The Highest Calling, page 31
Although in office for just two years and five months, President Ford continued the tradition of presidents building their own presidential libraries, and he had a talented presidential scholar, Richard Norton Smith, run it for many years. After retiring from that position, Smith wrote a book about the man he had come to greatly admire. I had a chance to interview him about President Ford at a Congressional Dialogues session at the Library of Congress on September 12, 2023.
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DAVID M. RUBENSTEIN (DR): When did you work for Gerald Ford? During or after he was president?
RICHARD NORTON SMITH (RNS): After. I had been at the Reagan Library, and I went to the Ford Library in’95. I was there until 2001, but remained in his orbit. I wrote some speeches for President Ford. I also did some op-eds.
DR: What would you say is the single most interesting thing about Gerald Ford?
RNS: That he was a much more consequential president than we’ve been led to believe, or that I think he had been led to believe. He went to his grave believing that his historical obit would say that basically this was a president who tried to restore public confidence following in the wake of Watergate and Vietnam. And we think of him as putting out fires in Vietnam and the CIA.
What I discovered, somewhat to my own surprise, was that he planted a lot more seeds, transformational things. Economic deregulation began with Ford. The Helsinki Accords, which heralded the collapse of the Soviet Union, were Ford’s doing. Ford left behind a much richer legacy that we only can appreciate 30 or 40 years later.
DR: Lyndon Johnson famously said, when he was mad at Gerald Ford, that he played football without his helmet too many times, implying that Ford wasn’t that smart. Was Ford upset?
RNS: People have it backwards. The story isn’t what Johnson said, because Johnson said things like that about all of his friends. The story is, why did he say it? He said it because Gerald Ford, as the Republican leader of the House, had a unique capacity to get under Lyndon Johnson’s skin and make him say things that even he later regretted.
The last weekend of the Johnson presidency, LBJ calls Ford at home in Alexandria, invites him to the White House, and they have this amazing meeting. He says, “We’ve said some pretty rough things about each other, but I never questioned your integrity.” Ford said the same. And they left friends. When LBJ had his first heart attack in 1970, one of the first people he heard from was Gerald Ford. The Johnson family and the Ford family became very close.
DR: Where was Ford born?
RNS: Gerald Ford was born in Omaha, Nebraska. He was born Leslie King Jr. Leslie King Sr. was a scoundrel. When I looked at Gerald Ford’s baby book, there’s a very poignant entry, “Baby’s first automobile ride.” He was two weeks old. His father had walked into his wife’s bedroom with a butcher knife, threatening to kill mother and child. And baby’s first automobile ride was his mother sneaking out of the house and slipping across the Missouri River to the Iowa side to take a train for Chicago. Eventually, she moved to Grand Rapids. She met a man named Gerald Ford, who became Gerald Ford Sr.
DR: Did he ever meet his biological father?
RNS: He did, under bizarre circumstances. Ford was an adolescent, working the lunch beat at a hamburger joint to earn a little bit of cash. And then one day, out of the blue, this stranger walks in, and Ford noticed he was kind of eyeing him. After ten minutes or so, he walked up and he said, “You’re Leslie King.” He said, “No, I’m Gerald Ford.” He said, “No, you’re Leslie King. I’m your father.” That was his introduction. They went to lunch. He gave him $25 and disappeared. He saw him once more. He never paid the court-ordered child support payments. So the first thing Ford did when he became congressman was introduce legislation to federalize child support payments.
DR: Gerald Ford grew up in Grand Rapids, and was he a football star in high school?
RNS: Yes, he was a football star in high school. He was a football star at the University of Michigan. It was football that paid his way. In the Great Depression, they had no money, and there were no scholarships. Football scholarships were unheard of.
DR: So how did it pay his way?
RNS: He got a job waiting on tables in the nurses’ dining room and as a dishwasher. He said later on he was probably the only American president who suffered simultaneously from football knee and dishpan hands.
DR: They won a national championship twice at the University of Michigan when he was playing there. Was he good enough to play in the pros?
RNS: He was approached by the Detroit Lions, the Green Bay Packers, and the Chicago Bears. But he already knew he wanted to be a lawyer. I think he knew he wanted to be a politician. So he went to Yale as an assistant football coach who also took a full-time course of law school classes.
DR: While he’s at Yale Law School he leads an America First group. What was that?
RNS: The term “America First” meant something different in 1940 than it does today. The post–World War I generation was disillusioned by the promises made, and also by seeing Europe heading down the road to another war. So it stood for isolationism against American entry into World War II. Young John F. Kennedy, young Gore Vidal, not so young Walt Disney, Frank Lloyd Wright—they all joined this organization that started at Yale Law School.
In the summer of 1940, Ford discovered something he liked better than America First. It was Wendell Willkie, the Republican candidate running against FDR, who stood for joining the fight against fascism. Ford was in Philadelphia, in the convention hall crowd, shouting, “We want Willkie, we want Willkie.” And needless to say, Wendell Willkie was not an American Firster. Ford resigned from America First. Unfortunately for him, in 1941, when he applied to be an FBI agent, he was personally blackballed by J. Edgar Hoover, who had discovered this connection. And I think Ford went to his grave not knowing the reason for his FBI rejection.
DR: In 1941, Pearl Harbor happens. Did Gerald Ford decide to enlist?
RNS: Yes. He signed up, and the first year he spent back at the University of North Carolina. The Air Force had a training program. They hired a lot of football players, a lot of jocks, to get future pilots into shape. Ford did that for a year. He wanted to get in on the action. So he wrote Arthur Vandenberg, who was his hometown U.S. senator and his political role model in many ways, and he pulled every string he could to get into the war. And he did. He was on the Monterey, an improvised quasi–aircraft carrier in the Pacific.
DR: He served from 1944 or so.
RNS: Yes. The worst part of the war for them was the great typhoon in December of 1944. The Monterey almost capsized. Nearby ships did capsize. Ford was up on the bridge. The ship was on fire. Two of the engines were out. And somehow they managed to bring it through.
DR: Richard Nixon, John Kennedy, and Gerald Ford all come back from the war and run for Congress. Why?
RNS: Ford ran for Congress in 1948 as an internationalist. He ran against an entrenched mossback Republican incumbent who was a fervent isolationist, and he beat him. And he won in the fall. He never had any trouble getting reelected.
DR: Was he a moderate, or conservative, or liberal?
RNS: He was elected with the endorsement of the United Auto Workers. What does that tell you? He was an unconventional Republican. His next-door neighbor in the House office building was John F. Kennedy. They used to ride the House subway together. Usually their votes canceled each other out on domestic policy, but not foreign policy.
DR: At one point Ford decided to take on the House Republican leadership. How did he get enough support to beat Charlie Halleck, who was the incumbent Republican leader?
RNS: Five years into his congressional tenure, Ford had been put on the supersecret, supersensitive Intelligence Oversight Committee, with five members—four old boys and one promising up-and-coming member. No staff, no notes. And he demonstrated his talent for discretion. That’s why he was also on the Warren Commission—his ability to keep secrets. The proverbial workhorse. And so in 1964 comes the Goldwater debacle. Ford was able to keep his distance because of his work on the Warren Commission. In the wake of that election, Republicans, younger Republicans especially, and newly elected Republicans, many of them Southerners, said, “We need a new face. Everett Dirksen is great, but he’s old and he hogged the stage. And Charlie Halleck is not a television figure.” Ford took on Halleck, again an insurgency. He won by four votes. The four votes were supplied by Bob Dole’s Kansas delegation. I always said he returned the favor a dozen years later with somewhat higher stakes. (Ford picked Dole as his running mate in 1976.)
DR: So he becomes the House minority leader. But his real goal was to be Speaker of the House, but in those days, in the 1970s, the House didn’t look like it was going to go Republican. So he tells his wife, “I think I’m going to retire in 1976.”
RNS: He tells his wife, “I’ll be 63 in 1976. Young enough to have another career.” He felt guilt, I think, over those years when he was on the road 200 nights a year, fundraising for other candidates and basically trying to become Speaker.
DR: So he realizes he’s not going to be Speaker. Then Spiro Agnew was forced to resign, and Nixon, under the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, now has a chance to pick a new person to be vice president of the United States. Why does he pick Ford?
RNS: Ford knew about Agnew’s problem six months before he ever acknowledged it, and he was interested in replacing Agnew. One of the things you’ve got to remember about good old Jerry is that he was a lot more ambitious than he let on. Nixon wanted John Connolly, a swaggering Texan who had a larger-than-life self-confidence that Nixon envied. The problem was that, among other things, Connolly had switched parties and the Democrats had hefty majorities on Capitol Hill in those days. There was no way that they were going to confirm John Connolly.
The one person who enjoyed bipartisan support was Ford, and in the end you could say it was Democrats in Congress who made Gerald Ford vice president. Nixon described Ford to someone at that time as an honest Truman. I don’t think he meant it as a compliment.
DR: But is it true that Nixon said at the time, “If I pick Ford, that’s my insurance policy. Nobody will ever get rid of me because they wouldn’t want Ford to be president”?
RNS: Which is only the latest example of terrible judgment on Nixon’s part throughout Watergate. Every mistake that could be made, he made. The people who had the highest opinion of Gerald Ford were the people who worked with him, who knew him the best. And Nixon had lost touch with those people.
DR: Under the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, you have to be confirmed by both the House and the Senate. And Ford did pretty well. He got only three votes against him in the Senate and perhaps 35 in the House. So he was overwhelmingly confirmed and gets the job. Does he expect that he’s going to be president, though?
RNS: No, here’s the irony. Eight days after Ford’s nomination is announced comes the Saturday Night Massacre, in which Attorney General Elliot Richardson and his deputy quit rather than fire the Watergate special prosecutor. Overnight Ford’s position is transformed. Instead of a caretaker to fill out Agnew’s term, Congress is looking at a potential president.
DR: When the existence of the Nixon White House tapes is revealed, the Supreme Court says they have to be handed over to Congress. They contain the so-called smoking-gun evidence of Nixon’s involvement in the cover-up of Watergate. Al Haig, then the chief of staff, says “Gerald Ford, you should get ready to maybe become president.” That’s around August of’74.
RNS: Haig had a strategy. I believe Al Haig had decided Nixon had to go, but he had to go in such a way that it did not further polarize the country. So Haig wanted to enlist people that Nixon would listen to, beginning with his vice president. And that’s what Haig had in mind on August 1st, when he went over to see Ford to tell him about the smoking-gun tape and—oh, by the way—raised the option of a presidential pardon.
DR: And what did Ford say about a presidential pardon?
RNS: Ford primarily is trying to digest the fact that he’d been denying for a year—that he was going to be president. As far as everything else, it’s typical Ford. He said, “You’re going to have to give me time to think about this. I’m going to have to talk it over with Betty.” And he said, “I also want to talk to Jim St. Clair,” who was Nixon’s White House lawyer. Mrs. Ford said Jerry came home that night and said Al Haig had offered him a deal, and she said, “You know you can’t do that.” And he said, “I know I can’t.” Before he went to bed that night, he called Haig and said, “That conversation we had this afternoon, no agreements, no deals.” Haig was sufficiently frazzled that he called Fred Buzhardt, the man who drew up the option list including the pardon, at 2:30 in the morning and said, “What the hell have you done to me?”
DR: Did he ever regret doing the pardon?
RNS: No.
DR: Later he carried around a piece of paper that says a getting pardon means that you are admitting you’ve made a mistake.
RNS: It was a legalistic explanation from a 1914 Supreme Court case, which established the principle that if you accept the pardon, it is tantamount to acknowledging guilt.
DR: Ford becomes president in August of’74, and he has a famous line, “Our long national nightmare is over.” Who wrote that line?
RNS: Publicly, the speechwriter Bob Hartman. What I discovered in another oral history that had not been opened previously was that there was another speechwriter named Milton Friedman, not to be confused with the economist. He wrote the line.
DR: Ford becomes president. Does he want to keep Al Haig as chief of staff?
RNS: No. But you couldn’t appoint Al Haig to anything that required congressional confirmation. So Ford found him the perfect job as the military head of NATO.
DR: Who does he make his chief of staff?
RNS: He brings in Don Rumsfeld, who was his campaign manager in the campaign against Charlie Halleck back in 1965. Rumsfeld made it very clear, when we talked to him, that he was more conservative than Ford. He thought Nelson Rockefeller was the wrong pick for vice president. He thought that Henry Kissinger shouldn’t be given carte blanche.
DR: Henry Kissinger was operating then as national security advisor and secretary of state.
RNS: Which Ford thought was a mistake from day one, and eventually he took Kissinger’s national security hat away from him.
DR: Did he sit down with Kissinger and say, “Henry, you’ve got to give up one job”?
RNS: No. Jim Schlesinger was his secretary of defense and Ford said later on—I heard him say this—that Schlesinger thought Ford was a dummy. Schlesinger, like Henry Kissinger, went to Harvard, was an academic star, brilliant. The difference is that Kissinger was the consummate courtier—kiss up, kick down. Schlesinger treated everyone the same. And that included the president of the United States. Ford got sick of it and fired him, replacing him with Donald Rumsfeld. At the same time, he took Kissinger’s second hat away and he made Brent Scowcroft national security advisor. Most people would think that’s one of the premier foreign policy teams.
DR: Who became chief of staff after Rumsfeld?
RNS: Rumsfeld’s assistant, a 34-year-old named Dick Cheney. The youngest chief of staff in White House history.
DR: Does Ford immediately say, “I really like this job. I want to run for president”?
RNS: It took him a couple of months. Originally, he thought he would not run. It’s easy to think of all the burdens that he brought into the office, but he thought how liberated he was. He had never run for the office. He made no promises, no commitments. He thought—he was naïve in so thinking—that we could put Watergate behind us, and then move on and address big issues.
DR: Let’s talk about some of the issues. The economy, as you pointed out, was terrible, with high inflation and low growth. They came up with a strategy called WIN—Whip Inflation Now. What was that?
RNS: That came out of the speechwriter shop. It was terrible PR. This is in the shakedown phase of Ford’s presidency. He was still thinking like a congressman with a constituency that you could address in a day. To succeed, Ford had to learn to be an executive.
DR: Under Ford, we pulled out of Vietnam. But we still have these images of the helicopter going off the roof of the embassy. Did Ford recognize he made a mistake in the exit?
RNS: Talk about a thankless position to be in. They had to pretend for the last couple of weeks that they weren’t pulling out. There was a big debate going on between Schlesinger and Kissinger about when and how openly to pull out. The concern was that if you were open about it, you could start rioting, and the remaining Americans could be in physical danger. So you had that balancing act. There was not supposed to be a helicopter evacuation. The airfield was being shelled, so they had to go to plan B, which involved helicopters instead of fixed-wing aircraft. It was supposed to be a three-hour operation. It took 18 hours.
But here’s the sequel. Two days after Saigon fell, Ron Nessen, the press secretary, came in with a report off the wire services. Congress had pulled the plug on resettlement money for Vietnamese refugees. Nessen said it’s the only time he ever heard Ford swear. He was livid. He said, “We didn’t do it after the Hungarian Revolution. We certainly didn’t do it with the Cubans. And we’re not going to do it with the Vietnamese.” It was the one instance in his presidency where he really effectively used the bully pulpit. He went to the country. He put together this crazy-quilt coalition. The American Jewish Congress. Pope Paul weighed in. The World Council of Churches. A number of Democratic state governors. They pressured Congress to change its mind, and 120,000 Vietnamese were brought over to the U.S. That I think is his finest hour as president.
