FOUR DAYS AFTER our painful farewell, Ford watched his beloved Michigan Wolverines blow an undefeated football season by losing to Ohio State. He was a certified Big Blue fanatic, dutifully watching all their games on DirecTV and occasionally shooing away aides demonstrating the poor judgment of interrupting him.
His gridiron days were so central to his persona that he’d inserted the Michigan band into his funeral plan. When he arrived in Grand Rapids for the final time, the band would serenade him with the stirring strains of “The Victors,” the storied Wolverine fight song.
In his ninety-fourth year, that moment was near at hand.
In early December, Dick Cheney telephoned with the welcome news that Congress had approved legislation naming the CVN-78, the Navy’s next nuclear aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford.
“He was a happy guy,” Cheney told a longtime acquaintance.
But just as I’d experienced in November, Ford was having trouble speaking more than a few words at a time. When Cheney called, Steve Ford, his youngest son, was on an extension line to help deal with the extended gaps in the conversation between the former president and his star pupil.
Mel Laird, one of his closest political friends and a former congressman and secretary of defense, called him to say goodbye, but Ford literally couldn’t talk.
Inevitably, death-watch rumors surfaced. Desert TV stations reported his condition had deteriorated dramatically.
The family suspected that the Fords’ minister, the Reverend Robert Certain of St. Margaret’s Episcopal, was the source. Certain had been asked in writing to stop talking about family matters, but kept talking.
Reluctantly, just before the Christmas holidays, I joined the throng of reporters struggling to find a polite way of asking if it was time to begin sprucing up their obit packages.
“It’s not good; you saw him,” Penny Circle told me in late December, the strain creeping into her voice. “But nothing has changed since you were here. I’m going to L.A. for Christmas, and you should go home to Texas.”
An old Ford friend was blunter: “He’s going to die soon, but only God knows when.”
The Ford family Christmas card presented another sobering omen. Like millions of Americans, the Fords used their annual holiday greeting as a photographic tableau of the ever-expanding clan. Usually the Fords were photographed in ski gear surrounded by their children and grandchildren. In 1994, they opted for a photo of halftime festivities at his alma mater when the University of Michigan retired his football number 48.
For the first time in decades, there was no photo with the 2006 card. It was just a plain-vanilla note with a timeless wish: “May this 2006 Christmas bring more wisdom to the way we look at the world and more love to the way we live in it!”
His signature at the bottom was another giveaway: the red “Jerry Ford” was bright and bold, far different from his actual signature in the last months.
By the time the card arrived in my mailbox on December 23, he was in extremis. One by one, his vital organs began to fail. “Everything was shutting down,” one of his closest friends would later recall. The congestive heart failure had so weakened his immune system that the guy who had run reporters half his age into the ground in the Air Force Two days couldn’t fight off yet another infection.
On December 26, at 6:45 P.M., Leslie Lynch King Jr., known more familiarly as Gerald Rudolph Ford Jr., died in his sleep. There are some who were very close to him who will always believe that in one monumental final act of kindness to his family, he somehow willed himself not to die on Christmas.
Betty and their three sons were at his side; Susan had been there for days, but had just returned to Albuquerque to be with her family.
He passed away in the study of his home, in the same hospital bed where we’d said our farewells on November 14. The cause of death was recorded as arteriosclerotic cerebrovascular disease.
Belatedly, his funeral educated a new generation of Americans, millions of them unborn when he’d left office, to his three decades of government service.
“Finally there’s some understanding of all the good things that guy did,” said Brent Scowcroft, his national security adviser, shortly after the services.
There was a therapeutic aspect to his send-off as well. In the middle of a wrenching and polarizing war, the national psyche sorely needed an uplifting occasion. In death, Ford once again had helped his country, if only for a moment.
“The country needed something to pull it together again,” Steve Ford told me at the Pentagon naming ceremony for his father’s aircraft carrier eleven days after the funeral.
For all the eulogies, the valedictory of the Ford years may have been pronounced by Henry Kissinger at the 1981 dedication of the Ford Library on the Ann Arbor campus of the University of Michigan: “The consolation you have, Mr. President, is that most of the constructive things that have happened since have been based on policies you originated.”
Like John F. Kennedy, he wasn’t president long enough to create an indelible record of accomplishment. He lacked Ronald Reagan’s flair and communications skills, and Bill Clinton’s political dexterity.
He assembled a strong cabinet and senior White House staff, but was too tolerant of their infighting and, like most presidents, had trouble cleaning out deadwood. “There are times when I really wish he could kick some ass,” one of his closest White House aides admitted to me one day in exasperation.
Yet his 896 days as president were momentous, especially for the normalcy he restored to the office and the process of governance.
“People look on him as having managed an interim presidency,” a former senior aide said a decade after the 1976 election, “but he’s still basically well liked and respected.”
In part that was because of who replaced him. Jimmy Carter presided over a presidency perceived as a failure by many Americans. Inevitably, Ford’s reputation was enhanced, just as the elder George Bush has benefited retroactively from the unpopularity of his son and his policies.
He was an ordinary guy in the noblest sense of the term, a steady, solid Michigander whose old-fashioned virtues were the perfect antidote for a nation desperate for stability and civility.
Utterly uncomplicated, lacking in artifice or pretense, he toasted his own English muffins and scooped his golden retriever’s poop from the South Lawn. He didn’t like opera or ballet and didn’t care who knew it. He never developed a taste for fancy food, preferring steak and butter pecan ice cream to any other menu combination. He always counted becoming the first Eagle Scout president one of his proudest moments.
At his first press conference he was asked if he planned to issue ethical guidelines to avoid another Watergate. He crisply replied, “The code of ethics will be the example I set.” Coming from Ford, an icon of personal probity, that required no follow-up.
Ford may have well have presided over the last genuinely civilized presidency. After him, the process became dog-eat-dog; there always had to be a loser. He wasn’t like that, and would have hated the corrosiveness and hyperpartisanship of today’s Washington environment.
In that vein, there was something else he did that I never appreciated at the time but certainly salute today. Unlike most of today’s political practitioners, he had an old-fashioned sense of public accountability. On every trip he took as vice president—thirty-five weeks, forty-one states—he scheduled at least one press conference, where he was routinely hammered about his support for Nixon, Watergate, the tapes, impeachment, and the like.
Even though it complicated the political tightrope he was trying to negotiate, Ford never stopped meeting the press, and he did it with good cheer and civility. He thought it was part of his responsibility as an elected leader. His stand-up performance at a very difficult historical juncture is a lesson worth remembering, especially in today’s control-freak political environment.
“Amidst the worst constitutional crisis since World War II, thank God for Jerry Ford,” Dick Cheney told me in 2002. “He was there when the country needed him. He served superbly under extraordinary circumstances.”
A year later, at a ninetieth birthday celebration at the White House, President Bush lauded the 38th president as “a fine gentleman and a faithful public servant” who had brought America safely through one of her darkest periods.
“Many presidents have stayed longer,” Bush noted, “but few have left the White House with greater respect from the American people, and none ever did more to restore the dignity and credibility of the office of president than Jerry Ford.”
Heading into the twilight, Ford was serene about his place in history. Not many others may have noticed, but he always took great satisfaction in the fact that it was he, not the disgraced Richard Nixon who desperately wanted the honor for himself, who presided over the nation’s Bicentennial observances.
(In typically peripatetic Ford fashion, he scheduled so many events in four days of celebration that they spilled over past the Fourth of July, ending with a swearing-in of new citizens at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello home on July 5, 1976.)
“He’ll go down in history as a good man and a good president,” an old friend once said, “and that suits him just fine.”
All of us in this crazy business of journalism retain instances that stick in our brains, moments that really weren’t newsworthy or happened past deadline, so they never made it into print or onto the air, but are memorable nevertheless because they offer an unexpected window into the character and humanity of a public life.
For me, one of those iconic insights occurred just four days after Gerald Ford became president, as he was fiddling with the speech he would give to a joint session of Congress in less than two hours.
Suddenly, Ford looked up from his text and a postprandial martini.
“Howard, have you had dinner?” he asked Commander Howard Kerr, the naval aide who had delivered the final speech draft to Ford’s modest home in the Virginia suburbs.
When Kerr said he hadn’t eaten, the new president led the officer into the kitchen and plucked the remains of the new First Lady’s tuna noodle casserole from the oven. Ford spooned out the entrée onto a plate and put it on the kitchen table. “Have some dinner,” he told Kerr. “I’m going to go work on the speech.”
A similar human moment happened at 5:53 P.M. on the afternoon of February 28, 1976. President Ford was barnstorming Florida during that bitter primary contest against Ronald Reagan. Toward the end of a typical marathon Ford day—16 events, 13 cities—he got caught in a sudden downpour at the Royal Park Shopping Center in Boca Raton. In no time, he was drenched. When he started to speak, his hair was slicked back, his suit totally wrinkled. The leader of the free world was an absolute mess. And he knew it.
“We’ve had a little rain, and I should apologize for my appearance,” he began his remarks. “But there’s an old saying: ‘Aristocracy is of the soul, not of the cloth.’ So I don’t look very good, but I think I’m a darned good president.”
I suspect history may well decide someday that Ford’s legacy can be summarized by the title of his memoirs, A Time to Heal. But I’m not an oracle, or a pundit, I’m just a reporter. So the historians can sort out the darned-good-president part of it.
As for the rest, to borrow one of his favorite phrases from the Air Force Two days, I can say, without any hesitation, reservation, or equivocation, he was a darned good person.
As Billy Joel sings, these are the times to remember, for they will not last forever.
I was reminded of that bittersweet truth on a return visit to Sand Dune Road in May of 2007. The process of shutting down Ford’s office had begun, but his study remained eerily intact. A lifetime of memorabilia still dotted the paneled walls. A photograph of his public policy school at Ann Arbor was in the middle of his desk, as if he’d just picked it up and proudly shown it off to a visitor. The chair where I’d sat for our interviews, to the left of his blue leather highback executive chair with the presidential seal, occupied its customary place. Reflexively, I sat there again.
Precisely the same as always—almost.
Afterward, I drove over to the old International House Hotel, the site of our epic Easter 1974 interview. After several incarnations, it was being converted to an upscale Holiday Inn. A chain-link fence kept the curious away from the construction. The barrier couldn’t keep me from luxuriating in those sunny slopes of long ago, as an old Texas Ranger captain liked to describe them.
En route to my hotel, I passed a large billboard that jerked me back to reality:
GERALD “OUR” FORD, 1913–2006
It had been a long, fateful, exhilarating journey. Those of us fortunate enough to have been along for part of the ride cherish the experience, and savor our memories.
For that, and for many other personal kindnesses, large and small, the traditional salutation ending presidential press conferences seems only fitting:
Thank you, Mr. President.