HE’D DEALT WITH five vice presidents, been one himself, and picked another, so Jerry Ford felt he knew something about America’s second-highest office. Even after three years of on-the-job training, he didn’t believe Dan Quayle was up to the task.
It wasn’t entirely the fault of the former Indiana senator, in Ford’s somewhat sympathetic analysis.
“He’s a lot nicer guy and he’s a lot more qualified than you in the press make out,” he complained to me in 1991. “I think he’s gotten an overcritical press. He wasn’t my candidate; I was for Alan Simpson and I talked to Bush about it. But, Tom, I think it’s true there are people in public who for one reason or another, justified or unjustified, get the wrong image and they’ll never change it.
“Dan Quayle is one of those. The good Lord could anoint him, and there’s no way he’s going to change that image.”
“So what do you do about that?” I asked.
“Well, if the economy’s good and there’s no other reason for George Bush to lose, Quayle will be on the ticket. But if they find the economy’s bad or some other incident arises where they don’t think they’re going to win, they’ll find another candidate.”
Asked if Quayle was presidential timber, he laughed, then delivered one of his trademark cushioned zingers: “Well, let me put it on a comparative basis: Dick Cheney would be much better.”
By early 1992, Ford grew increasingly restless with Bush’s prospects. The economy wasn’t good, and he feared Bush seemed out of touch with the mood of the country. Moreover, he’d decided that Quayle’s persona as an amiable chucklehead couldn’t be repaired, at least in time for the November elections. He concluded that if Bush was really serious about improving his reelection chances, it was time to replace Quayle.
As a historical proposition, Ford believed that Quayle was easily expendable. “Up until recently, vice presidents didn’t have a guaranteed retention on the job. Roosevelt got rid of [Henry] Wallace.” Bush’s political survival was infinitely more important, Ford thought, than a running mate who had become a national laugh track.
“Prior to our convention in Houston,” he remembered in 1993, “I became very concerned that the campaign was really dead in the water and that it needed some good, strong change, and I called Stu Spencer; he and I talked about it. He said, ‘Well, you may have to go directly to the president.’”
Spencer was the legendary California political consultant who’d successfully managed Ronald Reagan’s first campaign for governor. He’d stayed close to the Reagans but defected to Ford in 1976, helping devise the strategy that beat Reagan by a hair in a bitter Republican primary contest. Nancy Reagan vowed eternal revenge, but welcomed him back into the fold in 1980 and 1984; winning was even more important to her than settling scores. The two political junkies lived a few miles apart in the desert and had always stayed in touch, on the phone and the golf course.
Ford had seen this movie before; he’d dumped Nelson Rockefeller from the 1976 ticket, and spent the rest of his life being irritated at himself for it. But Ford had naïvely convinced himself that Rocky had approached him, which made it easier for Ford to go along with political advisers who thought dumping a liberal Yankee Brahmin was Ford’s best chance to beat Jimmy Carter.
“We agreed that if it were to be done, Quayle had to take the initiative and go into the Oval Office as Rockefeller did and say, ‘It’s more important that you be elected than I be on the ticket.’ So I called Jim Baker and I said to Jim Baker, ‘You’ve gotta do something, you aren’t gonna win if you just run a regular campaign. You’ve got to get a new spark.’”
James Baker, Ford’s delegate hunter and later campaign manager in 1976, by now had been dragooned to resign as secretary of state to help run the campaign out of the White House. He gave Ford the same advice he’d heard from Spencer: best to call George yourself. He placed the call; Bush rang Ford back from Air Force One.
“So I called the president and I said exactly what I told you before: ‘George, the campaign is dead in the water. You could lose unless there’s some new spark. The one that I think would change the atmosphere politically would be to have Dan Quayle himself, on his own initiative, walk into the Oval Office and offer to step aside.’”
That little it’s-my-idea minuet was the key, Ford told Bush. “It would not work if Bush called him in; it had to be unilateral action on the part of Quayle.”
(There was talk, Ford recalled, of sending an emissary to Quayle with a loaded pistol to leave on the nightstand, but apparently nobody ever approached the VP.)
Bush’s “body language” over the phone left Ford with the distinct impression he wasn’t buying. In the fall of 1987, Newsweek had famously suggested on its cover that Bush was a wimp. (“Fighting the Wimp Factor,” the headline had blared.) Five years later, he remained terminally touchy about the perception. He was still being hammered for caving on his promise to the 1988 Republican convention, “Read my lips—no new taxes.”
As Ford remembered in 1993, a few months after his phone chat with Bush, “the president’s reaction was, well, he didn’t like to change his mind and he didn’t think Quayle was as big a problem as some of us thought, and he doubted if he would respond by having something like that happen.” In other words, Read my lips—no new veep.
He recalled Bush saying, “You know, I changed my mind on taxes and this looks like I’m too willing to change my mind on major issues.”
It was also telling to Ford that Bush didn’t ask him who might make sense to replace Quayle. Ford would have told him Dick Cheney or Jack Kemp, with his former chief of staff the clear preference, but it never got to that.
“He knew the problem, but it did not appear to me that he was probably gonna do it.”
In fact, Baker and Spencer were part of a senior cabal of Bush aides who wanted Quayle dumped. A strategy memo prepared by one of Baker’s closest aides in the summer of 1992 had in fact recommended the veep be replaced by Colin Powell. The plotters had hoped that Ford’s backchannel counsel would lend credibility to their putsch plans, but Bush thought he’d come off as a real wimp for caving.
“I think the press would murder me if I do this,” Bush told several of the plotters.
So Quayle survived, at least until the fall election, when he and Bush were both sent packing. Ford always believed Bush might have won if his counsel had been heeded.
The Dump Dan offensive was one of Ford’s more ambitious political gambits after leaving Washington. Throughout his retirement years, however, in ways large and small, on the record and in the shadows, he worked assiduously to keep himself in the game.
Exploiting his cachet as a former president and his network of hundreds of political movers and shakers, he did favors for friends and charities, sometimes approaching the current incumbent himself to call in a chit. He doled out political advice to aspiring candidates, advised presidents on foreign policy, and sought to influence the political debate through thousands of speeches and scores of interviews.
Until he started slowing down in his seventies, he probably campaigned more during national elections than anyone except the actual candidates themselves.
In 1980, for instance, between Labor Day and the November 4 election, Ford was on the road fifty-three of sixty days, logging sixty thousand air miles and visiting thirty states. He made ten appearances for the Reagan-Bush ticket and also campaigned for twenty-nine congressional candidates, fourteen U.S. Senate hopefuls, and four gubernatorial candidates. Even by his usual travel credentials, he outdid himself that fall.
He liked to point out afterward that he did far more for Ronald Reagan that fall than Reagan had done for him in 1976, and always believed that his indefatigable stumping had helped Reagan win several states in what turned out to be a landslide anyway.
Despite another heavy round of campaigning by Ford, his party wasn’t so fortunate in 1992—and he wasn’t bashful about assessing blame in a postmortem during our May 1993 interview.
He didn’t want to dump on his dear friend and fellow Michigander Bob Teeter, but he made clear that he thought Teeter was a far more capable pollster than campaign chairman. He left little doubt that the candidate himself shared much of the blame for blowing the election.
“Bob is a good pollster, but he isn’t necessarily a good political strategist. He can get whatever the answers are out there in the field, but there’s a big difference between getting information and then utilizing.”
“[Also they] were not alert to the economic problems quickly enough. After the euphoria of Desert Storm, they didn’t realize that the gut political issue was still going to be the economy. As industries started to have trouble, as areas in the country began to have economic problems, they were not on the ball. If they had jumped right in and said we don’t like the economic picture, we think something oughta be done about it, I want you to know I’m gonna be out there trying to change the economic environment—if they’d done that, they would have stolen Clinton’s biggest asset. But for some reason they never recognized that was the major issue until it was too late. They didn’t have any comprehension that their basic issue was not gonna be the great success of Desert Storm but the failure of the economy.”
He gave Jim Baker a pass from criticism that he’d been a reluctant warrior, that he’d been going through the motions after Bush yanked him back from the State Department to help steer a losing reelection effort.
“I couldn’t help but note [his invisibility], but I have no reason to know why. I think he reluctantly left State, where I think he did a fine job, and regrettably from his point of view he got into the campaign before there was much he could do about it.
“I think he had some people around him who didn’t do the best job for him. [Chief of Staff Sam] Skinner; thank God his tenure was so short.”
As the 1996 election cycle approached, Ford was pessimistic about Republican prospects for toppling Bill Clinton even though his ethical and political difficulties offered an opening.
“Moving his Little Rock staff almost intact to the White House was a terrible mistake,” Ford said in early 1995. “They weren’t up to the job, and I think the evidence is very convincing.
“Number two, he ran as a new, moderate, middle-of-the-road Democrat and that was totally destroyed as an image when his major legislative program was a revolutionary health care bill. I don’t want seven politicians deciding what’s medically necessary; I want my doctor to do that.
“Number three, I don’t get into the character issue; it speaks for itself. There’s been so much about his various actions, or lack of responsible action, the American people hear it and finally they begin to wonder.
“I do think the Republicans can win, but they’ve gotta find the candidate, and I don’t see any candidate today in the forefront.” In no particular order and with no particular enthusiasm, he mentioned Bob Dole, Phil Gramm (“he just looks too sour”), Lamar Alexander, Dan Quayle (“he has a hard time convincing people he’s believable”), Arlen Specter (“he’s not going anyplace”), Jack Kemp (“too bad about Jack but somehow the train’s going by”), and Pete Wilson.
“The best president would be Bob Dole, now that Cheney’s out of the picture, but I don’t know whether Bob can get elected. I think if he goes all out he can get the nomination. Gingrich makes him look good; that’s a hard way to get your image, but Bob looks more and more like a statesman because of Gingrich. But he’s had for a long time the image of a gut fighter. I happen to think he had that role because that’s what he had to do. But that’s the way a lot of people think. It’s too bad.”
Given a field he plainly viewed as unappetizing, Ford offered up his dream candidate:
“Betty and I heard Colin Powell speak here a month ago. He spoke at a fundraiser for the University of California–Riverside. He made as fine an oration as I’ve heard—talked about foreign policy, military policy; on substance he was damn good. He has really learned how to make a speech.
“The Walter Annenbergs were there; Walter was ecstatic. I don’t know what Powell’s gonna do, but if he were to jump into the political arena as a Republican, I think he could get the nomination—certainly the vice presidential, if not the presidential, and he in my view would beat Clinton easily.”
Absent Powell’s star power and given the dwarflike Republican alternatives, Clinton would probably survive, Ford glumly mused.
“Primarily it’s because we haven’t found a candidate. The target is great but you gotta have an arrow that can hit it,” he joked.
He was proven right in 1996, when Clinton was reelected despite his scandal baggage. With an open seat in the Oval Office for 2000, Ford was more optimistic about his party’s chances when he analyzed the electoral landscape in 1998:
“The Republicans are preparing to learn from the mistakes the Democrats made when they ran Mondale, Dukakis, and McGovern. All three represented the liberal element in the Democrat Party, and they lost. The Democrats learned in the case of Clinton that at least superficially they had a middle-of-the-road Democrat, and they won. Now, there are other reasons why Clinton won, but at least he portrayed himself as a moderate. If the Republicans run an extreme hard-right candidate, they can’t win the election in 2000. That knocks out [Steve] Forbes and [Pat] Buchanan.
“My impression of Bush is that he’s moderated his views, more so than his dad did. So he’s a possibility. I don’t want to pick one, but they ought to have learned you can’t have an extremist. The Democrats couldn’t win with one on the left, we can’t win with one on the right.”
He thought Vice President Al Gore was a bad bet for the Democrats—more liberal than Clinton, and far less politically adroit.
“He’s such a bore,” Ford said. “When I went to Congress in 1949, his father was a firebrand—a hellfire-and-damnation Southern liberal from Tennessee—and his father was a helluva speaker. He would compare favorably with Ev Dirksen in his day. In contrast to his son; God, I can’t sit there and listen to him. He pontificates. Oh, God, he’s awful. His father was an interesting person to listen to. Can you imagine anybody, knowing that his tax return was going to be public information, spending $365 [$363, for charitable contributions]—that doesn’t wash.”
Ford was a lifelong Cold Warrior who believed in détente and dialogue but also shared Ronald Reagan’s trust-but-verify skepticism toward the Russians.
“I strongly think we should not put all our eggs in the Yeltsin basket,” he told me in 1996. “We have a tendency to get euphoric over some Russian leaders. I remember we thought [Mikhail] Gorbachev was the answer. He’s now irrelevant. It’s dangerous to think of [Boris Yeltsin] as the long-term solution to the Soviet-Russian republics problem. When you look at the implications of Chechnya, all of those republics are potential spin-offs, and if that happens you’ll never have a rebuilding of the old Soviet-Russian Empire.
“It’s a tough job he’s got, but I don’t think we can assume he’s gonna be the person for the next five years. If he had fewer personal weaknesses, maybe. But somebody that erratic, with all those personal unreliable characteristics—boy, that’s a weak reed to put our faith in.
“I told President Clinton that we’re dealing with a bunch of thugs—don’t trust them.”
In 2002, despite the U.S. invasion that toppled the Taliban and installed a pro-Western government, Ford was sounding nervous about the future of Afghanistan.
“Boy, that Afghanistan problem is a lot more complicated now,” he said. “These warlords are making it difficult for Karzai, and whether they would work with him if and when we pull out is a big question.”
Asked if the United States would have military forces in Afghanistan for a very long time, he said he thought so. “And instead of it getting [to be] a lesser commitment, I think it’s gonna be more.”
“You’re not becoming in your old age a little bit of an isolationist?” I asked.
“No, I have not said we shouldn’t do these things. But I’m saying if you do, you’ve got to build up your military so they’re not stretched too thinly. I’ve never criticized the commitment to Yemen, to the Philippines, to Kosovo. My concern is you’re trying to do more with fewer forces, and you can’t do that. That’s not good military policy.”
For the most part, Ford didn’t offer unsolicited advice to his Oval Office successors. Occasionally, however, he wasn’t above proselytizing a president, particularly on foreign affairs. In the case of Bill Clinton, whom he considered a weak foreign policy leader, there were at least two Ford tutorials.
In our May 1994 interview, he patted himself on the back for single-handedly persuading Clinton to pay attention to the North American Free Trade Agreement treaty, which was then languishing in Congress.
“There was one real benefit out of them coming to Beaver Creek and Vail [in 1993],” he contended. “Up until that point, Tom, President Clinton cared less about NAFTA. He wasn’t interested. I spent most of my time with him promoting NAFTA, urging him to take action, to get going, to get a bunch of former presidents together at the White House so we could show solidarity. I honestly can claim full credit for getting him off dead center on NAFTA.
“Now, once he got interested, he did a damn good job. He twisted arms, he browbeat Democrats, and he put on a good event in the East Room with Carter, Bush, and myself.” Once again he said, “You know, he’s a helluva salesman.”
In 1994, Ford read that Jimmy Carter was planning to travel to North Korea to interject himself into delicate negotiations between the Clinton administration and North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung. He was afraid Clinton might pay undue attention to Carter, whom Ford, despite their friendship, thought meddled too much in foreign policy.
“So I called Clinton,” Ford said in August 1994. “He was flying, and he called me back. I’ll tell you what I told him. I said, ‘Bill, I’m telling you this because I know about it. I’m telling you that Kim Il Sung is a bad man.’ I was in Congress on June 25, 1950, when he invaded South Korea, so you know he’s an aggressor. Number two, I was in 1953 and 1954 chairman of the Army panel on appropriations—that was the last time Republicans had control of the House—and after we adjourned in 1953, I flew over to Korea with Secretary [of State John Foster] Dulles and Secretary of the Army Bob Stevens, and I was there at Panmunjom when they signed the peace treaty.
“You’ve got to understand how this peace treaty came about. The negotiations had gone on for about a year between the North Koreans and Americans, and during the campaign of 1952, Ike said, ‘I will go to Korea.’ Well, the minute he said that, the presidential election was over, and Ike beat [Adlai] Stevenson badly. After he got sworn in, these negotiations were still dragging on and on, and Ike went to South Korea. When he came back, he did two things: Number one, he said unless these negotiations are consummated we will use whatever weapons necessary, or something to that effect, which was the inference of nuclear weapons. And number two, he moved an Army division from Japan to Korea to let the North Koreans know that we were prepared to accelerate the war.
“And you know who was the [commander] of that division? [Vietnam commander William] Westmoreland. That’s where I first met Westy, because after the peace treaty signing, Westy took me all along the whole range of the dividing line in a helicopter.
“Well, anyhow, the day after the treaty was signed, I flew up to the dividing line, DMZ, with Bob Stevens and [General] Max Taylor, and I saw the first prisoners of war come over the mountain in Chinese trucks, and I saw them being processed.
“I said ‘Bill, Kim Il Sung started this war, he thought he could get away with it. Harry Truman did the right thing to take him on, and I supported Truman right from the beginning. Secondly, the way it ended was Ike said if you don’t settle this thing, the war’s gonna expand. He understands power, and you should act accordingly.’
“He was very nice. He said, ‘Well, I think that’s my policy.’ He then sent the number-two or-three man at NSC, a young fella, out here to see me. He gave me this step-by-step evolution of their policy. When he got through, I gave him what I told you. Of course, he wasn’t around, he didn’t know any of that history. He went back and he obviously wrote an excellent letter for Clinton to sign thanking me for calling him and giving him historical information that he hadn’t heard and reassuring me that their policy was gonna continue to be firm, hard-line.
“I hope he’s right, but trouble is, somebody’s gonna talk to him after I talk to him, and it scares me he’s gonna go soft. They’re negotiating; they could be giving away the store. I hope not, and I was told they wouldn’t—but his reputation is not one of consistency.”
In 1998, I asked Ford if he’d spoken with Clinton lately. As a matter of fact, he had—and not about foreign policy.
“I had a strange thing happen. I had one conversation with him this calendar year. Walter Annenberg came over to see me three months ago, maybe, here at the office. Betty and I have developed a good friendship with the Annenbergs. They asked me to speak at his ninetieth birthday dinner along with three or four others, and we had them for dinner for Betty’s birthday. He came over to see me; he was mad. He had written Clinton about a tax proposal he felt strongly about. It was not a major, universal tax issue, but it had some implication to charity giving. It had gone to the president personally, and two or three months had passed, and no answer; no contact. He was very upset. I had a sudden inspiration [chuckles]: Well, why don’t I call Clinton and ask him why?
“So Walter was sitting there,” he said, pointing to my seat. “I told Penny to call President Clinton; I wanted to talk to him. And so, by golly, he got on the phone. Right then; right here. It took about a minute. I said, ‘Mr. President, I’ve got a friend of yours who’s got a complaint. Walter Annenberg’s sitting here and he wrote you a letter and you haven’t answered it and he wants to know why. I’ll put Walter on [big laugh] and you two discuss it.’
“Well, surprisingly, he knew about the letter. I couldn’t believe that.”
At this point, our interview was momentarily suspended by a phone call from Betty.
“I’ve gotta get our family dog in. Are you in a hurry?”
After tending to his chores, he continued:
“They had a little conversation. I don’t know whether he then wrote Walter, but I just assumed it was [a case of] screwed-up office management.” Annenberg’s problem ultimately went away.
More often than not, Ford’s string-pulling was centered on Capitol Hill instead of the White House. That wasn’t surprising, since he had scores of pals there, many of them in powerful positions and willing to intercede for an old colleague and friend.
“Now let me bring up a thing that happened in the last ten days,” he said in 1992, during our second off-the-record conversation. “Several months ago, the IRS issued a tentative order based on a previous law that money that’s paid by—we’ll say Chrysler out here for the Bob Hope Chrysler Golf Classic—was income to the Classic. Well, that affects all these charity events all over the country, including football bowl games where some corporations are some of the sponsors.
“Well, the Eisenhower Medical Center, that gets about a million dollars a year from the Bob Hope Classic, came to see me and said, ‘My gosh, what can we do? This will devastate us.’ I called Danny Rostenkowski, with a fellow from the medical center sitting right here, and I said, ‘Danny, what the hell’s going on here? Do you know anything about this?’ He said, ‘I know a lot about this; I think the IRS is going to back off because there’s an awful lot of pressure all over the country. Let me look into it.’
“Two days later, I got a full explanation and a personal letter from Danny saying in his opinion the matter is settled.
“The point I’m making is I still have some people in the Congress, where I can be helpful, influential, and constructive. That’s perfectly legitimate. It’s a good case. I think the IRS was wrong to dredge up an old law to try and do what they did.”
In 1998, four years into Newt Gingrich’s Republican revolution, Ford reflected on the changes in his beloved House of Representatives. He wasn’t thrilled with what he saw happening in the legislative branch. Still worse from his perspective, much of the damage had been inflicted by his own.
“Congress has changed. Fundamentally it’s the same institution, but generationally it’s different. I’m not sure it would offer the same satisfaction or thrill of being there. You know, when I came there I, like many others at that time, we were relatively young, we were inspired by the opportunity. It was a great, great opportunity to serve. I’m sure many of those things are still true today, but there’s a lack of civility that bothers me.
“When I and a bunch of other World War II veterans came, Democrats as well as Republicans, there was a hierarchy of old-timers around that added something. So you had this interesting mixture of new blood that were inspired to come for all the good reasons, and then you had some old-timers who had survived and were stable and good. I don’t see that today. Sam Rayburn was a great speaker [of the House], and my best mentor was Earl Michener. He had come in with Sam Rayburn, but was beaten in 1932 in the debacle, but came back in ’34.
“He was my guiding counselor; he was most helpful. He said, ‘You can either be one of two kinds of members: you can sit on the floor and learn how to be a parliamentarian, how to be a speaker, how to conduct yourself, or you can be a committee member. But if you’re going to be a committee member, don’t try to be superficially knowledgeable about a lot; be the best expert on an important issue, so that when you go to the floor of the House to discuss something, people know you know more about that subject than any of them do.’
“You know, Tom, the House was my home. I loved it, and still love it, but I’m worried about it.”
Asked how the decline could be fixed, he admitted, “I don’t have an answer for that, unfortunately. I think the speaker has a big impact, and Newt Gingrich got off on the wrong foot. The best speakers are those who conform to the role of speaker of the House, not speaker for the majority. Now he’s changed and moving in the right direction. What he ought to do is keep himself up above the fray and let [Majority Leader Richard] Armey carry the ball on the floor of the House. I’m not sure he has full faith in Armey; he just doesn’t measure up to a strong majority leader, that’s his problem.
“Speaking of Republicans in the House, I’ve watched with interest on what’s happened to the revolt against Gingrich. Two problems—and I know something about revolts [having been elected minority leader when Young Turks ran him against Charles Halleck in 1965]: Number one, you can’t beat an incumbent with four candidates. You have to have one unified opponent to the incumbent. You get four, you spread the effort, there aren’t enough votes. Number two, you should never challenge an incumbent party leader in the middle of a session. You should do it after an election or before—at the time the parties organize—so you’re focusing on that issue.
“That’s what we did: we all agreed I would be the candidate: [Mel] Laird and [Charles] Goodell and [Don] Rumsfeld and [Al] Quie wouldn’t be competing candidates, and they’d all vote for me. And we did it after the 1964 debacle when the Republicans were organizing [the new Congress], so that the only issue was whether you wanted new leadership or not. It wasn’t all involved in who’s gonna be for tax cuts or who’s gonna be for this or that.
“The members that orchestrated the effort against Gingrich hadn’t been around the House long enough. They just hadn’t understood how those kind of things work. It was screwed up, and it ended up a failure. I’m not saying they should or shouldn’t have done it; I’m just telling them why they didn’t win.”
Ford and Alan Greenspan were longtime friends, dating from when the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board had been chairman of President Ford’s Council of Economic Advisers. When Ford heard via his Washington grapevine that Greenspan was being shut out of the first Bush White House, he seized on a target of opportunity to do some high-level power-brokering.
“About two months ago, in December, John Sununu came down to see me,” Ford recalled in 1992. “They were out here for something and he drove down here on his own, no publicity, and spent an hour or two with me. It was when he made his decision to leave [as White House chief of staff]. He asked my advice. I said I was worried that there isn’t better rapport between Bush and Alan Greenspan. I said that in my case I had a superb relationship with Arthur Burns. We had been friends a long, long, long time. I enjoyed his company and admired him.
“Arthur used to drop by the Oval Office unannounced about every ten days, two weeks maybe, and we would chat informally for about a half hour. I would tell him what we were trying to do, and you know we had a tough economic problem, and Arthur would tell me what he thought the Fed would do, and we tried to make sure that we weren’t going in opposite directions. That relationship paid big dividends.
“I said, ‘John, I don’t think that’s happening [with Greenspan],’ and he said, ‘That’s true.’ I said, ‘Why can’t you get the president to invite Alan to come in and sit down and talk?’ I had seen Alan at the White House when Betty was there to get the Medal of Freedom. Although Alan didn’t ask me to do it, he reminisced about how nice it was when Arthur Burns and I were there. I know Alan didn’t feel he had ever been invited. Now, why he wasn’t, I don’t know. I think that’s [finally] happening now. If I could accomplish that one thing, that would be more important than any speech or any criticism or any praise. If George and Alan are doing that, it will pay big dividends.”
Over the years, academics and reporters frequently asked Ford how the country could harness the collective institutional wisdom of retired presidents. He consistently opposed the notion as well intentioned but woolly-headed.
“There should not be a formal organization or process,” he emphasized in 1992. “There have been proposals to have a Former President’s Council with a staff. That would be totally unnecessary and, I believe, counterproductive. The truth is, a president has unlimited access to a former president, and a former president has unlimited access to a president. When Carter was there, I could call right from here and get him. He could call me. That was true of Reagan; that’s true of Bush. It would be totally unnecessary and just another bureaucracy to have a Council of Former Presidents. Each president knows where his predecessors are; he knows where their influence is, what their views are. If he wants help, all he has to do is call ’em on the telephone.”
Historically, it’s rare that a former president turns down a plea for help from a successor, even one from the other political party.
“Reagan sent me to Oman to represent him in the fifteenth anniversary of the sultan’s accession,” Ford pointed out. “Nixon had a unique situation with the Chinese, and sending him there under those circumstances was a very, very good idea.”
“If a president wants my advice, there’s an open line,” he echoed in 1993. “To try and get five former presidents to sit down periodically and come up with specific advice would be an action in futility. If you start having a Council of Former Presidents, then you get another damn bureaucracy and God knows how much that would cost. It’s just one of those academic exercises in trying to fix the world without any dealing with reality.”