A friend posed this question on Facebook in response to my blog post on the 40th anniversary of President Nixon’s resignation.

He asked about my thoughts relating to President Ford’s pardon of Nixon barely a month after taking office on Aug. 9, 1974.

Here it is: President Ford did the right thing.

I’ll add that at the time I didn’t agree with the decision to grant a full and complete pardon. I was barely 25 years old at the time and I suppose I wanted my pound of flesh from the former president. Nixon, after all, had clobbered Sen. George McGovern in the 1972 election, dashing my hopes after working for McGovern in Multnomah County, Ore., and after casting my first-ever vote in a presidential election.

That was then.

Time, as they say, has this way of tempering one’s anger.

It has done so with me.

I grew to respect Gerald Ford immensely over the years. I now understand why he did what he did so early in his presidency. He did it to spare the nation the heartache of a possible trial for crimes that President Nixon committed against the nation, the Constitution and, yes, rank-and-file Americans.

I wasn’t alone in looking critically at the president’s decision to pardon his immediate predecessor. Nor am I alone in recognizing President Ford’s decision.

Not too many years before his death, President Ford received the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award granted annually by the JFK Library and Museum in Boston. The man who presented the award to the former president was one of his harshest critics at the time of the pardon: the late Sen. Ted Kennedy.

Kennedy turned to Ford and said, in effect: “Mr. President, I was wrong to criticize that decision.”

The president did perform a courageous political act. It well might have cost him his election to the presidency in 1976.

It was the right thing to do.