Gerald Ford and the Challenges of the 1970s

Gerald Ford

and the Challenges

of the 1970s

Gerald Ford

and the

Challenges

of the

1970s

YANEK MIECZKOWSKI

Publication of this volume was made possible in part

by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Copyright © 2005 by The University Press of Kentucky

Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth,

serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre

College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University,

The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College,

Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University,

Morehead State University, Murray State University,

Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University,

University of Kentucky, University of Louisville,

and Western Kentucky University.

All rights reserved.

Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky

663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008

www.kentuckypress.com

All photographs are courtesy of the Gerald R. Ford Library,

unless otherwise specified.

09  08  07  06  05       5  4  3  2  1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mieczkowski, Yanek.

  Gerald Ford and the challenges of the 1970s / Yanek Mieczkowski.

      p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 0-8131-2349-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)

 1. Ford, Gerald R., 1913- 2. Presidents--United States--Biography. 3. United States--Politics and government--1974-1977. 4. United States--Economic conditions--1971-1981. 5. United States--Social conditions--1960-1980. I. Title.

  E866.M54 2005

  973.925'092--dc22                                                 2004026890

This book is printed on acid-free recycled paper meeting

the requirements of the American National Standard

for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

To my parents,

Dr. Bogdan and Seiko Mieczkowski

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part One: The Leadership Challenge

1. Hungering for Heroes

2. The Congenial Presidency

3. Gerald Ford and the Ninety-fourth Congress

4. Ford’s Vision for America

Part Two: The Economic Challenge

5. The Great Inflation of the 1970s

6. Taking Aim at Inflation

7. Teetering on a Knife’s Edge

8. Rallying the Nation to Fight Inflation

9. The Great Recession of the 1970s

10. Ford’s 1975 State of the Union Program

11. Economic Initiatives, 1975–76

Part Three: The Energy Challenge

12. The Energy Crisis of the 1970s

13. A New Energy Program

14. The Energy Stalemate

15. Breaking the Energy Logjam

Part Four: Diplomatic and Political Challenges

16. Gerald Ford’s Internationalism

17. Thunder from the Right

18. Back from the Brink

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations follow page 228

Acknowledgments

This work began in a grape vineyard overlooking Seneca Lake in Central New York. While attending graduate school in Manhattan, I returned to my hometown, Ithaca, for an early autumn weekend, along with a classmate, Mike Green. I was planning to begin my doctoral dissertation, and I knew that I wanted to study Gerald Ford’s presidency. Ford, I felt, was a thoughtful and steady leader who had never received enough credit for his stewardship—especially in economic matters—during difficult years in our country’s history. People familiar with the Finger Lakes region know that its beauty can act as a tonic, and it did for me that weekend. As Mike and I discussed Ford’s presidency—picking Niagara, Concord, and Catawba grapes, of all things—I felt a work begin to crystallize in my mind.

Over the next few years, my dissertation adviser, Alan Brinkley, gave me enormous encouragement and guidance, helping to shape the thesis into a study of not only Ford’s presidency but America in the 1970s. The other members of my dissertation committee, David Farber, Joshua Freeman, Robert Shapiro, and James Shenton, gave valuable advice to prepare the work for publication. David Farber expressed interest in this project from the start, and three other graduate school professors, Mark Carnes, John Garraty, and Alden Vaughan, greatly influenced my training as a researcher and writer, as did several classmates, including Ed O’Donnell of Holy Cross College.

The Gerald R. Ford Foundation awarded a generous grant to conduct research at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I have made numerous trips there and found the staff peerless in efficiency and helpfulness. Supervisory archivist David Horrocks has been wonderfully supportive; Geir Gundersen answered many questions by telephone and e-mail over the years; audio-visual archivist Kenneth Hafeli fulfilled numerous video requests and gave generous assistance in selecting photographs for the picture section. I want to thank all other staff members as well: Director Dennis Daellenbach, Stacy Davis, Donna Lehman, William McNitt, Nancy Mirshah, Helmi Raaska, recent retirees Dick and Karen Holtzhausen, and archives technicians Brooke Clement and Joshua Cochran. Donald Holloway of the Gerald R. Ford Museum in Grand Rapids proofread the manuscript and gave me access to museum holdings in storage, and Jamie Draper helped me to assemble them for photographs. Jennifer Sternaman, now at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, was very helpful during my early years of research at the Ford Library.

I got to know many libraries well while researching this book. I want to pay homage to the libraries and librarians of Dowling College, Ithaca College, Columbia University, and Brevard Community College at Cocoa. Especially helpful have been those institutions that keep paper volumes of older periodicals; digging up 1970s articles on paper was much easier than on microfilm, and the portraits of this nation and individual Americans in the pages that follow came in part from my poring over the bound paper collections of a few libraries.

A number of institutions offered financial assistance to mine their archival collections. I received grants from the Lilly Library of Indiana University at Bloomington, the Rockefeller Archive Center of Sleepy Hollow, New York, and the Carl Albert Congressional Research and Studies Center at the University of Oklahoma, where archivist Todd Kosmerick gave great assistance. Diane Windham Shaw of the David Bishop Skillman Library at Lafayette College helped me considerably during visits to review the William Simon papers.

Faculty, staff, and administration colleagues at Dowling College have been extraordinarily supportive, and the college’s Long Range Planning and Development Committee has facilitated my research by granting course releases, for which I am deeply grateful. During the spring 2003 semester, I assigned an earlier draft of this work to my America in the 1970s class at Dowling. The students were very encouraging, and their reactions and insights informed my thinking not only on the Ford presidency but the entire decade. During 2003–2004, I was lucky to have two Dowling students working as research assistants, John Conroy and Darren Large, who helped to transcribe the interviews that I conducted from 2002–2004.

I owe a huge debt of gratitude to members of Gerald Ford’s administration and the Ninety-forth Congress who granted interviews and patiently answered questions that probed their memories of decades-old events and emotions. A number of Ford administration and congressional alumni proofread chapters, offering valuable comments, and gave me access to their personal papers. I would like to thank Roy Ash, Charles Curtis, Barber Conable, Max Friedersdorf, John Hill, Russell Freeburg, Ken Glozer, Paul MacAvoy, Ron Nessen, Robert Nordhaus, L. William Seidman, Paul and Nancy Theis, and Frank Zarb. Charles DiBona and William Johnson, energy advisors during the Nixon administration, spent considerable time in explaining the origins of the energy crisis, giving me a wealth of recollections as well as books and articles. I owe special thanks to James Lynn and Glenn Schleede, who proofread chapters and, more than that, have been wonderful friends, directing me to colleagues and showing a patience and generosity for which I am profoundly grateful.

President Ford has been more than a good sport as I researched and wrote this work; he has lived up to his reputation as one of the most open and accessible of modern presidents. Few works have benefited from as much cooperation from a former president as this one, as President Ford hosted me at his California and Colorado homes to answer many questions and explain the decisions that he made while he led the country. I would also like to thank Chief of Staff Penny Circle and Judi Risk for arranging my interviews with President Ford and making me feel welcome whenever I visited.

Although no longer with the University Press of Kentucky, John Ziegler made it clear that he wanted me to publish with them from the moment I approached. My editors, Gena Henry and Nichole Lainhart, were excellent: always kind and helpful, they accommodated many last-minute changes and guided this project to completion. Freelance copyeditor Bob Burchfield and freelance proofreader Bethany Easter made numerous insightful comments and corrections that improved the book. Rick Perlstein read the manuscript thoroughly—twice, in fact—and made valuable recommendations for improvement, which led me to write new chapters. I greatly appreciate his encouragement and shrewd judgment.

Mike Green, who teaches at the Community College of Southern Nevada, has done marvelous work as a proofreader, tightening prose, pointing out errors, and showing unstinting generosity with his time and ideas. In countless ways, this work has benefited from Mike’s insights and immense knowledge of history.

The deepest debt I owe is to my parents, Bogdan and Seiko Mieczkowski. I wrote the manuscript at their home in Ithaca and continued to revise the manuscript during extended visits with them. Dedicated professors and scholars, they proofread, directed me to sources, and had long conversations with me about the topics that this book comprises. As always, they have my greatest admiration and appreciation.

Introduction

Presidential Leadership

in Post-Watergate America

What do you think is the most important problem facing this country today?

Think about it for a minute. Pollsters have posed this question to Americans throughout the post–World War II era. In the summer of 1974, shortly before Gerald Ford became president, three issues stood out. Respondents overwhelmingly ranked the high cost of living as their chief worry. Then came a pair of concerns associated with the Watergate scandal, lack of trust in government and corruption in government. Third came the nation’s energy crisis.¹

Gerald Ford saw these problems as the greatest of his presidency. In July 1975, after almost a year as chief executive, he sat in the Oval Office as New York Times reporters interviewed him. They asked him what goals he had set for his administration and how he had fared in accomplishing them. He cited three: reducing inflation and unemployment, restoring public confidence in the White House after Watergate, and redressing the country’s energy vulnerability. These challenges became themes of the Ford presidency and the 1970s, and he believed that he had taken the right steps toward solving them.²

These responses, from Americans and their president, typified the decade. Today, if you ask people about the 1970s, you might hear something about disco, pet rocks, or polyester. But these fads were more blips on the cultural radar screen than true national concerns. Instead, inflation dominated Americans’ thoughts like few phenomena did during the post–World War II era. Energy shortages also haunted daily life for most of the decade. Americans viewed a national energy policy as a higher priority than national health insurance or public job programs. By May 1979, 57 percent of respondents still considered inflation the nation’s most important problem, and 33 percent picked the energy crisis.³ The economy and energy were such important concerns that, in negotiating presidential debates during the 1976 campaign, some of Ford’s advisers pressed for one debate devoted exclusively to these two matters. Ultimately, trust in public leaders, another critical issue of the era, helped to determine that election’s outcome. The integrity of public officials continued to be a driving force in politics for the rest of the decade (and into the 1980s, when character issues torpedoed Ronald Reagan’s 1987 nomination of Douglas Ginsburg to the Supreme Court and Senator Gary Hart’s 1988 campaign for the presidency).⁴ Two of these defining issues were inextricably linked, because high energy prices fueled inflation. In early 1975, Ford’s principal economic adviser, Alan Greenspan, surveyed how much the economy had changed since the 1960s and concluded that the immediate problem is oil.⁵ Richard Nixon’s presidency bequeathed all three issues to Ford in far worse condition than when Nixon took office.

These concerns were striking for another reason. Almost never surfacing during previous cold war decades, they uniquely defined the 1970s. In the 1950s and early 1960s, Americans generally trusted their leaders. They considered their presidents trustworthy men who skillfully managed the economy and protected their national security, which oil embargoes never threatened. Aided by low energy prices, the economy hummed along so well during these decades that Americans took its health for granted. With domestic issues under control, they scoped out the world. International issues—the containment of communism, the Korean and Vietnam wars, the arms race—dominated the nation’s agenda before the 1970s. Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy devoted their inaugural addresses almost entirely to foreign affairs, and a 1964 survey showed that the top five issues on Americans’ list of concerns were all foreign policy issues.⁶

What a difference a decade made. During the 1970s, Americans looked inward. This domestic focus—especially on the three overriding challenges that Ford confronted—helped to define the decade and distinguish it from the previous two decades. Gone was the buoyant optimism of before, when Americans enjoyed prosperity without galloping prices, contained communism abroad, and even landed men on the moon. In part, the reversal of fortune was prompted by the Vietnam War, which ate away at Americans’ trust in their leaders, increased budget deficits and economic instability, and made Americans question whether the country should lead the free world so actively. By 1973, fewer young men described themselves as willing to go to war to defend America’s interests or maintain its world power.⁷ A neo-isolationist mood gripped the country, and it tightened as the economy deteriorated and Americans encountered difficulty in finding fuel to run their cars and heat their homes.⁸ Then came Watergate and Nixon’s resignation, and the country felt shattered.

These untoward circumstances help to explain a sentence on a display at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan: Gerald Ford may have been among the unluckiest presidents of the 20th century. The nation’s only unelected president, he came to the Oval Office during a constitutional crisis, without a mandate, and amid horrendous economic conditions. The country suffered double-digit inflation and soon fell into a deep recession. Preoccupation with domestic issues reduced the presidential authority of previous post–World War II decades, because in foreign policy presidents carried the greatest prestige and enjoyed a rally-around-the-flag effect. With domestic problems, Americans voiced more dissenting views. To make matters worse, Americans were cynical after Watergate, yet Ford had to summon their support while negotiating with aggressive opposition in Congress. The treacherous political environment was one of the worst that any chief executive has ever faced. How Ford addressed these challenges furnishes a compelling story of presidential leadership.

Cleaning Up Messes

Watergate and the credibility gap left from previous presidential administrations presented a personally demanding challenge to Ford. Although Watergate was shocking, Americans had been losing confidence in government for several years. They had grown frustrated, even frightened by the social conflicts of the 1960s, which the government failed to quell and, indeed, even contributed to, as Lyndon Johnson’s and Richard Nixon’s deceptive conduct of the Vietnam War generated deep mistrust of the presidency.

Nixon’s behavior, especially in his second term, further crippled public trust. Nixon concentrated power in his office and blocked access to himself, nearly shutting down the lines of communication between the White House and Congress. Nixon never got along with the Democratic Congress; he never really intended to, and he ignored constitutional limits on presidential power. Trust in the presidency plummeted when Nixon resigned from office in disgrace. William Hungate, a Democratic congressman from Missouri who had decided on a career in government service after returning from World War II, opted to retire in 1975. His passion for the job had burned out, and he felt disappointed by the distrust and disillusionment toward politicians: Politics has gone from an age of ‘Camelot’ when all things were possible to the age of ‘Watergate’ when all things are suspect.⁹

The constitutional crisis coincided with economic decline. Since the end of World War II, most Americans had known prosperity. The U.S. economy was the most powerful in the world, enabling millions to experience rising standards of living, low inflation, and low unemployment. Economic expansion seemed limitless; indeed, the liberal tenets that dominated American political thought during the 1960s preached the belief that this growth would continue unabated. Government planners were primarily concerned with ensuring full employment; inflation was of secondary importance.¹⁰

Yet by the late 1960s, the post–World War II economic boom slowed down; by the 1970s, it had ended. Labor productivity slumped after the late 1960s, and manufacturing employed a declining share of workers, reflecting deindustrialization. The country’s share in world markets slipped, especially in mainstay industries like automobiles and steel. In 1951, the sixteen leading industrial nations of the world did 30 percent of their business with the United States; by 1971, the United States accounted for 18 percent of their world trade.¹¹ Other parts of the world, like Japan and Western Europe, competed successfully with the United States for slices of the world market. Americans could see signs of this change in their streets, as peppy, fuel-thrifty imported cars began to outsell clunky American models.

The worst sign of economic decline was inflation. Averaging only 1.6 percent annually between 1948 and 1965, inflation increased steadily and topped 12 percent in 1974.¹² Americans wondered if high inflation would stay forever. And again, the federal government failed. Nixon’s policies, such as wage and price controls, were feckless, even counterproductive, and by 1973 he was too embroiled in the Watergate scandal to pay enough attention to the economy. Compounding the inflation, economic growth became sluggish and unemployment relatively high. This combination of high inflation laced with anemic economic performance marked a bewildering phenomenon, stagflation. Ford saw the worst of it. When he took office, inflation was over 12 percent; just a few months later, the picture was entirely different. As Ford recalled, By early December [1974], our economy was having a tremendous change. We went from inflationary problems to unemployment problems. And by January of 1975, we were in the worst post–World War II economic recession. . . . And the net result was, instead of fighting inflation, we were fighting a recession.¹³

A major contributor to the economic downturn was the energy crisis. U.S. oil consumption had increased dramatically in the post–World War II years, rising from 6.5 million barrels a day in 1950 to 13.9 million barrels in 1970.¹⁴ Meanwhile, domestic oil production peaked in 1970, then began to decline, and the United States relied increasingly on imported oil, so that by the 1970s the United States imported one-third of its oil. The government adopted disastrous policies that reduced the country’s oil supplies, setting the stage for a devastating display of American vulnerability during the Arab oil embargo of 1973–74, which some observers called an economic Pearl Harbor. That winter the country suffered fuel shortages, long lines at gas stations, and frayed tempers. Americans chastised themselves for a gluttonous appetite for energy. Ominously, they believed assessments like that from economist Walter Heller, who stated that the era of cheap oil and gasoline is rapidly slipping into history, never to return.¹⁵

The challenges of the 1970s were disorienting. Americans had never experienced such domestic problems in the post–World War II era. The president of Ohio State University, Harold Enarson, worried about declining confidence and faith. The energy shortage is the least important of the shortages in our life, he said. The American society is now short of those attributes that, mattering the most, undergird all else: integrity, high purpose, confidence in one another, faith in a brighter future.¹⁶

Many cultural phenomena of the 1970s owed their popularity to the troubled times, as Americans needed some way to escape or soften the difficult reality of life. The popular music of the decade was more mellow and lighthearted than that of the 1960s, typified by recording artists such as the Captain and Tennille, the Carpenters, Barry Manilow, and Neil Sedaka. The top-rated television program of the mid-1970s was ABC’s Happy Days comedy, set in 1950s Milwaukee. The popularity of the series, its Laverne and Shirley spin-off, director George Lucas’s motion picture American Graffiti (1973), and the Broadway musical Grease showed a nostalgia for the 1950s, a prosperous decade and a more innocent, tranquil time before the turmoil of Vietnam and Watergate.¹⁷

Some cultural commentators have explained the success of the 1970s’ highest grossing film, Star Wars (1977), by describing it as an antidote to the national malaise. With the country buffeted by forces that seemed evil, Star Wars offered an escapist reaffirmation of the nation’s virtues. Americans wanted their country once again to have the determination and force of Jedi knight Luke Skywalker, battling the evil Darth Vader. Los Angeles Times writer Eric Harrison observed, "America was tired of complications in 1977 when the first Star Wars was released. Vietnam, Watergate, and social unrest had rattled our brains. The oil embargo showed us how weak we had become. We’d lost our sense of who we were. George Lucas reminded us."¹⁸

Perhaps Lucas could inspire Americans, but could a president? Gerald Ford took office under extraordinary circumstances. He had to lead a country whose morale had been battered by rude shocks—assassinations, social unrest and fragmentation, the Vietnam War, Watergate, the energy crisis, stagflation, and runaway government spending. Ford navigated the country through uncharted waters and could not repair to any tested, proven doctrines.¹⁹ No president ever had to confront simultaneously what Ford called the three domestic devils—inflation, recession, and the energy crisis. Any one of the devils, by itself, would have been trouble enough. Coming together, they constituted a tangled skein, each related to the other yet requiring separate attention and treatment.²⁰

Making Ford’s challenges particularly significant, the political and economic landscape shifted under his feet. By the 1970s, Keynesian economic orthodoxy, which government fiscal planners had practiced almost religiously for decades, crumbled under the weight of stagflation and uncontrollable government spending and deficits. Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Paul Samuelson’s economics textbook, standard college reading for much of the post–World War II era, claimed, Economic science knows how to use monetary and fiscal policy to keep any recessions that break out from snowballing into lasting chronic slumps.²¹ But in 1974, the country slipped into a recession so deep that some Americans feared it would deteriorate into a depression.

The debate over how best to deal with these problems was divided into two camps, separated by just one mile in Washington. Capitol Hill, which Democrats had controlled since 1955, squared off against the White House, which Republicans had occupied since 1969. As Ford raced to develop programs to deal with the nation’s challenges, the debate sharpened. In explaining what had gone wrong with the economy, the fiscally conservative Ford blamed excessive government activity and federal deficits. On Capitol Hill, the Democratic Congress sought to ameliorate joblessness through government assistance programs, which Ford targeted for reduction.

Ford’s struggles were difficult not just because of the nature of the crises. He operated against an environment that resisted his policies. The public and the press had entered an era of diminishing trust and confidence in government leaders. The media, Congress, and even the right wing of Ford’s own party challenged his authority and never accepted his approach to the country’s problems. In addition, Ford had difficulty in making his ideas attractive and inspiring. He could not convince Americans of the logic of his ideas, the economic achievements of his administration, or the importance of his goals.

Although criticized for lacking visionary leadership, Ford had clear priorities and a guiding philosophy. His first objective involved calming the country and repairing relations between the White House and Capitol Hill. But Ford also focused on economic objectives, such as lowering federal expenditures and the deficit to contain his cardinal foe, inflation. He also had to reassure America’s allies that the country remained an active world player, recent setbacks notwithstanding, and he had to revitalize a Republican Party so fragmented and weak that it bore the stench of death.

Ford’s press secretary, Ron Nessen, reflected that Ford’s role in history was to clean up other people’s messes. In a coarse metaphor, Nessen recounted an incident during one Christmas with the First Family in Vail, Colorado. A family dog had an accident on the floor, and when a White House steward went to scoop up the mess, Ford rose from the family dinner table and cleaned it himself. No man should have to clean up after another man’s dog, he told the steward. On a national level, Nessen thought that the messes [Ford] inherited included: the shattered faith of the people in their president as a result of Watergate . . . [and] a sick economy ready to plunge precipitously because of mismanagement by earlier presidents and Congresses.²² This work will examine how Ford fared in cleaning up the messes of the 1970s.

At the time, the view of Ford’s performance was unkind. Liberal reporters pummeled him, his public approval ratings were stuck below 50 percent, and he lost the 1976 election. The view has begun to change. Two decades after Ford left office, against the backdrop of the scandal-tainted presidency of Bill Clinton, pundits reevaluated their harsh assessments of Ford. In 1996, journalist Richard Reeves, whose scathing 1975 book A Ford Not a Lincoln inflamed negative perceptions of Ford, offered an unusual mea culpa. In an article entitled I’m Sorry, Mr. President, Reeves admitted that he had been needlessly cruel toward Ford, who had done a much better job than I had predicted or imagined. Reeves acknowledged that Ford generated trust while in office and checked or slowed the slide toward today’s foul public cynicism.²³ In a similar vein, after Ford suffered a small stroke at the 2000 Republican National Convention, Anthony Lewis of the New York Times wrote, One of my greatest regrets as a newspaper columnist is how I underrated Gerald Ford when he was in the White House. It is time, past time, to say what a model of decency and respect for the law he has been.²⁴ As this book will illustrate, the new appreciation for Ford has considerable merit.

Who Was Gerald Ford?

Susan Ford was happy. The sixteen-year-old daughter of House minority leader Gerald Ford had just won a $5 bet with her mother. Susan had wagered that President Nixon would pick her father to be the next vice president, to succeed Spiro Agnew. Nixon loved pulling surprises, so he kept his choice confidential, and speculation ran rampant throughout the nation’s capital. Thinking the president might be calling them, many Republican politicians in Washington stood by their telephones the evening Nixon was to notify his nominee. Congressman Ford just finished swimming laps in his pool when the phone rang. Susan answered it and yelled, Dad, the White House is calling. In a private Oval Office meeting earlier that day, Nixon had informed Ford that he would be the vice-presidential nominee but asked him to keep that information secret, not even telling his family. Now, Nixon telephoned to make it official, and congratulatory calls flooded the Ford house. At one point, when a well-wisher called, Susan was on one telephone line, telling her friends the exciting news. Tell her to get off the phone, her father said. He thought for a moment and added, Tell her the Vice President told her to get off. That’s the only way to impress a teenager.²⁵

From that evening in October 1973, the Fords’ lives changed quickly and dramatically. Their quiet Virginia home became the center of activity and media attention. The garage was transformed into a Secret Service command center, staffed twenty-four hours a day, and the driveway had to be ripped up and rebuilt with reinforced concrete to withstand the weight of armored limousines.²⁶ That was just the beginning. In accepting the vice presidency, Ford assumed that he would merely serve out the balance of Agnew’s term. Instead, his appointment as vice president sent him on a trajectory that, within less than a year, landed him in the presidency.

The man charged with leading the country through the challenges of the 1970s was described by admirers and detractors alike as an ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances.²⁷ Gerald Rudolph Ford Jr. came from humble beginnings. He was born Leslie Lynch King Jr. on July 14, 1913, in Omaha, Nebraska, and his parents divorced when he was two years old. He was raised in Grand Rapids, Michigan, his mother’s hometown. There his mother remarried, and the young boy was renamed after his stepfather, Gerald R. Ford Sr. Jerry Ford was later compared to the furniture produced in that city—solid and plain, possessed of the virtues of middle America.²⁸ At Grand Rapids’s South High School, Ford was a serious student who concentrated on his studies, part-time work, and football. The young Ford was a star football center, played basketball, and ran track. His parents, with four children to raise, were always pressed for money and wanted the gifted athlete to take part-time jobs while he was in school, so Ford mowed lawns and grilled hamburgers at a restaurant across the street from his high school.

After high school, Ford attended the University of Michigan, where he pursued his passion for football, playing for two national championship teams and named the team’s most valuable player his senior year in addition to All–Big Ten honors. In 1935, he graduated in the top 25 percent of his class, majoring in economics. Passing up offers to play professional football with the Detroit Lions and the Green Bay Packers, Ford set his sights on law school. He took a position as an assistant football coach at Yale University and, by his second year, grew determined to enroll in the law school. But the faculty was dubious: here was a former college athlete, now a coach, who wanted a place in a law school where more than two-thirds of the students had achieved Phi Beta Kappa status as undergrads. Ford persuaded the law school faculty to allow him to take courses part-time, and he performed well enough to be admitted as a fully matriculated student. While working full-time as a coach, Ford earned his law degree, graduating in 1941 in the top quarter of a class that included such talents as future secretary of state Cyrus Vance, future Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart, future Pennsylvania governor William Scranton, and future Peace Corps director Sargent Shriver. Returning to Grand Rapids, Ford started a law practice with a college friend, Philip Buchen, but after just one year left to join the U.S. Navy and fight in World War II.²⁹

Returning home after the war, Ford joined a law firm, but in 1948 he made a decision that changed his life. He decided to enter the Republican primary to challenge Congressman Bartel Jonkman for Michigan’s fifth district seat. At the time, foreign affairs dominated the political landscape. The primary contrasted Jonkman’s fervent isolationism—he opposed the Marshall Plan, for example—with Ford’s internationalism. Ford ran against heavy odds. A political novice, he faced a Dutch man in a Dutch town, not to mention a ten-year House veteran and protégé of Frank McKay, a Grand Rapids political boss. Moreover, in the conservative fifth district, Ford’s internationalism and moderate Republicanism carried less appeal than Jonkman’s views. But the overconfident Jonkman took Ford lightly and exerted little effort against him.³⁰ Endorsed by Michigan’s senator Arthur Vandenberg, Ford won the primary and cruised to an easy victory in the general election. That same year, he also married Betty Bloomer, a Grand Rapids resident who had studied at Martha Graham’s dance school in New York City.

One of Congressman Ford’s first big breaks came in 1950, when he received a seat on the powerful House Appropriations Committee. Ford’s work on the committee tutored him on the intricacies of the federal budget. He stressed fiscal discipline and supported President Eisenhower’s drive to balance the federal budget.³¹ In 1963, Ford gained national exposure when President Johnson appointed him to the Warren Commission investigating the Kennedy assassination. When Johnson asked him, Ford at first demurred, saying that his congressional duties were already demanding, but the president practically ordered him to serve on the commission as a national duty. Ford worked tirelessly, reviewing graphic autopsy photos and x-rays of the slain president, visiting Dallas, retracing and timing the steps of Lee Harvey Oswald from the sixth floor of the book depository to the street below, and interviewing Jack Ruby (who told Ford that he shot Oswald to spare Jacqueline Kennedy from returning to Dallas to testify at a trial). In the end, Ford supported the Warren Commission’s conclusion that no evidence of a conspiracy existed, and Ford and his first campaign manager, Jack Stiles, authored a book, Portrait of the Assassination, detailing the commission’s findings.³²

Ford’s House career spanned a quarter of a century. Never regarded as a brilliant innovator in the House, Ford compensated with diligence and amiability for what he lacked in creative fire.³³ His 90 percent attendance record was one of the best on Capitol Hill. His reputation for congeniality and his absence of enemies, combined with hard work and an ability to compromise sensibly, also propelled him to the top of the Republican House leadership. In 1964, by a slim margin, Ford’s colleagues elevated him to chairman of the House Republican Conference. After Barry Goldwater’s disastrous defeat and the calamitous Republican losses in the 1964 elections, the GOP hungered for an image makeover, seeking to build a reputation as a more progressive party. A disgruntled group of House Republicans banded together and selected Ford as a candidate to depose the minority leader, Charles Halleck of Indiana, whose stodgy and truculent ways did the party little good.³⁴ In January 1965, their coup succeeded: Ford defeated Halleck to become the new minority leader. His ultimate political goal, the House speakership, was one step closer.

As minority leader, Ford earned a reputation as a conciliator, mending the breach between the conservative and moderate wings of his party, stressing compromise and collegiality. He once explained, You have to give a little, take a little, to get what you really want, but you don’t give up your principles. No great orator, he spoke simply, with little inflection in his voice and no bombast, avoiding grand ideas or abstractions, instead relying on facts and figures that some audiences considered boring. Ford belonged to an unlucky generation of congressional Republicans, almost always in the minority, never able to muster the votes to advance new or bold programs. To avoid the GOP’s being branded as negative or obstructionist, he opposed President Johnson’s programs largely for fiscal reasons, not just for the sake of opposing, urging Democrats to recognize the expense of their programs. The minority has the responsibility of pointing out ‘the other side’ and this includes the cost of the program or project, he said.³⁵

As minority leader in the 1960s, Ford sounded the tenets of moderate Republican conservatism that he would repeat as president in the 1970s. He wanted less government intervention in people’s lives and more reliance on private initiative and the workings of the free market. He warned against the explosion of federal spending and worried about the haunting image of inflation caused by federal deficits and federal borrowing. He believed that private ownership and free enterprise best serve economic progress and argued that government—like any household—should be forced to live within its budget. In the thousands of votes he cast during his congressional career, Ford established himself as a solid fiscal conservative. (The conservative Americans for Constitutional Action gave him an overall 77 percent rating.)³⁶

A quarter-century of friendship and conservative kinship translated into the minority leader’s firm support for Richard Nixon. As chairman of the Republican National Convention in 1968, Ford backed his friend against rivals Ronald Reagan and Nelson Rockefeller. Once Nixon was elected, the minority leader loyally supported the president, whose controversial policies often forced Ford into uncomfortable positions. At various times, Ford found himself defending wage and price controls, Nixon’s conduct of the Vietnam War, the supersonic passenger jet, and the doomed Supreme Court nominations of Clement Haynsworth and G. Harrold Carswell.³⁷ In 1973, Ford recorded the second-highest rate of support for Nixon in the House and voted to sustain all of Nixon’s vetoes.³⁸ Nixon’s landslide 1972 reelection victory, however, failed to translate to broader political gains; the Republicans held just 192 seats in the House. The continuing minority status of the GOP forced Ford to reevaluate his career. He wanted the House speakership so badly that he turned down opportunities to run for governor of Michigan, and in 1968 he casually dismissed suggestions that he make a bid to be Nixon’s running mate, gambling that the Republicans would soon win the House. With the GOP unlikely to gain control of the chamber, Ford faced bitter reality. His goal of the speakership was beyond reach. So, early in 1973, he agreed with his wife, Betty, that he would run for one more term and then retire.³⁹

National events propelled Ford’s career plans onto a different path. In a scandal unrelated to Watergate, Vice President Spiro Agnew was accused of accepting bribes while governor of Maryland and even while vice president. In October 1973, he resigned from office, only the second vice president in history to do so.⁴⁰ The vice presidency was vacant, and with Watergate transfixing the country and with mounting revelations of criminal behavior within the White House, the Agnew resignation prompted Ford to despair privately, I just wonder how much more of this the country can take.⁴¹

In light of his stormy relations with Capitol Hill and the brewing scandal, Nixon needed an uncontroversial replacement for the pugnacious, corrupt Agnew. Operating under the Twenty-fifth Amendment, ratified in 1967, he chose Ford.⁴² Ford was not Nixon’s first choice. Nelson Rockefeller, Ronald Reagan, and John Connally all ranked higher on the president’s list of possibilities.⁴³ But Ford was the least offensive, a decent man who could add ballast to Nixon’s foundering presidency. He could win easy confirmation by Congress, thanks to his popularity and reputation for honesty, and he could work to repair Nixon’s troubled relationship with the legislative branch. House Speaker Carl Albert told Nixon that Ford was probably the only potential nominee that his Democratic colleagues would find acceptable.⁴⁴ Upon learning of Nixon’s choice of Ford, Democratic senator Frank Church of Idaho commented, It’s a very good thing for the country we’re not likely to have a protracted [confirmation] struggle.⁴⁵

Congress approved Ford by resounding margins, 387–35 in the House and 92–3 in the Senate, and on December 6, 1973, he was sworn in as the nation’s fortieth vice president. His acceptance speech, short and modest, had a typically self-deprecating touch. The new vice president told his Capitol Hill audience, I am a Ford, not a Lincoln. My addresses will never be as eloquent as Mr. Lincoln’s. But I will do my very best to equal his brevity and plain speaking.⁴⁶ Ford’s swearing-in was greeted with a standing ovation and a palpable sense of relief in the Capitol rotunda. Representatives of both parties felt that they finally had a friend in the increasingly bunkered Nixon White House.⁴⁷

Vice President Ford believed Nixon’s assurances that he was innocent of the Watergate affair, and he publicly defended the president. But as Nixon’s presidency sank, Ford distanced himself from the chief executive. He had a fine line to tread: he could not continue to support a president guilty of wrongdoing, yet he could not appear eager to push Nixon out so that he could become president. Ford recalled, If I was critical of Nixon, people would have said, ‘He’s trying to get his job.’ If I were not critical, people were saying I was part of a conspiracy.⁴⁸ Because of this delicate predicament, Ford spent as little time as possible in the capital. Since the embattled president could do no campaigning, the responsibility fell upon Ford to be the GOP’s leader and chief spokesman.⁴⁹ He traveled extensively during his eight months as vice president, logging more than five hundred personal appearances in forty states.⁵⁰ I’m trying to do everything I can to put the party back together, he explained.⁵¹

Nixon’s demise was a distinct possibility, and members of Congress felt more comfortable about hastening his exit with Ford as vice president. In October 1973, at the reception following Nixon’s naming of Ford as his vice-presidential nominee, House majority leader Thomas P. Tip O’Neill alluded to the probable in a conversation with Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) James Lynn. Lynn approached O’Neill and said, Tip, what do you think of this? History is being made tonight. The Twenty-fifth Amendment is being enacted for the first time. I bet we’ll never see another night like this one. In his deep, gruff voice, O’Neill replied, Don’t count on it.⁵²

It took eight more months for events to overtake Ford.

Part One

The Leadership Challenge

Chapter 1

Hungering for Heroes

In the mid-1970s, feeling betrayed by their president after Watergate, Americans hungered for new national heroes. They found Evel Knievel. The motorcycle stuntman wore a red, white, and blue jumpsuit; spoke openly of his love of country; denounced the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang; and urged his young fans to avoid drugs and wear helmets when motorcycling. Most important, Knievel performed stunts that demanded superhuman courage, leaping over cars, trucks, buses, and even the fountains at Las Vegas’s Caesars Palace. A legend grew around him; awestruck children claimed that he had broken every bone in his body (in reality, his crashes had caused around thirty-five fractures).

On September 8, 1974, the daredevil performed what was supposed to be his greatest stunt. He tried to jump Idaho’s Snake River Canyon on his Sky-Cycle X-3, a rocket-motorcycle hybrid. The steam-powered machine was to shoot off a ramp and fly at 200 miles per hour across the 1,600-foot canyon. On that day, when Knievel pressed the ignition button, the Sky-Cycle roared up the ramp, but as it tried to sail across the enormous chasm, the safety parachute unfurled and the bike and rider floated slowly to the Snake River below. Rescuers plucked Knievel safely from the canyon floor. The daredevil received only scrapes and bruises; no broken bones this time. But he fractured his reputation. These were cynical times, and skeptics denounced the whole affair as a hoax, even accusing Knievel of intentionally deploying the parachute early.¹ The charges were untrue, but Knievel’s hero status was tarnished for good.

On the same day that Knievel made his notorious Snake River Canyon jump, more than 2,000 miles away in Washington, D.C., Gerald Ford took the most controversial action of his presidency by pardoning Richard Nixon. There were some parallels. Knievel crashed and enraged fans and detractors alike, who felt that they had been cheated; Ford’s public support crashed, and he, too, enraged supporters and opponents alike, who said that justice had been cheated, even accusing Ford of conspiratorial behavior. His presidency never fully recovered.

Post-Watergate Cynicism

On the morning of August 8, 1974, Vice President Ford had an appointment with the president. He walked into the Oval Office alone, unsure what Nixon would say. For months, the Nixon presidency had been hanging by a thread. On August 5, the thread snapped. The Supreme Court rejected Nixon’s claim of executive privilege, which he had used in refusing to turn over taped recordings of Oval Office conversations. Nixon was compelled to release transcripts of Oval Office conversations indicating that he had wanted the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to obstruct the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) inquiry into the 1972 break-in at the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate office-apartment-hotel complex. This evidence became the smoking gun implicating the president in an attempt to cover up the scandal. The release of the transcripts cost Nixon what little support he had left in Congress and with the public. Impeachment was a certainty.

Yet rumors circulated that the battle-scarred president might hang on and fight for his political life. When Ford entered the room, Nixon was sitting behind his desk. After Ford sat down, the tired president spoke solemnly and slowly. I have made the decision to resign, he began. It’s in the best interests of the country. I won’t go into the details pro and con. I have made my decision. After a pause, Nixon added, Jerry, I know you’ll do a good job.² Ford would become the thirty-eighth president of the United States, at the helm of a country in crisis. His most pressing goal was to reestablish trust in government, which had evaporated during Watergate.

On August 9, 1974, as he assumed the presidency on a wave of goodwill, Ford offered words of reconciliation. Since the development of voice recording, a few presidential inaugural addresses have been powerful enough to be preserved almost as a historical archive that many citizens carry in their heads. Franklin Roosevelt’s and John Kennedy’s stand out, and Ford’s became a classic as well. After taking the oath of office in the White House East Room, the new president spoke earnestly to the nation, his voice occasionally cracking with emotion. He declared, My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over, which became the most quoted and best-remembered line of his presidency.³ Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule, Ford continued. He reassured the nation, I believe that truth is the glue that holds government together, not only our government, but civilization itself, and he pledged, In all my public and private acts as your President, I expect to follow my instincts of openness and candor with full confidence that honesty is always the best policy in the end.⁴ These were words that Americans wanted—and needed—to hear.

By 1974, a series of presidential tragedies had brutalized Americans’ political sensibilities, and Watergate was the coup de grâce. Kennedy had been murdered, Johnson had led the country into a painful war in Vietnam, and Nixon had prolonged the war. For Americans, Vietnam was tragic not just in its outcome but in how it was conducted. Johnson, Nixon, and government officials withheld critical information from the public. During the 1964 presidential campaign, Johnson preached restraint in Vietnam yet secretly planned more bombing raids and troop commitments against North Vietnam and misled the public and Congress about attacks on American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. After deploying ground troops, Johnson tried to conceal from public view the enormous cost of the military effort. Taking their cue from the White House, top officials dissembled about the war. One assistant secretary of defense was even candid about government mendacity. In 1966, when a reporter questioned the credibility of official information on the war, he bluntly replied, Look, if you think any American official is going to tell the truth, then you’re stupid. Did you hear that—stupid. The 1968 Tet Offensive, during which the Viet Cong scored swift victories throughout South Vietnam, destroyed the credibility of American assessments that the enemy was almost vanquished and helped to drive Johnson from office. But Nixon followed Johnson’s pattern of prevarication, continuing wildly optimistic assurances, exaggerating enemy losses and the effects of American bombing, and ordering secret bombing raids into Cambodia.⁵ (Nixon’s diplomatic efforts throughout the world depended on secrecy and deception, sometimes leading to breakthroughs, as with his 1972 visit to China, but always surprising the public.)

Because of the deceptive conduct of the war, Americans increasingly distrusted presidential actions and decried a growing credibility gap, which became a euphemism for presidential lies.⁶ In a 1967 speech, Congressman Gerald Ford attacked Johnson’s war leadership, saying that Vietnam gave rise to the credibility gap. Various Administration statements and actions involving Vietnam initially established the credibility gap and then widened it. This . . . has produced the deep frustration felt by the American people, a crisis of confidence at a time of international crisis for the Nation.⁷ The trend toward distrusting the president had a corrosive influence on public approval ratings. During much of the post–World War II era, presidents won public approbation almost effortlessly. From 1953 to 1965, presidents usually scored an average of at least 60 percent in public approval, especially as Americans supported the president against the menace of communism. But Vietnam chipped away at this remarkable consensus, and as partisan sniping increased, Americans’ regard for their presidents fell. Beginning in 1966, approval ratings slid, and presidents had a difficult time even cracking the 50 percent mark.⁸

The Nixon presidency dragged the public’s trust in government down to a new low. (Ironically, Nixon had promised to be a healing president. During the turmoil of 1968, one of his campaign themes was bring us together; in a further irony, he promised that his administration would represent law and order.)⁹ Offenses of many different stripes continually assaulted the nation’s moral sensibilities. The president underpaid and made questionable deductions on his income taxes, and at taxpayers’ expense, he spent millions of dollars on additions to his California and Florida homes. Nixon also used the presidency for politicalcombat. He tarred political opponents as unpatriotic and kept track of them with an Enemies List. He ordered freeze-outs of reporters who published unfavorable stories, barring them from communicating with administration officials. Some tactics were squalid. In early 1970, when the Senate debated Nixon’s nomination of the undistinguished G. Harrold Carswell to the Supreme Court, the White House tried to sully the reputation of senators who opposed the nomination, spreading word that Birch Bayh once failed his bar exam and that Hubert Humphrey and George McGovern had restrictive covenants in the deeds to their houses forbidding their sale to blacks. (The Senate ultimately rejected Carswell’s nomination.) When Senators McGovern and Mark Hatfield introduced an amendment to force American withdrawal from Vietnam, the Nixon administration oppugned their patriotism. By fighting so dirtily, the Nixon White House cut political lacerations that would not heal as long as he remained in office.¹⁰

Watergate gouged the deepest wounds. After a long, bitter battle over the Watergate tapes in the spring of 1974, Nixon released edited transcripts. Most Americans recoiled at what they read. The transcripts revealed the president as a man of mean moral character, with private behavior sharply at variance with his public image. Senate minority leader Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania called them shabby, disgusting, immoral.¹¹ Small and petty men may commit small and petty crimes, but Nixon’s peccadilloes, like cursing in private conversation, were offensive simply by the nature of his position. He disgraced not only himself but the presidency, an office that Americans revered.¹²

What damages a president damages the nation, and that was true with Watergate. Democratic senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina, who chaired the Senate committee investigating the scandal, hyperbolically called Watergate the greatest tragedy this country has ever suffered, [worse than] the Civil War.¹³ Watergate changed how Americans saw their government and their president more radically than any other event since the New Deal. But while the New Deal prompted Americans to view the federal government as a benevolent force and the president as their friend, Watergate convinced most Americans that their president was evil.¹⁴ Heretofore, they thought that some sheriffs or mayors could be corrupt, but their president was somehow above seaminess. Watergate shattered the assumption of presidential decency.¹⁵ At a dinner party in 1973, Newsweek writer Shana Alexander overheard CBS News anchorman Walter Cronkite saying, I think we ought to take Lysol and scrub out the Oval Office. Alexander agreed, reflecting that Americans share [Cronkite’s] disgust and contempt for the soiled presidency; they too want to scrub it clean again.¹⁶

Public opinion polls reflected the plummeting confidence in government. Whereas trust in government stood at 76 percent in 1964—the highest rate in the world—it had dropped to 36 percent a decade later.¹⁷ A 1975 poll revealed that 68 percent of Americans thought that the government had consistently lied to the American people over the past ten years. Irving Crespi of the Gallup Organization predicted, If this trend persists, it is within the realm of possibility that the United States will in the near future experience its greatest crisis of confidence since 1933 [a Great Depression year].¹⁸

One measure of American disgust with politicians and government was the low voter turnout in the 1974 elections, when only 38 percent of eligible voters cast ballots, the worst showing in three decades.¹⁹ Surveys indicated a limited public confidence not just in the executive branch but in Congress. In 1975, one question from Maryland senator J. Glenn Beall’s survey of constituents asked, Do you have confidence in the ability of Congress to deal with today’s problems? Marylanders answered no by nearly 2 to 1. One Baltimore couple scoffed, We don’t have enough confidence—or trust—in our congressmen to let them take out the garbage. In Indiana, a woman wrote to Birch Bayh to tell him that all incumbents should resign from office. A popular bumper sticker simply read: IMPEACH SOMEONE.²⁰ This mood persisted when Ford ran for president in 1976, and in preparing the president for his debates against Jimmy Carter, adviser Doug Bailey suggested that Ford avoid mentioning his congressional experience—normally a political asset.²¹

Their moral fiber rubbed raw after Watergate, Americans had little stomach for shenanigans. In the mid-1970s, political careers lay ruined after revelations of scandal, like wreckage strewn across a field of ethical land mines. In October 1974, Washington Park police found Democratic congressman Wilbur Mills of Arkansas drunk in the Tidal Basin in the company of a spectacularly buxom stripper. The erudite Mills, who served as Ways and Means Committee chairman for more than a decade, was forced to relinquish the chairmanship and declined to run for reelection in 1976. That year the career of veteran Democratic congressman Wayne Hays of Ohio was ruined by scandal. Hays’s twenty-seven-year-old secretary, Elizabeth Ray, made the stunning revelation, I can’t type, I can’t file, I can’t even answer the phone, yet she was on the House payroll for two years. The only services that she performed were sexual favors for the congressman. After initially denying the affair, Hays confessed and resigned in disgrace.²²

The 1970s became an era of distrust in government. Presidents—indeed, the entire executive and legislative branches—faced relentless scrutiny by the public and press.²³ Republican congressman John B. Anderson of Illinois remarked that Ford presided as our chief magistrate under the shadow—under the overpowering ethos of the time—which was that we had a president who had defiled his oath.²⁴ A clear signal of the times came with the 1975 investigations into the CIA. A firestorm in the media and on Capitol Hill broke out after a December 1974 New York Times article alleged that the CIA carried out a massive, illegal domestic intelligence operation during the Nixon administration. Ford responded by forming a presidential commission to investigate the CIA. When the commission generally exonerated the agency, dissatisfied senators sprang into action, creating their own committee to look into the matter. It concluded that the agency needed congressional oversight, which was immediately implemented, signaling a dramatic change in the nation’s intelligence operations. The CIA, notorious for spying, would itself be under surveillance to guard against illegal or improper activities.²⁵

The post-Vietnam, post-Watergate suspicion was highly visible in the media. After covering the Vietnam War and Watergate and trapping the president in lies during both events, the press would not let presidential statements go unexamined. Reporters, hunting for fame, fortune, and Pulitzer Prizes, engaged in investigative journalism both in print and on television. (CBS’s news magazine, 60 Minutes, became a top-rated program during the 1970s and spawned imitations such as ABC’s 20/20.)²⁶ Ford became the subject of the more aggressive and cynical journalistic code. An example occurred in early 1975, when NBC White House correspondent Tom Brokaw interviewed him at the White House. The young reporter asked Ford if he was intellectually up to the job of being president. The audacious question at once illustrated three phenomena: the new, bold press behavior; the diminished reverence that the media felt toward the presidency and its occupant; and the negative public image plaguing Ford. Ford replied by mentioning his solid academic performance at the University of Michigan and Yale Law School. But this was not enough. The next day, reporters demanded that the White House furnish transcripts of Ford’s grades.²⁷ Jerald terHorst, Ford’s first press secretary, commented that the distrust was deep and almost endemic. . . . You couldn’t talk about policy and the need for continuity without someone questioning whether there was a devious plot behind it all. The press had been feeding on Watergate and Vietnam for so long that it was hard to shift gears. Government officials, journalist Bob Woodward believed, were usually guilty