BY THE FALL OF 2006, Ford was deteriorating rapidly. As they’d vowed at our May lunch, he and Betty had indeed defied the doctors and flown out to Beaver Creek in June. After a couple of weeks, with oxygen canisters helping them cope with the altitude, both of them were tolerating the mountains better than expected. Even his disapproving doctors were surprised at how well he was adapting.
Then, on August 15, Ford checked into the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. A terse statement from his office said he was there for “testing and evaluation.” In short order a pacemaker was inserted into his chest to help regulate his heartbeat. A few days later, he had an angioplasty that found major cardiac blockage. Stents were implanted in two of his coronary arteries to help with the blood flow to his weakened heart. He wasn’t strong enough to tolerate what he really needed: a valve replacement.
The conventional wisdom suggested he’d had a reaction to the altitude, as some of his pals and doctors had feared might happen. That wasn’t the case at all. What was true is that Ford had seen some cardiologists from Mayo at Beaver Creek who had briefed him on some new medical advancements that might improve his quality of life. He was faltering, and knew it; anything that might prolong his life was worth exploring. So he had decided to fly to Mayo for an assessment.
Shortly before the Fords were to leave for Minnesota, Betty Ford experienced serious leg pain. With daughter Susan accompanying her, the Secret Service drove her to Denver. It was a blood clot, and she needed surgery right away. But she wasn’t letting her husband go to Minnesota without her, so the doctors reluctantly agreed to postpone the surgery until she got to Mayo.
Her vascular surgery was never publicly acknowledged by Mayo or the family. In April 2007, she checked into the Eisenhower Medical Center near her home. The family confirmed that she’d had surgery; they didn’t disclose that it had taken six hours to remove two more clots.
Two weeks after arriving at Mayo, the former president was discharged and flew home—but to Rancho Mirage, not back to his beloved Beaver Creek aerie, where he’d always waited out the fierce desert summers.
The surgery ravaged what little stamina he had left. Even keeping to the indoors to ward off the heat’s dangerous effects, he was essentially an invalid as he recuperated.
He was extraordinarily weak by then, having trouble walking or even conversing for more than a few sentences at a time. He needed round-the-clock nursing help. He still read his papers religiously, took a few phone calls, and watched television, but he couldn’t walk more than a few steps without resting, and even that required help.
As word trickled out that he was failing, old friends would call and ask to mail in a photograph or artifact for what they must have sensed was surely a final autograph. They were told that he just isn’t signing autographs anymore. Oh, he’ll do it for me, they would say. But he wouldn’t, because he couldn’t. The simplest of tasks had become too much of an ordeal.
Still, Ford told aides and old pals he was determined to make one final commute home. On October 13, he was penciled in to attend the dedication ceremonies at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. Frail as he was, it was so important to him to return to his alma mater one last time that he had assured me in May he’d break his ban on the airplane flights that wore him out to be there.
“After football practice I’d walk to my job waiting tables,” he reflected. “I’d pass by this run-down vacant lot with weeds and broken glass. Never did I imagine that seventy years later, that lot would be the home of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy.”
Even as he weakened, Ford kept thinking about the Ann Arbor festivities. One old friend told him that if you walked to the very top row of Michigan Stadium, the massive “Big House” where Ford had played in the thirties, you could see the Ford School. He was excited, almost giddy, by the news, and gleefully repeated the story to well-wishers.
In May, in fact, one of his closest friends flatly predicted to me, “One way or another, he will stay alive for the Ford Center dedication in the fall.”
Ford hadn’t put it that way in May, but his determination to be there was unswerving. “I’m going out there,” he doggedly insisted. “That’s the only flying I’ll do [anymore]. The university said they would build us a building if we raised $11 million or $12 million, and we did it.”
The week of the dedication, he was still making plans to fly east. But two days before the festivities, an e-mail arrived from Penny Circle.
“So sorry to tell you—we aren’t going to AA. He can’t make the trip. I am heartbroken for him and disappointed for everyone.” The reality went unspoken: only a man who was dying would have no-showed something so dear to his ailing heart.
That grim news made me resolve to see him again. In conversations with his aides, I’d mentioned weeks before that I’d be in Palm Springs in November for an oral history interview and hoped to see Ford. The “body language” was iffy to negative. There are good days and bad days, we’ll just have to see, was the message. It was pretty apparent I was being discouraged from pressing for time. I made it clear I wasn’t interested in another interview; we all understood there was no way he could have handled a real conversation. Still, I was being waved off for even a simple drop-by.
On the morning of November 14, though, Penny said he was feeling okay and that I should come over around 11:30 so she and I could talk first.
“Prepare yourself,” she warned me. “He’s not what he was.” She asked me to keep our visit to five minutes.
As we walked over to the house a couple of minutes past noon, I asked if it was true the Colorado home was on the market. I wanted to eyeball the place again because several of our most memorable encounters had been there.
“Let’s talk about that after you see him,” she said.
Before he uttered a word, I finally understood why some of Ronald Reagan’s closest friends had refused to visit him at the end.
The president was in his sunlit study, the same room where I’d interviewed him in May and where he had shown such spunk. Instead of using the same big easy chair, however, he was propped up in a hospital bed near the sliding door, facing the television.
Pale and painfully feeble, he had on precisely the same casual clothes he’d worn at our last meeting in May. Unable to summon the strength to bring his right arm across his body, he reached up with his left hand and weakly grasped my outstretched right. A celebrated political faux pas tactlessly emerged from my one-liner history bank; when he’d met a judge with a crippled right hand, Richard Nixon had once exclaimed, A lefty, just like Bob Dole.
I’d steeled myself for his frailty, but hadn’t expected to find him bedridden; I hope I was able to conceal my shock as I asked him how he was doing.
“You’ve slimmed down,” he answered. That was a relief; at least he knows who I am, I thought to myself.
The conversation was strained because he could barely speak. I asked him what he thought about the midterm elections, but he couldn’t answer for several seconds.
“Terrible,” he finally said. I mentally kicked myself; it was a cruel mistake to have tried any substantive topics with him.
The day I arrived in Palm Springs, Ford had become the longest-living former president, surpassing Ronald Reagan. His office had released a touching statement:
“The length of one’s days matters less than the love of one’s family and friends. I thank God for the gift of every sunrise and, even more, for all the years He has blessed me with Betty and the children, with our extended family and the friends of a lifetime.”
Seeing him forty-eight hours later, I knew he couldn’t have written those words, much less spoken them, although I learned much later that he’d read them beforehand and approved their release.
There was likewise no way he could have signed the piece of memorabilia I’d brought along, so I didn’t even try. But I did pull it out of an envelope to show him, hoping he’d get a lift from the memory.
It was the program from a meeting of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists at Boston’s famous Parker House Hotel on May 25, 1974. He was the featured speaker, and one of the cartoonists had drawn a caricature of Ford in his Michigan football uniform. He was resolute, hands on hips, girding for gridiron combat. Instead of his old number 48, the jersey carried number 76, a premature metaphor for the bruising primary battle he would later wage with Reagan.
Ford took the oversized orange program in both hands and studied it intently for a few seconds.
“I used to play football,” was all he said.
Suddenly, Betty Ford walked in unannounced to say hello. She was almost as frail as he was, far more so than at our lunch in May; the strain of keeping him alive had plainly taken an enormous toll on her already-fragile constitution.
Betty and Jerry never spoke in that interlude, but the moment he saw her, his eyes lit up. If only for an instant, he was back at the Michigan beaches with Betty Bloomer, gorgeous in his swim trunks and crazy in love.
Four minutes after I’d been ushered in, it was time to go.
Neither of us could handle much more.
I tried a lighter note: “Phil Jones asked me to tell you that you’d better behave yourself, and he’s going to be watching to make sure you do.”
Jones was one of that tiny Band of Brothers from Air Force Two, now retired from CBS News. He’d always been one of Ford’s favorites, notwithstanding his habit of annoying the hell out of Ford with barbed questions he’d rather not answer. In April 1975, Ford had broken into a full gallop on a California tarmac to avoid answering a Jones query about Vietnam going down the drain.
A big grin spread across Ford’s face. “Oh, that Phil.” He smiled.
“You’ve lost some weight,” he said again.
As I took his hand for the last time, Ford had one final request.
“Come back again,” he said in a voice barely above a whisper.
Ever positive, to the very end.
“You bet I will, Mr. President. Please take care of yourself.”
As we walked back to her office, Penny delivered a jolt of her own. The Beaver Creek home wasn’t up for sale yet, but would be soon. She said she’d arrange for me to walk through. “But it’s a shell,” she warned. “It’s been totally cleaned out.”
That meant the Fords would never see their favorite retirement hideaway again. He was too sick, and she wasn’t going without him.
Later, I learned his aides had tried to dissuade him from seeing me because they didn’t want me to remember him that way. Maybe Reagan’s friends had been right to stay away at the end, I thought, preferring to remember him in his heyday, when he was larger than life.
But I told Penny, with more of an edge than I intended, that I’d remember Jerry Ford many ways, and none would be the sickly, hanging-on remnant of happier days gone by I’d just seen. I’d remember the day we hit an air pocket descending into Palm Springs late one night and a reporter’s gin-and-tonic arced from its glass, over a seat and right onto Ford’s head, triggering a nervous giggle. I’d remember that April day in 1974 when he grabbed my tie and politely ordered me to forget something he shouldn’t have blurted out. I’d remember the evening in 1997 when he (with Betty on an extension line) called my wife before her cancer operation.
And I’d remember a sweltering August afternoon in the East Room when the grace and quiet resolve of “Big Red,” as old friends called him because of his reddish-blond hair, steadied a fractured nation.
In distress I called Melanie, described what I’d just observed, and told her if she ever saw anything like that with me she had my permission to pull the plug immediately.
As I drove back to my hotel, out of nowhere the haunting lyrics of the country-western classic I once heard Buddy Holly perform popped into my head.
“The sun is out, the sky is blue, there’s not a cloud to spoil the view, but it’s raining, raining in my heart.”
From the moment I’d seen him, I knew the next time I visited Sand Dune Road, he’d be gone.