From The LA Times
By Matt Welch

When President Ford announced in his brief and sober inaugural address that “our long national nightmare is over,” it wasn’t just an attempt to lay the turbulent Nixon presidency to poetic rest. It was also a bit of wish-casting about the nation’s deep partisan divisions heading forward. As the man who coined the phrase, Robert T. Hartmann, once said of the speech, it was intended to “bridge — but also divide — the past and the future.”

But the future didn’t cooperate, as Hartmann himself was soon to discover bitterly during his tenure as Cabinet-level counselor to the president. Two other Ford administration heavyweights — Nixon holdovers Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney — outmaneuvered Ford’s most trusted lieutenant in launching what would become a career-long struggle to maintain and expand the powers of the executive branch against what they saw as a feckless Congress and media. This constitutional blood-feud continues to fundamentally shape the way the United States is governed today.

“At the end of the Nixon administration, you had the nadir of the modern presidency in terms of authority and legitimacy,” Vice President Cheney told reporters in December 2005, in defense of the National Security Agency’s possibly illegal wiretapping of American citizens. In January 2002, Cheney told ABC’s Cokie Roberts: “I feel an obligation, and I know the president does too — to pass on our offices in better shape than we found them to our successors. We are weaker today as an institution because of the unwise compromises that have been made over the last 30 to 35 years.”

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