The Un-Clinton
On August 9, 1974, Gerald Rudolph Ford of Grand Rapids, Michigan, became President of the United States after Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace. A steady, competent man whose integrity was unchallenged, Ford brought an element of Midwestern grace to an office that had been tarnished by lies and unethical behavior.

Born Leslie King—as a tot he was renamed after his new stepfather—Ford played center for the University of Michigan football team, attended Yale Law School, did some modeling on the side, and served as a lieutenant on an aircraft carrier in the South Pacific during World War II. Returning to Grand Rapids, he was elected to Congress in 1948. He served almost a quarter-century in the House of Representatives, rising to Minority Leader, before Nixon appointed him Vice President following the resignation of Spiro Agnew.

Upon being sworn in as President, Ford announced, “our long national nightmare is over.” He was exceptionally popular at first: His genial manner and laid-back family were a welcome contrast to the secretive and uptight Nixon White House. His honeymoon with press and public ended after just one month in office, however, when he pardoned former President Nixon.

Faced with a hostile Congress brimming with the “Watergate babies” of 1974, Ford used his veto pen an astounding 66 times. As if raging inflation, a deepening recession, and the lingering smell of the Nixon administration weren’t enough, President Ford survived two assassination attempts in 1975. His occasional stumbles provided material for TV comedians, though few, if any, Presidents have been as athletic as Ford—who turned down professional football contracts from both the Detroit Lions and the Green Bay Packers  in favor of law school.

Former California Governor Ronald Reagan contested with Ford for the 1976 GOP nomination. An increasingly sure-footed Ford defeated Reagan and then ran neck and neck—despite the pendant Nixon albatross—with Jimmy Carter in the general election. He lost, narrowly and graciously, and retired to California. (In an odd twist of fate, Gerald Ford was considered as Reagan’s running mate in 1980, though the deal fell through.)

Presidential reputations rise and fall: witness Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy. Perhaps, in this new age of presidential mendacity, it is time to revise the reputation of Gerald R. Ford. From a distance of 25 years, his virtues seem worthier by the day.

—the editors

Gentle in Manner,
Strong in Deed
By George Bush

The President of the United States is America’s moral, not just political, leader. Presidents must do right to achieve good.

Gerald Ford knew that, and decency was his core. I can think of no one who a quarter-century ago could have done a better job. He believed that honesty was government’s polar star. It lit his view that “Here the people rule,” “Ours is a country of laws, not men,” and “Honesty is the best policy.” I have never heard one story of Ford telling another person an untruth. And amid the nightmare of Watergate that was most welcome.

Jerry Ford was not a household name when he assumed the presidency. He’d been a Congressman for 25 years, and Vice President less than a year. But the more America saw of him, the more it liked.

I knew him for many years before he led this nation. He was his own man, with great self-confidence, and could work with people on both sides of the aisle. Ford meant what he said and said what he meant. Today, when politics is coarse and ugly, we should remember him as a man who had opponents but never enemies.

As August 1974 began, I was chairman of the Republican National Committee. It was a traumatic, almost unreal time. I remember a Cabinet meeting the final week of Richard Nixon’s presidency. Nixon came into the room and started talking about the economy. We wanted to talk about the Watergate scandal, but he wouldn’t. Until near the end, he was in denial.

Nixon often talked down to people. In Cabinet meetings, he would criticize “Ivy League bastards.” We’d roll our eyes but forgive Nixon because he worked so hard, knew what he wanted to achieve, and had a superb foreign policy. I liked him. I wanted him to succeed.

That’s why it was so tragic that Nixon lied about Watergate, and paid the price. I felt broken-hearted for the man. That last week of his presidency, I went to see the then-Vice President. Ford knew that he would shortly be President. He was calm, not arrogant, and believed he could do the job. I remember the change in mood in Washington when he became President. It was instant, overnight.

As President, Ford faced a nation obsessed with Watergate. His reply was the “full, free, and absolute” September 8, 1974 pardon for all federal crimes Nixon “committed or may have committed or taken part in” from 1969-74. Ford knew that the pardon would be controversial, and he took a lot of piling on. I thought it was right then, and I think history now agrees. He was willing to do the courageous thing—even though it probably cost him the presidency against Jimmy Carter.

On January 15, 1975, Ford said, “The State of the Union is not good.” It was dramatically better by the time he left office. In particular, he helped the economy by slowing spending and taxes and vetoing scores of bills.

Ford was a unifier, not a divider. Liberals dubbed Ford rightist. Conservatives thought him insufficiently partisan. He didn’t care. He intended to govern as President of all the people.

His forte was honor, not rhetoric, showing how civility could light even the dark cave of politics. I often compare Gerald Ford to Dwight Eisenhower, more President than politician. He would have liked the plaque that topped Ike’s desk: “Gentle in manner, strong in deed.”

NORMALCY COMES TO BEDLAM
By Aram Bakshian, Jr.

The first thing I noticed about the Ford takeover of the White House was the pipes.

Jerry Ford was a pipe smoker. So, Washington being Washington—and people being sheep—as soon as he assumed the presidency one noticed an increasing number of nervous staff holdovers in the corridors of the White House and the Old Executive Office Building puffing away on newly bought pipes. Not that it did much good; within days, many of the upper and upper-middle tier Nixon staffers were gone, or on their way out.

There were, however, a few comic exceptions. One of Jerry Ford’s first actions on becoming President was to appoint a new press secretary, his old friend and veteran Michigan reporter Jerry TerHorst. And one of Jerry TerHorst’s first actions as White House Press Secretary was to announce that John McLaughlin—of later “McLaughlin Group” TV fame—was no longer a member of the White House speechwriting staff. Father John (he was still a Jesuit priest at the time) trusted in the Lord, ignored the announcement, and hunkered down in his office. Before TerHorst could cut off McLaughlin’s electricity and running water, God or history intervened. TerHorst himself abruptly resigned as press secretary to protest President Ford’s pardon of Nixon while John McLaughlin lingered on for weeks. Not everyone shared John’s survival skills. David Gergen, the able head of White House speechwriting, learned that his departure had been announced at a press briefing while he was having lunch with his staff at Trader Vic’s. No one had had the courtesy to let him know in advance. Unfazed, Gergen became right-hand man to Treasury Secretary Bill Simon and—the last laugh always being the heartiest—was called back to the Ford White House in its last months to restore some semblance of order in the communications operation.

I was one of the few to be spared in this massacre of the semi-innocents. A member of the presidential speechwriting staff since 1972, I had helped draft a few speeches for Jerry Ford when he came aboard as Vice President following the resignation of Spiro Agnew. Ford and his senior staffers seem to have liked my work; at any rate, I was the only member of the Nixon speechwriting team who was invited to stay on indefinitely. For me, “indefinitely” proved to be until autumn 1975 when, as a self-taught college drop-out, I couldn’t resist the irony of accepting a proffered resident fellowship at Harvard’s Institute of Politics. After more than three years at the White House, I left without regrets—either for my time spent there, or for my decision to leave.

As an occasional writer of history and biography, I had particularly enjoyed studying what has to have been the most unusual transfer of presidential power in the history of our republic. If ever a man was dealt a weak hand on his way into the presidency, it was Gerald Ford. He had become unelected Vice President when Agnew resigned in disgrace. Once there, he felt honor bound to do everything he could to defend the beleaguered Nixon presidency while still maintaining his own well-deserved reputation for integrity. He had barely settled in as Veep when he had to assume the presidency itself after another resignation-in-disgrace.

President Ford inherited a sick, inflationary economy, an energy crisis, the still unresolved mess in Vietnam, a polarized population, a hostile media, and a Democratic majority in both houses of the Congress that smelled blood and was taking no prisoners.

On top of all that, Jerry Ford was the first President in our history to take office without any transition time. Every other President has been tempered by the Darwinian political process of, if not primaries, caucuses, and conventions, at least national elections in which they have run for either the presidency or vice presidency. Thus, by the time they reached the White House they already had battle-tested staffs. Experience and attrition had already stripped away many cronies and incompetents. Jerry Ford had no shake-down cruise. He had to start cold. It is a tribute to his personal character and judgment that, with all the cards stacked against him, he did as well as he did. There was something so obviously solid, honest, and manly about him that even those who were his political foes could not ignore it.

Not all of history’s indispensable men and women are star turns. Some of them simply prove to be the right person in the right place at a dangerous time. They may never make it to Mount Rushmore, but they help preserve the principles and the heritage of those who did. President Ford was such a man. Sitting with him in the Oval Office, going over a speech draft or discussing an upcoming event, you instinctively knew that you were in the company of a man who understood his job, was staunch in his beliefs, and was determined to do what was right for the country—not what the latest opinion poll told him was politically advantageous to himself. He was the ultimate good steward at a time when one was sorely needed.

It is only just that this modest, selfless elder statesman has lived to see his fellow countrymen recognize his qualities as a leader and as a man. Not that he didn’t have a little help from his successor. In December 1976, I happened to spend a few weeks at San Clemente, California, one of many writers and former staffers asked to contribute some editing suggestions to the memoirs Richard Nixon was writing in those lonely, early days of exile. In one long, rambling conversation Nixon asked me what I thought history would make of Jerry Ford.

“Just give Jimmy Carter a year or two,” I replied, “and Jerry Ford will look pretty damned good.”

He looks even better today. No President ever faced more challenges with fewer resources; none shouldered the burden more bravely, calmly, and uncomplainingly. The homely virtues that Gerald Ford brought to the White House never glittered. But, over the years, they have acquired a noble patina that will never fade.

“I never encountered a
hidden agenda”
By Henry Kissinger

After the so-called smoking-gun tape was released on August 5, Vice President Gerald Ford, at a Cabinet meeting the next day, took the unprecedented step of dissociating from President Nixon. He would no longer defend the President’s position on Watergate, he said, and, indeed, he would not have done so in the past had he known what was on the tape. Publicly he would maintain silence on the matter on the ground that he was a “party in interest”—pointedly reminding everyone that he was next in line for Nixon’s office. But Ford stressed that even though he was dissociating from the President, he would continue to support Nixon’s policies.

In the week of Nixon’s resignation soon after, I had no time to speculate on how it would affect my own position. Before I could address the subject, Ford took the decision out of my hands by telephoning me on the morning of August 8, after Nixon had informed him of his departure. Ford asked me to come to see him and, in his unassuming way, left the time up to me. In the course of the same conversation he asked me to stay on, and in a way that made it sound as if I would be doing him a favor by agreeing.

Dramatic events are not always ushered in by dramatic dialogue. As I recall this conversation from the perspective of two decades, I am struck by its matter-of-fact tone and concerns. At the time, I was affected by the understated way in which Ford conveyed Nixon’s decision, which would make him President, without rhetorical flourishes and without mentioning the emotional impact on himself. And I was moved by his tact in so swiftly putting an end to any personal uncertainty I might be experiencing.

The atmosphere of the conversation carried over into our meeting that afternoon. I sat on a sofa near the balcony overlooking the White House lawn, Ford in an easy chair with his back to the window. He seemed casual and calm, neither grandiloquent nor pretentiously humble. He opened the conversation by saying he intended to announce even before he had taken the oath of office—in fact, that very evening—that I would be staying. Artlessly, he added that he felt confident we would “get along.” I replied that it was my job to get along with him, not the other way around.

Perhaps the most lasting impression of that first conversation was its aftermath. For the first time since I came to the White House, I left the presidential presence without afterthoughts, confident that there was no more to the conversation than what I had heard. Starting with that first meeting, I never encountered a hidden agenda. He was sufficiently self-assured to disagree openly, and he did not engage in elaborate maneuvers about who should receive credit. Having been propelled so unexpectedly into an office he revered but never thought he would hold, he felt no need to manipulate his environment. Ford’s inner peace was precisely what the nation needed for healing its divisions.

Gerald Ford was an uncomplicated man tapped by destiny for some of the most complicated tasks in the nation’s history. He was called, after the Vietnam War and Watergate, to heal the most severe national divisions since the Civil War. As different as possible from the driven personalities who typically propel themselves into the highest office, Gerald Ford restored calm and confidence to a nation surfeited with upheavals, overcame a series of international crises, and ushered in a period of renewal for American society.

Gerald Ford performed his task of overcoming America’s divisions and redeeming its faith so undramatically and with such absence of histrionics that his achievements have so far been taken too much for granted. To a great extent, this neglect was because Ford bore so little resemblance to the prototype of the political leader of the Television Age. The media and many of his colleagues were at a loss when it came to fitting him into the familiar stereotypes.

The curious paradox of contemporary democracy is that while political leaders have never been more abject in trying to determine the public’s preferences, respect for the political class has never been lower. Gerald Ford, though, was about as different as possible from the familiar political persona. He was immune to the modern politician’s chameleon-like search for ever-new identities, and to the emotional roller coaster this search creates.

Cartoonists had great fun with Ford’s occasionally fractured syntax. They forgot —if they were ever aware—that being articulate is not the same as having analytical skill, which Ford had in abundance. For a national leader, courage and devotion to principle are, in any case, the more important qualities.

Ford was well aware of his relative lack of suavity and, unlike the modern political leader, was not embarrassed to admit it. “I am not one of those oratorical geniuses,” he said to me on the telephone on January 15, 1975. “There is no point in my trying to be one. I just have to be myself.”

Ford reacted to the seemingly inexhaustible volume of challenges without either self-pity or doubt about the good faith of his political adversaries. Ford viewed his role not unlike that of a doctor ministering to a patient just recovering from a debilitating illness. He therefore resisted demands for heroic posturing and prescribed a regimen of building and conserving strength. Ford thought it essential to prove to the American people that crisis and confrontation were a last resort, not an everyday means of conducting policy.

Ford displayed personal goodwill to friend and foe alike. At times, I thought his apparent equanimity excessive, especially when his reluctance to impose penalties made resistance to presidential authority appear free of risk. In retrospect, I have come to appreciate Ford’s self-restraint, for it gradually drained the American political system of its accumulated poison and created the conditions for the restoration of faith in American institutions.

This unflinching sense of the national interest enabled Ford in his 29 months in office to navigate his country through a series of crises that could have filled a two-term presidency. Other Presidents were to receive the credit for winning the Cold War. But I am certain the time will come when it is recognized that the Cold War could not have been won had not Gerald Ford, at a tragic point of America’s history, been there to keep us from losing it.

 The “Anti-Clinton”
By James K. Glassman

As President Clinton gave his testimony in the Lewinsky scandal, I was thinking about Gerald Ford. Like Bill Clinton, he is a graduate of Yale Law School, but the similarity ends there.

Ford came to mind because I had heard him speak twice in recent months. A remarkable man, he can still hold his own with the intelligentsia from the think tanks. Having turned 85 last July, he looks 20 years younger, with clear blue eyes and the stature of the football star he once was. At one of those talks, he made a broad tour of the horizon, discussing the economy, the performance of Congress and—a subject to which he warmed—the coming election.

Ford is an optimist. He has the proper degree of wonder as he looks at the world: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the budget surplus, the spread of prosperity. He laments the passing of a more congenial politics, but he will not criticize the perpetrators of today’s more contentious process. Despite what must have been a difficult life, with his wife’s addiction and breast cancer, he seems a happy man, but most of all, a real adult—in striking contrast to the current occupant of the White House.

I also believe that Ford was a great hero. His pardon of Richard Nixon was a necessary and courageous act. It spared the nation a terrible ordeal—the trial of an ex-President—but it cost Ford the 1976 election, an outcome he certainly could have predicted.

He did the right thing and took the consequences. Again, can one say that about Bill Clinton?

Larry King recently asked Ford to comment on the Clinton scandals. “There’s no question,” Ford said, “the White House...has been undercut and damaged.... It’s sad because the White House, historically, is looked upon as the epitome of integrity and leadership.” Indeed, in an age in which military threats have diminished and the economy rolls ahead (under Fed chairman Alan Greenspan, who was Ford’s top economic advisor), the most important function of the President is to serve as the symbol of national honor and strength and decency.

In that function, Clinton has clearly failed.

The Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans issued a report not long ago based on a survey of young people aged 14 to 18. When asked “which category their role model would be from,” less than 1 percent of all teens now pick a political leader (and that 1 percent is split between foreign and American leaders).

Is it really surprising that no more than one teenager in 200 saw Clinton as a role model? I only wish more young Americans could see what a plain but dignified leader looks like, talks like, and acts like. Like Gerald Ford.

A Dissenting View
By Joseph Sobran

To conservatives, as a rule, Presidents look better in retrospect. Another way to put this is that every President tends to make his predecessors look better than they did while they held office. Many conservatives now revere Harry Truman, of whom they (like most Americans) held a low opinion while he was in the White House. More recently, they have softened on George Bush and even Jimmy Carter. Some of them even praise Franklin Roosevelt, their ancestral enemy.

They also look back fondly on Dwight Eisenhower, though they much preferred Robert Taft in 1952 and “Ike” was the choice of then-powerful Northeast liberal Republicans. William Buckley predicted that if Eisenhower got the 1952 GOP nomination, he would not only win the White House but consolidate the New Deal, making its social programs virtually impossible to repeal thereafter. This turned out to be all too true. And in the same way, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford consolidated Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Republicans now talk of “saving” Social Security (FDR’s brainchild) and Medicare (Johnson’s progeny), the two greatest triumphs of what they used to call “creeping socialism.”

A couple of years ago, adapting Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous phrase, I observed that Bill Clinton had “defined presidential deviancy down.” Others have picked up this expression since then. But though Clinton has deviated more spectacularly than any previous chief executive he has effected no structural changes of the magnitude of the New Deal and the Great Society; his bad character hasn’t been translated into any permanent institution. He has merely proven successful in seducing women and Republicans.

We shouldn’t be misled by the trick of perspective that makes earlier Presidents look comparatively good. Often the harsh judgments of their contemporaries are correct. Conservatives deemed Gerald Ford an ineffectual President during his brief tenure. And so I believe he was.

As House Minority Leader and President, Ford offered little resistance to the agenda of the free-spending liberal Democrats who controlled Congress because he had no principled objections to that agenda. Like Robert Dole and George Bush, he was temperamentally opposed to most of the liberal agenda, but only until it was enacted. After it passed, he accepted it as a given. He lacked both the will and the imagination to try to repeal it because he lacked a philosophy by which to criticize it.

Gerald Ford was actually alarmed by principled conservatives. He didn’t understand them, much less sympathize with them. In 1980 he warned that Ronald Reagan couldn’t win the presidency because his views were too extreme. Even now Reagan’s victory has taught him nothing, and he regards the Republicans’ conservative wing—especially the anti-abortion elements—as an alien force that will bring the party to defeat.

President Ford has never recognized that the United States, since the New Deal, has undergone a second revolution, in which a Constitution that was meant to establish a limited, federal government, confined to a few specified powers, has been perverted into an instrument of limitless, centralized government. The great practical mission of conservatives is to restore the Constitution. Non-conservative Republicans too often make constant incremental surrenders to the Leviathan state as it usurps countless powers never delegated through the Constitution.

There can be no more strategic mistake than to allow liberals to write the rules of this game. Conservatives only began to correct it during the Reagan years, when Reagan nominated Antonin Scalia and Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. But to this day there has been no real follow-up, let alone a Republican “revolution” to repeal the Roosevelt Revolution. In that crucial respect, the Republican Party remains much more the party of Gerald Ford than of Ronald Reagan.

Good Instinct
By Donald Rumsfeld

Presidents in our country lead by consent and persuasion, rooted in trust, not by command. Fortunately, President Ford brought with him some extraordinarily valuable attributes: an instinctive honesty, straightforwardness, and openness. His character did much to restore confidence in government during that terribly difficult period in our country’s history.

He made many good decisions on the big issues. For instance, the President made a clear commitment that a long decline in defense spending had to be reversed, and that we needed to maintain the deterrent power necessary for the U.S. to be able to contribute to peace and stability in the world. It was not a popular position, but he worked hard on this problem and won.

At his inauguration, President Carter turned to the departing President Ford and said simply, “For myself and our country, I want to thank my predecessor for all he has done to heal our land.” Gerald Ford accomplished these things, in large measure, because of the kind of human being he is.

Dangers Vetoed
By Carla Hills

For 29 months, Gerald Ford successfully led our country, beset by a weakened economy, through its most serious constitutional crisis. Political turmoil at home and the oil crisis engendered in the Middle East had the nation reeling. Labor costs were rising, federal revenues were falling, inflation hit double digits, interest rates soared, and unemployment was climbing.

Candid, open, and direct, President Ford made the tough decisions. He brought strong-willed individuals into his administration and demonstrated his willingness to expose his ideas to independent thinking. I have vivid memories of his ability to debate issues openly and reach expeditious decisions. And his decisions were always guided by principles—not polls.

He knew that inflation could destroy the American dream for average working Americans. He was convinced that excessive federal spending was making their circumstances worse. In his first State of the Union address, he told Congress that he would veto bills promoting excessive spending, and this he did over and over. Remarkably, 54 of his vetos were sustained in a hostile Congress, indicating the correctness of his decisions.

I recall one bill that would have authorized the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development to reduce interest rates on home mortgages for middle-income families by making payments that would effectively limit the homeowner’s payment to 6 percent interest. Needless to say, the costs of this bill were huge—as was its popularity. President Ford immediately saw the dangers, however, and he vetoed it without hesitating. The President believed that our nation must live within its means, and time and again he brought Congress along.

Of Ethics and Flinching
By Barber Conable

I served in the House under Gerald Ford for almost ten years, and when he was chosen as Vice President there was nothing I wanted to add or subtract from his public or private character to fit the country’s need. From Gerald Ford you always got exactly what you expected; he was a direct, decent human being who could not be flattered beyond his limits and who knew how to accomplish what was needed within those limits. He invited diversity of viewpoint and debate as a necessary preliminary to decision—not because he was indecisive, but because he knew the nation depended on him to be thoughtful, dependable, and honest.

When I was a freshman congressman in 1965, Ford’s family needed a new puppy, and I gave him a young golden retriever from a litter of my brother’s dog. He insisted in return on paying $100 into my campaign fund, teaching me a lesson about accepting valuable gifts as a public official. I was struck by his concern about ethics and appearances.

In my second term, he explained to me that Republicans had to take the lead in changing the mindless operation of the seniority system in setting committee assignments. We made the needed changes within our Republican caucus, and the Democrats adopted the same rule two years later.

When events catapulted him into a wounded presidency, he did what was necessary, even when it would be politically damaging. He did not expect, and did not receive, mercy from the hostile Congress born of Watergate. But he did not flinch in doing his executive duty.

 

President Ford speaks with The American Enterprise

We recently dispatched Ben Stein, former Nixon speechwriter, lawyer, and current host of “Win Ben Stein’s Money” on Comedy Central, to interview Gerald Ford at his home in Palm Springs, California. 

TAE: As a young congressman elected in 1948, what did you think of your colleague Richard Nixon?

FORD: I first met Richard Nixon the day I was sworn in. I was impressed then and my admiration increased as I observed his performance on the Committee on Education and Labor and the Un-American Activities Committee. He was a skillful legislator. In my first term I asked him to come to Grand Rapids for the annual
Lincoln Day dinner.

TAE: When you first learned that you were under consideration to be Nixon’s Vice President, did you consider saying no?

FORD: I never considered declining.

TAE: When you saw Nixon during his final months in office, did it look like the pressure was getting to him? Did he seem to be the person you had known for many years or had he changed?

FORD: He was different, and I can understand it because of the strain of Watergate, the war in Vietnam. I don’t think it materially altered his capability to be President, but obviously, he was preoccupied by the problems that he faced.

The thing that worried me while I was House Minority Leader during Nixon’s presidency were three people on his staff that I had many differences with: Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Colson. They would meet with me and tell me the President wanted this or the President wanted that. I knew Nixon before they did, and I knew him better. So I would discount half of what that trio would allege.

TAE: In many ways the most controversial thing you have ever done in your political life was pardoning Richard Nixon. Did you agonize over it? Did you wonder if you’d done the wrong thing?

FORD: I agonized over it prior to my decision, but once I had made the decision I never had the slightest feeling I did the wrong thing. In fact, today my feeling is more forceful that I did the right thing.

When I became President my desk was piled high with economic problems: inflation was high, interest rates were high, unemployment was growing, we were facing a serious economic recession. At the same time, internationally, I had a scheduled meeting with Brezhnev within two months. I had the Yom Kippur War problems still chafing. I had the Nixon relationship with China. There was a whole shopping list of international problems.

The first month that I was President I spent 25 percent of my time listening to the Department of Justice lawyers, the White House lawyers, about what I should do with Nixon’s tapes, his papers, everything else. My first press conference in the East Room, I thought I would be asked questions about the economy, about foreign policies. Nine out of ten questions were, “What are you going to do about Nixon?”

On the way back from the East Room to the Oval Office, I thought to myself, “Am I going to be plagued with that kind of press conference in perpetuity? Am I going to spend 25 percent of my time with the lawyers arguing about papers, tapes?”

So when I went back to the Oval Office, I got Phil Buchen, who was my counsel, and Al Haig and Don Rumsfeld, and I said, “Find out for me what my authority is to grant a pardon.”

When Buchen came back and said I had the authority, I decided I was going to grant a pardon. It was solely a decision of my own. My staff were mostly opposed. But I was absolutely convinced it was the right thing to do, and I haven’t changed my mind.

TAE: Was the selection of Nelson Rockefeller as your Vice President a mistake?

FORD: I selected Nelson Rockefeller because he was the best choice to balance my views and experience. He had vast experience in state government and earlier service in foreign affairs in the Department of State. His liberal Republicanism was a balance to my moderate views. The choice of Rockefeller was a plus—definitely not a mistake.

TAE: Did you think Chevy Chase’s impression of you as a bumbler on “Saturday Night Live” was funny? Was it politically harmful?

FORD: I never watched the show. I guess I objected to it, but I learned a long time ago if you publicly object it just aggravates the situation. And having competed in athletics, where sportswriters are tougher than political writers, I learned you don’t gain a thing by making an issue with a newsman. They’re going to do what they want to, and if you criticize them, it gives them more space; so I just kept my mouth shut.

TAE: Squeaky Fromme and Sarah Jane Moore both tried to kill you in 1975. Have you ever had any contact with or communications from either woman over the years?

FORD: I got a letter from Squeaky Fromme, and I’ve forgotten when it was, in which she reiterated her attitude about me.

TAE: You mean she said she still wanted to kill you?

FORD: Well, in effect, yes.

TAE: Why?

FORD: I’ve forgotten the rationale. A few years ago I had what I call my special letter file evaluated by Sotheby’s, because my attorney said I ought to have my effects appraised. I’ve been a great saver; I save letters from Presidents, other dignitaries. I saved this letter from Squeaky Fromme and it was the most valuable letter, they told me.

TAE: Did you imagine the possibility that you would actually have to launch nuclear missiles against Russia? Do you think you could have dispatched the Strategic Air Command if, say, the Russians had moved into Germany?

FORD: I was never confronted with that challenge.

TAE: I know, but did you ever think of it?

FORD: I don’t like to speculate on unknown circumstances. My whole emphasis while I was in the White House was an effort to reduce the nuclear threshold and not build up a challenge that would require drastic action of the kind you’ve described.

TAE: How close did you really come to being Ronald Reagan’s running mate in 1980?

FORD: In reality, there was never a possibility that I would be Ronald Reagan’s running mate. A co-presidency would not have succeeded.

TAE: During Watergate it didn’t take long for Republican partisanship to break down and for a significant number of Republicans to vote for the impeachment of President Nixon, whereas the Democrats maintained perfect party discipline in the Clinton impeachment. Do Democrats have some ability to maintain party discipline better than the Republicans?

FORD: Democrats seem to have better discipline. Republicans always seem to generate defectors, and that I think is unfortunate right now.

TAE: You, President Clinton, and I share having gone to Yale Law School.

FORD: And so did Hillary.

TAE: I think a lot of Clinton’s obstructions of justice are based on what he learned of “legal realism” at Yale Law School: that law is what any person responsible for law makes of it, and that the person then rationalizes his decision later in terms of precedents. Do you think Clinton is in any specific way a product of Yale Law School? Do you consider yourself ideologically a product of Yale Law School?

FORD: When I was in Yale Law School from 1938 through 1941, I was more conservative than the majority of the faculty and probably more conservative than a majority of the students, but that was a good challenge to me. I learned from that conflict. I have always assumed that that philosophical view continued to prevail at Yale Law School and, if so, Clinton would fit right into that pattern, and so would Hillary.

TAE: If you could have a talk with Bill Clinton, what would you say to him about how he should prepare for life after the presidency?

FORD: He will be a very young ex-President. He should take some time before he makes a decision on what he ought to do. I can assure him he will receive many, many offers covering the spectrum—academic, business, what have you. He should be cautious about any conflict of interest. And he should take his time.

TAE: Do you think President Clinton has borrowed the GOP’s best programs and proposals, especially on fiscal policy?

FORD: The first two years, in ’93 and ’94, he was espousing a typical liberal Democrat philosophy, best shown by the abortive health-care program. But when the Republicans won control of the Congress in ’94, Clinton then, at least superficially, embraced many Republican programs, and he has continued to do that. He will be a superficial Republican as long as the Republicans control the Congress. If the Republicans had lost Congress, Clinton would have reverted back to his basic philosophy, which is liberal both at home and abroad.

TAE: What do you think of the level of military expenditures now?

FORD: I’m worried about the reduction from about $400 billion a year to the current level of $250 billion a year. I hope we’re not going through the peak-and-valley process that we did after World War II, after Korea, after Vietnam, where we win a war and then in effect decimate our Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines, so that we’re unprepared for a new crisis, and it costs money and lives to rebuild.

TAE: Who did you think was the best president of the twentieth century? Besides yourself?

(Laughter)

FORD: On balance, I would say Dwight Eisenhower. He seemed to handle major problems and achieve success. You look at his economic polices, the record was good. You look at his foreign policies, it was good. I admired Nixon for his foreign policy, and Harry Truman for his foreign policy.

TAE: David Eisenhower, the President’s grandson, has written that Dwight Eisenhower’s lack of fear and ability to fight with his fists was a gigantic factor in his self-confidence. You were the boxing coach at Yale and obviously unafraid to fight. Do you think a man who is afraid to fight with his fists lacks some basic self-confidence?

FORD: I don’t think a willingness to fight with your fists has any relationship to your willingness to stand up for a cause. Some people are just more combative physically, but I don’t think that lends itself to a more adamant attitude in dealing with nonphysical issues.

TAE: Four consecutive Republican Presidents (Eisenhower, Nixon, you, and Reagan) played college football. Is this a mere coincidence?

FORD: The gridiron does not breed
Republican Presidents. The list is purely coincidental.

TAE: Your children never seem to be in any kind of public trouble. What are the key ingredients of being a good father?

FORD: I can’t claim any great credit because Betty was a superb mother. I was gone 200 nights a year when I was campaigning for our Republican candidates all over the country, and Betty was really not only a mother but a father.

On the other hand, when I was home, I made a major effort to develop a relationship with my children, and Betty and I always planned on a family vacation where we did things that the children enjoyed, like skiing, and we participated in.

TAE: Do you still ski?

FORD: I had to give skiing up six years ago because I had total knee-joint replacement. I skied 40 years, but my orthopedic surgeon, after fixing two knees with replacements, didn’t recommend I ski any more.

TAE: Why did you retire to Palm Springs rather than Grand Rapids or somewhere else in Michigan?

FORD:  While I was in Congress, Betty and I used to come out here during Easter vacation and spend a week with several couples from Southern California. So we made friends out here. And Betty has bad arthritis, which damp weather aggravates.

TAE: You are the last surviving member of the Warren Commission. Do you think that President Kennedy’s assassination might have been connected in any way with Castro or with Khrushchev?

FORD:  Absolutely not. Lee Harvey Oswald committed the assassination.

TAE: No foreign involvement or conspiracy, he acted alone?

FORD: Absolutely.

TAE: How would you like to be remembered in American history books?

FORD: I hope history will record that I became President in extremely challenging times, with most Americans disillusioned because of Watergate, the Vietnam War, and an economic recession, and that I restored public confidence and healed distrust of the nation’s leaders and their government.

Ford To City: Grow Up

Conventional wisdom has it that by pardoning Richard Nixon, President Ford sacrificed his re-election. A different act of presidential bravery, however, may have been even more consequential, both for the nation and for his political viability: namely, his refusal to bail out New York City. That inspired the notorious newspaper headline, “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.” Writing in the Almanac of American Politics at the time, Michael Barone judged that “Ford’s posture probably cost him New York’s 41 electoral votes—and the election.”

Today, Barone still thinks that judgment is right, and he adds that if Ford had given in to the city’s demands, “all the other big cities would have gone that route,” busting their budgets, defaulting on their bonds, and then relying on the federal government to bail them out. “The dream of 1965-75—that there was unlimited money and big cities had unlimited claims on the resources of the rest of the country—was stopped. Ford forced people to wake up from the dream.”

The drama began in early 1975, when lenders refused to buy any more of New York City’s bonds. It was becoming clear that the city’s spiraling budget deficits, and the borrowing needed to cover them, were spinning out of control.

In May, city officials asked Ford to make good their debt with federal monies. They were politely but firmly rebuffed. In his letter to New York Mayor Abe Beame, the President wrote:

I was deeply impressed with the problems you and the City Council must face in the next few weeks in meeting the financial problems of the great City of New York.... However, it was also clear that the City’s basic critical financial condition is not
new but has been a long time in the making without being squarely faced.

A federal bailout “would merely postpone...coming to grips with the problem,” the President concluded, adding:

Every family which makes up a budget has to make painful choices. As we make these choices at home, so must we also make them in public office too. We must stop promising more and more services without knowing how we will cover their costs.... In view of the foregoing...I must deny your request.

New York had an unrivalled proportion of its population on the public payroll, and it paid them lavishly. Congressional Quarterly documented that New York’s per capita expenditures in 1972-73 were far higher than any other major city—over four and a half times Chicago’s level, for instance. New York was paying its sanitation employees 50 percent more than Boston’s, double Newark’s, and four times New Orleans’.

Ford’s Treasury Secretary William Simon, who wrote the definitive history of this affair in his memoir A Time for Truth, explained that New York pols thought they had found “the political formula for permanent wealth: promise-borrow-spend, promise-borrow-spend.” The city’s “unpleasant little secret” was its “subsidies to the middle classes” (especially its municipal unions), which were “overwhelmingly greater than its subsidies to the poor.” When this scheme collapsed, New York politicians “howled with self-pity,” noted Simon.

Ford was pummeled by Democrats and the heavily New York-based media. New York Governor Carey accused the President of “kicking New York in the groin.” He warned of riots and demanded “federal funds or federal troops!” New York socialist Irving Howe fumed that Gerald Ford had launched an “assault on maintaining, let alone extending, the welfare state.” Ford’s response: Any bailout bill will be vetoed.

This finally forced New York to take drastic steps. City unions made serious concessions, government expenditures were cut, taxes were raised, and a plausible plan to bring the city’s budget into balance with-in two years was implemented. Applauding the way “New York has bailed itself out,” Ford agreed to support temporary federal loans, with stringent conditions and above-market interest rates, which helped the city meet its seasonal cash needs until its budget reached balance.

“If we had shown any give,” Ford later explained, New York would have dodged “the hard decisions” necessary. And he warned the country that “other cities, other states, as well as the federal government, are not immune to the insidious disease from which New York City is suffering.” It is “a progressive disease” that can bring “a day of reckoning” to any locale where government becomes grandiose.

While it badly hurt his political standing in New York, Ford’s demands for “fiscal responsibility” turned out to be popular with the rest of the country. Concern about profligacy in government began to gel nationally in the wake of the crisis, a backlash that bore political fruit a few years later. By holding firm even at the cost of losing re-election, President Ford thus set the stage for Ronald Reagan, Rudy Giuliani, and whatever hope America has for limited government in the future.

—SW