Volume 22, Number 16 · October 16, 1975
He's Not So Dumb
By Garry Wills
Portrait of a President
by Hugh Sidey, photographs by Fred Ward
Harper & Row, 190 pp., $12.95
The President
by John Hersey
Knopf, 153 pp., $6.95
Gerald Ford and the Future of the Presidency
by Jerald F. terHorst
The Third Press, 245 pp., $9.95
A Ford, Not a Lincoln
by Richard Reeves
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 212 pp., $8.95
For a while, it was enough not to be Nixon. We did not expect Ford to be perfect; just not to tell unnecessary lies. There was no economy to Nixon's lying. He added the pointless little excess—like falsifying his return date from Moscow, to suggest he missed the countdown toward a Democratic National Committee break-in. Nixon offended as much by being maladroit as by being malevolent. Ford's have been good workmanlike lies, the kind we allow politicians when telling the truth would embarrass them.
Review, 8619 words
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