THE DAY HE LEFT OFFICE in January 1953, Harry Truman boarded a train at Union Station without a penny in federal largesse except a microscopic Army pension. Back home in Independence, Missouri, the newly retired president soon discovered that he couldn’t even answer his mail—biographer David McCullough reports he got 72,000 pieces in the first two weeks alone—without dipping deep into his own pocket. Even after selling some property and signing a book deal for his memoirs, Truman complained that he was financially squeezed.
Because of Truman’s predicament and some personal lobbying by the 33rd president with former Capitol Hill cronies, Congress eventually passed the Former Presidents Act in 1958. It gave Truman and his successors a $25,000 yearly pension, plus annual stipends for staff, office space, and free use of the mails.
A half-century later, those modest emoluments have escalated dramatically into a massive financial safety net; these days a former president, regardless of his length of service, draws a $191,000 annual pension for life, regularly increased, plus generous appropriations for expenses, travel, staff, office space, and Secret Service protection for at least ten years.
These regal sums, however, are but the tip of the buckraking iceberg available to retired chief executives. In his first year out of office, Bill Clinton earned $9.2 million from speechmaking, delivering a paid lecture every six days on average. More than two-thirds of that income was to audiences in nineteen foreign countries. He earned $350,000, nearly double his presidential salary, for a single talk in Milan. With the help of the international date line, he even managed speeches in New York and Hong Kong on the same day, at a breathtaking $250,000 apiece.
For better or worse, this eye-popping earnings potential exists because of Jerry Ford and his lifelong devotion to free-market, capitalist philosophy.
As an early order of business, in fact, every future president should visit Ford’s grave in Grand Rapids and thank him personally for ensuring that each of them will be multimillionaires in perpetuity.
Before Ford’s involuntary retirement, the primary income-generating opportunity for ex-presidents was a written memoir of their White House years. At the time it was considered unseemly for them to accept speaking fees, have consulting contracts with corporations or go on their boards. There were occasional exceptions; Dwight Eisenhower decided to supplement his government pensions by becoming president of Columbia. But Congress presumed that anyone who once was the most powerful leader in the universe had sufficient means to live out his days comfortably.
Ford single-handedly rewrote those rules, and always deeply resented critics who accused him of moneygrubbing. The financially strapped college kid who sold his blood to a hospital for $25 a pop was determined to live well in retirement and provide for his four kids and his grandchildren, and made no apologies.
He was enraged, in fact, with his first White House press secretary, Jerald terHorst (who had resigned after a month on the job the very day Ford pardoned Richard Nixon), after terHorst, an old Michigan friend and veteran journalist, wrote that Ford was making so much money he should be required to have his government pension reduced by a dollar for every two dollars he was making in the private sector.
“Dammit, Tom,” he told me a few years into retirement, “it’s the free-enterprise system at its finest,” pounding his fist on his desk for emphasis.
He certainly practiced what he preached. Between 1977 and 2001, for instance, Ford averaged two trips a year to Las Vegas, and he wasn’t a gambler. They were speaking gigs, mostly to well-heeled conventioneers.
Not all his enterprises were income-generating. In a given year he always made far more pro bono appearances, and raised millions for charitable causes. He estimated that he turned down three or four paying propositions for every one he accepted.
Still, he earned boxcars of cash, well beyond his expectations. At the age of sixty-four he was the first former president with both the esteem and the energy to pursue an aggressive agenda of retirement opportunities. Roosevelt and Kennedy had died in office; Truman had left Washington with his reputation and popularity in tatters; Lyndon Johnson, already independently wealthy, was in poor health and saddled by Vietnam; Nixon was in abject disgrace. Ford also had the good fortune to become a commodity in the marketplace at a moment when speaking fees available to big-name public figures were exploding.
At the peak of his commercial activities, Ford was earning $3 million to $4 million every year. The first decade after leaving Washington, he averaged twenty-three travel days a month, and a normal day on the road involved five separate events. He was so flush with cash that he paid off the mortgage on his Rancho Mirage home in a mere eighteen months. At his death, informed estimates of his net worth were in the $25 million range.
“I was young enough when I left and I was healthy enough,” he explained to me in 1992. “I wanted to have some ongoing interests. I didn’t feel like coming out here and playing golf seven days a week, and I didn’t want a full-time job. So I developed a broad-based list of activities.”
At 7:33 on a sun-splashed July morning in 1977, Gerald R. Ford emerged from the kitchen of his rented chalet in Vail, Colorado. Wearing a white terrycloth bathrobe emblazoned with blue tennis rackets crossed like sabers, he sauntered past strawberry plants showing signs of chipmunk damage.
“This is the earliest Barrett has been up in months,” he twitted a distinctly slit-eyed Bob Barrett, his White House military aide who’d resigned his Army commission to journey westward with the ex-president as his retirement chief of staff.
Then Ford plunged into a covered, heated swimming pool for the first of his two daily swims. A dozen hard laps later he pulled himself from the water and onto an aquamarine scale. “One-ninety-seven,” he said, only two pounds more than his best weight during the White House years. “Not bad.”
Six months after he left Washington, the bitterness of his narrow loss to Jimmy Carter seemed to have largely dissipated. “It’s been an exhilarating experience,” he told me, toweling himself dry. “It’s a wonderful new life, and I love it.” Then, unable to suppress a twinkle in his blue eyes, he mischievously added, “But I certainly wouldn’t want this nice life to preclude my taking a look at political opportunities in the future.”
Ford was so gushing about his new life-after-political-death that I couldn’t resist suggesting that he almost seemed happy to have lost the election.
“I don’t want you to get that impression,” he quickly interjected. “All I’m saying is we lost, the term ended, and we’ve had a most enjoyable six months. I’m a pragmatist; I prefer thinking about the future.”
From the moment he finally reconciled himself to the reality that his political career had first been unexpectedly extended and then, to his mind, cruelly truncated by fate, Ford had set himself three parallel goals for his post-presidential life. First, the cash-poor congressman who took out loans on all his insurance policies to buy a modest condominium in Vail resolved to get unflinchingly rich, at least to the extent of providing permanent financial security for Betty, the four kids, and the grandchildren.
He also wanted to assemble a package of philanthropic, educational, and political endeavors to burnish his legacy as an elder statesman and certified national asset. Simultaneously, he quietly began plotting a grudge rematch against Jimmy Carter in the 1980 presidential election, a contest Ford was convinced he would win easily if given the chance by other Republican hopefuls—namely, his implacable nemesis Ronald Reagan.
Whatever Ford’s choices, it was certain to be a comfortable existence. For openers, he had lifetime Secret Service protection, which was more of a huge and extremely welcome transportation and logistics benefit than anything else: the threat level largely evaporates once a president leaves office. There was also government money for staff, office space, postage, and travel, and his two pensions, for his congressional and presidential tenures. As it turned out, those cushions would amount to pocket change for the president-turned-entrepreneur.
“He’s going to have most of the perquisites and none of the grief of being president,” Dick Cheney, his last chief of staff, observed to me early in Ford’s retirement years.
One of those perks was far more privacy. I once asked Ford what he enjoyed most about retirement. “Oh, lots of things,” he replied with a broad grin. “And you don’t have to release your tax returns every year.” (The only reason anyone knows about Bill Clinton’s postpresidential cash windfall is that such information must be listed on his wife’s financial disclosure forms as a senator.)
His selection of venues was the easiest of all his post-Washington lifestyle choices. He and Betty already owned a condo free and clear at The Lodge in the center of Vail, and for years had rented a place in Palm Springs, where the dry desert air favored his passion for golf and tennis and her arthritic neck. That much was settled early: the California desert for most of the year, the mountains in the summer and ski season. Jerry and Betty sold their home in suburban Alexandria, Virginia, for a $115,000 profit and headed for the coast.
The Fords had been aficionados of the Palm Springs life since the 1960s; they’d been hooked on the charms of the desert by Earl (Red) Blaik, the legendary football coach at the U.S. Military Academy from 1941 to 1958. He and Ford had met in the thirties, when Blaik was coaching football at Dartmouth and Ford was scouting Ivy League opponents for the Yale football team while getting his law degree. “When I was going up to Hanover to scout, after the game I would drop by and say hello as an old Michigan football player,” he recalled in 2000, “so that’s how our friendship developed.”
After leading West Point to two national championships and producing two Heisman Trophy running backs, Blaik retired in 1958 and signed on as the Washington representative of Avco Corporation. In that capacity he’d call regularly on Ford, who was then a rising House power and in a position to be useful. Blaik’s company had a condo in Palm Springs, and the old coach had often suggested that Jerry and Betty stay there over Easter. They took him up on the offer during a trip to San Diego one year; as Blaik had predicted, they loved it and succumbed swiftly. The following year they rented another condo for a week with their friends Leon and Barbara Parma, a tradition that remained intact until he became vice president.
At the urging of his old friend and major Republican moneyman Leonard Firestone and to the surprise of nobody, Ford quickly decided to make Rancho Mirage his formal base of operations. He accepted Firestone’s offer to rent out a home once owned by Ginger Rogers’s mother on the Thunderbird Country Club golf course as his permanent office. (The Secret Service and the General Services Administration, which by law provide office space for every former president, paid the rental tab to Firestone.) He also bought a lot from Firestone next to the office on Sand Dune Road and commissioned architects to begin planning his dream retirement home.
For the first thirty days, he decompressed—no public engagements, only marathon bouts of golf—and mulled a blizzard of offers, most of them for pay. It was a given that he’d land a multimillion-dollar contract to write his memoirs; every former president was in demand that way as a prestige author, even though most of them produced prosaic, ghostwritten apologias that sugarcoated and frequently skirted the truth. Ford’s, titled A Time to Heal, didn’t break the mold when it debuted in 1979.
Even before he’d left the White House, Ford had been approached by a Washington law firm eager to land his services. Actually, they just wanted his name: they were willing to pay him a quarter-million dollars a year just for the privilege of listing him as “of counsel,” with no legal duties whatever. He declined.
Within two weeks of leaving the White House, Ford became a millionaire overnight when he signed a seven-figure deal with Harper & Row for him and Betty to write memoirs. He was financially set for life, and hundreds of thousands of other dollars began rolling in.
He received requests to make speeches, write newspaper columns, cut ribbons opening shopping malls, join corporate boards, and affiliate with colleges and universities; those latter offers multiplied after he mentioned to me in a Newsweek interview that he’d be interested in doing some teaching. Before long, he was lecturing before trade associations and major corporations for $10,000 a pop, a princely sum three decades ago but chump change for ex-presidents today and even for Ford himself in his latter moneymaking years, when he had the luxury of rejecting engagements paying $100,000 and more.
Though he aggressively pursued his wealth-building enterprises, Ford was always a little in awe of the huge amounts of cash he could make—and spend. When his home was being built in the desert, he’d inspect the construction once a week. On one of those visits, workers had just finished a large concrete slab for his golden retrievers.
“That dog run,” he told a companion, “cost more than my first house.”
In 1978, in a deal that some of his most ardent loyalists thought tacky, he signed a contract with the Franklin Mint to hawk commemorative medals depicting the hundred most significant events in the American presidency, ranging from George Washington’s first inaugural to Ford’s speech in Philadelphia honoring the country’s Bicentennial. He sent off “Dear Fellow American” letters hustling the medals, which could be had in gold or silver for $1,950 to $2,750.
Early into retirement, he warmed to Barrett’s idea of hosting two annual events in Vail to raise his profile: a charity golf tournament, the Jerry Ford Invitational, and the World Affairs Forum, where Ford enticed political leaders and old global cronies like Germany’s Helmut Schmidt and Britain’s James Callaghan to enjoy the crisp mountain air while opining on geopolitics. It was a Rocky Mountain version of the Bohemian Grove for the towel-slapping political and corporate elite.
After the book deals, Ford’s most lucrative arrangement was a $1.25 million contract with NBC to collaborate on documentary programs and take two round-the-world trips as a goodwill ambassador for the network. He also drew stipends from the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative Washington think tank, and the Eisenhower Fellowships program.
Before long, he was also raising millions of dollars for charity. An early passion was the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, a world-class detox center to help people with the same sort of alcohol-and substance-abuse maladies that Betty Ford had battled for decades and finally conquered. He helped bring in millions more to endow his presidential library in Ann Arbor and his museum in Grand Rapids.
Mixed in were a steady stream of foreign trips, college seminars, and fundraising appearances for Republican candidates, and the occasional pleasure cruise. He temporarily decided against doing corporate work and permanently ruled out lobbying and consultant offers; he didn’t ever want to be in a position, he told associates, of being paid to put the arm on former congressional colleagues. There was a has-been, opportunistic quality to that line of work that had always bothered him. He didn’t want a full-time job, either, turning down a feeler from Pepperdine University to become its chancellor.
Anyone who thought Ford would enter meekly into his forced retirement had never studied his record. In twenty-eight years of elected and appointed federal service, Ford had never demonstrated any predilection toward repose. Even as president, he’d traveled so much that aides sometimes grumped he was on the road more than a Fuller Brush man. He wasn’t about to change; approaching his sixty-fourth birthday, he showed no symptoms of slowing down. His vigor was even more extraordinary when compared with the reclusiveness of Richard Nixon at his La Casa Pacifica exile in San Clemente.
“Look at him. He’s sixty-four going on fifty, the bastard,” muttered Bob Barrett in the summer of 1977.
In the first six months of his so-called retirement, the former president logged 103,000 travel miles, spending eighty-seven days, or almost every other day, on the road. In May of 1977 alone, he was out of town twenty-seven of thirty-one days, an even more madcap pace than his peripatetic days as Republican minority leader. His logs showed that he’d answered more than one thousand questions from students attending his lectures and seminars on five college campuses and made dozens of public appearances. He received 120,000 pieces of mail and a whopping 5,000 invitations for personal appearances.
His projected schedule for 1978 was just as hectic, beginning with serving as grand marshal of the Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena on New Year’s Day, a special thrill for an old Big Ten football jock. His public agenda for the indefinite future was so extensive, in fact, that Ford, a longtime advocate of fiscal austerity, ironically busted the budget for former presidents in his first year in the Exes’ Club.
The Former Presidents Act simply hadn’t envisioned a retired chief executive with the personal energy and, his defenders argued, the national esteem to generate and handle that level of public interest. The Carter administration agreed. When Ford’s transition budget ran out on September 30, 1977, the White House asked Ford’s old Capitol Hill cronies to increase his annual staffing allowance by more than half, from $96,000 to $146,000.
In the immortal phrase of one of his retainers, in less than a year Ford had become a one-man mini-corporation—and his most prodigious income-generating opportunities were then still several years away.
One of his closest political confidants, a former member of Congress with Ford, was even more pointed in his eyebrow-raising. “Ford has commercialized the former presidency,” he would say disapprovingly—but never to his old comrade, who wouldn’t have listened anyway.
It wasn’t long before friends and staffers were grumbling about how Ford, who spent two hundred days a year on the rubber-chicken circuit as a Republican leader, was spreading himself too thin for no particular reason other than his always impressive energy level. By the 1980 election, he had logged three million travel miles.
One old friend who always thought Ford was overextended lamented to me in 1977, “If Adolf Hitler liked Jerry Ford and was loyal to him, Jerry would probably think Hitler was a pretty good guy who was just misunderstood.”
That was obviously a tactless exaggeration, but there’s no question Ford was a hopeless soft touch. At a convention where he was the featured speaker, Ford was introduced to a corporate CEO from Connecticut who asked about retaining his services at an upcoming event in Palm Springs. That invitation was an oratorical chip shot long favored by show-for-dough thespians: no travel involved. When the exec asked whom to contact at his speakers’ bureau, Ford replied, “Those scoundrels? They’ll charge you twenty-five thousand. Call me direct. I’ll do it for five thousand.” And so he did.
When I spent a few days with him in July of his first summer-in-exile, Ford’s financial situation was sufficiently comfortable that he’d already stockpiled a quarter of a million dollars into his savings account even after paying from his own pocket the salaries of a full-time cook, a personal steward, and a valet, plus a personal assistant for Betty and a cleaning lady. He was living in a rented home in Rancho Mirage’s Thunderbird Heights subdivision while his own ranch-style place was being built. When the 115-degree desert heat got to be too much, the Fords fled to the Colorado Rockies, renting the same house near the foot of Vail Mountain from Texas businessman Dick Bass he’d leased when he was president.
In either location, a typical at-home day for the former president began at 6:30, just an hour later than his usual rising time during the White House years. He didn’t need a mechanical alarm clock to wake up and begin twenty minutes of sit-ups and leg lifts designed to strengthen his gimpy knees, never the same after football injuries in college.
After his first round of laps, Ford showered, shaved, and changed into casual slacks and a golf shirt. Betty was never a morning person, so while she slept in he ate breakfast alone—half a honeydew melon, orange juice, bran flakes with bananas, and an English muffin or two, depending on whether he was dieting
By 8:30, he’d finished breakfast, scanned the papers, and begun two hours of never-ending paperwork: correspondence, autographs, speech contracts. Four days a week, he’d play a round of golf, gobbling a sandwich on the run between the front and back nines. On non–links days he’d play tennis doubles, his knees propped up by braces concealed beneath sweatpants. A couple of hours with his memoirs was followed by another bout of paperwork, usually while nursing a double martini.
He spent at least half an hour each weekday kibitzing with Washington pals, even House Speaker Tip O’Neill, one of his closest political friends despite their monumental ideological differences.
“Tip and I have great rapport,” he said of their odd-couple relationship. “He gives me hell and I give him hell. He’s an old rascal.”
“I get restless if I just sit around the swimming pool,” he added. “That’s not my nature. It’ll never be my lifestyle. I’m going to be busy in some way all the rest of my life. Betty accuses me of being busier now than when I was in the White House.” Not really so, he added, since morning intelligence briefings and managing foreign crises happily weren’t part of his portfolio any longer.
“But right now the truth is I work a minimum of eight hours a day, six days a week,” he boasted, a testament to his Calvinist upbringing and devotion to the work ethic. “I drive myself because I’ve done it all my life. It’s just natural for me to keep working.”
Despite protestations to the contrary, even then Ford was extraordinarily sensitive to, and eternally peeved about, whispers that he was profiteering from an accidental presidency. It simply drove him crazy. In his view, he’d never earned a cheap dollar in his life, much less accepted a freebie. He was absolutely furious with me after a story on his moneymaking enterprises ran in Newsweek in 1981.
“It’s important for a former president to write a book,” he explained to me. “It’s constructive to do television documentaries. It’s constructive to meet with students. Everything I’m doing is constructive, and the compensation I get is very proper. I think I earn the money I’m being paid. Over the years I got used to cheap shots. So I just don’t pay any attention to these cheap shots.”
That was the high-toned, defensive version of what he really thought. More like it: “I’m a private citizen now,” he added, bridling at the memory of some reporter who’d recently asked him how much he was worth now. “It’s nobody else’s business.”
He’d telegraphed his true feelings just two months after leaving office, when he was back in town for a few days. During that visit he met with the Sperling breakfast club of reporters, a Washington fixture run for more than forty years by the Christian Science Monitor.
He was circumspect about his view of the new president and for the most part was his usual cheerful self—except when a Los Angeles Times reporter asked him how much money he expected to earn from outside activities in 1977.
“I’m a retired public figure,” he snapped. “I don’t intend to discuss it.” But he went on to defend his intention to make money, uttering a classic Jerry Fordism.
“That’s what the free-enterprise system’s all about,” he said.
Besides, he always maintained, he always bent over backwards to be careful.
“I’m a lot more cautious, responsible, and careful than some of the others,” he said in 1991. “Some news media have given me the devil that I’ve been too business-oriented. I feel very strongly that I’ve been extremely discreet. The facts are I’ve turned down ten for every business opportunity I’ve had, and I’ve done it [selectively] to be scrupulously careful. I have no apologies for business connections I’ve made, because I’ve worked at whatever my responsibilities are.
“I never take money for not doing anything. What I do I think I earn, and the people who pay me think I’m worth it. But I turn down many, many more. I’ve been to almost 180 college and university campuses. I’ve taught more than 700 classes, answered 7,000 questions from students and faculty, and most of those are for minimum compensation. They can’t afford to pay [more, and] I enjoy the opportunity.”
As for his corporate boards, “I turned down about seven for every one I accepted,” he said a year later. “Over a span of time I have served on about ten; I have now reduced that to four.
“I’ve been offered financial opportunities I might have pursued, but as a former president I was reluctant. You have to be even more cautious when something involves foreign interests. I’ve been very careful and scrupulous in what I have done.”
In his rare hours of postpresidential repose, Ford spent considerable psychic energy preparing to run against his successor in 1980. Though reluctant to engage in analyzing the incumbent president, Ford wasn’t able to resist telegraphing his belief that Jimmy Carter was messing up just about every issue he touched. “They had historic opportunities to move to a SALT II agreement,” he lamented in 1977. “They had the best atmosphere in the Middle East in recent years for a major move for peace. They had an exceptional opportunity to make real progress in southern Africa. I just hope they can make progress, but time is slipping away.”
It was also clear that Ford would have worked Carter over far more vigorously if the Georgian hadn’t now joined the most exclusive fraternity in America.
“I have a certain obligation to speak out on major issues when I think the national interest demands it,” Ford confirmed. “Other than that, I’m not going to be nitpicking on a daily basis. A president’s got enough troubles without an ex-president beating him over the head every day in the political arena. I just don’t intend to do that.
“I am not obsessed with the idea of running for president, but I’m not going to neglect my civic responsibilities if I think my party or the political arena need my participation.
“I’m deeply dedicated to certain economic and foreign policy principles that affect this country. If I believe that the choice in the Republican Party is going to be preempted by somebody who strays wildly off or away from those principles, I’m going to be active.”
Translation: The thought of Ronald Reagan becoming my party’s nominee makes me want to puke.
Ford’s flirtation with running again in 1980 was fueled by three imperatives, all largely emotional. He wanted to avenge his loss to a president he thought had become a disaster; he also desperately longed to exorcise the Accidental President chatter, the whispers, galling him no end, that he simply never had what it took to be elected in his own right and had only gained the White House via a monumental fluke of history. By no means a minor consideration: he also relished the payback prospect of denying the Oval Office to Reagan, whom he considered a lazy and unfit pretender.
Ford was convinced he could beat Carter and sure that Reagan couldn’t, a judgment that would of course ultimately prove erroneous. He further believed that the 48 percent of Americans who’d voted for him in 1976 would still be there four years later. Carter’s rising unpopularity, he thought, would bring along enough other voters to make Ford another Grover Cleveland, who’d been defeated for reelection in 1888 by Benjamin Harrison but regained the presidency by beating Harrison four years later.
By the fall of 1979, Ford had traveled more than a million miles, basking at every step in the adulation of audiences who convinced him he was still politically viable. More than once, he’d be introduced by a university president or captain of industry who confessed he was embarrassed to admit he’d voted against Ford in 1976 and urged him to run again in 1980. Ford ate it up, and invariably pronounced absolution. “I am a very forgiving person,” he told one such remorseful patron.
It wasn’t all tease. By his own reckoning, he was a known quantity; his experience and integrity were a given, and Carter’s missteps made Ford look progressively better. He was the single candidate, Ford thought, who neutralized Carter’s positives and accentuated his negatives.
Longtime loyalists like Henry Kissinger and other former retainers urged him to run. Thomas Reed, a former secretary of the Air Force, formed a Draft Ford Committee. Two governors of megastates whose electoral votes were crucial, Jim Rhodes of Ohio and Bill Clements of Texas, lobbied him hard to make the race.
Ford wanted to believe, and so he did—up to a point. He was a totally conventional politician, as white-bread as they come, but his career had been propelled to heights he’d never aspired to by the most unconventional of circumstances. Even aides who were sure the idea was a disaster waiting to happen agreed that Ford couldn’t be faulted for wondering whether destiny might work its magic with him one last election.
“For a guy who got to be president the way he did,” one of the realists told me at the time, “he’s one of those people who believes anything can happen.”
But not all of his onetime inner circle were counted among the resurrectionist romantics. Loyalists like Dick Cheney, pollster Bob Teeter, and strategist par excellence Stu Spencer were all distinctly skeptical. To them, a renaissance race was theoretically doable but very tough. Everything would have to break Ford’s way. Moreover, as one of them put it, “his only chance is to rip Ronald Reagan to shreds.”
Understandably, Ford had a problem with that; he thought playing the spoiler would tarnish his cachet, not to mention possibly reelecting Carter by splitting the Republican vote. Carter with another four years was even more anathema to Ford than Reagan winning.
By early March, with important filing deadlines looming, Ford convened councils of war in Washington and Rancho Mirage with his closest advisers. Their judgment was sobering: the best-case scenario pegged Ford 150 delegates short of catching Reagan. They’d all be there for him if he decided to go, but he needed to recognize how iffy a proposition they thought it would be. “The math isn’t there,” Ford glumly told one of his true believers. Psychologically, he was desperate to run, but he wasn’t totally crazy.
On the afternoon of Saturday, March 15, 1980, a sunny day as usual in the desert, Ford pulled on a gray suit and blue button-down shirt and walked out to meet a handful of reporters near the grapefruit tree in the front yard of his office complex. In what he’d later call the toughest decision of his life, he took himself out of the race.
“America needs a new president,” he said, Betty smiling at his side. “I have determined that I can best help that cause by not being a candidate for president, which might further divide my party. I am not a candidate. I will not become a candidate. I will support the nominee of my party with all the energy I have.”
Just before he walked back inside, his political career irrevocably ended, I caught his eye. He looked right through me; it was as though we didn’t know each other. He was that upset over his “final and certain decision.”
With Betty hugging him for dear life, he walked into his office and announced with a raucous laugh, “If I were a drinking man, I’d have myself a drink.”
Instead, he changed out of his television clothes and immediately headed off for a therapeutic round of golf with Leonard Firestone, Darius (Dee) Keaton, and Alan Greenspan.
For the next twenty-four hours after ceding the Republican nomination to his archenemy, Ford was at war with the world. He charged out onto the Thunderbird Country Club course adjoining his home and took out his frustration on his golf game. He played some of his worst golf ever, spraying tee shots all over the course, clobbering palm trees, and missing easy chip shots, finishing his round literally in the dark.
He told aides he didn’t want to take any phone calls. Even the dearest of friends who wanted to console him were urged to steer clear for a while, lest they absorb indiscriminate shrapnel. “Stay the hell away from him,” Bob Barrett warned one old pal, “and make sure anybody you care about does the same.”
By Monday, however, Ford had expunged his demons. He was as cheerful and upbeat as usual, his raucous laugh reverberating around his office-in-exile.
On Tuesday, three days after taking himself out of the race, Ford finally agreed to give me a brief interview in his office. His mood was markedly sunnier. After massacring Thunderbird on Saturday, he said he’d played the tough Mission Hills course on Sunday. “I played the best golf of my life,” he boasted. “An 81 at Mission Hills—and it should have been 78.”
He confirmed, however, that he’d been in a vile mood right after ending his political career and had needed a little time to decompress.
“I was still uptight and tense, but I feel good about it now. It was the right thing to do, and Betty is behind it 110 percent,” he told me.
“This country has to get rid of Carter. To jeopardize that for the sake of personal ambition would have been irresponsible. Besides, you have to be realistic. I’m a realist—the numbers just weren’t there.”
Had he opted in, Ford added, he was convinced he’d be accused of being an egotistical party wrecker, a mortal sin for the ultimate party man: “You could see it coming; as soon as I got in I was gonna be torn apart, by Carter and Reagan.”
“Now we’re gonna enjoy the good life,” he vowed. “I’m gonna do some things I’ve never done. We’re going to the Kentucky Derby with friends, and I’m gonna play at Augusta National.”
And make some real money in the bargain.
Closing that door simultaneously opened another, less fulfilling psychologically but infinitely more lucrative: a robust sellers’ market for his services even his most aggressive financial advisers hadn’t imagined. Literally overnight, Jerry Ford’s earnings potential exploded, and that suited him just fine.
“This is my last political hurrah,” he told me toward the end of the 1980 campaign. “I’m going to reduce my political activity ninety percent and concentrate on my business interests.” For a man given to understatement, that was a whopper.
By then Ford was already a millionaire several times over, but he had consciously avoided the corporate world lest some business affiliation could present a practical problem if he ran for president again in 1980. When your name is on the door, Ford once told an associate, you’re part of the problem if there ever is one. He worried about potential conflict-of-interest allegations if he challenged Jimmy Carter—a race he wanted to make, badly.
It was only after he reluctantly decided not to launch that rematch that he embraced his beloved free-enterprise system headlong and ratcheted up the buckraking machine.
“The first four years, I kept my options open for ’80,” he told me in 1993. “I didn’t join any corporate boards, I affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute, and taught at about sixty colleges and universities; made a few honorarium speeches; but I never got affiliated with any business organizations, so that if I ran in ’80, people couldn’t say, ‘Well, look what he did with Corporation X or Corporation Y.’ After ’80, when I decided not to be a candidate ever again, I changed my focus to things that I thought I would enjoy.”
Suddenly, the corporations who had eagerly sought his services even while he was still in office renewed their sales pitches, having been alerted that this time the response might be more favorable. Two weeks after ending his political career by his own reluctant hand, Ford was elected to the board of directors of Santa Fe International Corporation, an international oil-drilling company. Within a year, when Newsweek ran a story headlined “Jerry Ford, Incorporated,” which he hated even though he was my source for much of the reporting, Ford was a director in six other corporations: Shearson Loeb Rhoades, the investment banking giant; AMAX, a mining and metals conglomerate; Tiger International, the international air cargo operation later subsumed into Federal Express; GK Technologies, a fiber optics and electronics firm; Texas Commerce Bancshares, a Houston bank holding company; and the Pebble Beach Corporation, a California real estate and resort development company whose board included his old friends Leonard Firestone and Dee Keaton.
In another year, Ford’s director’s portfolio had bulked up to include American Express and 20th Century–Fox Film Corporation, which had been acquired by his oilman pal Marvin Davis. Until mandatory age-limit regulations began forcing him off most of his boards, Ford was a director of more than a dozen major corporations. He was such a prolific corporate titan that one aide estimated it was costing his benefactors a million dollars a year in aircraft expenses for his services. That was another new, felicitous perk: more corporate jets, fewer commercial flights.
He also received thousands of shares of stock as compensation from some of those corporations. His friend Sandy Weill made sure that Ford held on to those shares, arguing, correctly, that over time they would increase in value handsomely.
Like other board members, Ford collected director’s fees in the $20,000 range. But he was in such demand as a trophy hire that he asked for, and got, a separate consulting deal for most if not all of these firms. Those fees were estimated at between $35,000 and $100,000 each by Ford associates.
In a deal that some close associates thought crept right up to the top of the smell-test chart, he also inked a consulting deal with the Charter Corporation, a Florida conglomerate that had once retained President Carter’s brother Billy to help lobby oil deals with the Libyan government.
For the handsome compensation they paid him, Ford’s business colleagues gained a high-profile, prestige partner, one of the globe’s most recognizable and formerly powerful individuals, who imparted an instant aura of legitimacy and respectability. He wasn’t a rainmaker and still ruled out any lobbying chores. He consciously turned down all entreaties from defense companies, wary of conflict-of-interest charges, since those firms did billions of dollars’ worth of business with the federal government.
So what did he actually do as a boardman?
“The chairman or the president will call me and ask for my appraisal of the domestic and international situation,” he told me a month after opting out of the 1980 presidential race, “and at board meetings I’m usually called upon to give a review of the political, economic, and international situation as I see it. I never involve myself in actual business operations.”
Even so, he was an eager corporate cheerleader, willing to inspire, schmooze, and entertain clients and employees alike. He was the star attraction, for instance, at the 1981 opening of Shearson’s new branch in Singapore and later spoke to the firm’s top six hundred salesmen in Honolulu in October. That same year he flew to Brazil with other GK Technologies directors and made an eleven-country around-the-world tour in a Charter corporate jet, mixing business activities with official duties as a high-level emissary to the Chinese and Saudi Arabian governments at President Reagan’s behest.
Below the radar, Ford also aggressively pursued a variety of private investment ventures. In 1979 he and neighbor Firestone had formed Fordstone Incorporated. Among their early investments were radio stations in Durango, Colorado, and a local hotel and residential project opposed by environmentalists. Ford was one of several partners with golfing legend Jack Nicklaus in a golf course and had real estate holdings in the Midwest and California, including a piece of a San Jose shopping center.
Ford was a dutiful board member, faithfully attending quarterly meetings and making a dozen trips to New York City every year just for corporate work. Even when he couldn’t handle the flying anymore, he participated in board sessions via teleconference from Rancho Mirage.
A quarter-century after he joined his first board, what some critics still denounce as his selling of the presidency arguably remains the most controversial aspect of Ford’s career. There’s little doubt that Ford’s business dealings at the very least lacked some sensitivity to the appearance of impropriety. It was a blind spot even his defenders fretted about.
Predictably, he never saw it that way. To him, his reputation for personal integrity, not to mention a prodigious work ethic, should have been sufficient to insulate him from criticism. When he wasn’t irked about the naysayers, he always seemed to me almost hurt by the suggestion he’d cheapened the presidential aura.
He was particularly irritated that Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan were reliably reported to have accused him of unseemly profiteering. Carter even said so at a 1981 press conference: “I think it’s inappropriate for an ex-president to be involved in the commercial world.”
Those who decried his entrepreneurial excess never recognized, he often complained, that he did a huge amount of pro bono work. He never quite understood what the fuss was all about.
On his 1981 trip for both Carter and Reagan, he was at pains to point out, he’d refused to do any corporate work with the Chinese and Saudis despite plenty of openings to do precisely that.
“I kept the missions President Reagan gave me totally separate from the things I was doing otherwise,” he told me in April 1981, betraying a sense of weariness as well as defensiveness at my questions. “I was very scrupulous in that regard.”
As he got older, and wealthier, Ford steadily dialed back on his business operations. In 1995, when he celebrated his eighty-second birthday, he pointed out a new policy: “I won’t take a speech in New York, even for a big fee, unless I’m out there [anyway]. That’s a three-day commitment.” At long last, Ford was slowing down.
“I used to speak three to five times a month for honorariums,” he told me in 1998. “I now do probably one a month or less for honorariums. I just turned down this morning a $100,000 fee to go to Egypt. They wanted me to speak to two thousand people. I just don’t do that anymore. It literally ends up into a four-or five-day trip. I’m finding that long-distance travel takes a lot out of me.
“I’ve cut back to three boards: Texas Commerce Bancshares; it’s now Texas Chase, American Express, and Travelers.”
He expected that the Travelers-Amex merger might result in his getting bounced from the new combined board of directors. “We don’t need the money, and if I’m not on the board, we’ll survive,” he shrugged. “That’s just five less trips to New York every year, which is fine.”
Even as he scaled back, the questions never went away, nor his pained defenses. In his mind, they all boiled down to two simple sentences he uttered in 1981:
“I’m a private citizen now. As long as I work for what I get, and as long as I behave in an honorable fashion, it’s my business.”
At its peak, quite a business.