Opinion: For whom the Ford obits toll

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Gerald Ford had almost 40 years on me. Even so, the former president’s death provided me with an intimation of morbidity, if not mortality. Death has taken another figure (sometimes a figure of fun) from my formative years as a journalist.

As a young editorial writer at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 1973, I landed the coveted Watergate franchise when the editor, who had written our 1972 editorial endorsing Nixon’s re-election, withdrew in pain from the whole subject. (He returned, after the release of the “smoking gun” audiotape, to write an editorial urging Nixon to resign. I was hoping Tricky Dick would stay on, be impeached, tried and convicted, if not hanged.)

Watergate made Ford president, but it made me a legal journalist. As the legal cover-up unraveled, I found myself delightedly writing about subpoenas, indictments and grand juries. The interest stoked by Watergate moved me to attend law school (where I learned to my horror that serious constitutional lawyers supported Nixon’s argument that he could defy the courts and hold on to his Watergate tapes).

Any man’s death diminishes me,according to John Donne, but Ford’s passing inters another part of my newspaper career. I winced when I saw the sub-headline on The Times’ Ford story today -- “Sworn in After Nixon Resigned, New President Helped Nation Recover” -- not because it was predictable but because the information it contained was probably news to some readers. To today’s 25-year-old, the Ford administration is as distant as FDR’s presidency was to me when I was writing about the 18 ½-minute gap in a vital Watergate tape.

For some time I have noticed that reporters, and not just obituary-writers, are painstakingly filling in historical background that strikes me (at first anyway) as redundant. Some of the back story really is unnecessary, like a young reporter’s overly conscientious description of a long-dead European leader as “German dictator Adolf Hitler.”

But other history is necessary if younger readers are to navigate through stories that link the present and the past. To someone my age, the name “Gerald Ford” instantly conjures up WIN buttons, Ron Nessen on ‘Saturday Night Live’ and waiting lines for the swine flu vaccine. But why should even a well educated 25 year old be aware of those iconic images from the real “That 70s Show”?

The flip side of the helpful addition to news stories of historical factoids is that, when inserted by younger reporters or copy editors, they’re sometimes wrong. A story that requires a reporter to include background from before he or she was born can be a ticket to the Corrections column.

That scenario occurs to me when I see corrections like this one from the New York Times: “An introductory note last Sunday in a transcript of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s telephone calls misstated the title held by Robert F. Kennedy when he participated in a 1965 conversation. He was a United States senator, no longer the attorney general.”

It’s highly unlikely that someone my age wouldn’t have known that Kennedy quit the Johnson Cabinet in 1964 to run for the Senate. His resignation was widely regarded at the time as the last nail in the coffin of Camelot. But you had to be there -- as Gerald Ford was and as I was, albeit as a teen-age political junkie. Now one of us is gone.