A NIXON PARTISAN once predicted that Watergate would eventually evaporate like an evanescent cloud. Instead it had cast a funereal pall over the country and the White House. That August evening in the East Room, the cloud began lifting.
That first Ford state dinner marked a seismic correction to the style of the arrogant, secretive, and oppressive attitude of the Nixon years. In just a couple of hours, the camaraderie and the conviviality of that dinner seemed to dissipate much of the angst and rancor that had turned the president’s house into a fortress for the previous four years. The sea change was remarkable.
For instance, I’m confident in predicting that Jerry Ford will be the first, last, and only president of the United States to dance at the White House to Jim Croce’s street-dude ballad “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown.”
But long before the new president boogied with the wife of NBC News’s Ron Nessen, later to become his press secretary, the new mood of the place was apparent to all.
At the predinner reception, Senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon walked up to a friend, stuck out his hand, and beamed. “Happy New Year,” he said.
JFK and LBJ secretary of defense Robert McNamara, a fellow Michigander who had been added to the guest list by Ford himself, told fellow invitees that he’d returned from Venezuela the night before and had planned to fly to Aspen—until the invitation arrived.
Shocked and delighted at being included—McNamara was persona non grata in the Nixon regime—the former president of the Ford Motor Company was overcome by the high drama and emotion of the moment. Trembling, he pointed at Ford and said, “I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. Civility had gotten lost in the country, but this man has America smiling again.”
Henry Kissinger greeted McNamara warmly. “My God,” he said, “you know things have changed when they let you in here.”
They had indeed—but the new mood had been apparent even before Ford had taken the oath of office in the same room just a week before.
By design, the president-to-be strode into the East Room with a distinct absence of fanfare. It was a solemn, sad moment in our history, Ford had told his aides, not cause for celebration. So at his express order, the ubiquitous presidential anthem, “Hail to the Chief,” wasn’t played to herald his arrival.
Long ago, history settled on the operative sound bite from that inaugural address:
“My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over. Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here, the people rule.”
As I stood in a corner of the East Room watching him promise not to let America down, my mind kept returning to a line he had used all the time as vice president: “I’m a Ford, not a Lincoln.” It was a clever device to lower expectations, but also a window into Ford’s humility.
My most enduring memory of that historic day has nothing to do with Ford. As the audience assembled in the East Room, I was struck by the pathos of chief of staff Alexander Haig trying to comfort Nixon’s personal secretary Rose Mary Woods as they waited for Ford to arrive. Haig kept patting Woods on the arm, as if to reassure her that life would go on without her former boss. A superloyalist until her last breath in 2005, Rose Woods was in no mood for consolation: she stared straight ahead, eyes fixed on the lectern, trying, I thought, to control her rage and grief. By outward appearances, her life was over.
In the next few days, Ford and his lieutenants set about reassuring the nation and the world that nothing had changed in America except presidents. They also worked overtime dismantling the stuffy and imperial Nixon aura.
It wasn’t a behavioral stretch for the new president: he was as unimperial a politician as I’ve ever encountered.
He commuted to the Oval Office from his Alexandria home for a few weeks, for example, before finally settling in to the White House. After church services in Virginia one Sunday, the Fords swung by the house to check on the status of the packing. The new president saw an open carton in the living room. Reaching in, he discovered his World War II Navy uniforms—khakis, whites, blues—meticulously folded by Betty.
“Well, I guess we should send them to Goodwill,” he observed.
Betty smiled. “Jerry, I think some of this stuff may be a little important now. We’d better keep them.”
“Well, okay,” her husband said. Those uniforms now reside in the Ford Museum in Grand Rapids.
The Ford takeover may have been the most stylistically jarring switch since John Quincy Adams and his Boston Brahmins were replaced by Andrew Jackson and his frontier ruffian pals.
Word was passed that the White House family quarters henceforth would be known as “the residence,” instead of “the Executive Mansion.” Nixon’s grandiose name change for Air Force One, The Spirit of ’76, was swiftly repealed. When he wasn’t busy toasting his own English muffins or having cottage cheese and ketchup for lunch, Ford replaced the unpopular Ron Ziegler as press secretary with Jerald terHorst, a widely admired journalist. He also told his senior staff they could talk with reporters without having their contacts cleared by the press office.
To reinforce the image of bipartisanship he’d pledged in his inaugural speech, Ford decided not to attend any campaign fundraisers in the fall. He banned Nixon’s practice of having church services at the White House; this president would come to God, not vice versa. He met guests at the door to the Oval Office instead of waiting at the imperial desk. He let his counselor Bob Hartmann use the private presidential toilet. When his golden retriever Liberty needed to answer nature’s call in the middle of the night, Ford would grab his bathrobe and walk her to the South Lawn himself. And he decided to offer conditional amnesty to young men who’d fled the country to avoid being drafted for Vietnam.
“The real reason he likes living in the White House,” a senior counselor joked, “is because he drops his laundry down a chute at night and it comes back clean in the morning.”
But there was one serious new-life downside for a president religious about his daily aquatic regimen: his new home’s swimming pool, favored by FDR and JFK, was underneath the briefing room and long sealed up.
“Fifteen minutes in the pool,” he moaned to an aide, “are worth two martinis.”
The humanity offensive worked. The Washington Post’s esteemed David Broder described Ford as “the most normal, sane, down-to-earth individual to work in the Oval Office since Harry Truman left.” A holdover West Wing secretary told me at the end of Ford’s first week, “I haven’t seen so many smiles around here in a long, long time.”
This cheery era of good Ford feeling abruptly imploded twenty-three days later, at 11:05 on the morning of Sunday, September 8.
At 8:30 A.M., press office staffers began alerting media regulars that Ford would have something to say in a couple of hours. Newsmagazine reporters got an extra bit of off-the-record guidance: might be a smart idea to stop your presses.
During his vice presidential confirmation hearings, Ford was asked about the possibility of pardoning Nixon, before he’d been indicted. “I do not think the public would stand for it,” he’d replied. That was prophetic in the extreme.
Speaking on live national television from his desk in the Oval Office, Ford called Nixon’s plight “an American tragedy” that was “threatening his health”—three words he inserted into the text his staff had prepared. “Someone must write the end to it. I have concluded that only I can do that.”
He granted his predecessor a “full, free, and absolute pardon,” signing it on the spot.
It wasn’t as if he hadn’t warned us. At his first press conference, on August 28, where he’d worn his congressional tie as a further reminder of his unimperial side, Ford was asked about the pardon more than once. Instead of brushing it aside as a hypothetical question, he said, “I’m not ruling it out. It is an option, and a proper option for any president.” Listened to a third of a century later, those words leap off the videotape. We in the press hadn’t been paying sufficient attention; it had sailed right past us all.
A few minutes after the bombshell announcement, I ran into Howard Kerr, who was now working for Ford counselor Jack Marsh in the West Wing. Kerr was standing near the Cabinet Room with Alexander Haig, who had replaced H. R. Haldeman as Nixon’s chief of staff and was known to have favored the pardon.
Kerr asked me what I thought. “Howard, he just lost the 1976 election,” I replied. Haig begged to differ. “He just made his first presidential decision,” the general maintained.
Three decades later, I think Haig and I were both right. I’m still convinced the pardon finished Ford’s chance to escape the historically unique status of being America’s only unelected vice president and president, an anomaly that bothered him far more than he ever admitted.
In time, however, the pardon has also been judged a principled decision of statecraft that helped right a wounded and polarized nation after a profound constitutional crisis. Ford always believed that winning the Profile in Courage Award from the John F. Kennedy Library in 2001 for the pardon was not just one of the great honors of his life; it was historical vindication as well, an acknowledgment from onetime political foes that would embellish his legacy forever.
That was hardly apparent at the moment, to put it mildly.
Overnight, the healing stopped. Ford had sought to cauterize the wound of Watergate; instead, he’d ripped off the scab. In the process, he’d grievously damaged his own political prospects as well as his ability to pick up the pieces of government and craft a bipartisan agenda.
The enormous reservoir of goodwill Ford had enjoyed, especially with his Democratic cronies on Capitol Hill, swiftly dissipated. His popularity plummeted, making it easier for the Democrats who liked him personally to doubt him politically. In turn that made it harder for Ford to rally support for dealing with runaway inflation or the Vietnam War.
When he nominated George H. W. Bush director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Senate Democrats made Ford promise Bush wouldn’t be his running mate in 1976. Before the pardon, that wouldn’t have happened, but Ford had squandered his political leverage with the pardon.
Democrats said he was just another pol cutting just another deal for a discredited crony. The country appeared to agree: in the November elections, Republicans were obliterated. The Democrats gained forty-nine seats in Jerry Ford’s House, giving them more than a two-to-one majority. The new president could kiss his legislative agenda goodbye in the 94th Congress.
With the party and Ford’s moral authority in tatters, the conservative Republican wing was emboldened to abandon a leader they’d never much liked. By year’s end, Ronald Reagan decided Ford was sufficiently weak to challenge a sitting president for his party’s nomination in 1976.
Within hours, the collateral cost of his decision manifested itself in a very personal way for Ford. Not long before Newsweek closed its pardon package that Sunday afternoon, I called terHorst as a safety check. I simply wanted to make sure there was a “lid” for the day at the White House, a time-honored signal that reporters can safely stand down until the next news cycle.
I had no particular reason to say that I assumed nobody on the White House staff had resigned because of Ford’s decision.
“What’s your question?” Jerry asked.
“Has anybody on the president’s staff resigned in protest over the pardon?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Who?”
“Me.”
Ford was stunned when he’d learned, but couldn’t talk his press secretary into reconsidering. Ford wished him well, but their relationship never recovered.
The rapport between Ford and us Air Force Two alumni, whom he always went out of his way to recognize at press conferences, remained intact. Energized by our presence at the state dinner, the veep-beat regulars began planning an Air Force Two reunion for his Christmas trip to Vail. We knew he’d come; at a reunion barbecue at Ron Nessen’s house nine days after becoming president, he’d been invited, and had accepted on the spot.
In planning for the party, we all got a quick lesson in how the logistical train required for every presidential movement complicates the spontaneity of any event. Instead of a handful of aides, social directors suddenly have to factor in personal aides, doctors, communications specialists, the military guy with the nuclear codes, and exponentially more Secret Service agents. It’s far worse these days; the now routine hassle of magnetometers was still years away.
There was no way to duplicate the informality we’d taken for granted in the pre–August 9 universe, or so we thought until Ford blasted right through the institutional barriers.
He walked in the door of my rented condo, unannounced and unnoticed, made straight for the kitchen, and asked as heads swiveled, “Who needs a drink?” For a half hour or so, he wasn’t the leader of the free world anymore. If he hadn’t been on holiday, he might as well have been wearing one of his congressional ties.
He mixed and mingled with the two dozen guests, then took the seat of honor on a sofa and fired up his pipe. It was small talk, mainly; he remarked on how much easier the Christmas of 1973 had been. He described the seismic shift in his life with a simple “before things changed.”
About five minutes before he was scheduled to leave, he shifted in his seat and crossed his legs, managing to plant a loafer dead in the center of a two-pound wheel of Brie on the coffee table.
It’s not often that reporters are eyewitnesses to that sort of social faux pas, particularly when a president is the perpetrator, and here was a boatload of them, trying to keep from giggling as Ford puffed on his pipe and blithely chatted away.
I had nightmare visions of Ford standing to leave, accompanied by his new best Brie. No way that story would stay in the room. I’d probably be pressed to write something for the magazine. The gossips would have a field day. I’d be blamed by his staff, of course.
All eyes were on the cheese, except Ford’s. So he didn’t notice, as he stood up, that the cheese stuck to the bottom of his shoe for a heart-stopping instant—before quietly plopping back onto the plate. He never knew. The reunion was a resounding success.
Later, when he started bumping his head on helicopter doors and fell down the steps of Air Force One, those of us who were graced by his generous company that night always said to ourselves: we’ve seen this movie before.
For the rest of his term, Ford was reduced to playing defense, fighting fires with the Soviets, the Democrats, and the Republican conservatives.
His White House staff was an uneasy amalgam of old-timers like Bob Hartmann, his congressional counselor and über-speechwriter, and new recruits like chief of staff Donald Rumsfeld and his young deputy Dick Cheney, whom Hartmann disdained as “the praetorians.” For all Ford’s geniality, the constant internecine warfare between the factions frequently got in the way of policymaking.
It was an unusually strong cabinet—Kissinger at State, Bill Simon at Treasury, Ed Levi at Justice, Bill Coleman at Transportation, Cap Weinberger at HEW, Jim Lynn and later Carla Hills at HUD—but because of the pardon, they were dealing with a weak hand, and time was short.
In a little more than two years, Ford confronted his share of governmental grief: runaway inflation and high unemployment, the traumatic end of a wrenching war in Vietnam, a major cabinet shake-up, a looming energy crisis, and escalating Cold War tensions with the Soviets and North Koreans.
He knew 1976 would be a bruising political year, so he crammed all his foreign travel into 1975 to keep the election year clear for maximum campaigning. Beginning with a trip to Japan, Korea, and Vladivostok in November 1974, he made seven foreign trips in thirteen months, including the People’s Republic of China and three trips to Europe.
In his spare time, he welcomed the Emperor of Japan to the White House, dealt with his wife’s breast cancer surgery, fired his CIA director and secretary of defense, named John Paul Stevens to the Supreme Court, dumped Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, and juggled a bona fide international crisis.
On May 12, 1975, an American merchant ship, the Mayagüez, was seized off the coast of Cambodia and its thirty-nine civilian crew members were taken ashore by members of the Khmer Rouge. After three days of intense deliberation with his National Security Council, Ford ordered air strikes to retrieve the ship and rescue the crew.
The operation was a success; Ford got the word after being pulled from a black-tie dinner with the Dutch prime minister. He wanted to trumpet the good news and knew he shouldn’t appear in the press room in his tuxedo. So he changed into a brown business suit, but forgot to replace his patent leather pumps.
At 12:30 in the morning, he exited the press room and walked down the colonnade that connects the West Wing to the state rooms and family quarters. Watching from behind, I thought he looked like a man with the world’s weight still on his broad shoulders.
Just before he disappeared into the residence, he turned to an aide and posed a question. A couple of days later, I caught up with the aide and asked about his query.
Ford had merely asked, “Say, does anyone know who won the Bullets game?”
As he wrote in his memoirs, “Once I determine to move, I seldom, if ever, fret.”
Four months later, Ford confronted an even greater crisis, this one personal. On the morning of September 5, 1975, Ford set out from Sacramento’s Senator Hotel for a meeting in the Capitol with California Governor Jerry Brown and a speech to the legislature. It was a very short distance and it was a sunny day, so Ford decided to walk, something that would never happen today. The press pool accompanying Ford was about fifteen feet behind him on his right.
We crossed L Street and began a leisurely stroll up a curving walkway through the statehouse grounds. Spectators standing two or three deep lined both sides of the sidewalk, and Ford shook a few hands en route.
About a hundred yards from the rear entrance to the Capitol building, someone suddenly yelled, “Gun.” I later learned it was Secret Service agent Larry Buendorf, who plunged into the crowd.
“Get down, let’s go,” barked Ernie Luzania, who had been the chief of Ford’s vice presidential Secret Service detail and had followed him to the White House.
Simultaneously, the agents nearest Ford formed what reminded me of a football huddle around him. Luzania and a second agent grabbed the president by the scruff of his blue suit jacket and pushed him forward so forcefully that he buckled over almost to his knees. The protective cluster set out for the statehouse in a full gallop, with the press pool in hot pursuit.
We caught up with Ford on the steps of the Capitol. Just before the president disappeared inside, ABC’s Steve Bell asked him, “Are you all right, sir?”
Ford’s face was ashen, his demeanor grim. He was so shaken, in fact, that he could barely answer Steve’s question. “Sure,” he whispered, managing a nod that signaled the pool that he was okay.
As I described the moment in the pool report delivered verbally in a frenzied press room a few minutes later, “He seemed to me stunned, bewildered, dazed, something like that, and it was clear that he knew what had happened.”
That’s because he had stared squarely into the barrel of a .45-caliber handgun brandished by the now infamous Lady in Red: Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, a twenty-six-year-old disciple of convicted murderer Charles Manson.
As Fromme famously noted when the agents handcuffed her, “It didn’t go off.” There were four rounds in the weapon, but none was in the firing chamber.
Press pools are a staple of news coverage, a vehicle used to keep a manageable number of journalists in proximity to a president in case he decides to commit news or something unexpected occurs. Poolers are charged with staying with the “body” at all times; we couldn’t peel off to see what had caused all the commotion. By the time we’d finished briefing our absentee colleagues, Fromme was long gone, the crime scene secured, and the crowd dispersed.
That pool was a curious historical anomaly: we were all eyewitnesses to an assassination attempt against a sitting president—but never saw a thing until we reviewed the videotape later. Because we were behind and to Ford’s right and Fromme was ahead on the left, the scrum of agents and staff blocked our view.
From outward appearances, Ford shrugged off the death-defying encounter; he didn’t even mention it during a forty-five-minute chat with Brown. But a few days later, I encountered him at a social event, and he couldn’t stop talking about nearly getting killed. It was clear he hadn’t gotten it out of his system.
“I extended my left hand to her—that’s when I saw the gun,” he told me. “Then Ernie grabbed me, and I was gone.”
Incredibly, it happened again in San Francisco, just seventeen days later. Ford was leaving the St. Francis Hotel on Union Square after a local television interview. He emerged from a side entrance and waved to a large crowd on the north side of Post Street.
Then the pop of a single gunshot rang out, clearly heard by those of us in the press bus, which was pulled up near Ford’s limousine. Two agents flung Ford into the car and the motorcade tore away from the hotel. As the bus lurched forward, we could see a huddle of police and agents surrounding someone in the crowd. She later turned out to be Sara Jane Moore, who had fired a .38 revolver at Ford. Her errant shot slammed into the facing of the hotel.
By year’s end, Ford had switched to full campaign mode to confront Ronald Reagan, who’d announced his Republican primary challenge just before Thanksgiving.
It was a grueling and divisive primary, with Reagan charging that Ford was an ineffective leader who wanted to give away our Panama Canal and make too many deals with the Soviets, and Ford insisting, mainly through surrogates, that Reagan was naïve, inexperienced, and trigger-happy.
Along the way, there was time for a little fun—like the Saturday in San Antonio when after a speech at the Alamo he attended a reception in his honor given by the Daughters of the Republic of Texas and dug into a homemade tamale before remembering to remove the corn husk.
He and Dick Cheney were also the ringleaders of one of the more ambitious pranks in White House press lore. Unfortunately from my perspective, it was at my expense.
On March 5, 1976, Ford was in Peoria campaigning in the Illinois primary. His entourage spent the night at the Peoria Hilton.
I was already in bed when my phone rang around 11:30 P.M. It was press secretary Ron Nessen, my old comrade-in-arms from Air Force Two. He told me he had a great piece of gossip if I could meet him in the hotel bar. I wasn’t thrilled and tried to get him to spill over the phone, but he was persistent; he wanted to do it in person. He promised his info would be perfect for Newsweek’s Periscope section. He’d found my soft underbelly: in those days, we were paid extra for Periscope items.
I trudged downstairs for a quick drink and Nessen’s “hot tip,” something so lame neither he nor I can remember it. Irked by being yanked from bed, I went back to my eighth-floor room to discover a dozen of my colleagues hiding in the bathroom, and a sheep so terrified that she kept depositing remembrances of her visit on the carpet.
What became known as The Sheep Incident was masterminded by New York Times beat reporter Jim Naughton, supposedly to honor my pedigree as a graduate of Texas A&M, renowned for its agricultural and military heritage.
Ford had bestowed his full blessing on the scheme and had given Cheney permission to make the arrangements. That wasn’t a mere courtesy; livestock, after all, aren’t ordinarily cleared by the Secret Service into hotels where a president is sleeping.
By coincidence, I was the magazine pool reporter for Ford’s first “movement” the next morning. In those days, pool reporters were routinely allowed in actual physical proximity to a president; by contrast, these days President Bush is out of his limousine before the pool van rolls to a stop at the rear of his motorcade.
Ford popped out of an elevator and saw me: roadkill.
He had so much fun with this that he put the tale in his memoirs. “How’s your friend?” he has himself gleefully wondering.
Another published version of our encounter quotes him asking, “Did you boys play well in Peoria?”
After he managed to stop giggling, what he actually said was, “I understand you had company last night.”
Nessen had the last word, and best line; just before the motorcade pulled away from the Hilton, he appeared at the door of the press bus and chortled. “Tommy, there’s a sheep in the lobby crying her eyes out.”
That was one of the few mirthful interludes in that bitterly contested campaign. After months of mortal combat, Ford had just barely beat back Reagan’s challenge at the Kansas City convention, winning renomination by a couple of dozen delegates. But he was left with a horribly fractured party and the Nixon pardon dragging him down. In the general election, he started out dead in the water, nearly thirty points behind former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter.
He wasn’t a particularly effective campaigner. Until Ronald Reagan and the Presidents Bush came along to trump him, Ford’s verbal bloopers were the gold standard for rhetorical malapropisms:
Uran-um. Beverly Stills. Ma-zell-tov. Judga-ment. Geothermer energy. And his thanks to a priest who’d delivered an invocation: “Merci, garçon.”
Gradually, however, he managed to narrow Carter’s once impregnable margin. In an Oval Office interview five weeks before the election, Ford was sounding more bullish about his prospects.
“I’m optimistic, I really am,” he told me, “on the basis that we have the momentum and they have been dropping off. Number two, they are getting very strident, very partisan and very personal”—characteristics Ford believed were always symptoms of a campaign in trouble.
The optimism of that interview was rendered obsolete exactly one week later at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, when at the second debate with Jimmy Carter, Ford uttered a memorable election gaffe: “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford administration.”
With that one sentence, momentum abruptly shifted back to the challenger. Carter’s handlers gleefully exploited their opening, saying Ford had shown he really didn’t have a firm grasp on foreign policy. It took twenty-four hours of fighting with an unusually stubborn president before Cheney, in a southern California parking lot, finally persuaded a recalcitrant Ford that he had to issue a “clarification” to stop the bleeding.
Many of Ford’s senior campaign hands still believe the contretemps threw Ford onto the defensive for just long enough to make a lethal difference.
His handlers had kept him bottled up in the Rose Garden for most of the campaign because, as chief strategist Stu Spencer immortally told him to his face one day in the Oval Office, “Forgive me, Mr. President, but you’re a fucked-up campaigner.” They finally let him out for a final ten-day blitz, and to the surprise of some of his aides he rose to the rhetorical occasion. To nobody’s surprise, he ended his surge with a rally in Grand Rapids.
After voting at an elementary school near his old home next morning, an exhausted Ford kept to his tradition and ate blueberry pancakes at Granny’s Kitchen, as he had after voting in each of his thirteen congressional elections. He paid $4.37 for himself and Betty. Then he flew back to the White House for the denouement, convinced that his strong performance down the stretch would pull him through, if barely.
To chart the eleventh-hour ebb and flow of Ford’s fortunes, I’d asked Dick Cheney to let me spend the evening in his corner West Wing office, just a handful of steps from where he operates today. The chief of staff had graciously agreed.
As the polls began closing, I was struck by the absence of much emotion among Ford’s chief lieutenants, which I read as a bit of a down indicator.
Throughout the evening, as returns rolled in on two color television sets and three miniature black-and-whites, the staff mood began to worsen and their comments, though largely matter-of-fact, reflected an erosion in confidence.
At 8:40 P.M., Cheney mused, “If we’re going to do it, we’ll do it by an eyelash in the big states.”
Twenty minutes later, he was theorizing that Ford might win the electoral vote but lose the popular vote.
By 9:40, when an aide delivered the bad news that Ford would lose Philadelphia by 270,000 votes, Cheney grimaced.
“We can do it without Pennsylvania, but it’s awful tough.”
Just before ten o’clock, Cheney looked over at his wife Lynne and warned, “It’s gonna be a long night, baby.”
Hard to imagine Vice President Cheney saying anything like that, but I was there.
He was certainly right about that.
At 12:30 on Wednesday morning, pollster Bob Teeter got strategist Stu Spencer on the phone and ran through four possible combinations that might still produce a win. They were all a stretch. “The possibilities are getting pretty extreme,” admitted Teeter, always an honest guy with the numbers.
Cheney looked up from his calculator and legal pad to announce at 1:03, “Without Texas or New York, we’re at 266—if we take Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, and California. Then Hawaii could give us 270,” the magic number.
Reliably Democratic Hawaii? Not likely, and Cheney knew it.
Over in the residence, Ford decided he’d had enough. “If I’m going to be worth a damn tomorrow,” he told an aide at 3:15, “I’d better go to bed.”
At 3:55 A.M., with the outcome still hypothetically in doubt, Cheney announced, “Gentlemen, I’m going to close up the shop.”
Although aides knew the signs were ominous, Ford went to bed not knowing if he’d still be president when he awoke. Just before that, Ron Nessen arrived in the residence, carrying the United Press International flash giving the election to Carter. Not seeing Ford, he didn’t have the heart to pass it along.
Somehow, it made psychic sense for Ford to learn the news from photographer Dave Kennerly, who’d become his de facto fourth son.
“I’m afraid we’ve had it,” the usually irrepressible photographer told him at 9:00 A.M.
My final image of that long night was Kennerly, his feet propped up on Cheney’s conference table.
“You know,” he said, “I’ll bet the pardon had a lot to do with this. I don’t think he ever really got over the effects of it.”
At 12:14 Wednesday afternoon, the Ford clan trooped into the press room. They all looked stricken except Betty, whose cheerfulness seemed to say that her side may have been vanquished but she’d won, because she was about to see a lot more of her husband.
Ford had lost his voice and could barely rasp out a few painful words:
“It is perfectly obvious that my voice isn’t up to par, and I shouldn’t be making very many comments, and I won’t. But I did want Betty, Mike, Jack, Steve, Susan, and [daughter-in-law] Gayle to come down with me and to listen while Betty reads a statement that I have sent to Governor Carter….
“But I do want to express on a personal basis my appreciation and that of my family for the friendship that all of us have had. And after Betty reads the statement that was sent to Governor Carter by me, I think all of us—Betty, the children, and myself—would like to just come down and shake hands and express our appreciation personally.”
Betty, whom he’d introduced as “the real spokesman for the family,” read a poignant statement that, given the pain on his face, was mercifully brief.
“It has been the greatest honor of my husband’s life to have served his fellow Americans during two of the most difficult years in our history,” she said, thanking his supporters and urging the country to give “your united support” to the president-elect.
Then she read the “Dear Jimmy” concession telegram, which said in part, “Although there will continue to be disagreements over the best means to use in pursuing our goals, I want to assure you that you will have my complete and wholehearted support as you take the oath of office this January.”
Then, as advertised, all seven of the Fords stepped down from the podium and circulated through the press room, case studies of grace under emotional strain. I can’t remember what Mrs. Ford said as she grasped my hand, but the president’s tortured words are seared into my consciousness, as vivid and painful as I write them now as they were at the moment he uttered them.
“Well, Tom, we had a great time on Air Force Two, didn’t we?”
I told him those times had been the most fun I’d ever experienced in journalism, and among the best moments of my life. I thanked him for his generosity and said I was sure we’d see each other in the years ahead.
“Don’t forget us when we’re gone,” he whispered in his shredded voice.
I struggled to keep my composure as I managed to reply, “Mr. President, I’ll have to live a very long time to be able to reciprocate all the nice things you’ve done for me.”
“Okay, Tom,” he said, moving away to work the room.
For another ten or fifteen minutes, he circumnavigated the briefing room, greeting everyone, the film crews, the techs, even a couple of reporters he didn’t like.
Gradually, he worked his way back to the front to return to the Oval Office. He saw me again, and walked over to where I was standing. So numbed by the raw emotion of the moment, I guess, he didn’t realize we’d played this scene minutes before. So we both had to struggle through the sorrowful minuet a second time.
“Those were great times on Air Force Two, weren’t they?” he said.
It could not have been over soon enough for me. I’ve spent thousands of days in that room, more than any other professional venue; those two fleeting exchanges were the most wrenching moments I’ve ever endured there.
Presidential transitions are always the worst of ordeals for the departing. They’ve suddenly become yesterday’s people. The national spotlight obsesses with the president-elect, his transition team, his cabinet and White House appointments, his every utterance. Overnight, the White House is a death-watch beat, where everyone but the president himself is worrying about the next paycheck.
Ford flew off to California for a week of golf and emotional rehab. To the alarm of his retainers, the vacation didn’t get him out of the doldrums. He was so down that when the New York Times asked to interview him for his obituary, Ford got unusually agitated. “I’m not interested in obit interviews,” he snapped. The very idea made him feel like a has-been.
In late November, Newsweek ran a story reporting that Ford was taking his defeat exceptionally hard—so hard that a naturally gregarious guy had become something of a recluse.
“He’s just unbelievably disgusted with himself for losing,” one old friend told me, “and every day, as he hands over more power, it drives the point home deeper.”
After Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter visited the Fords, a top Ford aide scathingly complained to me, “He’ll probably take Carter through the residence next time to see if there are any coats or ties or anything else he wants. That’s probably why he lost the election.”
The story was headlined “Jerry Ford’s Blues,” but around the West Wing it became universally known as “The Sulking Story.” Dick Growald of UPI did a clever cartoon of Ford skiing at Vail with a Cheshire-cat grin plastered across his face. “He doesn’t want DeFrank reporting he’s sulking,” the caption read.
I heard he was irked about the piece, especially the wardrobe line. But nobody told me I was wrong. Nearly all his closest aides, in fact, including several who personally assured him they hadn’t helped me, were my sources.
In time, he recovered his emotional balance and reconciled himself to building his new life in the desert and presiding over a graceful if unwelcome transition of power.
To commemorate another Ford passage, we in the remaining Air Force Two press corps decided to have an Auld Lang Syne reunion on New Year’s Eve. Just five Slingshot Airlines alumni were along on that bittersweet vacation for Ford, and only three of the originals: CBS’s Phil Jones, the VOA’s Bob Leonard, and me. The venue was the same as the first in December 1974, my rented Vail condo overlooking the creek in the center of town.
Even before we heard back, we knew Ford would show up; he’d come to the second, at Maggie Hunter’s home in the winter of 1975, and there was no way he’d skip the finale. That’s just the way he was.
He arrived on time and stayed nearly an hour, reminiscing about those halcyon days of yore. He remembered that night returning to Palm Springs when the plane hit an air pocket and plunged downward, dumping a gin and tonic onto his head and scaring the hell out of all of us.
He was in high spirits that night; the blues that had seized him for several weeks after losing had vanished completely. Curiously, he wanted to know about life in Plains, Georgia, his successor’s hometown. I remember him roaring with glee when I said that the British must have had Plains in mind when they envisioned Georgia as a penal colony in the eighteenth century.
Solicitous as ever, he wanted to know how I’d dislocated my right shoulder playing tennis early that morning. He told a long story about how he’d done the same thing courting Betty during a ski vacation in Michigan.
“You’re going to have problems with it for the rest of your life,” he warned.
My colleagues and I were struck by Ford’s liberal use of profanity. Even in those private sessions aboard Air Force Two when he’d loosen his tie and unload on political opponents, he’d never curse. But this night the hells and damns and craps flew off his tongue; hardly Nixonesque blue-streak profanity, but out of character for Ford. The conclusion was obvious: as a soon-to-be unemployed politician, he no longer felt any need to watch his language.
At the end, we presented him with a plaque featuring an engraving of our aging propeller plane and this inscription: “From the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed survivors of Air Force Two—‘Slingshot Airlines’—in appreciation for good times. Best wishes for clear skies and tailwinds.”*
His eyes misted a bit as he said that while he’d enjoyed every moment of being president, he likewise remembered the Air Force Two era with special affection. He posed for a farewell group photo and went back home to get ready for his own New Year’s Eve party, to which the Air Force Two charter members were also invited.
That’s where he laughed uproariously over a gag gift—a Ski Poland travel poster. UPI’s Growald had altered the headline to read “Ski Free Poland,” a witty reference to Ford’s calamitous remark in the second debate.
When I returned to Washington, I retrieved the Air Force Two class photo from the first reunion to compare with the new one. The contrast was astounding; in 1974 he looked a decade younger. Maybe he hadn’t enjoyed every minute of being president after all; in any event, the rigors of the job had aged him dramatically in just two years. Presidencies have a way of doing that, even with younger men. Just compare the photographs of George W. Bush in his first year with today’s images.
On January 20, 1977, Ford reluctantly passed the baton to Jimmy Carter and flew off to retirement in southern California, where Richard Nixon had also begun his political rehabilitation.
By the time Ford reached Andrews Air Force Base, the trappings of executive power were already slipping away. Left behind at the Capitol were two men never far from his side when traveling—his personal physician, Rear Admiral William Lukash, and a military aide with the “football”—the satchel of ultrasecret codes triggering nuclear attacks against enemy targets only on the commander in chief’s personal order.
Departing his Marine One chopper for the last time, Ford was greeted with a nineteen-gun salute, not the twenty-one he would have rated two hours earlier. Even the backup Air Force One he was flying—the same plane that had brought John F. Kennedy back from Dallas—was now simply a more prosaic Air Force 26000.
Normally, presidential pools are assigned by a long-standing formula: wires, networks, print, magazine, photo dogs. On this bittersweet occasion for him, however, Ford ended his presidency the same way he had begun it—with a thoughtful gesture toward the media.
This particular pool was an Auld Lang Syne lineup, handpicked personally by Ford. It included all the Air Force Two regulars still in journalism, plus some other Ford family favorites, like Growald.
For the first ninety minutes, the former president and Betty were alone with their memories and their golden retrievers, Liberty and Misty. After his customary brace of martinis, Ford ordered the low-calorie plate: canned salmon, cottage cheese, and raw onion slices. But he indulged himself a final time with two scoops of butter pecan ice cream, his favorite dessert.
Then, coatless and with tie askew, he wandered to the rear of the aircraft for his last airborne interview.
“Do you have anything to tell us?” a reporter asked.
“Well, anything I say isn’t very important anymore.”
The sting of his defeat had momentarily evaporated. Jerry Ford was his gregarious, bluff, genial self again.
He praised Carter’s inaugural speech, shocked his aides by describing the new president as a friend, and offered to help the victor however he could.
“I don’t deny I got a little sentimental,” he added, “but I tried not to expose it, to keep it within myself. But we’ve had two and a half great years and you can’t help but be a little emotional and sentimental. I’m human, like anybody else.”
Later in the flight, Ford invited Dick Growald, Phil Jones, Maggie Hunter, and me up to his cabin for a private adios. My notes record him saying his loneliest day was the Friday evening when Betty was at Bethesda, preparing for cancer surgery. His tensest moments were the Mayagüez crisis. He wasn’t ruling out running against Carter again in 1980.
The truth is, I remember almost nothing about that moment, except for his parting words.
“It’s been great, Tom. Tell your wife hello. Come see us in the desert.”
As the ex-president and his wife returned to their memories, the most embarrassing spectacle I’ve ever witnessed in three decades of flying Air Force One was playing out in the press cabin.
Reporters are notorious pack rats, of course, but the wholesale looting by the pool was breathtaking. I should have known what was coming when a pool photographer showed up with two camera bags, one brimming with gear, the other empty.
The keepsakes that passengers grab on every presidential flight went first—the notepads, the matchbooks, the menus, the cigarettes, which were replaced by small boxes of M&M’s chocolate candies during the Reagan years.
The grand theft didn’t end there. Nothing was safe: pillows, blankets, silverware, napkins, candy dishes—gone. One reporter swiped an entire set of glasses with the presidential seal. Another even took the made-in-Taiwan wicker fruit basket. The feeding frenzy didn’t stop until we landed in California. To this day, I still cringe when I think about it.
In a tableau tinged with pathos, Ford bounded from the Boeing 707 after landing in Monterey and instinctively moved toward the fence to work the crowd of two thousand who’d come to bid him farewell. Suddenly, he seemed to remember: it’s all over. He was just Good Old Jerry again. He stopped in mid-stride, climbed into a black Cadillac Fleetwood limousine without the trademark presidential seal and flags, and rode away in a six-car motorcade that the day before would have been at least triple the size. By day’s end, Citizen Ford was golfing at Pebble Beach with Arnold Palmer.
I was too neurotic to stay and enjoy the Monterey Peninsula. I’d spent only a couple of weeks covering candidate Carter and felt woefully behind the curve with the new president. So I asked Colonel Les McClelland, the presidential pilot, for permission to deadhead back to Andrews. He graciously obliged, and after a brief refueling stop, we flew back to Washington. It was a surreal feeling: I was the only passenger on the most famous aircraft in the world, now empty and darkened.
In an hour or so I’d banged out a file on my portable typewriter, then settled in for a few hours of decompression before worrying about President Carter. In due course, I struck up a conversation with a friendly Air Force flight attendant. After a couple of drinks, I confessed I was mortified at the media thievery.
He didn’t seem perturbed at all. “We’re used to it,” he said cheerfully. “It happens all the time. As a matter of fact, senators and congressmen are the worst. They steal everything that isn’t bolted down.”
Just as I was starting to feel a little better about the whole squalid affair, he politely inquired, “Incidentally, what did you take?”
I gulped. I blushed. I squirmed. Consumed by guilt, I decided to come clean.
“I only took one thing,” I protested. Sheepishly, I pulled from my briefcase a white cotton hand towel I’d lifted from the lavatory on the outbound leg. It had the words “Air Force One” embroidered in royal blue script along the border. A keeper of a souvenir: these days the lav towels are paper in the press cabin.
“Is that all you took?” he persisted.
“I promise; I swear, nothing more.”
“Well, if that’s really all you took, you deserve to be rewarded. Come with me.”
He led me up to the front of the plane, past deserted cabins that hours before had been crammed with Ford’s friends, aides, ex-staffers, and Secret Service agents, past David Kennerly’s color portraits of the Fords, now garishly out of place. We entered the former president’s private cabin, the inner sanctum ordinarily off-limits to all but the closest presidential intimates. He invited me to sit in Ford’s blue, high-backed executive chair while he rooted around in a side cabinet. The very same chair where, a few hours before, Ford had bade farewell to the Air Force Two regulars.
After a few seconds, the steward handed me my prize. It was a double bridge deck of genuine Gerald R. Ford autographed playing cards in a blue suede slipcase.
“I guess we won’t be needing these anymore,” he said. It was the only memento come by honestly that Inaugural Day thirty years ago.
“I think Carter’s going to be okay,” he said as I was ushered back to the cheap seats, “but it’s going to be a helluva long time before we fly any finer man than Ford.”