AT GERALD FORD’S burial service in Grand Rapids, Jimmy Carter began and ended his eulogy with the same dramatic first sentence from his own inaugural in 1977: “For myself and for my nation, I want to thank my predecessor for all he has done to heal our land.”
At the finish, Carter struggled to maintain his composure in his grief for someone he considered a good friend, and whose friendship was firmly reciprocated, as Ford would have described it.
That unexpected rapprochement with an old political foe had journeyed a long distance, having its genesis in their bitter 1976 slugfest. Even five years later, on the very occasion where both Ford and Carter would always agree their enmity finally ceased, Ford was reminded why sometimes it was exceedingly hard to like the 39th president.
It happened on their trip to Cairo in the fall of 1981. Ford, Carter, and Nixon were traveling together on a government jet as Reagan’s emissaries to the funeral of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, who had been assassinated by Arab militants.
On one of that trip’s long legs, an Air Force steward asked the three sort-of amigos to pose for a picture with the flight attendants. Nixon, never known for his warm bedside manner, had no problem with that. Predictably, Ford also agreed without murmur.
“How long will it take?” Carter wanted to know.
The steward assured him it would just be a couple of minutes.
Carter agreed, but said he needed it to be quick.
A few minutes after the historic photo op, Ford couldn’t resist confiding to another member of the delegation, “You know, that just goes to show you can’t make chicken salad out of chicken shit.”
That was probably one of the worst things he’d ever said about a political adversary, no doubt reflecting lingering animosity from 1976. Significantly, it came amidst a series of casual conversations on the plane that began the process of consigning their differences to the ancient-history folder.
A few days after he returned to California, I talked with Ford via telephone about the better vibes with Carter.
“After several meals we had together, I felt there was a warmth that really hadn’t existed [before], and I felt very good about it.”
Ford said that at the outset of the trip, he’d suggested to Nixon and Carter that to avoid confusion they should refer to one another as Jimmy, Dick, and Jerry. The icebreaking continued over several meals they had together in the VIP cabin of Air Force One.
They talked about some of the nasty things each had said about the other in the 1976 campaign and decided to consign those to an inactive memory bin.
“I guess we figured we were gonna be in a plane together forty hours, more or less, and in order to be pleasant [chuckles], it was a good idea to just wipe the slate clean, which we did.”
They spent a lot of time discussing presidential libraries, the newest former president picking his predecessor’s brain about how to raise money and put together a staff. The exchanges were more comfortable than Ford had expected.
“There was more warmth than I had seen previously. We were always friendly on a professional basis, but we found in talking about a number of non–issue-oriented matters that we had an understanding of one another.”
The social dynamics between Nixon and Carter, however, were another matter, according to Ford.
“I made a bigger effort to get along with them than they made to get along with each other,” Ford said. “Maybe that’s my nature. On the other hand, on a professional level, I thought both of them tried to be discreetly polite—but they’re just such different personalities.”
He laughed heartily when I reinforced that point by confiding that a few days before, a senior Reagan aide had told me, “Carter’s so strange he makes Nixon look normal.”
Even so, Ford was pleased with the trip and thought it sent a powerful positive signal to the rest of the world.
“This was a very wholesome trip from my perspective. The fact that the three of us made that effort with our historical background was a big plus for the country. If the occasion arises, we ought to do it again. The impression over there was tremendous.”
Considering the way Carter and Ford had trashed each other in 1976, some aides to both men doubted the bad blood would ever dissipate. Throughout the fall campaign, Ford had repeatedly disparaged Carter—particularly after the challenger had, in Ford’s estimation, deliberately distorted Ford’s record.
He poked fun at Carter’s height and his smile, and didn’t like what he termed Carter’s commercializing his religion for political purposes. Aides also heard him say several times that he considered Carter unfit for the job and, despite his earnestness, lacking in principle.
“Teddy Roosevelt said, ‘Speak softly and carry a big stick,’” Ford liked to thunder when assailing his opponent’s defense views. “Jimmy Carter says, ‘Speak loudly and carry a flyswatter.’”
(At one torchlight rally at the end of a long day and after a couple of martinis, it took Ford three tries to nail the punch line. “Speak softly and carry a flyswasher…flyspotter…flyswatter.”)
Some of that vitriol was the inevitable byproduct of a bitter contest that Ford had once thought was hopeless. He’d roared back so dramatically, however, that he could taste the victory that then slipped away in the final days. As his fortunes improved, Ford never mellowed. In the final weeks, I was told repeatedly that this most mild-mannered of presidents simply couldn’t abide his challenger.
After the fateful second debate in San Francisco, Ford was seething after Carter claimed that Henry Kissinger was the real president and that Ford couldn’t cite a single accomplishment of his administration. Some of his top counselors said Ford’s pique with Carter’s stinging accusations rattled him so badly that it was a major factor in his blowing the Eastern European question later in that debate.
In a chilling wind at the Grand Rapids Airport waiting for Ford to return to Washington on Election Day, I was told by one of his closest aides, “Jimmy Carter is probably one of the few people in the world he genuinely dislikes.”
The devastating loss made Ford’s dyspepsia even worse. He couldn’t believe he’d been beaten by a peanut farmer. When Carter came calling during the transition, Ford was gracious, but his lack of warmth was transparent. He was still seething when he left for California on January 20, 1977.
Ford recognized that the code of conduct had changed when he became a former president. He resolved to be more circumspect about his disdain, at least for a decent interval, but for years biting his tongue about Carter was always exceedingly hard work.
“The facts are we do have some differences and there’s no use to paper them over,” he told me in 1977. “I don’t agree with the energy program. I don’t agree with the proposals to rescue the Social Security program.”
Not to mention Carter’s human rights crusade:
“It’s important for 215 million Americans and 260 million Soviets not to have a nuclear holocaust. Those are pretty important human rights, too. I don’t want a campaign of human rights to destroy the chances of a SALT II agreement.”
He complained that Carter embraced a double standard on the issue. “He can’t ignore it vis-à-vis Cuba and Vietnam, and insist upon it with our Latin American friends.”
As the 1978 midterm elections came around, Ford wasn’t feeling any kindlier to Carter. In an August Newsweek interview, however, he told me that Republicans who thought Carter was an easy mark for 1980 were “being very naïve. Presidents can and do come back,” he said, citing his own resurgence in 1976. Then he used golfing terminology to skewer Carter’s performance.
“He’s hit a few out of bounds, had a number of double bogeys, quite a few bogeys, a few pars and not many birdies. His constant flip-flopping is his fundamental difficulty. The inconsistencies and uncertainties worry people. One day he’s here and the next day he’s there. It’s a pragmatic approach that has no ideological consistency.”
Carter remained Ford’s favorite punching bag. His belief that Carter was a national disaster kept him flirting with the notion of running again in 1980 long after most of his counselors concluded it was a foolhardy idea. Once he decided against opting in, he ratcheted up his rhetoric as he stumped the country for Republican candidates.
On October 15, 1980, his thirty-second wedding anniversary, Ford was campaigning for Reagan in California. As usual, he delivered his stock blistering denunciation of his successor:
“I have thought back over my 1976 campaign warnings that Mr. Carter was given to wobbling, weaseling, and waffling on issues all over the lot. That he was all promise and no promise. That he was ill-equipped and woefully innocent about Washington and the real world.
“I am sorry I said those things. I was much, much too kind.
“His economic program has been a disaster; his energy policies have been misguided and ineffective. His foreign policies have been contradictory, erratic, and dangerous.”
And aside from refusing to second-guess Carter on his handling of the Iranian hostage crisis, Ford even took a rare swipe at a fellow member of The Club on a foreign policy issue.
“Mr. Carter has forfeited his immunity at home,” Ford thundered. “We cannot permit him to create crises that threaten our very survival and then cry for unity and a moratorium on debate until this election is over.”
In an interview the next day, he told me his fervent support for the Republican nominee was motivated less by any altruism toward Reagan than by his deep animus toward the man who had beaten him in 1976.
In my experience, Ford always tried to find something nice to say about even his political adversaries. “Most people are mostly good, most of the time,” as he explained his half-full philosophy in 1999.
The best he could manage for Jimmy Carter in this conversation was to observe, “We don’t have very much in common.” Then he launched:
“I think he’s the weakest president I’ve ever seen in my lifetime,” Ford said. “And he’s defending the poorest economic record of any incumbent president since the Depression.”
The thought of Carter’s being reelected was literally too horrible for Ford to contemplate. “God help us,” he said quietly. “I really mean that.”
He didn’t stop there, accusing Carter, National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Secretary of Defense Harold Brown of willfully distorting his record on national defense.
“There are a couple of things that really irritate me,” he complained. “The president himself, Brzezinski, and more recently Harold Brown—so it had to come straight from the White House—say that in the last eight years of Republican administrations, defense spending was reduced. That is a distortion, and a deliberate distortion, of the truth.
“In all of those eight years, there was a Democratic Congress. We proposed in my budget increases in defense spending, and on each occasion except the last one, the Democratic Congress reduced the defense spending of the Republican president.
“Now, that’s the truth,” he said, spitting out his scorn. “And for Mr. Carter, Mr. Brzezinski, and now Harold Brown to repeat that untruth really galls me.”
He was also extremely irked that Carter was trumpeting his alleged hikes in military spending. “A significant part of that is caused by Carter inflation,” Ford argued. “The cost of living has gone up, for crude oil, for food, for everything. Now, to take that inflation and say that it has helped the Defense Department is an inaccurate distortion that really burns me up. That really gets me, because as you know I’ve always been proud of my advocacy of the Defense Department in the Congress, as vice president, and as president.”
I provoked a quick morality tale by making what I thought a seemingly benign reference to Carter’s much-ballyhooed government reorganization proposal, which Ford considered just another pointless, sleight-of-hand gimmick often favored by liberals to camouflage their big-spending schemes. He dismissed the idea with a clever little story about a purported conversation between Herbert Hoover and his predecessor, Calvin Coolidge, who was a legendary tightwad.
“Former president Coolidge and President Hoover were discussing what was going to happen to the horses assigned to the White House. Hoover said somewhat proudly that he’d had them transferred from the White House to Fort Myer. Coolidge said, ‘Who feeds them?’ That’s very applicable to the Carter reorganization plan. The government still picks up the tab.”
After Ford and Carter’s icebreaking talks during the Sadat funeral trip, the pace of détente accelerated. The vehicle was Carter’s trouble with getting his presidential library off the ground. While Ford had made staffers available to discuss the problem, in time Carter approached Ford directly for help. Having left office as an unpopular and more or less failed president, Carter was having trouble raising the millions of dollars in private funds needed to build his library.
Not knowing how his onetime foe would react, Carter asked a favor: Would Ford be willing to come to Atlanta and participate in a symposium to help raise some interest—and more to the point, cash—for the Carter Center?
“I told him I agreed on one condition,” Ford told me in 1982. “That he would come to an event in Grand Rapids or Ann Arbor for my museum or library.”
Carter accepted, triggering a Jimmy-Jerry tag-team match extending over several years.
These back-scratching appearances didn’t convert them into friends, but the relationship was notably friendlier. They began staying in regular contact, talking on the phone, and exchanging birthday greetings.
Their contacts were sufficiently public that some of Ford’s closest political allies grumbled that he was spending altogether too much time with Carter—not unlike similar complaints from Bush 41 partisans today that he hangs around Bill Clinton too much. Ford brushed off the complaints.
Beyond their shared practical interest in presidential libraries, another unifying bond was at play. Both ex-presidents had strong reasons not to like Ronald Reagan, which helped cement their ties even though neither one would ever admit it publicly.
To one old Ford friend, the calculation was simple: “Once you did something for his library or museum, you were a friend for life.”
Perhaps, but Ford blew hot and cold with Carter. Even at their friendliest, they were never ideological soulmates. And Ford took a dim view of what he considered Carter’s meddling in foreign affairs, behaving like a shadow secretary of state in places like Haiti, the Balkans, and the Korean peninsula.
“He came to my museum and library, I went down to Atlanta, but we have not done as much lately,” he noted in 1991. “He’s gone off on these tangents overseas, and frankly, I think he’s doing too much of it. He’s well intentioned, Tom, but it’s just not my interest. I like him as a person. We’re friendly. But I think our activities have diverged.”
He could be considerably less delicate with close friends. “Well, you know Jimmy,” he commiserated with one of them once after one Carter extracurricular diplomatic venture. “He can be a real pain in the ass, but we get along.”
In 1995 he told me that President Clinton was furious with Carter for involving himself in efforts to ease tensions between North and South Korea:
“I thought he interjected himself in the North Korean negotiations unwisely. I told President Clinton that. The White House was very upset, I can tell you that. Personally, his effort in Bosnia was well intentioned, but that whole thing’s fallen apart. Now he has volunteered, is anxious to get into the baseball negotiations.
“I think he’s well intentioned. He wants to do something that enhances his postpresidential reputation. I don’t question his motives, but I think he’s so zealous about it he undercuts his credibility.”
Trying to exorcise a failed presidency? I speculated.
“That’s the net result of it. He hasn’t gotten very good reviews on his poetry. I’ve read a few; I had a hard time. I don’t think it’s Robert Frost.” He laughed.
Two years later, however, in May of 1997, he was mellower about Carter: “It’s warmed up, it’s gotten more intimate, and Betty and Rosalynn have become, I would say, close…. It’s healthy for the institution.”
They were an odd couple, to be sure: a short, wonkish engineer and a tall, gregarious jock. But in time they managed to bridge their ideological gulf and end up, unexpectedly, genuine friends. The fact that both had once been, in the celebrated description of a Time reporter about another president, the “highest source in the land,” has a way of doing that.
Having endured his own grand funk for a while after losing to Jimmy Carter, Ford knew something about the postpresidential blues. So when he heard that George H.W. Bush was in a bit of a tailspin after his defeat by Bill Clinton, Ford took it upon himself to stage a friendly intervention.
“I’ve had a lot of contact with George since he left office,” he told me in 1993, “because I wanted him to know that there was life after the White House.”
Apparently, 41 hadn’t seen that memo, so Ford had decided to engage in a little life-goes-on pep talk.
“I’d heard he was down in the dumps. Two or three people called me and told me that; he wasn’t gonna do this, he wasn’t gonna become active in various organizations. I said, ‘George, the quicker you get active, the easier and better it is.’ So I tried to urge him to become active in a variety of organizations, because he’s relatively young, he’s healthy. He ought to do more than just relax in Houston.
“When I asked him, ‘Are you down in the dumps?’ he was very upbeat. He said, ‘Those stories aren’t true. Don’t believe that: I’m in good health, mentally, physically.’
“I said, ‘Well, I’m glad to hear that’—but it had come from two or three people who thought they knew. But when I confronted him, he said, ‘That’s a lot of crap,’ so I assumed it was.”
On the other hand, I interjected, Barbara Bush has been asking friends to invite her husband to lunch because he was climbing the walls.
“These are the kinds of rumors I heard, but when I called him and”—he chuckled—“talked to him directly, he totally denied it.”
Did that sound like a bit of denial? I wondered.
“Could be.” He smiled knowingly.
That led him to reflect on how he came around to picking Nelson Rockefeller as his vice president in 1974, even though the conventional wisdom favored the elder Bush.
“Who was the gentleman that was such a lovable, wonderful adviser to presidents? My memory fails—little, short fellow.”
“Bryce Harlow,” the legendary presidential counselor with strong ties to Capitol Hill.
“When I was trying to pick the vice president, I had Bryce, sort of behind the scenes, take charge, and he made a chart—who favored Rockefeller, who favored Bush, who favored Reagan.”
In his memoirs, Ford wrote that former congressman and United Nations ambassador George H.W. Bush topped Harlow’s chart; Rocky came in a weak fifth. Ford didn’t care.
“I said, ‘Bryce, I need somebody like Rockefeller on the ticket, somebody that has a different ideological view, is more liberal than I, who’s had state experience.’ Bush had none. Reagan had only limited. Rockefeller had had Washington experience. Rockefeller had had three or four terms as governor, and I said, ‘I’m gonna exercise my own judgment and this is who I’m gonna recommend.’”
Bush was the also-ran again two years later, but in Ford’s telling, Bush was cheerfully willing to give up a shot at being vice president four years before he was tapped to run the Central Intelligence Agency.
“I wanted to appoint him head of the CIA, because there was a vacancy there. And the Democrats said, ‘Oh, you can’t do that. We’ll never approve him because that means he’ll be your candidate for vice president [in 1976].’ So I called George 41 into the Oval Office and I said, ‘George, you have to make a choice. You can be CIA director, but you’ll have to make a public commitment you won’t go on the ticket in ’76. If you don’t make that commitment, the Democrats won’t approve you as CIA director.’ I said, ‘It’s up to you, I’ll play it either way, George.’ [A day or two later he said,] ‘I’ll take the CIA job.’ Well, with that commitment, his name never came up in ’76.”
Given their long professional association, Ford had high regard for the elder Bush, and vice versa. As president, Bush ordered secure telephones installed in Ford’s California and Colorado offices. They consulted frequently, particularly on foreign policy matters. While he thought Bush was less strong on domestic affairs, Ford especially liked Bush’s handling of the Gulf War in 1991.
“I’m very proud of what he’s done in meeting several crises,” he told me later that year. “The Persian Gulf crisis was extremely well handled. You know, he had three choices. He could have done nothing when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. If he had done nothing, there’s no doubt in my mind that Saddam Hussein would have moved into Saudi Arabia, into the Arab Emirates, into Bahrain, into Qatar—might have gone as far as Oman. That would have been catastrophic. He had another choice—he could have done just the diplomatic, but you and I know the track record of the UN between Harry Truman’s day and then was poor, very bad. So the third option, which was the right one, was to combine military and diplomatic, and I think it was a tremendous success.
“They made one miscalculation: I do not think they foresaw the Kurdish problem to the degree that it developed. On the other hand, after it developed over four or five days, they corrected it and they came out of it in good shape.
“Lots of argument: didn’t Bush stop too soon? You go back and read all the press before he decided to stop. Most of the press wanted him to stop. Of course, they forget that [now].”
Because of Desert Storm, Ford thought Bush was in strong shape for reelection in 1992, with one caveat: “His only worry [is] will this economic recovery continue? If we should have a double-dip recession, that would be a hangover into 1992, and that could have very tough political ramifications. I don’t see that happening.” Neither did President George H. W. Bush.
Ford never developed much of a relationship with George W. Bush, though he had a generally favorable view of him. But in our February 2000 chat, he worried about Bush’s prospects against former vice president Al Gore. John McCain, he thought, would be stronger against Gore:
“Six months ago, I thought [Gore] would be a dull, uninspiring loser candidate for the Democrats. Today my opinion is he’s gonna be tough to beat. He’s improved as a debater, and of course I remember how he devastated Jack Kemp. We haven’t heard much from Kemp since Gore whitewashed him.
“Now, as Gore has gotten better, I have noticed in his contacts with [former Senator Bill] Bradley, he’s got a mean streak in him which is becoming more and more evident when he’s under pressure, and that is unattractive. Nevertheless, he’s gonna be formidable.
“As of today, he would make George W. look bad. I’m talking about the debates. And I think as of today it would be close, but Gore would beat George W. head-to-head.
“Now, as of today I think McCain would be a better candidate against Gore. He looks stronger, he is stronger. Gore-McCain would be a race that I think McCain could win. He’s a good contrast to Gore.”
In Ford’s estimation, McCain had more gravitas versus Gore, especially because of his military service and Vietnam prisoner-of-war hero’s status. “You know, he had a helluva military record.”
In sharp contrast to Bush, he added: “Bush has that air reserve [Texas National Guard] record; of course, Gore’s war record in Vietnam ain’t much, either.”
“George W. is not a good contrast to Gore as of today. He doesn’t look tough enough, and I must say bringing in his dad and mother was a tactical error.”
He was referring to a celebrated incident at a rally just before the New Hampshire primary where Bush’s father told an audience, “This boy, this son of ours, is not going to let you down. He is going to go all the way and serve with great honor all the way.”
That prompted snickers at the Clinton White House, where aides started referring to the candidate as Boy George, and quiet ridicule from fellow Republicans and the media.
“To say ‘my boy’—God almighty, that was terrible. I think that’s very unwise; he’s got to win it on his own. Now, I think he’s doing better; he’s handling himself in the debates and his public speaking—he’s doing a hundred percent better than a month ago, but he’s got to get tougher and more articulate.
“I think once he gets toughened up and more knowledgeable and more articulate, he could be a good candidate. But he’s got to do that in the next month, because Michigan is not encouraging.”
How did he think the Republicans could beat Gore?
“You’ve got to attack him, I think legitimately, on his fundraising excesses—the Buddhist temple deal—he’s got a lousy track record. And he’s got a record of switching, the abortion issue being one, the tobacco issue. He’s pretty flexible on whatever is politically expedient, and I think you have to tie him to the Clinton problem. You don’t do it brutally, you do it subtly. He can’t shake that tie-in.”
For a guy who liked reporters and had a grown-up tolerance of their essential if frequently nettlesome role in the democratic process, Ford also worried that Bush might have been unduly influenced by the anger toward the media by his mother and his father, who once admitted publicly, “I hate them.”
“A week ago in San Diego, I had a half hour with Barbara Bush in a holding room,” Ford said in 2000. “Boy, is she bitter about the press. If George W. loses, she’s gonna pop off about the press, and I’m sure it’s a reflection of George Senior’s attitude toward the press.”
The Bush press-bashing didn’t abate, even after their boy became president.
“He and Barbara were staying over at the Annenbergs’,” Ford said in 2002. “He had a speech, and we were over there for dinner, and we played nine holes of golf. We rode together on the golf cart, but we didn’t spend much time talking about his son. I sat next to Barbara at dinner. She obviously is very proud of George W.,” he said, chuckling. “She gets very upset with the press. Boy, she’s not very subtle with her attitude vis-à-vis the press.”
After Bush was elected, Ford thought that the crucible of the September 11 attacks turned him into a leader overnight.
“I think he’s done very well,” he observed in 2002. “He was a little uncertain until 9/11, but since 9/11 he’s catapulted to the forefront, and has changed a great deal of public support and public favor [his way].”
Those comments, of course, were made well before the Iraq War began falling apart.