AT FORD’S FUNERAL, two of the three surviving former presidents joined George W. Bush in memorializing Gerald Ford’s life and public service. There’s a simple reason why Bill Clinton was the only ex-president who didn’t speak at any of the ceremonies: Ford himself wanted it that way.
He once entertained Bill and Hillary Clinton at his Colorado mountain retreat, and found the new president just as charming and charismatic as advertised. Like his view of Ronald Reagan’s showmanship, he admired, if somewhat grudgingly, the 42nd president’s undisputed political agility. Not long after their 1993 socializing, in fact, Ford told me that he’d telephoned old Republican friends and party leaders with a blunt warning: This new president shouldn’t be underestimated as just another slick politician.
“This guy can sell three-day-old ice,” he confided with a mix of envy and disdain. “He’s that good.”
At the same time, he was even more complimentary about Clinton’s gifts in a conversation with a close associate: “I get confused by him. I don’t know what’s at his core. I don’t know what’s most important to him. But this guy is the best politician I’ve ever seen.”
He compared Clinton favorably to John F. Kennedy, another charismatic politician. For some reason, he didn’t refer to the 35th president as Jack, using his formal name instead.
“John was great, but all John had was the press. He was still an elitist; he didn’t like the rope line. This guy loves the rope line—and the rope line loves him.”
Yet he always believed Bill Clinton had disgraced the office by trysting with a young intern on the job as well as, in his view, obstructing justice and lying under oath and to his family, his staff, his Democratic supporters, and the American people.
As then vice president George H. W. Bush once told Ronald Reagan in an entirely different context, “There are standards.” In Ford’s righteously Middle American view of good and ill, Clinton’s wobbly personal standards were enough to veto what would have no doubt been an elegant and heartfelt eulogy.
Even so, at the critical juncture of Bill Clinton’s troubled second term, Ford had actually been willing to reach across the political aisle and offer Clinton some desperately needed bipartisan impeachment help. They could never agree to the terms. Ford wanted more contrition and admission of guilt than Clinton was willing to concede, so what would have been a remarkable deal between two Odd Couple presidents died.
He hadn’t known Clinton before his election, but that changed in the summer of 1993, when Jerry and Betty invited them to their Colorado home and hung with them for three days.
“His daughter Chelsea likes to dance,” Ford recalled in May 1994. Four years ago, the Vail Valley Foundation brought the Bolshoi Academy to Vail to set up a school for young American ballet students. They were there six weeks, and it’s developed so that Vail is the center of summer ballet in the country. It’s a great add-on to Vail’s winter skiing.
“So the White House learned about it and they asked could Chelsea come out and get some [ballet] exposure. Well, the minute I heard that, I called Clinton. I said, ‘We’d love to have you; Ambassador Firestone’s home next door is available to you and the family. I hope you’ll come.’
“He said, ‘Well, I can’t tell for sure.’ Well, then the Pope was [coming to] Colorado. Clinton then called and said, ‘When we’re in Colorado for His Holiness, we could come up for two or three days.’ So they came up. We played golf two days with Jack Nicklaus, and we had dinner three times. We got to know him quite well.”
What had he learned about the new president, other than the fact, as Ford grumped to friends, that he cheated at golf?
“Well, he’s a nicer person than I thought. I think he’s a nice person. He’s very persuasive. He’s a helluva PR guy. He’s a typical Chautauqua salesman who moves in, seduces everybody, and then starts to compromise his position based on the pressures that he gets politically and otherwise.
“He doesn’t think it’s wrong; he enjoys the process. I don’t worry about that domestically, Tom. But I am very sincerely concerned about his handling of foreign policy. He’s got a mediocre team and I don’t think he likes foreign policy. In fact, when I see him come to the podium to talk about a foreign policy issue, he is uncertain, he doesn’t look comfortable, he doesn’t project strength, and that worries me.
“Look at North Korea, where he now is gonna buy them off with half a billion dollars’ worth of aid. Certainly Haiti is a disaster; Somalia. I think you’ve got to decouple trade from human rights in China. And the handling of Japan is anything but successful.”
He repeated that “he’s a helluva salesman.” It wasn’t clear if he thought Clinton’s evangelism was sincere or merely an act.
“I think he thinks he’s sincere. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. On domestic policy, I think he’s sincere.”
And effective, Ford added. He predicted that Clinton had to be favored for reelection in 1996.
“He’ll be very hard to beat. I do not think the Republicans can win challenging him on domestic policy. He’s very articulate, he’s a helluva salesman, and on the assumption that the economy is okay, Republicans will have a tough time in ’96 unless—and I think this is the key—he could have a foreign policy crisis, and his track record to date is terrible. If we have a crisis, the American people will reflect on the incompetence and they’ll say, ‘We can’t gamble with this man for another four years.’”
As an American first and a partisan Republican second, he hoped that contingency didn’t happen, and assumed Clinton would then breeze to a second term.
I asked if he agreed with many of his Republican pals back in Washington that the press was giving Clinton a pass on his personal life.
“There’s no doubt they’ve treated him differently than they treated others. Whether you call that a free ride or not, it’s hard to tell. Certainly, on domestic policy they haven’t been antagonistic, and I understand that. Seventy-five percent of them ideologically agree with him, and subjectively they can’t be mean to somebody they inwardly have a camaraderie with. I mean, that’s human nature. And he is a nice guy, and he is a salesman.
“In foreign policy, the press is beginning to be worried and their objectivity is beginning to come to the surface. Anthony Lewis in the New York Times has been giving him hell in Bosnia for six months, with good reason. The facts are there.
“He’s got a mediocre staff. You know, Warren Christopher’s a very nice person, but he looks like a dried-up prune and he talks like somebody who should be a good number-two but has no role in the global atmosphere of foreign policy. And with all deference to [Deputy Secretary of State] Strobe Talbott, your former compatriot in the journalism profession…” Ford laughed derisively.
I followed up my earlier question about media coverage of Clinton’s personal baggage.
“I don’t see how in conscience the press can ignore some of it. Now, if I were in your boots, I would not like to write it, because I do have a certain feeling about privacy and I also know, Tom, there are damn few Americans, including myself, who don’t have some skeleton in your closet.
“The difference is: lots of people make one mistake, but they learn and they don’t repeat it. Everything you see about him is a pattern.”
I was curious whether he’d picked up any evidence of Clinton’s flirtatious side in their socializing at Beaver Creek.
“Turn that off,” he commanded, pointing to my recorder.
“I’ll tell you one thing: he didn’t miss one good-looking skirt at any of the social occasions. He’s got a wandering eye, I’ll tell you that. Betty had the same impression; he isn’t very subtle about his interest.”
Despite his personal distaste for Bill Clinton’s behavior, Ford never thought Clinton had committed an impeachable offense. He also believed, regrettably, that fellow Republicans were pursuing impeachment mainly for partisan political gain and that even if the president had perpetrated a high crime or misdemeanor as defined by the Constitution, the votes to remove him from office weren’t there in the Senate anyway.
In early May 1998, with independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s investigation of Bill Clinton’s financial and alleged romantic entanglements in its fourth year, I interviewed Ford at his office in Rancho Mirage and asked, “Is any of this impeachable?”
“I don’t think it is and I hope it isn’t,” he answered. “If they have a clear-cut case, it’s no different in many respects from Nixon. But it’s not clear yet, and I just don’t like the country going through that kind of a traumatic experience [again].”
I asked him what Clinton should do to avoid being impeached.
“A lot depends on what the truth is. Obviously, Starr thinks he’s got enough evidence to prove something. To take all this time and make all this effort and end up with zero, I can’t believe he would go ahead [otherwise]. He can be surmising something with a lot of credibility, but that’s different from proving the truth in the House Committee on Judiciary or the House, even the public. I think the public, despite some of their poll surveys, thinks something’s going on.”
Ford enjoyed a reputation for having sound political instincts, so I asked what his gut was telling him about the allegations Clinton had been fooling around with intern Monica Lewinsky.
“I don’t want to believe it’s true, but the cumulative evidence leads you to that conclusion,” he said, remembering his experience while entertaining the Clintons at Beaver Creek. He and Betty had compared notes after one dinner party and were both struck at how aggressively Clinton had engaged several attractive women, even with his wife in the room.
“He’s got his eyes wandering all the time,” Ford recalled—not the first time he’d made that point to me. “He’s attractive and he’s persuasive, obviously.”
Ford scoffed at Clinton’s assertion that Secret Service agents he didn’t want to talk to Starr were covered by executive privilege protections, like senior White House aides.
“His claim of executive privilege can’t hold up in court. Executive privilege is not written into the Constitution. That’s fractured legal theory.” But he agreed that Clinton could drag out a ruling for at least a year “unless the Supreme Court takes the initiative and calls it up and takes quick action.” That was Clinton’s game, Ford thought: stall for time.
Since he was in the House then, I wondered how Clinton might fare if he went on television the way Vice President Nixon did in 1952 and made a “Checkers” speech of his own.
“It would solve a lot of problems, but I don’t think that’s his nature. He believes everything he says. Under any circumstances, at any time, and he’s sincere about that. He just has a very facile mind.” He chuckled at that.
I asked Ford if anyone had urged him to use his moral authority as a former president to talk about the institutional damage he believed Clinton was doing to the presidency.
“Nobody’s come to me. It’s not my style to interject myself, and as a result I’ve said absolutely nothing. Jimmy Carter hasn’t done it, I don’t intend to do it, Ronald Reagan can’t, and George Bush to my knowledge has not. I think it’s wise for the three of us, and Ron Reagan if he were able, to just stay totally out of it. It’s a damn shame; it’s undercutting the image of the presidency.”
Actually, he didn’t quite “just stay totally out of it.” Five months later, on October 4, 1998, as Republicans ratcheted up their demands for Clinton’s forced removal from office, Ford floated an idea for avoiding impeachment in an article in the New York Times. He skewered Clinton for having “broken faith with those who elected him…forced to take refuge in legalistic evasions” and “glossy deceit.”
Yet to avoid a messy impeachment trial without letting Clinton off the hook, Ford also proposed a novel twist to the upcoming 1999 State of the Union speech: instead of reciting the usual laundry list of policy items, Clinton should appear in the well of the House and accept a verbal rebuke from legislators.
“By his appearance the President would accept full responsibility for his actions, as well as for his subsequent efforts to delay or impede the investigation of them,” Ford wrote. “No spinning, no semantics, no evasiveness or blaming others for his plight.
“Let all this be done without partisan exploitation or mean-spiritedness. Let it be dignified, honest and, above all, cleansing. The result, I believe, would be the first moment of majesty in an otherwise squalid year.”
Plainly, Ford was trying to avoid a constitutional mess and also lend a hand to a fellow president, but he was also motivated by an intense desire to save his beloved party from itself. He believed his fellow Republicans were so consumed by their animus for Bill Clinton, and Hillary, that they couldn’t do the right thing for the country and, in the process, their own partisan political interests. He conceived of the op-ed as a road map for collective sanity, especially for his Republican brethren.
The House ignored his creative suggestion and impeached Clinton anyway, on December 19, 1998. So he tried again, collaborating with Jimmy Carter on a second op-ed. Writing in the Times two days after the House vote, the former presidents argued against Clinton’s conviction and ouster from office by the Senate. Instead, they proposed a bipartisan senatorial resolution of censure:
President Clinton would have to accept rebuke while acknowledging his wrongdoing and the very real harm he has caused. The Congressional resolution should contain language stipulating that the President’s acceptance of these findings—including a public acknowledgment that he did not tell the truth under oath—cannot be used in any future criminal trial to which he may be subject. It may even be possible for the special prosecutor publicly to forgo the option of bringing such charges against the President when Mr. Clinton leaves office.
Ironically, Ford was precisely recycling his rationale for the Nixon pardon twenty-four years earlier. Without some remedy to bring the impeachment crisis to a swift conclusion, the country would almost surely be embroiled in bitter partisan strife for months, probably years. A censure, he was arguing, would eliminate the need for a Senate trial that would “only exacerbate the jagged divisions that are tearing our national fabric.” The censure option, he was convinced, was the only route to avoid another Watergate orgy of recriminations and national gridlock.
After his knees were replaced and skiing became but a melancholy memory, Ford settled into a predictable lifestyle routine: the desert in the winter, the mountains in the summer. So when by coincidence I was invited to make a speech in Beaver Creek in late January 1999, I was certain he wouldn’t be there. I was wrong.
“You’re in luck,” Ford’s chief of staff Penny Circle told me just before Christmas. “They’ll be there for the World Cup.”
The World Alpine Skiing Championships were being staged in Vail, and Ford had always been passionate about the sport. One of his fondest memories was a ski trip to Vermont with his drop-dead-gorgeous model girlfriend Phyllis Brown in 1940. Their junket landed them on the cover of Look magazine.
In typical fashion, when Ford learned that my wife and three-year-old son had come along with me, he invited the three of us over to chat. We arrived at the Fords’ elegant Elk Track Court chalet at 2:45 P.M. on January 31, the Sunday of Super Bowl XXXIII between the Denver Broncos and the Atlanta Falcons.
It was a clear, cold, sunny day in the mountains. Ford greeted us at the front door and for the first and last time in my experience, took the elevator to the second floor, where Betty was waiting. “I’ve torn a ligament in my ankle,” he grumbled, “and I don’t know how I did it.”
Just as in Rancho Mirage, Ford and I had always met in his study, on the south side of the staircase. This was my first exposure to their living room, an airy, inviting space with large picture windows that overlooked the town center of Beaver Creek below. From the sofas, we could see the chairlifts busily shuttling skiers up the slopes.
“We’re still using the Christmas napkins,” Betty said, laughing as their chef passed around a plate of cookies and took drink orders.
Communal chitchat quickly gave way to some triage: Mrs. Ford and my wife, Melanie, adjourned to another part of the living room and launched into girl stuff: decorators, cancer therapies, the perils of conception. My son, Andrew, occupied himself with playing with Happy, the Fords’ frisky cocker spaniel.
It was ostensibly a social occasion, so Ford and I kept on with small talk. He was tickled that Andrew had been enrolled in the Beaver Creek toddlers’ ski school and was becoming a “Mini-Mouse,” ruing that skiing had been the first of his athletic passions to go because of his gimpy football knees.
Politicians being politicians and reporters being inquisitive pot-stirrers, the discussion predictably turned to Bill Clinton’s impeachment, which the House of Representatives had voted six weeks earlier.
“Well, have I told you about my conversation with Clinton?” he wondered.
If my notebook had been out, I’d have dropped it.
He began a riveting narrative by telling me that during the previous fall, not long after his October op-ed appeared, Bob Strauss had called him in Rancho Mirage. The White House had commissioned Strauss to ask Ford if he’d be willing to testify on Clinton’s behalf before the House Judiciary Committee. Strauss said that if he’d agree, Bill Clinton was willing to let Ford be the only witness to vouch for him at the committee hearing. Unspoken was the clever rationale for the extraordinary proposal: How could rabid House Republicans ignore the wise counsel of one of their most famous alumni?
“I told Bob there was just no way,” Ford recalled. “I mean, can you imagine me, a longtime House Republican, testifying for Bill Clinton before a Republican House?”
Admittedly, the legendary Texas pol was the perfect choice for making the initial approach. He and Ford were old friends, throwbacks to the long-dead era when civility was still de rigueur in the Washington political process. They’d always been friendly, but Ford’s admiration for Strauss had been enhanced by remarks the Democratic warhorse had made at the March 1975 dinner of the Gridiron Club, the capital’s most prestigious journalists’ organization.
“President Ford, our friends here in the press consistently write, ‘Jerry Ford is a good man, but…’” he said, catching Ford’s eye. “Mr. President, let me say to you that you are not ‘a good man but.’ You are a ‘good man and.’ And as chairman of the Democratic Party, let me say you are what this country needed.”
Ford was so touched by that generosity of spirit from the political opposition that he wrote Strauss a glowing letter the next day. “It has always been my experience that political competition can be tough without being unpleasant and vigorous without becoming vicious,” he said. “Thank you for going the extra mile the other night.”
Their camaraderie, however, wasn’t enough to change Ford’s mind about fronting for Clinton. Strauss said he’d pass the thanks-but-no-thanks message back to the White House, and Ford assumed that was the end of it.
But not long after the full House impeached Clinton just before Christmas, Ford got a call from Charles Ruff, the White House counsel. Ruff praised the second op-ed piece Ford had written with Carter and wondered if there was anything more Ford might be willing to do to help a fellow president out.
“I told Ruff the only way I would do anything else is if Clinton admitted he’d lied under oath.”
Ruff replied, “He will never do that, Mr. President.”
“Well, if the president will admit perjury I will do more,” Ford said. “You talk to him.”
Ruff said again that Clinton wouldn’t agree to that.
In that case, Ford countered, there was no way he could go beyond his op-ed. Having failed to get an admission of guilt from Nixon a quarter-century earlier, he wasn’t about to make the same mistake again, especially with a Democratic president.
That still wasn’t the end of it.
“A little later, Clinton called me; we have a Jerry-Bill relationship. He said he really needed my help and wanted to know if I could help,” Ford recalled.
He offered Clinton the same deal he’d proposed to Ruff.
“Bill, I think you have to admit that you lied. If you do that, I think that will help—and I’ll help you. If you’ll admit perjury, I’ll do more.”
“I won’t do that,” Ford quoted Clinton as responding. “I can’t do that.”
The 38th president reminded the 42nd president, just as he’d previously told Ruff, that his op-ed censure proposal, which Clinton had lauded, included the same condition—Clinton had to admit his guilt as part of the deal. Clinton again demurred, but repeated that he could really use Ford’s gravitas as a voice of reason with Republicans.
“They wanted me to give up my position,” Ford said. “There was just no way.”
Neither president was budging.
“Well, Bill,” Ford said, “this conversation must end.” After a few perfunctory pleasantries, it did.
Precisely what Ford was prepared to do to help Clinton was never broached between the two, because, as Ford remembered, “we never got past the crucial question” of Clinton meeting Ford’s conditions.
Ford thought Clinton had been unduly stubborn and said he was amazed at his lack of contrition. “It’s a character flaw,” he told me. He predicted that Clinton nevertheless would beat conviction by the Senate but would be censured, with strong support from Democratic senators. He was wrong. As he’d feared, Clinton bloodlust blinded Republicans from taking a censure deal, which he was sure Clinton would have accepted. Twelve days after our conversation, the Senate acquitted Clinton—and there was no censure. Afterward, White House aides reported that Clinton was gleefully telling friends he’d beaten the rap.
At some point, our spouses wrapped up their sidebar talk to rejoin the three guys—and burst out laughing. Ford and I had been so engrossed in our Clinton dialogue we hadn’t noticed that Andrew had sampled every cookie, taking a bite from each before placing it back on the plate.
That prompted a conversation about food. I said I was glad to see that the Left Bank, the fancy French restaurant where Ford liked to break the chef’s heart by ordering liver and onions, was going strong at creekside in downtown Vail. It was still his favorite, Ford said.
When my wife said I had a cast-iron stomach, Betty interjected, “He’ll pay for that later. Jerry was like that, too. He could eat anything. Now he can’t.”
Ford echoed his wife: “I can’t sleep if I eat too much spicy food.”
“I’m eighty-five,” he mused. “It’s time to put my feet up.”
Back to impeachment: Ford told Betty that we’d been talking about Clinton’s troubles.
“Betty and I have talked about this a lot. He’s sick—he’s got an addiction. He needs treatment. He’s sick.”
The former First Lady, whose Betty Ford Center has turned around tens of thousands of lives, joined in.
“You know, there’s treatment for that kind of addiction. A lot of men have gone through the treatment with a lot of success. But he won’t do it, because he’s in denial.”
Our chat was winding down. He mentioned that he was having more of his letters appraised and confessed to being a hopeless pack rat. “That comes from my mother. She saved everything about me; football clippings, everything.”
He wondered why his party was having its 2000 convention in Philadelphia, sixty years after he’d stumped for Wendell Willkie outside another Philly convention.
“I can’t figure out why the Republicans picked Philadelphia for the convention,” he said. “It doesn’t do anything for them politically, and Philadelphia doesn’t have much going for it.”
Finally we took the elevator downstairs, and Ford walked us out. On the front steps, he returned to his Clinton head-shaking theme without any prompting.
“I don’t understand why any of his cabinet hasn’t resigned. How can they keep working for him after he lied to them?”
On a human level, he was more concerned about what he believed was Clinton’s denial—something he himself had witnessed with Betty for years until she faced up to her alcohol and medicinal dependencies.
“I’m convinced that Clinton has a sexual addiction,” he repeated. “He needs to get help—for his sake. He’s already damaged his presidency beyond repair.”
Ford knew next to nothing about Bill and Hillary Clinton before the 1992 election. The only thing he said to me about the new president before he met him was during an uncharacteristic swipe at the press in 1993: “The media helped Clinton get elected.”
But he always considered Hillary the one who got away; paraphrasing Marlon Brando, she coulda been a Republican. In fact, Ford thought Hillary, a product of the Illinois suburbs, had started out as a country-club Republican, much like himself.
He even had the visual evidence to prove it. On the last night of the Clintons’ three-day visit to Beaver Creek in 1993, “she brought this photograph: Hillary Rodham standing between Mel Laird and me,” he recalled. “She was a summer intern for Mel Laird when he was in the House; this was 1963, ’64. And in the picture are Mel Laird, Hillary Clinton, Jerry Ford, Charlie Goodell, Al Quie. She was a Republican! Now she got converted to a liberal Democrat up at Smith College or wherever she went [Wellesley, actually].
“Her mother took it off the wall and sent it to her, and she gave it to me. I sent it to my library.”
It was a gracious gesture by the new First Lady, and Ford loved to regale associates with his Hillary-the-Republican tale. But he and Hillary were polar opposites ideologically, and he wasn’t sure she would be a particularly appealing candidate if she ever ran for the White House.
But those first few encounters in the mountains convinced him she had the emotional toughness for the job:
“I learned this: she’s stronger and tougher than he is,” he told me in 1994. “When she takes a point, you’re gonna have to be damn sure you’re well informed, because she won’t compromise as quickly or as easily as he. She’s very bright, she’s strong, and I think he defers to her. When she gets her dander up, she ain’t gonna roll over.”
In July 2000, Ford told me Hillary’s race for the New York Senate seat being vacated by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, which he thought she’d win easily, was a calculated stepping-stone in her ultimate quest to become the first female president.
“They’ve been very nice to us, the Clintons,” he admitted, “but I think there’s a feeling in the country that she’s only running for senator from New York so she can be a candidate for president, and [people] resent that. They think [a Senate race] is an expedient for her own [presidential] ambitions. Now, there’s no question she’s a very, very ambitious gal. Truth is, I think she is doing it [to run for president], but that’s a handicap to her.”
Even so, he continued, “The Republicans will make a mistake if they think she is gonna be a pushover. She is a tough, knowledgeable, articulate lady. On the other hand, her toughness in the political arena may not be a big asset. She obviously wants to stay in the political spotlight.”
By 2002, he was certain Hillary had already decided to make a presidential bid:
“I’ll make this prediction, as long as this is off the record. I’ll gar-antee [sic] you, either in 2004 or 2008, Hillary Rodham Clinton will be a candidate for president. [And] I wouldn’t rule out Hillary in 2004, I really wouldn’t.”
Asked if Hillary would be formidable, he replied that her nomination by the Democrats was a foregone conclusion: “Hillary is gonna be on the ticket in ’04 or ’08, one or the other, and you can write that down.”
Why was he so sure Hillary was running?
“Because she has unlimited ambition. When you look at her record, she’s a bona fide liberal with unlimited ambition.
“You look at her track record. She went to Arkansas and married Clinton because she saw in him a way to get national recognition ’cause she thought from the beginning he would be a candidate for president and would get to be president. There’s nothing in her track record, Tom, which shows any [inclination] to stay in the background.”
But he thought she’d have trouble getting elected because of all the political and personal baggage she’d be toting.
“It depends on the public sentiment in the years out [at the time]. Of course, she’s very vulnerable—she was the mastermind of that terrible health care program which she tried to sell. So that would always be a liability for her.”
Ford interjected that Laura Bush was a more popular and appealing national figure than Hillary Clinton, then segued into his long-standing belief that the political deck remained stacked against women candidates for the Oval Office.
“I don’t think the country is ready for a lady president,” he ventured. “I guess I’ve told you before how I think it’s gonna happen.” In fact, he hadn’t.
“Both parties or one of the parties will nominate a male for president and a female for vice president. The ticket will get elected. The president will die in office. The lady becomes president automatically, and once that happens the dam is broken. And from then on, us men are gonna be number-two.”
Had he ever ruminated about who that first trailblazing female president might be? “Haven’t given it a bit of thought, Tom.” Plainly, however, he didn’t think America’s first Madam President would be Hillary Rodham Clinton.
On August 13, 1999, Ford received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Bill Clinton at White House ceremonies. “President Ford represents what is best in public service, and what is best about America,” Clinton said in praising his appreciative predecessor.
“He made a helluva nice statement for me,” Ford said in a 2000 interview. “I couldn’t ask for a more complimentary comment. It was damn nice of him to be there and sit for an hour and a half and listen to all that stuff others said.”
As those comments suggest, like every member of the most exclusive boys’ club in the land, Ford was always somewhat ambivalent about passing judgment on fellow initiates.
“We have a good relationship,” he told me in 1997, remembering that he and Betty had gone up on the stage after the 1996 Clinton-Dole debate in San Diego. After seeing Ford give Hillary a big bear hug, Clinton bounded across the stage to schmooze with his predecessor.
“I think you have to believe that people who have been in the Oval Office—it’s a very small group and there’s almost a historical camaraderie, which is healthy in my opinion. Having been there, you don’t want to be hypercritical.
“When I’m asked at a press conference what I think of President Clinton, I give a very simple answer that ends the interrogation: ‘I voted for Bush, and I voted for Dole.’ Period. That’s it. I don’t go beyond that.”
“But you’d help him if he asked?”
“Oh, of course. I helped him on the chemical treaty. I really went to bat for NAFTA. And I told Secretary [of State Madeleine] Albright when she was in Grand Rapids I hope the president would push hard on getting fast-track authority and the sooner the better, because I felt it was important to expand NAFTA into Chile and into other Latin American countries.”
As an old Korea hand, Ford also applauded Clinton for having the good sense, in his obviously biased view, to reach out to him to discuss the troubled peninsula.
“I talked to him at length on the telephone,” he told me in 1995. “He has had the NSC come out three times to make sure I was fully informed and kept abreast of everything. I’m grateful, because I’m one of the few politicians around who was there when Kim Il Sung started the war. I’m the only person around who flew over there and went to the signing of the Panmunjom Armistice. So I have a background [on Korea] that few people in public life have today. Clinton understood that, and I appreciated that he took it seriously.”
Their relationship was sufficiently friendly that after Clinton hurt his right knee in 1997 while visiting golfer Greg Norman in Florida, Ford called to commiserate. “I told him I knew a little bit about knee injuries, and the main thing he had to do was what the doctors prescribe about rehabilitation.” Clinton had probably paid little attention to the advice, since “he was still in considerable pain,” Ford recalled.
Even so, Ford thought Clinton an unreconstructed liberal whose celebrated “triangulation” strategy was simply an expedient—and successful—device to capture the political middle.
“The truth is, Clinton only modified his political philosophy after the Republicans won [the House] in ’94,” Ford said in a 1998 interview. “He’s only been a moderate Democrat since that election. But if you have a change in the control of the House [in 1998], you’ll see a reversion to the basic Clinton liberalism.”
Even before his stunning 1999 soliloquy on Clinton’s roving-eye tendencies, Ford had difficulty keeping his straight-arrow disdain for Clinton’s personal life bottled up in our conversations.
In a 1997 interview, for example, Ford brought up the sensational case of Lieutenant Kelly Flinn of the Air Force, a female B-52 pilot who’d just been cashiered from the military on allegations of adultery.
“Betty and I were watching 60 Minutes last week and saw the story about this poor little Air Force girl,” he remembered. “I turned to Betty and said, ‘What about the commander in chief?’”
Given Clinton’s history of peccadilloes, Flinn’s punishment seemed grossly unfair to Ford. “Nobody’s made that point yet: Why is she being penalized?”
In a 1998 interview, moreover, Ford said, “The president’s got an addiction, and it affects his judgment.”
Two years later, with Clinton free of impeachment and in his last year as president, Ford offered this valedictory: “He’ll always have a blemish on the grounds of character, but on the other hand, you have to admit he’s a hardworking, articulate, bright person who has done his darnedest to build up an image. But you can’t erase character problems.”
His most exhaustive dissertation on the subject of Clinton’s “addiction” came on March 29, 2002, a Good Friday, in Rancho Mirage.
Out of nowhere in our wide-ranging sit-down, Ford the pol morphed into Ford the gossip.
“Let me ask you something,” he said. “Is Clinton loyal to his sweet wife in his travels around the world?”
I passed on some of the Washington and New York whispers that have dogged the Clintons since Little Rock, and asked what he’d heard.
“I don’t hear much,” he admitted, but he knew what he thought, and he repeated what he’d told me in 1999.
“He’s got a sex sickness; I mean that.”
That reminded him of an old friend with the same roving-eye problem who was getting married—again.
“We just got a wedding invitation. [Name deleted] has that same problem [as Clinton]—except he marries them,” Ford said, emitting a hearty laugh.
He agreed with me that Clinton’s personal life, real or imagined, was a potential political time bomb.
“Oh, I agree on that. He’s very skillful in handling it so far except for the Monica Lewinsky and the [Gennifer] Flowers matter, but he’s his own worst enemy. But he’s so slick he gets away with it.”
Predictably, he also was scornful of Clinton’s eleventh-hour pardons—except for one: Dan Rostenkowski.
In all his ex-White House years, Ford’s single pardon letter had been for his old House pal Rostenkowski, once the powerful Democratic chairman of the Ways and Means Committee.
“Danny’s problem was he played precisely under the rules of the city of Chicago. Now, those aren’t the same rules that any other place in the country lives by, but in Chicago they were totally legal, and Danny got a screwing, and I was pleased that Clinton granted it.”
“There was a lot of [pardon] skulduggery, a lot of it. I think the Marc Rich action was unconscionable. There’s this case out here in L.A. where the old man was a big donor and he got all the politicians out here to write letters to grant the pardon.”
By his reckoning, handing out political pardons while heading out the door confirmed Ford’s views of Clinton’s ethical shortcomings.
“The truth is, Tom, he’s a very talented guy, but he has no convictions—none whatsoever.”
Given such broadsides, Ford would surely have squirmed a bit had he known that Bill and Hillary Clinton rearranged their schedules to arrive in Washington a day early to pay their private respects to Betty before the funeral. He would have been genuinely touched, but probably not enough to recant anything—even though, ironically, their views on how to conduct a former presidency were simpatico.
“I haven’t talked to Bill Clinton since he left the White House,” he said in that Good Friday interview. “He’s all over the world making a lot of bucks. He’s in demand, and I understand he won’t speak for less than a hundred thousand.”