ON JULY 30, 1976, as we flew down to Jackson, Mississippi, where Ford would woo that state’s thirty critical swing delegates to the Republican national convention, I interviewed him on Air Force One. A couple of weeks later, a photograph of our session arrived with this handwritten inscription: “Sure does beat Air Force #2. Best wishes, Jerry Ford.”
Maybe for him, I’ve said hundreds of times since that brutally hot summer day, but never for me. Covering Ford’s presidency was memorable enough, but always a lot less fun than those heady days from December 6, 1973, to August 9, 1974, when Ford was the first unelected vice president in American history. Most of my happiest professional memories are anchored in those eight memorable months traveling at a madcap pace with the man who would be president.
It was a miserable time for the country. The Watergate scandal was in full frenzy, building to what even then seemed like an inevitable outcome. Richard Nixon’s foreign policy accomplishments couldn’t trump the criminal behavior of his senior lieutenants and mounting evidence of his own complicity in covering up their misdeeds. A Texas lawyer, Leon Jaworski, had been appointed as a special prosecutor. The House Judiciary Committee had launched an impeachment inquiry. The White House was refusing to turn over transcripts of Nixon’s secret tape-recorded conversations to Jaworski, and the Supreme Court would have to resolve the impasse.
Protests against Nixon multiplied with each new revelation by the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. One of my enduring images of those days is the autos passing by the White House—Pennsylvania Avenue wasn’t closed to traffic then because of security fears like today—incessantly sitting on their horns. (Protesters in Lafayette Park were brandishing signs urging motorists to “honk if you think he’s guilty.”)
Yet it was a supremely exhilarating time for an apprentice reporter from Arlington, Texas, hurtling around the country amidst a bona fide constitutional crisis and a riveting news story.
Mostly that was because of an ordinary man, who also happened to like reporters, unexpectedly thrust into the crucible of extraordinary times. But improbable as it may seem now, what also made it a magical, mystical experience for many of us was what Ford would laughingly call, in a 1991 interview with me, “that awful plane.”
Five years ago, I was at Andrews Air Force Base in the Maryland suburbs, preparing to board Air Force Two for a trip with Vice President Dick Cheney. I saw Cheney’s sleek Boeing 757 jumbo jet and couldn’t help smiling. An Air Force sergeant politely wondered what was so funny.
I told him that my mind’s eye had just flashed back to the first Air Force Two I’d ever seen, twenty-nine years earlier, on the very same tarmac.
The only resemblance of Jerry Ford’s Air Force Two to Cheney’s upscale version was that they both had a white-and-blue color scheme.
Ford’s plane was a tiny VC-131H Samaritan, the military version of the Convair 580 twin-engined propjet.
It was so slow that cross-country trips were interminable, especially when we had to refuel en route. Its 330-mile-per-hour top airspeed was so glacial that on one early flight, as the pilot started the engines, Secret Service agent Jim Huse yelled, “Quiet, please. Prepare to activate slingshot.”
Forevermore, we dubbed the aircraft Slingshot Airlines.
As second in line to the presidency, Ford by protocol rated a ritzier plane. But Henry Kissinger had more grandiose tastes than the vice president, so Ford had allowed the secretary of state to have first choice. Henry and his oversized ego made the most of the veep’s generosity. Occasionally Ford’s military aides would commandeer a larger four-engine jet for him, but it wasn’t much to crow about either: a converted C-135 tanker without any windows. We called that one the Flying Sausage. At least it was faster.
As it turned out, that little plane was a godsend for reporters. Unlike today’s executive military jets, where the dignitaries sit up front and reporters are relegated to the back of the bus, we sat in the front and Ford’s cabin was aft. That meant that on every trip he had to walk past the media gauntlet. It was constant engagement with the press, whether he liked it or not. Much to our satisfaction, we’d soon learn that for the most part, he liked it.
“You’re looking bright-eyed and bushy-tailed this morning” was his standard line as he breezed past us, which was seldom the case because we were all usually exhausted by his frenzied pace.
Even Bill Clinton at his most peripatetic was no match for Jerry Ford in traversing America’s skies. He was constantly on the go, cramming multiple events into his already-jammed travel schedule.
On July 6, 140 miles out of Dallas en route to a political event, he came up to the press cabin to announce he’d just reached the 100,000-mile mark.
By the time he became president, Ford had logged 130,000 miles visiting forty-one states, averaging nearly a coast-to-coast trip every week for eight months.
How crazed were his itineraries? Only Jerry Ford would begin a two-day vacation to Hawaii with a fourteen-hour Friday in Honolulu with eleven events, the last an evening speech to a Boy Scout convention.
Such scheduling overkill was vintage Ford: he didn’t want it to seem he was gouging taxpayers for a very brief downtime weekend at the posh Mauna Kea Beach Hotel on the Big Island of Hawaii.
That sort of forced-march regimen wasn’t an aberration; he did it all the time, wearing out aides, Secret Service agents, and reporters half his age.
A one-day trip to Wichita Falls and Tulsa was a typical death-march bruiser: nineteen hours, ending at 2:00 A.M., after five receptions, three speeches, and two press conferences.
Here’s a sample of one twelve-day schedule I filed with my editors:
Monday, May 20—leave early ayem for Seattle; return Washington two ayem Tuesday.
Wednesday, May 22—leave ayem for New York and Delaware, return midnight.
Thursday, May 23—leave early evening for New York, return midnight.
Friday, May 24—leave ayem for Lansing, Michigan, return midafternoon.
Saturday, May 25—leave midafternoon for Boston, return midnight.
Sunday, May 26—leave noon for New York and Connecticut, return midnight.
Tuesday, May 28—leave midmorning for Charlotte, return one ayem.
Wednesday, May 29—leave midday for Birmingham, return one ayem.
Friday, May 31—leave midafternoon for New Hampshire, return midnight.
In other words: nine states, nine out-and-back day trips in twelve days.
Like George W. Bush today, Ford liked to sleep in his own bed, so most of his trips were these marathon one-day stands that had him arriving home well past midnight. Then he’d turn around and crank it up again the next morning, usually with only five hours of sleep. And he loved red-eye flights like no politician I’ve ever covered.
As vice president, Ford was faced with one of the more daunting assignments any American politician has ever confronted. He was determined to remain loyal to his president, the old friend and former congressional colleague who’d made him VP. He was also intent on staying true to his conscience, and much of what he saw unfolding at the White House troubled him. More than anything else, he was also desperate to do everything in his power to hold his beloved Republican Party together amid the wreckage of Watergate.
Every vice president struggles under the yoke of playing second fiddle, but Watergate made the part far trickier for Ford. Even in the beginning, when he still believed Nixon was innocent, Ford was smart enough to realize there was a reasonable chance he might become president anyway. If it happened, he’d need to come before a wounded and troubled nation as the Great Healer. By defending Nixon too forcefully, he risked being tarred as an Agnewesque polarizer, diminishing his capacity to reunite the nation.
In retrospect, I believe that’s why he left himself some safety valves, such as saying he believed Nixon was clean “based on the current evidence” or the assurances of others.
He also proved he wasn’t a total lapdog one day in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, when a hotshot local TV anchor prefaced a question with a reference to “this media-manufactured Watergate crisis.” When asked if he agreed, Ford firmly rejected the notion that Watergate was the creation of the Nixon-loathing press.
Juggling multiple obligations and masters was fundamentally impossible, but Ford gave it his best, rhetorically hooking and slicing with maddening regularity. As with sausage-making, legislation, and reporting, Ford’s attempts to negotiate that tightrope weren’t always a pretty sight.
But it was an intriguing exercise in political Kremlinology, not to mention one helluva lot of fun, for the small band of reporters along for the ride.
Many of our colleagues cycled in and out on Ford trips, but there were seven of us in the core group. Marjorie Hunter of the New York Times, who’d covered Ford for years on Capitol Hill, was the senior member. The network reps were Phil Jones of CBS, Ron Nessen of NBC, and Bill Zimmerman of ABC. Bob Leonard of the Voice of America was always urging Ford to speak in Special English, a simpler version of English that the VOA still uses on many of its international broadcasts. David Kennerly, the wisecracking Time magazine shooter who later became President Ford’s personal photographer, rounded out the group.
As Ford began more or less nonstop travel, a couple of realities quickly became apparent: he was far more popular than Richard Nixon, and he was also a dull, uninspiring speaker. But nobody seemed to care, because he was such a decent soul, the quintessential un-Nixon.
Despite his sometimes reflexive support for Nixon, Ford’s popular appeal was undeniable. In February, a Gallup poll showed that if he were running for president against Nixon, he’d beat his boss by a 14 percent margin.
Judged against Ford’s abundant list of oratorical defects, those numbers were even more remarkable. After two months of traveling with him, I’d reached the conclusion that the advance book on Ford was true to form. On February 13, I summarized him this way in a file to my editors in New York:
He is basically the poor man’s Dwight D. Eisenhower, an earnest plodder whose intellect will never be described as scintillating. He exudes about as much flair and charisma as Calvin Coolidge. He is a terrible orator, one of the worst in recent memory. Although his newly hired ghosters can be expected to improve upon an erratic prose style in which major chunks of his speeches fail to hang together and trail off into dead ends, they probably won’t be able to do much for a soporific delivery so deadly it could put an insomniac to sleep, and probably has. What other GOP pol would be injudicious enough, e.g., to claim in public [last week] that “we have a President who has selected the finest people to serve” when most of Nixon’s first team have been disgraced by Watergate?
Why, then, all the popular adulation? The answer is deceptively simple: Jerry Ford is a human being cum laude, a down-to-earth, earnest, genuinely likable guy with an infectious laugh and not the slightest hint of pretentiousness. He is a politician of great and genuine sincerity who feels far more comfortable with “Jerry” than “Mr. Vice President.” And in a time when virtuous pols seem as scarce as gasoline, Jerry Ford sticks out as a man of abundant decency.
Ford’s humanity was demonstrated in all sorts of ways. When Spiro Agnew was vice president, an Air Force JetStar and its crew were kept on call for Agnew’s exclusive use. Ford ordered the plane returned to the VIP motor pool. One of the reasons he liked his little Convair turboprop was that it burned less fuel than pure jets. When the Secret Service made him take a Boeing 707 military jet to Vail for Christmas 1973, he made sure that the ten extra seats went to soldiers trying to make it home for the holidays.
When he and Dick Cavett prepared to enter Ford’s Alexandria, Virginia, home for a TV taping, the protocol-conscious Cavett inquired, “Does one precede the vice president?” Ford answered, “In my house you do,” holding the door open for his guest.
And when an ice storm delayed Time magazine reporter David Beckwith from getting to Baltimore/Washington International Airport in time to make that Christmas holiday flight to Vail, a bone-weary Ford, exhausted from a trip to Madrid for the funeral of an assassinated Spanish official, graciously ordered his jet held on the runway for half an hour until the offending reporter sheepishly arrived from New York. Agnew would never have done that; Nixon would probably have had Beckwith shot on the tarmac.
Neither would Nixon have ever allowed himself to be photographed amid the mellowness of a two-martini evening. That happened one night as we returned to Washington from Florida during the height of the streaking craze, where young men and women would strip naked and run through public places, including that year’s Academy Awards show. After Ford pronounced the practice “silly,” Maggie Hunter had T-shirts made up that said “Keep on Streaking” and gave him one. After takeoff from Tampa, he put it on and literally sprinted up to the press cabin, gleefully cackling in full frat-boy mode.
As for the bigger Ford picture, we all more or less figured Ford would be president before long, and further suspected that he knew as well.
In most speeches he told a joke about how whenever his motorcade drove past the White House he’d say to himself, “If you worked here, you’d be home already.” It infuriated Nixon’s courtiers, but was ostensibly designed to reinforce Ford’s self-deprecating sense of self. Or was there another message to his one-liner?
Ours was an endless cat-and-mouse game of trying to draw him out on the Watergate issue of the moment, then parsing his language to determine whether he was being imprecise or verbally clumsy, or whether he’d consciously created new distance between himself and Nixon. It was rigorous work: Ford zigged and zagged more than a Singer sewing machine.
(We caught him only once. Leaving Palm Springs for Washington at Easter, Ford shot the breeze on the tarmac with Phil Jones and me while waiting for Betty, who was hobbled by a bone spur operation and having trouble negotiating the Air Force Two ramp. Jones chided Ford for his spiffy new glen plaid suit with deep side vents and angled pocket flaps. Ford responded in kind about Jones’s bush suit, the sort favored by reporters who’d spent time in Vietnam.
“Are you going to wear that over to the White House?” Ford asked. In an instant he caught himself. “And up to the Hill?” We both knew exactly what he was saying.)
After returning from his Christmas skiing holiday in Vail, Ford began 1974 in unadulterated Nixon waterboy mode. In a January 15 speech to the American Farm Bureau convention in Atlantic City, he declared the impeachment effort the handiwork of “a few extreme partisans” bent on destroying not only the president but the American system.
He was deeply embarrassed, and his credibility wounded, when it became known that the speech had been drafted by the White House. He quickly hired his own ghostwriters to establish some autonomy, but the incident undercut his insistence that he intended to be his own man despite his friendship with Nixon.
On January 21, a Monday, Ford spent an hour and 45 minutes with Nixon and came away convinced his boss was totally clean. The next morning he asserted at a press conference, “The president had no prior knowledge of Watergate, had no part in the cover-up, and has not been party of any of these allegations made by some.”
He repeated the same defense to me in an interview the next day, predicting that the House Judiciary Committee would never impeach Nixon and extolling his strength under duress.
“If anyone thinks he is not strong mentally and physically,” he confided, “they don’t know what the facts are. If anybody doubts his desire to move ahead—domestically, internationally, and politically—they haven’t seen him lately.
“The president isn’t sitting there huddled up, scared to speak out. He’s in charge.”
In full cheerleader mode, he also predicted that in the unlikely event the committee impeached Nixon, impeachment would lose in the full House by at least 100 votes—probably more when all the good things Nixon was doing in the Middle East came to fruition.
“You’re going to see the embargo lifted on Middle East oil,” he predicted, “which will have a tremendous psychological attitude on the economic condition and the public attitude. If a real shot in the arm comes like that, is the House, in that improving atmosphere, going to attack the guy that made it possible? I don’t think so.”
By the middle of February, he was spending more time on the road than at his desk in Room 275 of the Executive Office Building. Passkey, his Secret Service radio call sign, was the hottest political commodity in the country. (His code name was later changed to Pontiac, legendary chief of the Ottawa Indian tribe and a fellow Michigander.)
More than five thousand speaking invitations had poured into his office from supplicants as diverse as other countries to Girl Scout troops, and one hundred new requests piled up each day.
“All the attention embarrasses me,” he told me one day. “It’s just not my style. I’ve always been a self-sufficient individual.”
Ford was particularly sought-after by fellow Republicans, who rated Richard Nixon somewhere below the plague as the midterm elections approached.
He left standing orders with his schedulers to say yes to any member of Congress who needed him to campaign; throughout his vice presidency, half his travel was devoted to Republican Party events.
“Watergate has disastrously damaged our party,” he was overheard telling a seatmate on Air Force Two in the spring of 1974.
That was an understatement. On February 18, the Democrats won the special election in his old congressional district. It was the first time in sixty-four years that Ford’s home turf wouldn’t be represented by a Republican, and he was shaken when he heard the news in a phone call from a former aide aboard Air Force Two returning from Chattanooga. He was staggered. “It’s a beating,” he disconsolately muttered over his shoulder to a reporter’s question.
By March, Ford’s rhetoric was becoming far more cautious. In campaigning for Republicans, he began praising Nixon’s policies without managing to use his name. Privately, he advised nervous former congressional colleagues to put similar distance between themselves and Nixon.
About the same time, Ford’s aides began whispering to the Air Force Two press regulars that in private he was sharply critical of Nixon’s handling of his Watergate defense and was urging the beleaguered president to be more forthcoming, with investigators and the country.
On March 2 in Phoenix, without checking with a subsequently enraged White House, Ford told reporters that a federal grand jury’s report on Nixon’s alleged Watergate involvement should be made available to the House Judiciary Committee.
Why the sea change? Simple: Ford, the consummate party man, was furious with Nixon’s statement at a February 25 press conference that he wouldn’t resign even if the Republican Party was eviscerated in the process. Ford read that as a to-hell-with-the-party kiss-off, and bitterly resented it.
Around this time, I asked him why he was traveling so much. He didn’t mention any obligation to defend Nixon.
“Our party needs some help,” he said, “and at the moment I’m the one person who can go to Arizona and Boston and get the party together.”
He wouldn’t let me use it at the time, but he also said this: “Somebody has to keep this party from falling apart.”
There was more to it than that. Desperate to save his party from ruination, Ford also understood what Watergate had done to the fabric of the nation and its confidence in government. Over time, Ford had essentially become America’s de facto president.
So while Nixon became a virtual hostage of the scandal, Ford quietly but consciously stepped into the void, assuming much of the show-the-flag function normally the preserve of a president.
Wherever he went, Ford reminded his audiences that this was still a great country, respected throughout the globe, the last best hope for mankind, the arbiter of choice in the Middle East.
“I’ve been telling as many members of the Class of 1974 as I can reach that the government in Washington isn’t about to sink,” he said at a Texas college commencement in May. “That it is and will continue to be about as good as concerned and conscientious citizens make it, that the constitutional processes are working as the Founding Fathers intended, without riot or repression and most importantly, without as yet seriously weakening our strength at home and abroad.”
It wasn’t just political imperative or his reputation as a soft touch that explained why Ford could be found stoically puffing on his pipe at head tables in such backroads locales as Great Bend, Kansas; London, Kentucky; and Charleston, Illinois. Or why he spoke to such normally non–vice presidential groups as the Mobile Home Manufacturers Association, the Tinley Park [Illinois] High School Titans, or the New York Masonic Lodge. Or why he addressed a North Carolina graduating class of sixty-seven.
As one of his closest friends explained, “Jerry understands that he’s one of the few people in a position to keep this country from falling apart.”
Meanwhile, Nixon was cratering, and Ford knew it. Suddenly, he was far more his own man. At a March 11 fundraiser in Boston, he praised Francis Sargent as one of America’s finest governors—just five days after Sargent had suggested America would be better off if Nixon resigned.
Earlier that day, he damned Nixon with faint praise with some Harvard kids. While insisting he hewed to a “high degree of loyalty” to Nixon, he also said, “I don’t happen to believe on the basis of evidence that I am familiar with…that the president was in any way connected with Watergate per se, and I don’t believe that he had any part in the cover-up—but time will tell” (emphasis added).
On March 30 in Chicago, he denounced Nixon’s reelection committee, familiarly known as CREEP (Committee to Re-elect the President), for caring more about its candidate than about the Republican Party. He dismissed the committee as “an arrogant, elite guard of political adolescents” and recommended that all future national campaigns be run by the Republican and Democratic National Committees.
That night I cabled this assessment to my editors after checking with two of Ford’s closest aides: “Ford’s paramount responsibility (in his view) is to save the Republican Party if at all possible from what he worries will be a debacle this fall. He will defend Richard Nixon whenever he can as long as he can, but Nixon’s survival is secondary to the survival of the GOP.”
The qualitative change in Ford’s defense of Nixon didn’t pass unnoticed at the White House, which began telling reporters that maybe the vice president wasn’t as loyal as he professed. That prompted another celebrated Ford turnabout.
On April 24, a week after my fateful conversation with Ford in Palm Springs, Maggie Hunter in the Times broke a story that began, “Vice President Ford has confided to acquaintances in recent weeks that he is perplexed by what he senses to be the feeling of some White House aides that he is attempting to undercut President Nixon.”
The story analyzed the schism between Ford and some of Nixon’s more rabid assistants and noted, “Mr. Ford is said to be deeply concerned over the apparent feelings of some White House aides that he is intentionally trying to overshadow Mr. Nixon. He has told close friends that he has no desire to rupture his still close relationship with the President, but he feels he is obliged to do all he can to keep his party from being swept away in a Democratic landslide this fall.”
Maggie was a good reporter and a fabulous den mother for us rookies on the Ford beat, but her sourcing for this particular article was unusually impeccable: Jerry Ford himself. In this instance, we were “the acquaintances” in whom Ford had confided.
In fact, Ford had backgrounded all of us reporters traveling with him the week before between Monterey and Palm Springs. But he had insisted any stories we filed be held for a week so they would carry Washington datelines, a device he hoped would help disguise the true identity of our primary source.
Three decades later, it’s clear in retrospect that Air Force Two was his private chamber, his flying safe house. It was the only place where he could really relax, and he often included us. “Anything that was on his mind,” Phil Jones remembered, “we would usually know about it.”
None of us in the press corps considered ourselves “close friends” of the veep, but we went along with Ford’s ground rules to help cover his tracks—and facilitate our access to him in the future. Such phrases as “in recent weeks,” “observed a few weeks ago,” and “said to feel” were all standard camouflage language. That’s the way the leak game is played in Washington, then and now.
It was apparent by then that while he was predisposed to give Nixon the benefit of the doubt, the more he learned about Watergate, the more he began to believe he was being lied to—a political mortal sin for a straight arrow like Jerry Ford. By early May, I was filing that Ford agreed with old friends in Congress that Nixon would be impeached.
Not coincidentally, his rhetorical distance from Nixon expanded significantly. Returning from a day trip to New York City on May 6, Ford wandered up to the press cabin and said he was now worried about Nixon’s ability to conduct foreign policy because of the scandal.
In effect, he was suggesting that Nixon’s political survival might no longer be in the national interest, a blockbuster notion coming from the guy who would have to pick up the pieces.
All of us immediately grasped the impact of what that meant; Nixon’s foreign policy strengths were the bedrock of Ford’s case against impeachment. In almost every speech he would say, “Richard Nixon is the greatest president in foreign affairs in my lifetime.” Now Ford was really off the reservation.
The next afternoon, after his personal phone calls failed to persuade the regulars to hold off on publishing his damning remarks, Ford was in a rage when he came aboard for that day’s trip back to New York.
“Good afternoon, gentlemen,” he said, brushing past reporters without pausing. It was the only time in those eight months that I saw him struggle with his temper, and he told me coming back to Washington that night that he’d never hoist a round with us again. Typically, that embargo lasted a little more than twenty-four hours—which told me Ford was only annoyed his remarks were attributed to him, not that they were reported.
Four days later, on May 11, Ford was the commencement speaker at Texas A&M University, my alma mater. For a story previewing the vice president’s visit, I was interviewed by a reporter from the student newspaper, The Battalion, where I had once been the editor.
The day before we arrived in College Station, The Batt, as it’s known, ran a front-page story that began this way: “Those who hear U.S. Vice President Gerald R. Ford speak at Saturday’s commencement exercises will probably be listening to the next President, said Newsweek writer Tom DeFrank.”
The story was delicately modulated; I’d been careful in the interview not to say Nixon was a goner, only that Ford was “capable of stepping into the Presidency” if it came to that. I also talked about Ford’s pleasing personality and opined, “I believe Ford is being honest when he says he will not run for President in 1976. At the same time, he is smart enough to know that if he is forced into the Presidency, it will be a different story.”
But as all reporters quickly learn, often to their dismay, sometimes a story’s headline is pithier and more lacking in nuance than the text. That was certainly true in this case: “DeFrank Predicts Ford’s Presidency,” the headline trumpeted.
Not long after Air Force Two landed at Easterwood Airport, I was tipped off to the story by Mary Helen Bowers, the wife of my favorite journalism professor and faculty adviser, David Bowers. Unfortunately for me, several of my colleagues in the traveling press corps overheard our conversation.
After Ford’s unmemorable address, which included a couple of local-color references about A&M traditions that I’d passed along to his chief of staff Bob Hartmann, the entourage returned to the airport and flew off to political events in Houston and Dallas before heading home.
As we boarded Air Force Two, it was instantly apparent the irrepressible pot-stirrer Phil Jones had been up to his usual mischief: every seat on the plane had a copy of the Battalion story talking about how Jerry Ford was going to be the next president. Their only source for this bombshell revelation, of course, was me.
As Ford walked through the press cabin, Jones helpfully pointed out a story in the local press that might be of interest. Ford picked up the paper, saw the headline, and winced, literally.
“You’re gonna get me in trouble, Tom,” he grumped, swiftly exiting our cabin before any of my gleeful colleagues could engage him further.
I knew he was annoyed; even though the story was complimentary to him, there was no doubt it added to the uncomfortable bind he’d been in since being sworn in. But I also knew I was right about my prediction; I’d heard him admit it himself just three weeks earlier in Palm Springs. I wondered if he remembered that conversation; perhaps that was why he didn’t give me more of a hard time about it.
In fact, good sport as ever, he actually signed a copy of the offending article for me. It turned out to be the tersest autograph I have from him: “Thanks, Jerry Ford.”
Two days later, Ford flew to New Orleans. Then he changed planes for the short hop to Baton Rouge for a speech to the Louisiana legislature. On that leg, Air Force Two was an ancient Naval Reserve C-54 propeller cargo plane that should have been in an air museum instead of hauling VIPs. The engine cowlings appeared a heartbeat away from metal fatigue. The interior, I wrote in my notebook, looked like the inside of a New York City subway station. There was no air-conditioning, leaving Ford’s retinue to baste in the muggy eighty-degree climate. Instead of the vice presidential seal, the door of the plane carried its own distinctive logo: a smirking raccoon, its tail hoisted in the air.
This day, the vice president of the free world was being flown in a plane emblazoned with the ass of a raccoon.
The pilot apologized to Ford’s military aide: “Commander, I know this is a cattle car. But you should have seen it yesterday before we cleaned it up.”
That was a relative description for a plane whose normal mission was ferrying okra and snap beans around the Mississippi River delta. When Louisiana governor Edwin Edwards fastened his seat belt, his pristine vanilla ice cream suit got slathered with grease. Congressman F. Edward Hébert, powerful chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, was so incensed by the plane that he arranged alternative transportation back to New Orleans.
Ford, as usual, took it all in stride. But he later told an aide: “Don’t ever let this happen again.”
As he walked into the statehouse later, the resemblance to a president entering the House of Representatives for a State of the Union address was eerie, and the symbolism wasn’t lost on the former House minority leader.
After being introduced by Edwards, Ford quipped—or did he: “I hope my friends in the press aren’t getting the wrong impression that my speaking before a joint session of the legislature is any forerunner to what might happen in the future.”
If that is the case, I thought to myself, the country will need to get used to a less than spellbinding orator. In that utterly pedestrian speech, Ford uttered one of the dopier lines of his vice presidency: “General revenue-sharing is as basic to the new federalism as shrimp is to the Creole.”
Another week, more waffling. Nixon had turned over nineteen “edited” transcripts of his Oval Office conversations to the House Judiciary Committee. In Delaware on May 22, the same day the White House said it wouldn’t give the committee anything more, Ford criticized the decision. “Let’s get it all out there and the quicker the better,” he argued.
Nixon was livid, and Ford was summoned to the White House the very next day for a private chat. It didn’t go well; I know that because in an off-the-record interview that I was able to use only after it was heavily doctored, he told me so. A telltale sign, according to Ford: Nixon wasn’t smoking a pipe, which he usually did when he and Ford were alone.
Ford confided that he’d told Nixon his hard line on the tapes was counterproductive and that by opposing Nixon’s stand, he was giving his defense of Nixon’s innocence more credibility. Nixon wasn’t buying.
Then, Ford said, he’d warned Nixon that if he didn’t turn over more tapes, he almost certainly would be impeached.
“I made my position clear and he made his position clear,” Ford guardedly told me.
Ford always wore his emotions on his sleeve; on a trip to Lansing, Michigan, the next day, he appeared visibly tense and upset. It was apparent the meeting had thrown him off balance.
On May 28, Nixon singled Ford out for his “terrific job” at a hastily arranged cabinet meeting. The stroking worked; in Charlotte later that day, before playing golf with Billy Graham at the Kemper Open, Ford touted his bonds to the boss: “The president and I have had an excellent personal, social, political relationship, and I see no change whatsoever despite what some have speculated. We are firm friends.”
The next day in Birmingham, he recanted his previous criticism, saying Nixon’s decision to hold off on more tapes “is proper” for the time being.
It drove his staff crazy. They privately fretted to me and other reporters that Ford looked indecisive; his vacillating, one of his closest aides complained, could be fairly construed as a “commentary on his ability to command.” Ford’s aides knew Nixon was history, too.
Why another maddening reversal? His indiscriminate admission to me in April that Nixon was a goner had been proven out with each new round of revelations and stonewalling. He knew he would be president, and soon. As a wounded nation’s new leader, he had to know that the beneficiary of Nixon’s demise couldn’t be seen as a party to the process that forced him out. If it looked like he was greasing the skids, Republicans would never forgive the man who liked to think of himself as Mr. Republican, and Democrats would surely suspect him of opportunism. His moral authority would be shredded.
I remembered what he’d said in April: When the pages of history are written, nobody can say I contributed to it. Nixon’s doom was now certain; the loaded pistol was on the nightstand. Ford was determined not to have his fingerprints on the weapon.
One morning in early July, Mel Elfin called me into his office and laid a huge downer on my head: Newsweek’s White House correspondent, Hank Trewhitt, was leaving for the Baltimore Sun. I’d be replacing him.
I was crestfallen. I was having the time of my life on the Ford beat; now I was being banished to the Nixon bunker, which had become even more oppressive and hostile to the press as the president’s prospects diminished.
I reminded Mel he’d assigned me to Ford in the first place so the magazine would have someone with connections to the new president and his staff. It made no sense to yank me off now, I argued.
Mel was adamant. I was now sufficiently well sourced with the Ford operation, he said, so whenever he took over, I’d be in good shape and already in place at the White House.
I figured Nixon was toast, but guessed he could hang on another six months. That would be pure hell for me, like a major-leaguer banished to the Double-A Texas League of my youth.
I had no choice, so with monumental unhappiness I did as ordered; you didn’t say no to Mel Elfin. But I wangled one small concession. Ford had a trip coming up to New Mexico and California that included a meeting with Nixon, who was vacationing at his La Casa Pacifica compound in San Clemente. Mel agreed that I could fly out with Ford, make my goodbyes, and cover the Nixon meeting. But when Ford flew back to Washington, the torch would be passed: I would stick with Nixon.
So on July 12, I flew off on my last Air Force Two trip in a bleak mood. It had been such a blast—the most fun I’ve ever experienced in journalism—but it was over. Ford had been especially generous to me, and I wanted to thank him for that and also explain why he wouldn’t see me around anymore. So somewhere between Washington and our first stop in Alamogordo, New Mexico, I wrote out a handwritten goodbye letter to Ford.
At the end, I couldn’t resist a little snippet of reality. I said that since I was heading to the White House I expected to see him there before long. “So just consider me your advance man,” I signed off.
The next day in California, I was the print pool reporter for the Nixon meeting. Nixon had sent his personal helicopter to pick Ford up, and that’s the only time I’ve ever flown on Marine One. (Or maybe it was Army One; in those days the Army and Marines each had a helicopter squadron that rotated presidential transport missions.) Then Ford had a dinner speech in Orange County, and afterward he and my friends red-eyed back to Washington.
As I watched from the tarmac as they all flew off without me, my spirits couldn’t have been lower. I took a cab to Laguna Beach and prepared to begin my exile on the Nixon death-watch beat.
By the time Ford landed at Andrews, he’d be observing his sixty-first birthday, so his staff had planned a party en route. My colleagues presented him with a rakish birthday card (which I’d signed on the flight between New Mexico and the coast) featuring the rear end of a mule stuck astride a fence and the caption “You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.”
During the festivities, Ford mentioned he was sorry I was AWOL but that he’d gotten a letter from me he hadn’t read. When he fished it from a pocket, my press colleagues talked him into sharing the letter to the assembled.
Memo to future vice presidents in waiting: never read in a public forum a private communication that you haven’t vetted first.
All was well enough until he got to my last line. He paused, instinctively understanding the reaction he’d get. But he was in too far—my media pals goaded him to keep reading. Visibly uncomfortable, he did so, and lusty applause erupted from the audience over the advance man line.
Eleven days later, I received a very generous letter from Ford:
Yours is one of the most touching letters I have ever received from anyone. It was with great appreciation that I read your comment that you “have never been around any politician for whom [you] have greater personal or professional respect.”
It has been great having you cover me. I am most grateful for your fair and objective reporting and for your fine friendship. I will miss you very much.
For my money, Ford buried the lead, as journalists like to say. His cryptic third paragraph had this to say: “I also appreciate your comments regarding another matter on which I will not quote you. Thank you very much.”
Ah, I thought, Ford gets the joke. I remembered our momentous conversation of April 17, when he’d told me he knew he was going to be president. Now he was signaling me that he indeed knew he would be sitting in the Oval Office—and even sooner than I had feared when I’d been reassigned. Suddenly my grim Nixon duty seemed a little more tolerable. As George W. Bush would say at every stop of his 2000 campaign, help is on the way.
A few days later, however, I heard from one of his aides that Ford was irritated about my letter. The implication was that I had sandbagged him by putting him on the spot in front of my colleagues. I remember saying, in my defense, that I’d never dreamed it would be seen by anyone but his staff, much less read aloud in a public setting. I did some more checking, and heard the same thing: he’s irked with you.
Improbably, I brooded, Ford and I had now come full circle. We’d started out on a lousy footing, then developed a strong professional bond. Now I was back in the doghouse where I’d started, and he was about to become the next president.
History records what happened not long thereafter. The Supreme Court had ruled on July 24—the day before my letter from Ford was dated—that Nixon must hand over the tapes to Jaworski. Three days later, the House Judiciary Committee voted the first of three articles of impeachment against Nixon. On August 5, the White House reluctantly released the “smoking gun” tapes proving that Nixon had approved of the cover-up. I called Mel Elfin from the White House and read him a couple of sentences. It was over.
On August 8, Nixon told the nation he’d resign the next day. Watching his speech on a tiny black-and-white television in the basement of the press room, I heard a tumultuous roar of approval from the thousands of demonstrators across Pennsylvania Avenue in Lafayette Park.
The next morning, after an emotional farewell address to his distraught staff, Nixon walked to Army One, accompanied by his vice president and their spouses. At the top of the steps he waved goodbye; then, in almost an afterthought, he flashed that signature double-V salute that his enemies despised, and helicoptered off to exile to await history’s judgment.
As I walked back into the White House to await Ford’s swearing-in, I noticed a hard-nosed, middle-aged guy with tears streaming down his cheeks. It was Dick Keiser, the head of Nixon’s Secret Service detail.
Exactly one week later—Friday, August 16—Ford hosted his first state dinner, with King Hussein of Jordan.
I was shocked to receive an invitation to the dinner, but that was Jerry Ford. The Air Force Two regulars were invited guests that night.
I’d been in a couple of pools with the new president but hadn’t gotten close enough to speak with him. As I stood in the East Room receiving line before the dinner, I was filled with trepidation. After the letter flap, I was sure he’d give me the cold shoulder.
Finally, it was my turn to be introduced by a young military social aide who had no idea that Ford and I had ever met.
“Mr. President, Mr. Thomas DeFrank of Newsweek magazine.”
“Hello, Mr. President. Congratulations.”
“Hello, Tom, nice to see you.” (That was the standard Ford greeting; no tipoff to his mindset there.)
Then he turned to the king. “Your Majesty,” he said, “I’d like you to meet Tom DeFrank. He’s one of my advance men.”
Before I could react, out came that hearty Midwest bellow that was another Ford trademark.
King Hussein didn’t have a clue what was going down.
“My congratulations, sir.” He smiled, earnestly shaking my hand.
It was a classic “gotcha” moment. But the real message, which I absorbed with enormous relief, was that Ford and I were back in business.