To reconcile a nation: Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and the question of amnesty, 1974-1980

The radically altered realities that Gerald Ford confronted when he assumed the discredited office of the presidency in 1974 remain, at best, understated. Generally overlooked as an important link to understanding the decline of liberalism in the late 1960s and the emergence of the neoconservatism of the 1980s, the years immediately following the first American military failure abroad offer telling clues both to the lessons of Vietnam and its legacy.;Gerald Ford's tenure at this juncture marked a key point of transition. Assuring the nation that the long national nightmare would soon end, Ford pardoned Richard Nixon and, within a week, offered conditional clemency to Vietnam-era draft resisters and military deserters. Yet contrary to administration claims, Ford's "earned re-entry" program in general, and the Clemency Board in particular, provided little substansive reconciliation between those persons Ford viewed as "transgressors" and the mainstream of American society. Indeed, Jimmy Carter's pardon of draft evaders and discharge review program in 1977 further underscored lingering divisiveness over the war, and seemed to many amnesty advocates to close the circle of race and class discrimination that had marked the draft system.;Each president hesitated to confront directly the difficult implication of the war. And on the question of amnesty, they offered moderate solutions intended more to heal the nation's wounds through symbolic national reconciliation than to tackle the controversial question of amnesty. Both Ford and Carter were--like most Americans--unable to forgive or to forget entirely, and they presided over a nation unable to come to terms with the war and its implications. Their eagerness to turn their attention from the wounds of the previous decade--combined with their paradoxical inability to forget--actually prevented close examination of the forces that drove the United States into Southeast Asia and prolonged the healing process for the nation generally. Covering over, rather than healing the nation's wounds, Ford and Carter's methods of effecting national reconciliation through limited forms of amnesty failed to prevent the "Vietnam syndrome" from becoming a powerful force in the coming years.