A Powerful Pardon | The Nixon Era
Whistlestop: Presidential History and Trivia
Slate Podcasts
4.8 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 14 June 2017
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This episode of Whistlestop revisits Sunday September 8, 1974 when President Ford announced his pardon of Richard Nixon.
Whistlestop is Slate's podcast about presidential history. Hosted by political correspondent and Political Gabfest panelist John Dickerson, each installment will revisit memorable (or even forgotten) moments from America's Presidential carnival.
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Podcast production and edit by Jocelyn Frank. Research by Brian Rosenwald.
Email: whistlestop@slate.com
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Whistle Stop. I'm John Dickerson of Face the Nation. |
| 0:09.4 | A president sat behind the polished wooden table of a House Congressional Committee room. |
| 0:15.1 | He was there to testify to the details of a private meeting, a solitary exchange between two men |
| 0:20.2 | whose recollection of events could determine the destiny of a young meeting, a solitary exchange between two men whose recollection of events |
| 0:22.0 | could determine the destiny of a young administration and whether either one of those two men |
| 0:27.4 | could wind up in the chafing, baggy institutional uniform of a federal incarceration facility. |
| 0:33.9 | The star witness was the 38th president, Gerald R. Ford, all domed forehead and looking like the established owner of a group of regional banks. |
| 0:42.3 | A month before, the new president shocked the nation when he said, |
| 0:45.4 | I, Gerald R. Ford, President of the United States, pursuant to the pardon power conferred upon me by Article 2, Section 2 of the |
| 1:01.1 | Constitution, have granted, and by these presents do grant a full, free and absolute pardon |
| 1:10.6 | unto Richard Nixon. |
| 1:12.2 | Just 30 days before uttering those words, Ford still had a vice at the start of his title. |
| 1:17.5 | Almost immediately after pardoning Nixon, conspiracies raged. |
| 1:21.1 | Did Ford and Nixon have a deal? |
| 1:22.6 | Nixon would resign and Ford would pardon him, sparing him jail time that he was almost certain to serve. |
| 1:28.4 | After all, the evidence was damning. Just before the resignation, Nixon had been caught on tape, |
| 1:32.7 | ordering his staff to get the CIA to tell the FBI to end its investigation. |
| 1:38.4 | The House Judiciary Committee called Ford to explain if there had been a deal, |
| 1:42.1 | his lawyers counseled against his going, but the president |
| 1:44.7 | and former House Minority Leader, Ford had once been a House Minority Leader, said, quote, |
| 1:50.4 | I've got nothing to hide. I'm going up there. As a sitting president, Donald J. Trump, has promised |
| 1:56.0 | to testify under oath, and as leaders of Congress have asked him to pilot his limousine to the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue for a sit-down, we now look back at the last time a president submitted himself to questions from the other branch of government. |
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