Ford and the pardon

To be frank, Robert Kennedy's assassination traumatized my younger self and left me cold to politics for decades. Oh, I voted and so on, but I didn't care about it. That may explain why I don't really remember having much of a reaction to Ford's pardoning Nixon. Intellectually I knew Nixon was a criminal and deserved impeachment, but I bought the argument that the pardon "healed" the nation - not that I thought much about it.

Karl at World Wide Webers has a couple of posts (here and here) which are changing my mind more and more the more I think about them.

What Beschloss calls our "faith in the system"--the same belief that Ford himself invoked when he declared, "Our Constitution works"--is very much what I had in mind when I wrote (somewhat vaguely) about "the spirit of the Constitution." This faith, this spirit, is damaged when it appears that the workings of the system will be short-circuited on the arbitrary say-so of one or a few government officials whenever they deem it necessary.