did Gerald Ford. And President Ford said to him (I've forgotten the professor's last name, his first name was Graham, and the UM [that's Michigan, not Maryland] servers aren't cooperating right now) "It's good to have a divergent view."

And I said to myself, under my breath, "Yeah. One."

Index Keywords: civic-engagement