9

Looking for Traction

With the 1976 presidential election on the horizon, many in Washington thought little of Gerald Ford’s chances for success. The Nixon pardon retained its corrosiveness, as many Americans believed that Ford had engineered yet another Nixon cover-up, that he was nothing more than a patsy for the ex-president they loathed as “Tricky Dick.” Also swirling around Washington officialdom was the churlish notion that Ford was an impostor president, a glorified caretaker who never could have gotten elected in his own right. As White House press secretary Ron Nessen remembered, Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld remarked late in 1974, “At the end of three months, the Ford administration will either have the smell of life or the smell of death … . If it’s the smell of death, this White House is going to be torn to pieces by the press, by the Democrats, even by other Republicans who will challenge the president for the nomination in 1976.”¹

The pardon, however, was just one of Ford’s public relations problems. Virtually everything Gerald Ford accomplished during his abbreviated term in the White House helped to doom his chances of winning the presidency in his own right in 1976. Ironically, the opposition to his policy achievements came not from the Democrats but from his own Republican Party. Many GOP leaders deemed Ford’s policies way too liberal. Sparked in part by his trip to Finland, the tensions roiling the conservative ranks in 1975 would change the GOP for good, and presented the president with a dilemma: if he did what it would take to win his party’s presidential nomination, he wouldn’t have a prayer to win the general election—but if he did what would make him competitive the next November, he could well lose the Republican nomination he needed to get that far.

In the wake of Watergate and the Nixon pardon, the Democrats tightened their hold on Congress. Ford, for his part, vetoed fifteen bills in his first three months in office, more than Nixon had in the eighteen months preceding his resignation. However, Ford had a higher percentage of those vetoes overridden than any other twentieth-century president. “You’ve got to consider how tough it was for me to operate from the center,” Ford recalled. “Liberal Democrats controlled the Senate and Congress. They wanted me marginalized. The conservative Republicans were all about Goldwater-Reagan … . They disdained my pulling out of Vietnam, the Helsinki trip and draft amnesty promise. And the media, having forced Nixon to resign, was just overflowing with venom.”²

The journalist Richard Reeves observed that as of mid-1975, Ford had had less success leading Congress than any new president in recent history. It seemed as if every major bill Ford supported was treated like a flaming cowpie. After taking over from Nixon, Ford won just 58 percent of the 122 congressional votes on which there was a clear White House position, a record that compared badly with the 80 to 90 percent win records scored by Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon in their first congressional confrontations—it was even worse than the 60 percent scored by Nixon on 136 votes during the traumatic last eight months of his presidency.³ Conservative Republicans like William A. Rusher, the publisher of National Review, saw an insurmountable and emblematic problem in Ford’s choice of vice president. “Nixon’s 1972 victory had been the by-product of a newly forged and distinctly fragile coalition of economic and social conservatives,” Rusher explained in his 1984 book The Rise of the Right. “Victory for the Republican Party, at least for the foreseeable future, involved nurturing that coalition and making it permanent. For that purpose, the designation of Nelson Rockefeller … as vice president was not only pointless but downright counterproductive. Rockefeller represented virtually everything that antagonized social conservatives.”⁴ As the historian Herbert S. Parmet put it, “His presence accelerated the rebellion from what Kevin Phillips called the ‘new right.’”⁵

Ford had had no intention of antagonizing his own party’s powerful right wing when he picked Rockefeller. To the contrary, Ford had meant the choice to signal his desire to bring the Republican Party together, under a tent big enough to accommodate every view from his own up-by-the-bootstraps heartland conservatism to the progressive stands on social issues espoused by the Rockefeller Republicans. Ford was so proud of the move, in fact, that when asked at a November 14, 1974, press conference what he had achieved in his first hundred days in office, he replied: “Number one, nominating Nelson Rockefeller.”⁶

Rockefeller’s performance as vice president was faultless. He hewed loyally to the president’s positions, at all times treating Ford with a properly humble deference. Moreover, he completed his boss’s assignments better than capably, avidly presiding over advisory panels on issues from national health insurance to intelligence reform, in the latter case issuing the well-regarded Rockefeller Commission report on domestic espionage and other alleged illegalities by the Central Intelligence Agency.

But this wasn’t good enough for GOP’s conservatives, who at the 1964 Republican National Convention had booed Rockefeller off the stage before they anointed Barry Goldwater. The faithful objected to what Nelson Rockefeller represented, not to what the real man was. Firing him would be a first step toward realigning the entire Republican Party to the right. The former New York governor made stabs at conciliating the right by pandering to ultraconservatives down South—going so far as to appear with arch-segregationist governor George C. Wallace of Alabama and reaching out to Barry Goldwater and other libertarians. But the party’s hard-liners wouldn’t bend.

With his right flank permanently at odds with him for putting the paradigm of the Eastern Republican establishment within a heartbeat of the presidency, Ford thus had good reason for concern about his electoral prospects in 1976. He well knew that his finest accomplishments as president—getting the United States out of Vietnam, offering amnesty to the draft resisters, and supporting the Helsinki Accords—had hurt his standing among the more conservative members of his party. What’s more, he knew that this time even his good-guy image wouldn’t be enough, co-opted as it increasingly was by the surging Democratic challenger, Jimmy Carter. The former Georgia governor used his born-again Christianity and peanut farmer populism to define himself as an even more decent human being than the Republican incumbent. “Carter was running on ‘I’ll never tell a lie,’” Ford recalled. “I had the albatross of having pardoned Nixon, a known liar.”⁷

Everywhere Ford looked in 1975, trouble loomed. Kissinger’s famed Middle East shuttle diplomacy—which had wrought the Egyptian-Israeli accord of 1974—hit a sudden dead end. The new Israeli government of Yitzhak Rabin, according to Kissinger, went “shivering in fear” every time Jordan was even mentioned.⁸ Then, in March 1975, Kissinger, hoping for “Sinai II,” tried to convince Rabin to withdraw from the mountain passes of Gidi and Mitla, to pull back in the Sinai about fifteen miles; Rabin flat-out refused. Annoyed that the Israelis were being stubborn, Ford sent a blistering cable to Jerusalem on March 21. “I am disappointed,” Ford wrote, “to learn that Israel has not moved as far as it might.” If diplomatic negotiations broke down over Sinai II, Ford threatened that America would “reassess” its entire Middle East strategy, including “our policy toward Israel.”⁹

These were tough words from Ford—very tough. “It was about as brutal as such diplomatic letters get,” the historian Walter Isaacson later wrote, “and the Israeli cabinet was shell-shocked.” But Rabin refused to be intimidated. Despite a gallant effort, Israel wasn’t going to give up a kilometer of the Sinai desert. Returning to Washington with no deal, Kissinger, on the flight home, carped (off the record) that Rabin was “a small man,” and that for the peace process to continue, Israel needed a brave leader like Golda Meir. With Ford’s approval, the State Department and NSC both issued Middle East “reassessment” memoranda.¹⁰

Eventually, persistence prevailed. On August 21, after twelve days of negotiations in Jerusalem, Kissinger secured a Sinai II agreement. What turned the Israeli government around was the Ford administration’s pledge for approximately $2.6 billion in military aid (including F-16 fighter jets). As Richard Valerian of NBC News put it, Sinai II was “the best agreement money could buy.”

But Vietnam and the Middle East weren’t the only regions causing the Ford administration fits. The U.S.-sponsored government in Cambodia, headed by Lon Nol, had been toppled by the Khmer Rouge. Since February 1973, the United States had dropped more than 250,000 tons of bombs on Cambodia, hoping to disable the Khmer Rouge—it only strengthened the insurgency movement. NATO ally Portugal, after a failed coup attempt, was drifting ever closer to the Soviet Union. A civil war in Angola was destablizing Africa. Worse, the major rebel cadre was being bankrolled by the unacceptable combination of Cuban troops and Kremlin aid. Add to the mix the strenuous opposition to SALT II by Senator Jackson and others and the result was a dismal foreign policy. “Every time we tried to move the ball forward,” Ford recalled, “we seemed to lose ground. Eventually we got Sinai II and Portugal stayed in NATO and SALT II stayed alive into the Carter years but we were in a hard yardage situation. Perhaps the good news was we were getting America out of wars, not into them.”¹¹

Meanwhile, the U.S. economy could not have been worse for Ford in his first full year in office. If the public associated his term in office with the nation’s dreadful fiscal condition, it would be another large hurdle for his election campaign to handle. When Ford assumed the presidency in August 1974, the U.S. Gross National Product was plummeting by 4.2 percent a year, consumer prices were soaring an annual 16.8 percent, and home-mortgage interest rates remained mired above 10 percent. By the end of Ford’s first month in office, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had fallen ninety-nine points (a very significant drop at the time), followed by another fifty-point drop the week after he pardoned Nixon, combining to account for the sharpest stock-market dive in one month since the fall of 1929.¹² In January 1975, the U.S. unemployment rate rose by a full 1 percent, meaning a million Americans found themselves newly out of work in the space of a single month. Four months later, the jobless rate hit a peak of 8.9 percent. It would not be until the end of 1975 that the economy would begin to turn around, led by the halving of the inflation rate from the daunting 12 percent Ford faced when he took office.¹³

The economic news only fueled conservatives’ ire. To Ford’s dismay, it looked ever more likely that the Far Right’s chosen champion, Ronald Reagan, would challenge him for the GOP nomination. The White House staff swept chaotically into action to keep that from happening, but their efforts went nowhere. Ford opened his gambit to hang on to the Right’s support by naming nails-tough, Georgiabred Secretary of the Army Howard “Bo” Callaway to manage his campaign. Callaway immediately set to courting his fellow arch-conservatives by publicly disparaging Vice President Rockefeller and his fitness for the Republican ticket. Ford did nothing to stop his own campaign from humiliating the distinguished public servant he had so proudly chosen. “My not defending Nelson at this juncture is my biggest professional regret,” Ford later said. “He was a good man. I should have gone to bat for him.”¹⁴

The president’s appeal to the right wing was not helped by First Lady Betty Ford’s appearance on the CBS News program 60 Minutes in August 1975. Although most of the American public liked and admired Betty Ford for her lively independence—and thought well of her husband for calling her his most trusted adviser—many conservatives took violent exception to the First Lady’s apparent unconcern that her children had “probably” tried marijuana, not to mention to her response that she “wouldn’t be surprised” if her teenage daughter, as “a perfectly normal human being like all young girls,” were to have a premarital “affair.” Even worse, as the right-wingers were concerned, Betty Ford also told the interviewer, Morley Safer, that she considered Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court ruling legalizing abortion, “the best thing in the world … a great, great decision.”¹⁵

Summarizing the Right’s ensuing outrage, the National Review joked that “Mrs. Ford ought to know that it is not up to her to rewrite the Ten Commandments on nationwide TV.”¹⁶ Her husband felt compelled to issue a quick statement to the effect that although he supported his wife’s right to speak out, her opinions were entirely her own.

As he had demonstrated throughout his career in Congress, Gerald Ford had as keen an eye for good, and bad, publicity as any politician in the country. During his first hundred days in office, he had vastly expanded the White House PR staff.¹⁷ Ford beefed up his own contributions to the PR effort soon after announcing his bid for the 1976 Republican presidential nomination. He increasingly hit the road to make personal appearances across the nation. Although he tried hard to look more like a caring leader reaching out to his constituents than a hungry candidate flat-out campaigning for votes, Ford couldn’t help but want to counter Ronald Reagan’s undeclared stumping around the country. For starters, Reagan was telling Republican audiences in city after city that he, and not Ford, was the true ideological heir to the party’s 1972 landslide. “The mandate registered by the people still remains,” Reagan declared. “The people have not changed in philosophy.”¹⁸ Just by making that backhanded swipe at Ford’s claim to lead the GOP, Reagan again succeeded at sapping some of the president’s support within the party.

Within the United States there was still residual 1960s-style anarchism erupting in the streets, the status quo being attacked from all corners. On January 29, the Weather Underground bombed the U.S. State Department headquarters in Washington, while on June 27 two FBI agents were killed in a shootout at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Teamsters Union president Jimmy Hoffa was reported missing (presumed kidnapped or killed). In late December a bomb exploded at New York’s LaGuardia Airport, killing eleven. Some people called it a Year of Bad Karma. Ford wasn’t immune from the violence: twice in 1975 he was almost assassinated, both times in California.

On September 5, the president was shaking hands in a crowd that had turned out to see him near the California state capitol in Sacramento when an odd-looking woman standing two feet away from Ford pulled out a gun and pointed it at him. Fortunately, the woman couldn’t fire a shot before a Secret Service agent wrested the .45-caliber pistol from her hand, while the rest of the detail threw themselves on the president and hustled him into the capitol building. Minutes after the twenty-six-year-old perpetrator, Charles Manson follower Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, had been arrested, handcuffed, and trundled off to jail, Ford calmly proceeded to his scheduled meeting with Governor Jerry Brown, who didn’t even learn of the assassination attempt until forty minutes later, when Donald Rumsfeld interrupted the economic policy discussion to give the president the official report on the incident. After meeting with Brown, Ford made his speech to the California legislature—on crime—as planned.¹⁹

Soon after the news of Fromme’s attack reached Congress, a proud GOP committeeman took the floor and proclaimed: “Mr. Chairman, I think the record should show that for the first time since McKinley, we have a Republican President worth shooting.”²⁰ Apparently so, as practically the same thing happened again just seventeen days later.

The second attempt on Ford’s life bore eerie similarities to the first. On September 22 the setting was again California, where the last event of the president’s trip to San Francisco was a local television interview at the St. Francis Hotel. After the taping Ford walked out of the lobby and was heading to his limousine when a shot rang out. Rumsfeld and two Secret Service men pounced on the president and pushed him behind the car as bystanders seized gray-haired gunwoman Sara Jane Moore and her .38-caliber revolver. “The one shot Moore fired,” Ron Nessen reported, “struck the wall of the hotel to Ford’s right, ricocheted, struck the curb to Ford’s left and, now spent, bounced up and hit a taxi driver in the groin.”²¹ As the police carted off Ford’s second female would-be assassin that month, the president lay on the floor of his limo, uninjured despite being crushed under the considerable weight of two beefy Secret Service agents plus Donald Rumsfeld, all three of whom remained atop him as the motorcade sped away. “Can we turn on the air conditioning? It’s getting stuffy in here,” Ford cracked.²²

Outwardly unfazed by the two attempts on his life, President Ford made it clear that the bizarre acts of two deranged women in California would have no effect on his public appearances. “Under no circumstances,” he declared, “will I, and I hope others, capitulate to those that want to undercut what’s good in America.”²³ That said, although he did not reduce his travel appearances, at the Secret Service’s insistence Ford began wearing bulletproof vests under his suit jackets when he went out in public. When asked in 2003 whether he had any nightmares after two assassination attempts, Ford claimed he told Betty, “I’m going to have to review my support for the Equal Rights Amendment. These women are trying to kill me.”²⁴

Ronald Reagan, meanwhile, kept up his cross-country noncampaign. While Ford and his fretting staff waited for the former California governor to declare himself in or out of the presidential race, Reagan rolled merrily along, gathering momentum as he continued to pick up passionate support from bedrock conservatives, including a few with very deep pockets. A number of like-minded hard-core political pros also signed on to the Californian’s righteous crusade. In truth, Ford and Reagan were both calling for pretty much the same platform the GOP had been pushing for decades: smaller government, less federal spending, and upward mobility by one’s own bootstraps for all. But while their messages were essentially the same, the two men vying to be the Republicans’ bicentennial-year messenger had little in common except their mutual antipathy.

“Several of his characteristics seemed to rule him out as a serious challenger,” Ford recalled thinking of Reagan during those uncertain months of 1975. “One was his penchant for offering simplistic solutions to hideously complex problems. A second was his conviction that he was always right in every argument; he seemed unable to acknowledge that he might have made a mistake. Finally, I’d heard from people who knew him well that he liked to conserve his energy. From every campaign I’d witnessed, I knew that you can’t run for President and expect to work only from nine to five.”²⁵

Reagan, who later proved that you can actually be president and work only nine to five, considered Nixon’s successor weak. “‘Ford was not a leader,’ Reagan told his intimates,” reported his biographer Lou Cannon. “In private conversations, Reagan referred to him as a ‘caretaker’ who had been in Congress too long.”²⁶ According to Cannon, Reagan also blamed Ford for the federal budget deficit, which had soared near $52 billion by that point. Willfully ignoring the president’s obvious efforts to curb the deficit by repeatedly vetoing congressional spending bills, Reagan persisted in portraying the incumbent as entirely responsible for the government’s outrageous debt. (Beginning just six years later, over his own two full terms in the White House, Ronald Reagan would send the nation’s borrowing skyrocketing far higher, setting a new record of $1 trillion during his first year in office and breaking it each of the next two years.)

In reality, to fight the ongoing recession President Ford proposed a stimulative $28 billion tax cut in October 1975, an outgrowth of the plan to “cut taxes for most individual businesses,” coupled with a request to Congress to cut an offsetting $28 billion in spending to keep the reduction in tax revenues from hiking the federal deficit and thereby spurring inflation even higher. Just before its winter recess, Congress approved the president’s proposed tax cut but not the lower spending, leading Ford to veto the bill. Congress then responded by editing into the bill a vague pledge to try to rein in federal expenditures some other time. The president reluctantly signed the barely revised new version, in the hope that it would prove better for the economy than doing nothing.

Ford took his toughest stand against government spending in response to New York City’s fiscal crisis. The nation’s largest metropolis had long been its most profligate as well, shelling out twice as much as any other city in the country for services and salaries.²⁷ Since 1965, New York City’s budget had tripled as its expenses had shot up by some 12 percent a year while its revenues grew only about 5 percent annually.²⁸ After a decade of recklessly unaffordable spending on ever more programs, employees, and raises, the Big Apple had put itself in a pickle. By April 1975, just to meet its bloated municipal payroll the city had racked up a whopping $14 billion in debt—most of it on wildly unfavorable terms. Worse, the loans were secured on pie-in-the-sky projections of highly unlikely future revenues, which city officials continued to put up as collateral for even more new loans.

That spring, the pyramid was starting to collapse as New York ran out of both cash and credit. “The city’s politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike, had behaved so irresponsibly for so many years that a fiscal Armageddon was almost inevitable,” Ford would recall in his memoir.²⁹ The finance capital of the world was teetering on the verge of bankruptcy.

Throughout the year, New York City mayor Abraham Beame and New York governor Hugh Carey went hat in hand to the White House to ask President Ford for a federal bailout in the form of ninety-day guarantees for $1 billion in new city bonds. Ford and his top economic advisers responded to the appeal by essentially telling the New Yorkers that it was their own fault their city was in this fix, as the Big Apple’s own officials were the ones who had spent money like drunken sailors on a decade’s shore leave. Stung by the administration’s rude rejection, Carey declared it the product of a “level of arrogance and disregard for New York that rivals the worst days of Richard Nixon and his gang of cutthroats.”³⁰

Treasury Secretary William Simon, a Nixon holdover and former Wall Street investment banker, likewise excoriated the city’s managers, labor unions, and even its commercial lenders for letting New York dig itself into such a deep pit. In Simon’s view, the city could and should take the harsh steps needed to solve its own problems; throwing more money at them would only perpetuate the foolishness. President Ford and Federal Reserve Board Chairman Arthur F. Burns concurred, joining in advising their guests to implement sounder budget policies and cut less necessary municipal services. The message was clear: make the hard choices and you’ll pull through somehow.

With no help forthcoming from Washington, at several points before the year was out New York indeed toed the brink of insolvency. But it managed to yank itself back every time by making just the kinds of drastic cuts the Ford administration had suggested, including the layoffs of forty thousand police, firefighters, sanitation workers, and other city employees. Many Americans outside the nation’s biggest city applauded their president’s tightfisted approach. “The country has long seen New York as arrogant,” remarked one observant bond broker. “The attitude is, ‘So now you’re in trouble, then help yourself, Big Mouth!’”³¹

As New York City’s financial woes worsened, Vice President Rockefeller advised Ford that his home state might be able to step in to help before the federal government had no choice but to do so. With Ford’s approval, Rockefeller met with state Republican leaders that October. The vice president listened as the upstate pols laid out their concerns regarding the fiscal crisis. The New Yorkers understood, of course, that the administration’s skinflint stance grew from Ford’s need to court the conservative wing of his party away from the allure of Ronald Reagan—and that the Republican Right sneered at the very idea of a federal rescue for New York, of all places, from its own wretched excesses. That said, however, the state GOP’s representatives also warned Rockefeller that unless the White House started treating New York City a little more nicely, Gerald Ford might as well forget about the state’s mighty electoral vote come next November.

Rockefeller dutifully reported what he had heard back to the president. Ford listened to the New Yorkers’ concerns. Their veiled threats, however, only stiffened his resistance to their entreaties for federal assistance until he saw proof of real belt-tightening in New York City. Ford’s stance remained as firm as it had since his May meeting with Beame and Carey, who had come begging then without so much as a pie chart to show what New York intended to do with the federal aid they were asking for. “Beame and Carey had no answers. Nor did they have a plan,” Ford recalled in his memoir. “And their demands were ridiculous. Apparently, they thought they could come down to Washington, employ scare tactics and roll over us. If the city went bankrupt, they warned, the effect on the banking community in the United States would be catastrophic.”³²

Ford still wasn’t buying it five months later, although he did give Rockefeller permission to speak out on the crisis in New York on the grounds that it couldn’t hurt, and might even help both the city and the vice president, at least politically. On October 12 Rockefeller made a speech in Manhattan that appeared to extend the metropolis a hint of sympathy, even while deflecting the blame for the lack of federal action off of the White House and onto Congress. The vice president’s remarks went over fairly well with his audience, but they raised conservatives’ hackles elsewhere and kicked up a firestorm in the West Wing. “There is no more continuous thread in the history of our Republic than White House wrath when Vice Presidents speak out of turn in public,” explained Robert Hartmann, one of Rockefeller’s few fans in Ford’s inner circle. “Now they [Ford’s other top advisers] said Rocky was really off the reservation, sabotaging the President’s careful and nearly successful strategy, feathering his own New York nest, furthering his family’s banking interests, fueling conservative rebellion in the South, West, and mid-America. Simon and Rumsfeld temporarily buried their old blood feud. The President was inundated with polls and polemics with a single theme: Rockefeller’s gotta go.”³³

It was all over for Jerry Ford’s right-hand man. First, at a press conference in Washington, the president firmly restated his—and thus his administration’s—official lack of sympathy for the spendthrifts of New York, declaring: “I do not think it is a healthy thing for the federal government to bail out a city, and I mean any city that has handled its fiscal affairs as irresponsibly over a long period of time as New York City has.”³⁴ Then, on October 28, Ford dropped the boom on his vice president at their regular weekly meeting in the Oval Office. As ever, the tone between them stayed civil, even cordial, as the two old pros discussed the problematic political situation indicated by recent polls, which showed how gravely Rockefeller’s presence on the ticket weakened the GOP’s chances of keeping the White House. Finally, Ford wrote in his memoir, he told his vice president that, “to be brutally frank, some of these difficulties might be eliminated if you were to indicate that you didn’t want to be on the ticket in 1976. I’m not asking you to do that, I’m just stating the facts.”³⁵

Rockefeller’s unswerving loyalty to his commander in chief prompted him to offer to bow out immediately. Both men could then maintain that it had been the vice president’s decision to withdraw from the 1976 ticket. But the fact remained that he had been pushed, and that Jerry Ford had chosen to do the pushing. Indeed, as Ron Nessen recalled, at the end of the huddle the president told Rockefeller, “Nelson, you’re a hell of a team player.”³⁶ Ford would later express misgivings about the move that he never mentioned at the time. “I was grateful for his expression of unselfishness,” Ford confessed, “his willingness to do what was in the best interests of the party and the country—and me. At the same time, I was angry with myself for showing cowardice in not saying to the ultraconservatives, ‘It’s going to be Ford and Rockefeller, whatever the consequences.’”³⁷

Ford’s public change of mind about such a crucial decision as his choice of vice president—especially against his own inclinations, and less than a year after having called it his proudest achievement—not only made him look weak, it smacked of the most craven politicking. Whatever one may have thought of Rockefeller, it was difficult not to be disheartened by the way the president threw him over, so openly kowtowing to the noisiest rabble in his party. What’s more, getting rid of Rockefeller didn’t succeed in pushing Ronald Reagan out of the race.

“I am not appeased,” Ford’s rival replied when asked his opinion on Rockefeller’s removal after the news was officially announced in early November.

If Ford hadn’t already been about to lose New York state’s hefty chunk of electoral votes for kicking its favorite son off his ticket, he certainly ended his chances when he further hardened his line against federal aid for its beleaguered city. In an October 29 speech at Washington’s National Press Club, the president swore to veto any bill Congress might pass to bail New York City out of the morass caused by its own “fiscal mismanagement,” on the grounds that to do so would allow its leaders to “escape responsibility for their past follies.” ³⁸ Noting that New York’s “officials have proved in the past that they will not face up to the city’s massive network of pressure groups as long as any other alternative is available,” Ford cautioned: “If they can scare the whole country into providing that alternative now, why shouldn’t they be confident they can scare us again three years from now?”³⁹ The next day, the front page of New York’s Daily News blared the seventy-two-point bold headline “Ford to City: Drop Dead.”⁴⁰

The president was stung by the ensuing charges that he lacked compassion for all the little people in the big city who would be hurt by his ogrelike heartlessness. But Ford—whose core belief in the virtue of thrift had been instilled in him in boyhood by his revered parents’ hardworking example—honestly thought that his “Dutch uncle approach” to New York’s problems would not only work in the short term but give the city just the tough-love impetus it needed to put its finances in order for good. As he would explain to reporters later that year, “I think the decisions that I have made [that] have been hard, that on the surface appear at this time to be lacking in compassion, those decisions, in the long run, are going to be recognized as right. So it is a question of understanding at the moment that you have to take the long view, not the short view, in order to really indicate your compassion. And that is what I have tried to do.”⁴¹

In the end, he succeeded in getting New York City to adopt more sensible financial practices. He provided the bailout its local officials had been begging for all along, on the condition that the city thereafter operate within austerity budgets imposed by Washington. The deal was accepted on November 26. Ford immediately asked Congress to pass legislation giving New York City access to up to $2.3 billion in direct federal loans in each of the next three years.⁴² The lawmakers complied, and Ford signed the bill on December 9. When asked about the deal at a campaign session with local officials in Louisiana the next spring, Ford explained: “Because I was very firm in dealing with the Mayor and the Governor of New York, we finally worked out a program that I think, if they carry it out—and they are going to carry it out, or else—we can get them by their own bootstraps to straighten out their problem.

“We did agree,” he went on, “to give them some money on a cash-flow basis because they have peaks where they get money and they have valleys where they have to spend it and their revenues don’t equal their expenditures. But I can tell you that New York City is on schedule as far as we are concerned.” The president added that a few weeks earlier the city had made its “first payback,” of $270 million plus $5 million in interest. “So,” he pointed out, “Uncle Sam didn’t do too badly.”⁴³

Gerald Ford, on the other hand, wasn’t doing too well with the American people. The heartland’s schadenfreude toward New York didn’t stand up against the thought of all those laid-off cops and firefighters. That fall, between his cold dismissal of Nelson Rockefeller and his harsh treatment of the Big Apple, good ol’ Jerry Ford had begun to look awfully mean, not to mention disloyal, cynical, and somehow waffling and stubborn at the same time.

On November 28, however, Ford scored a touchdown by nominating Judge John Paul Stevens of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago to replace William O. Douglas on the U.S. Supreme Court. Ford had been trying to get Douglas off the court since the mid-1960s and now the liberal justice had finally retired. All presidents covet the power to appoint a Supreme Court justice to cement their legacy. With the stakes high, usually a rough-and-tumble confirmation process ensues. That was not the case with Stevens. The U.S. Senate approved him by a 98 to 0 vote.

With the Stevens appointment, Ford was starting to define himself. He knew shake-ups were necessary if he wanted to de-Nixonize his White House. In addition to the official withdrawal of Nelson Rockefeller as his 1976 running mate, Ford announced on November 3 that James Schlesinger would be removed as secretary of defense in favor of the more trustworthy Donald Rumsfeld, who would in turn be replaced as White House chief of staff by his less excitable deputy, Dick Cheney. William E. Colby was out as CIA director, and George H. W. Bush was coming back from Beijing to take his place. Ambassador Elliot Richardson would likewise be called home from the Court of St. James’s to take over as secretary of commerce from the ailing Rogers C. B. Morton, who would henceforth devote his efforts to Ford’s campaign. Finally, in the move that generated by far the loudest buzz, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger would no longer serve concurrently as national security adviser. His deputy, air force lieutenant general Brent Scowcroft, would take over that role. The media dubbed the changes “The Halloween Massacre.”⁴⁴

The impetus of the Halloween Massacre, according to Ford, was his inability to tolerate the crude, daily backbiting between Kissinger and Schlesinger. “I was sick and tired of their irreconcilable views and personalities,” Ford recalled. “Therefore, I had to make a choice. I chose Kissinger. I decided to call Schlesinger in on a Sunday morning. And I said, ‘Jim, things aren’t working out well on the cabinet level. I want to make a change and I’d like you to step aside and I’ll appoint you as an ambassador someplace in Europe.’ He said, ‘I won’t take that. Are you firing me?’ And I said, ‘If you put it that way, yes.’ So he got up and walked off. So I put Rumsfeld in at Defense.”⁴⁵

Displaying a share-the-pain approach, Ford next informed Kissinger that his portfolio was going to be reduced in half. “I went to Henry and I said, ‘Henry, I’m going to take your NSC hat away from you because I think it’s poor organization,’” Ford later explained. “Henry didn’t like that too well. He said, ‘The press will misinterpret that I am being demoted.’ Well, you know Henry’s famous ego. He was bruised. But I did it and I elevated Brent Scowcroft, his deputy, to head NSC. So that was a busy Sunday. It gave me a chance to put my imprimatur on my cabinet at a very important time.”⁴⁶

Although the president emphasized that his main motive for making these drastic personnel changes was to formalize the establishment of his “own team,” whispers quickly arose that Rumsfeld had orchestrated the entire shake-up, mostly to get himself the Pentagon’s top job, but also to get Kissinger out of the West Wing and Bush out of the running to replace Rockefeller as Ford’s running mate.⁴⁷ Eager to deny any such thing, Rumsfeld pointedly informed the president that he would need a few days to think over Ford’s offer. When a reporter for Time magazine asked Kissinger if he believed Rumsfeld really had any such reservations about taking the Pentagon’s plum job, the secretary of state deadpanned, “Yes … and Nixon didn’t want to be President.”⁴⁸

Whatever inspired the overhaul of the Ford administration, the results proved the moves a good idea. The White House operated far more smoothly under the low-key Cheney than it had when the contentious Rumsfeld was running the place, although the new staff coordinator exercised at least as much control, and before long wielded even more power than his predecessor. “Some reporters privately started calling him the Grand Teuton,” Nessen remembered, a pun linking the mountains in Cheney’s home state of Wyoming with the Prussian sensibility of H. R. Haldeman, who had ruled the White House with an iron fist for Nixon.⁴⁹

Regardless of personnel shake-ups, the low ebb of U.S. foreign policy during Ford’s White House tenure occurred on December 7, 1975. President Ford, along with Kissinger, was wrapping up a tour of Asia. Diplomacy in the region was getting more and more complicated; India, for example, just the previous year had detonated its first atomic bomb. After spending a few days in China and then the Philippines, they headed to Indonesia, where Ford met with the country’s thuggish dictator, General Haji Mohammad Suharto. At the time, East Timor, located in the Indonesian archipelago, was in the midst of an independence movement. A group called the Front for the Liberation of East Timor (FRETILIN) had taken to the streets demanding sovereignty. Portugal, the colonial power that had controlled East Timor for more than 450 years, pulled out. Suharto, however, wasn’t going to allow independence to happen. Insisting that East Timor was part of Indonesia, he called up his troops with orders to invade East Timor and squash FRETILIN by whatever military means necessary.⁵⁰

Ford and Kissinger approved Suharto’s plans to invade East Timor. “You’ve got to remember that we just lost Vietnam,” Ford recalled in a 2003 interview. “We didn’t know whether the domino theory would occur throughout the region. Our main goal wasn’t to alienate Indonesia from us. So when Suharto raised the imminent invasion of [East] Timor we didn’t object. It was, I recall, only briefly discussed. To be honest, I had prepared mainly for my China meetings. The State Department was overseeing the Indonesia situation. I wasn’t informed properly, I guess.”⁵¹

Documentary evidence proved that Ford-Kissinger acquiescence helped contribute to the genocide of approximately two hundred thousand East Timorians due to violence and famine. Armed with U.S.-made weapons, General Suharto’s troops massacred about one-sixth of the nation’s population. The butchering began only sixteen hours after Air Force One left Indonesian airspace. “Suharto was given the green light to do what he did,” former CIA operations officer C. Philip Liechty recalled. “There was discussion in the Embassy and in traffic with the State Department about the problems that would be created for us if the public and Congress became aware of the level and type of military assistance that was given to Indonesia at that time. Without continued heavy U.S. military support the Indonesians might not have been able to pull it off.”⁵²

Obviously President Ford didn’t want two hundred thousand East Timorese slaughtered. That year, in fact, the new independent nation-states of Angola, Cape Verde, Mozambique, Papua New Guinea, Suriname, and the Comoros became a geopolitical reality. And, to his credit, he never tried to cover up his meeting with Suharto. “Look,” Ford later recalled. “I don’t want to pass the blame. Given the brutality that Indonesia exhibited in East Timor, our support was wrong. Henry was not infallible. I didn’t realize just how bad the situation would become. You’ve got to understand that, in the scope of things, Indonesia wasn’t too much on my radar. Hindsight is easy. I should have questioned Henry more about the situation. My record shows, like Helsinki, that I personally cared about human rights. I listened to the experts on Indonesia. That was a mistake. At the time, though, it didn’t seem like a mistake. We needed allies after Vietnam. Henry—and I’m not exonerating myself—goofed.”

When asked if he wanted to apologize to history for East Timor, Ford said, “Yes. I mean I truly, honestly feel for those families which suffered losses. I’m sorry for them. The whole thing was tragic but I only learned the extent to what happened there after I left Washington. Then it was too late.”⁵³ The people of East Timor would have to wait until 2002 to gain their country’s independence.