Practically the first thing President William Jefferson Clinton did on entering the White House was in effect to shut off congressional investigation into the Reagan-Bush scandal of Iran-Contra. Practically the last thing Clinton did on leaving the White House was to pardon fugitive billionaire financier Marc Rich, heavily involved in Iran-Contra. If Senator Clinton is indeed serious about running for the White House – by no means a given – it will be important to ask her why her spouse prevented investigation into Iran-Contra. But in any case, when Mr. Clinton dies, I shall be surprised if any neo-con or other right-winger refers to either of these Clinton actions as “healing.”

Not that the episodes are likely to be mentioned – corporate media outlets seldom bring up Iran-Contra – but if they are, it will be generally and accurately registered that their primary healing was to Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Marc Rich, and their personnel, some of whom serve under the current White House, rather than to the nation. This withholding of grateful acknowledgement will not be mitigated by the fact that the beneficiaries of Clinton’s shutting down investigation and prosecution in Iran-Contra are the patrons and promoters of neo-cons and neo-con policies. As we know by now, neo-con gratitude doesn’t work that way.

De mortuis nil nisi bonum.

It is a pleasure to record that former president Gerald R. Ford was by all accounts a good and loving son, a good and loving husband and father; that he was tender and supportive regarding health problems in his own family; and that as a political candidate and an officeholder he could get along with people. These are not small matters. There are no anecdotes of his being rude, tyrannical or overbearing with staff or with private citizens. In all his years in Washington, he built up no history – underscore no history -- of private rages or tirades, petty vendettas, cursing out the help or otherwise wantonly abusing female clerical staff among others. On the contrary, virtually everyone who dealt with him (back in the years before I moved to the DC region) seems to have found him pleasant to deal with.

But it would be a lot easier to serve up only the benign eulogies required by the solemn majesty of death, and leave it at that, if our major media outlets were not trying to shove a false “legacy of healing” down our throats 24-7. Thus, noting that 40% of our current U.S. population was not yet born when Ford pardoned Nixon, some of our most prominent media commentators seem to be diligently promoting a fiction that the pardon – before Nixon had been charged with anything – was the right thing to do.

It was not the right thing to do. It did not spare the nation; it spared Richard M. Nixon. The nation had not undergone a long nightmare with Nixon’s resignation; Nixon had. The nation had not endured a virtual state of siege with Nixon’s attempt to spy on and to steal from the opposition and then to stonewall investigation into his actions (assisted by then-head of the Republican National Committee George H. W. Bush); Nixon had. And with all due respect, most of the graybeards on television probably know that. If they don’t, they’re not qualified to be either reporters or commentators. Anyone who recollects the Seventies as being a period when public adoration of Dick Nixon was at its peak – such that seeing him answer questions about Watergate would have been simply unbearable – is remembering wrong.

I take the current debate over semantics regarding whether the pardon was a “deal” to be indirect acknowledgement of the above. Anyone who has listened to Katie Couric, Alexander Haig, Bob Schieffer and assorted historians and journalists over the past couple of days chewing over those sheets of paper that Al Haig brought to Jerry Ford can make a pretty accurate judgment. And not that one wants to promote dishonesty, but hypothetically if you ever do want to make a deal that shouldn’t be made, the game plan is simply to deny at every step that that’s what you’re doing. When you lay out the terms of the arrangement, you say, with bell-like clarity, “This is not a deal.” When the other party receives the terms, he asks, “Is this a deal?” You deny it. Then the other party is within his rights to say firmly, “This is not a deal.” Asked about the matter, you can then say into perpetuity, again firmly, “There was no deal.” This sequence of actions is not only politic but necessary; if it were a deal, after all, it would be illegal. After all, if you made no agreement (to pardon the man later, for example) reduced to writing, you could hardly attest even your own intention. Intention matters, but it is not the same as action. And as the Uniform Commercial Code states, good faith is an element in all contracts.

Every iota of this is being laid out in perfect clarity for the general public, at present, and precisely on the occasion when you would think it wouldn’t happen, namely that of Mr. Ford’s death.

A strange way of paying tribute to a public figure. It is almost like some kind of indirect Emersonian compensation, like an undertow, reacting against the overblown pretense that the death of a former president is the same as the death of a sitting president. I think the late Mr. Ford and his family are to be much commended for not including a riderless horse, stirrups backward, in the funeral procession.

That is the kind of taste and judgment we need to see more of, and worthy of all the compliments you can make about it.