JERRY FORD WAS a mild-mannered soul for the most part. Like any politician, however, he had strong feelings about some of his contemporaries, especially Ronald Reagan. But in all our conversations, stretching across thirty-three years, nobody prompted more genuine vitriol from Ford than his father.
Eighty-nine years after his mother fled from Omaha to Grand Rapids with her infant son Leslie King, Ford still had never mellowed toward his real father.
“I make a speech on occasion that says, Isn’t this a wonderful country?” he mused in 2002. “A person can come from a broken home and become president of the United States. And then I tell them about my mother, who when I was two months old took me by a taxi across the state line in Nebraska because she was being physically and otherwise abused by my real father. And then she went to Grand Rapids two years later, married my stepfather, who turned out to be a wonderful, wonderful person.
“The divorce trial of my mother was a big news story in Omaha back in those days. People think I just came from Grand Rapids. Well, I had a tough time getting there. If my mother had stayed, my whole life would have been totally different.
“My father was a bad man. In the divorce case, the court ordered him to pay twenty-five dollars a month to my mother for my support. He never paid a nickel. His father, who was a very successful businessman in Omaha and Wyoming, paid it, and when he died, my own father never paid a nickel. And so my stepfather raised me really, financially and otherwise, and of course my stepfather had a tough time during the Depression—very tough. One of his businesses went bankrupt. So when I went to Michigan in the fall of 1931, the tuition was a hundred dollars for a year. Well, my principal in high school was a great Michigan supporter, and he wanted me to go to Michigan so I could play football there. South High had a school bookstore, and principal Arthur Krause established the bookstore scholarship and gave me a hundred dollars. That’s how I got my tuition.
“Well, when I got to Michigan they didn’t have football scholarships in those days; they didn’t exist. But the Michigan coach got me a job working at the university hospital, where I waited on tables at the interns’ dining room and cleaned up the nurses’ cafeteria after lunch, for which I was paid fifty cents an hour, and I earned enough every day to buy my meals.
“I lived in the third floor of a rooming house with another fella; we paid four dollars a week. Then I joined the Deke [Delta Kappa Epsilon] fraternity and I got a job washing dishes there, and then eventually my senior year I became house manager. But anyhow, in my junior year, during the depths of the Depression, my stepfather couldn’t send me a penny, because they had three other sons younger than I. And he had this small paint company that was right on the edge of bankruptcy. I didn’t get any money—except I would go to the university hospital and give blood every two months, for which I would get paid twenty-five dollars. I was desperate. I wrote my real father asking for six hundred dollars. I never got an answer. Never!
“Well, after things got better and I was back practicing law [in Grand Rapids], I said to my mother, ‘Your husband and my father must have been an evil man.’ Because he inherited all his own father’s money and property when [my] grandfather died. And one day I was talking to a friend of mine, a lawyer in Detroit, and I told him about all this accumulated unpaid child support, and he said, ‘Well, why don’t we start a lawsuit?’
“He was a young, struggling lawyer that wanted to get a case, so he pulled all the facts and the money and it came to about five thousand dollars. So he filed the lawsuit in Omaha, and the court somehow found out that my real father was in Omaha, although he now lived permanently in Wyoming. And they nabbed him [big laugh] and put him in jail until he paid this four or five thousand dollars.
“In desperation, my father called me. He said, ‘Get your mother off my back.’ I said, ‘That’s her business, it’s her money, it’s not mine.’ And that was it: I never did anything, and he finally paid up.”
For altogether different reasons, Ford similarly had no use for filmmaker Oliver Stone, whose movie on the Kennedy assassination, in Ford’s opinion, had distorted the truth and impugned the work of the Warren Commission. As the last surviving member of the commission, Ford felt strongly that Stone’s movie was artistically and historically irresponsible.
“I signed the report,” he recalled in 1992. “I’ve never changed my opinion. I feel as strongly today, Tom, on the two basic fundamental issues. Number one, Lee Harvey Oswald was the assassin. Number two, the commission found no evidence of a conspiracy, foreign or domestic.
“I should add a footnote: The staff, in its draft of the report, said there was no conspiracy, foreign or domestic. The members of the commission unanimously changed it to say the commission found no evidence of a conspiracy. Now, the question is raised: Has there been any new, credible evidence since 1963? In my opinion, absolutely not.
“I don’t understand how Oliver Stone latched on to the weakest conspiratorial theory with Jim Garrison. The Garrison theory is totally discredited. It bothers me that a commercial, moneymaking movie can be believed by so many people. Even Stone says it’s not a documentary. I guess my only solace is they’re still raising questions about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln 130-some years ago. So I guess conspiracies can be raised by anybody, and those that raise them seldom have an answer. I’ve looked at it again, I’ve studied it, restudied it. Truth is, I’m more convinced than ever.”
Had he seen the movie?
“No, I’ve read the text. Let me tell you something off the record. Betty and I were in Hawaii at a big YPO, Young Presidents [Organization] meeting. Walter Cronkite was there with his wife and we were on a program together. We were both asked about the Stone movie, because Stone uses him and his interview with Kennedy as a basis for the thesis that Kennedy was about to change his mind on Vietnam, which is bullshit. That—well, let me finish this. Walter Cronkite is very, very upset with Stone using shots from that interview without getting his permission, and he’s equally upset with CBS for authorizing it without getting his approval. And the truth is, he’s contemplating at least going to see lawyers, about suing.
“I’ve read the script; I don’t want to see the movie, because I would be so upset with the damage it does. You know, to allege that Lyndon Johnson and the seven of us on the Warren Commission are a part of a conspiracy is ridiculous. None of us wanted to serve on the commission, but Lyndon, in his arm-twisting way, in effect told us it was our patriotic duty. I remember on Monday night, after the assassination, I was home. I got a call from the White House: the president wanted to talk to me.
“He said, ‘I want you to serve on this commission.’ I said, ‘Mr. President, I’ve got a full-time job in the Congress, important committees, all this and that.’ He just brushed that aside and said, ‘This is critical, you gotta do it,’ and so forth.
“I’m bothered by a commercial movie, which is biased and filled with half-truths, [that] can be believed by so many. It is not a documentary. I really get upset with it. If I went to the movie I wouldn’t sleep at night I would be so upset.”
(In a 2003 interview, Ford told historian Douglas Brinkley that he in fact had seen the “ridiculous” film, but totally by accident. He was on an American Airlines flight from New York to Los Angeles, and the movie was the featured entertainment. So he watched, but not happily.)
Enough time has passed, he added, that it’s time to release the entire commission report, which still hasn’t happened fifteen years after he recommended full disclosure in our conversation.
“The time has come to do it, but you have to be forewarned: there are some stories that’ll come out that were never verified that could be harmful to some people.” He wouldn’t be more specific about who they were: “I’ll just say some people that are known. You know how that happens—somebody investigates, somebody asks questions, and they make a statement. They’re never verified, it’s rumor, et cetera. That’s gonna happen, and that’s too bad.”
“I am a total devoted person to the [commission’s] conclusions. But seventy-five percent of the people don’t believe the Warren Commission anymore. It just makes me sad and unhappy. I was talking to somebody the other day in the movie business. I said, why don’t you do a documentary? Her answer was it wouldn’t sell. In the New York Times last Sunday, nonfiction bestsellers, Mark Lane’s book, Plausible Denial, was in the top five. In the paperback bestsellers, three of the first five were books that criticized the Warren Commission. The public is being overwhelmed with these irresponsibilities.
“The trouble with the movie, experts tell me, is, eighty percent of the people who go to movies are between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four. None of those were alive when JFK was killed. So they’re getting a totally distorted story about that tragedy.”
Including one of his sons. “He came out of the movie and said, ‘Now I understand.’ I said, ‘Sit down.’ The son of one of my agents did the same thing. It’s frightening.”
Our conversations weren’t solely about politics or his career. We sometimes veered off into contemporary topics as well. In 1995, for example, I asked him about the infamous O. J. Simpson murder trial, where the former football star was later acquitted of killing his ex-wife and her friend.
He asked me to turn off the tape recorder and put away my notebook. That was a rarity; when he asked me to turn off the machine, he usually let me keep taking notes. Not this time. As soon as I got back to my car, I pulled out my notebook and wrote this memo to myself:
He didn’t want to say on the tape that there was no doubt in his mind that O.J. was guilty, that he’d done it. But he thought he was going to get off because “all you need is one juror,” and he thought it was going to be a hung jury.
He told this story that he said, “I hope you completely forget it.” He said he had many friends who were friends of O.J.’s, and they had all told him years and years and years before this had happened, that O.J. had a really dark side, that there was a flaw in his character. He told me a story that about two years ago he and Mrs. Ford were at a concert here with Frank Sinatra for the Sinatra golf tournament and O.J. was sitting two places away from the Fords with a beautiful white woman not his wife, and that O.J. spent the whole time pawing her and had his hand up her dress. You could see how offensive Ford thought this was. He just kept saying, “It was really offensive.” He said, “Betty and I aren’t prudes, but I was even embarrassed to tell my wife to look at this. Of course I did, but it was still embarrassing.”
In that same interview, Ford showed me a letter he’d gotten from Jordan’s King Hussein, his first state dinner guest in 1974, about the Arab-Israeli peace treaty. That reminded him that he’d been a lifelong pack rat.
“You know, the original of this letter would be pretty valuable, don’t you think? My mother was an incredible collector, and she taught me to hang on to everything. I have kept over the years all my letters from presidents and important people. About two years ago, I had Sotheby’s appraise them; I just wanted to see how much they were worth.”
He was shocked to learn that he was sitting on $365,000 worth of letters, later reappraised upward to $400,000.
“Do you know the most valuable letter I have?” he said, chuckling at the recollection of a moment I would have thought he’d prefer to forget.
“It’s a letter I got from Sara Jane Moore saying she didn’t regret trying to kill me,” he divulged, laughing uproariously.
Moore tried to shoot him as he emerged from a side entrance of San Francisco’s storied St. Francis Hotel on September 22, 1975, the second assassination attempt on him in California within seventeen days.
He said that Sotheby’s had appraised the letter at $9,000.
“I couldn’t believe it,” he recalled. “That’s more valuable than my letters from Nixon during Watergate, or anything else.”
He showed me the letter, dated December 30, 1975. The operative line: “Although part of me regrets not being successful in this task, I am very thankful I did not kill another human being.” That caused another big chuckle.
(Signed “Sally Moore,” the letter also notes, “May I apologize for the pencil and paper. No disrespect is intended; it is all we are allowed at county jail.”)
“You know, I’m not going to live forever; you’ve gotta start thinking about what you want to do with stuff like this. What I think we’re gonna do is give some to the children and then we’re gonna give the rest to the foundation, and they’ll probably end up at the library at Ann Arbor.”
As his mirth over the Moore letter suggests, Ford was in good spirits—except for his bum left shoulder. He said he was desperately trying to avoid surgery, because that would mean six weeks in a sling and six months without swinging a golf club. Almost as bad, as a southpaw he wouldn’t be able to write for six weeks.
“I’m just too old to be an invalid for six months at this point in my life,” he grumbled.
In 2002, I asked him about some private buzz in Bush circles that Dick Cheney had served his original purpose—getting George W. Bush elected by reassuring moderate and independent voters that Cheney’s gravitas compensated for Bush’s relative inexperience—and could now be replaced as vice president if necessary. Ford bristled at the notion:
“It would be wrong politically and substantively. Dick Cheney’s got a support group out there in the country that I think feels that Cheney was a big asset [in 2000] and would be an asset in the future.”
I asked him to compare Rumsfeld and Cheney, his two chiefs of staff.
“In many ways, very similar. Both were very well organized, both were able to speak up and tell me what they thought. Very loyal, both hardworking. They both ran the White House very effectively and the way I wanted it. So it’s pretty hard for me to pick any differences.”
On reflection, he thought of one: “I would say Don is a little more sensitive to criticism than Cheney. Cheney laughs about it; he may resent it, but he doesn’t show it.”
He made it clear in a 1995 interview that he wasn’t enamored of H. Ross Perot, the billionaire Texan who’d run for president in 1992.
“I don’t know what he’ll end up doing, but he’s going to be mischievous at best. Anybody with that much ego who wants that much power with that much money you can’t discount. I think he’s disgraceful. I’ve never seen him do anything constructive. My friends in Michigan can tell you horror stories about his days on the General Motors board. I can tell you stories from people who dealt with him politically, so I see nothing constructive in what he’s done—except make a helluva lot of money. The worst thing for him to do is get into Republican primaries, because he would really be a time bomb politically. He’s gonna be in the political arena directly or indirectly, and it will be no good for the country in my opinion.”
House Speaker Newt Gingrich fared a bit better in that same interview, but Ford’s praise was faint. Mr. Congeniality didn’t much care for Gingrich’s scorched-earth tactics.
“Obviously, he is very smart,” Ford allowed. “I wish he would moderate a little. I think at the moment he has a tough choice: the book deal and other things, primarily the book deal. Unquestionably he’s slowed down the legislative process with the Contract with America. If that continues, he has to make a choice—is he gonna be stubborn about the book deal and jeopardize the Contract with America? If he gets to be stubborn about the book deal, it’ll hurt him and it’ll hurt the Republican image. I think he could make a ten-strike if he forgets the book deal. I’m more interested in making strong, effective progress on the Republican contract.”
Before Betty Ford stole his heart in perpetuity, Gerald Ford’s first great love was Phyllis Brown, whom he’d met when she was an eighteen-year-old student at Connecticut College for Women and Ford was at Yale Law School. They’d had a torrid romance that lasted nearly three years, but Phyllis, now a Powers model in New York, dumped him when he announced he was absolutely serious about returning to Grand Rapids after Yale.
“I talk to her on the phone about once every five years, or if I’m in Reno I call up. But I don’t have her come to my hotel room,” he said in 1997, giggling like the lovelorn young buck he once was. “I sit in the coffee bar, and we have a Coke.
“When I was courting her from 1939 to 1941, she was on most of the Cosmopolitan covers when Bradshaw Crandall was the artist, and we had a pretty deep romance. But when I got through law school, I made a very firm decision to go back to Michigan, and she was one of the top models in New York, so [Grand Rapids] wasn’t a very good choice for her,” he said with a chuckle.
“But you still remember her fondly, and vice versa?”
“Oh, yeah. I mean, only trouble is, she’s been married at least three times, maybe four, so I don’t think she ever would have been a very helpful wife for a politician. Very smart, very beautiful, very great—really a great gal. But she was a New York girl.”
I asked if she’d ever shown up in Rancho Mirage or Beaver Creek—their ski weekend in Vermont made the cover of Look magazine in 1940—and he said no.
But there’s a sequel to the story. A few years ago, Phyllis did turn up in the desert, unannounced, and asked if she could drop by for a quick hello with her old flame. Much to her chagrin, the answer was no.
They never spoke, but no doubt he was torn; his days with Phyllis were among his happiest memories. But Betty Ford, understandably, had never been high on the brassy babe. There was no way the straightest of arrows would have seen her without telling Betty, and after nearly sixty years of marital bliss, he wasn’t about to risk hurting the uncontested love of his life, the woman he described a few weeks before his death as “the greatest of all my blessings.”