Opinion: Trump inspires yet another profile in cowardice

President Ford, left, and former President Nixon, right, flank their wives, Betty Ford and Pat Nixon, as the Nixons leave the White House in 1974. One of the foundation’s best-known trustees — Pulitzer Prize-winner David Hume Kennerly, Ford’s White House photographer and then his friend — resigned on Tuesday after its executive committee refused three times to consider giving its annual Gerald R. Ford Medal for Distinguished Public Service to former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, herself a board member, the daughter of Ford’s White House chief of staff, Dick Cheney, and, as the nation knows, Trump’s foremost Republican antagonist. Politico disclosed Kennerly’s five-page scorcher of a letter to the foundation’s executive committee and board, in which he revealed that the members lacked the “kind of guts” that Ford had shown as a World War II combat veteran and politician — refusing to honor Cheney for fear of enraging Trump, who might threaten the foundation’s tax-exempt status or otherwise take retribution should he become president again. Kennerly closed: “If the foundation that bears the name of Gerald R. Ford won’t stand up to this real threat to our democracy, who will?” Depressingly, that question echoes the one Summers posed to corporate America seven years ago, and which has been put to many other institutions since. The Ford Presidential Foundation‘s executive director, Gleaves Whitney, told Politico that because Cheney had not ruled out running for president this year, the nonprofit foundation could have risked losing its tax-exempt status by honoring her and making what “might be construed as a political statement.” That’s ridiculous.