FROM TIME TO TIME I’d covered a few of Gerald R. Ford’s press conferences when he was House minority leader, but our first genuine encounter was in the fall of 1973, not long after Richard Nixon introduced him to the nation as the 40th vice president.
It wasn’t an auspicious beginning, that first interview. Actually, it was a conspicuous disaster.
After a 1968 summer internship at Newsweek and two years as an Army public affairs officer at the Pentagon, I’d rejoined Newsweek’s Washington bureau in the fall of 1970. For most of 1973, I’d been covering the American prisoners of war from Vietnam; I was sent to Clark Air Base in the Philippines in February to cover their dramatic return from Hanoi, and was tracking their remarkable resilience as they coped with the reimmersion challenges of a normal existence after many years of brutal deprivation by their North Vietnamese captors.
I’d just returned from a fall vacation in Texas when my bureau chief, the legendary Mel Elfin, informed me I was being assigned to cover Ford. He’d never amounted to much as a backbench House leader, I was told, but Mel and Newsweek’s editors had concluded Nixon was finished and that Ford, sooner or later, probably sooner, would be the 38th president. The magazine wanted to have a leg up with the new guy when Nixon resigned or was impeached. “I want somebody who knows him and his people,” Elfin said. “Your job is to live with him until he’s president.” As a twenty-eight-year-old journeyman, I was ecstatic at my sudden good fortune.
On the surface, the assignment seemed promising. Most political correspondents thought Ford a bit of a dullard, but he also had a reputation for being generous with reporters. Columnist Martin Schram, then a rookie from Newsday assigned to Sunday duty, once asked him for the name of an aide he could bother at home on the weekends. Ford gave him his own home phone number in Alexandria and encouraged him to call anytime. Unlike some of his predecessors, not to mention successors, he liked reporters and was always a grown-up about their often irksome questioning.
This day, however, I promptly landed myself squarely on Ford’s enemies list.
It was Media Day for the vice president designate. He’d been scheduled for wall-to-wall interviews. Reporters were being shuffled rapid-fire through his congressional office like visiting constituents. I’d drawn an afternoon slot. Several down, several more to go.
Ford was wearing a frumpy brown business suit, the sort that reminded me of those Grand Rapids jokes about old Dutch guys wearing wooden shoes. Although he greeted me cordially enough, it was obvious he had more pressing items on his mind. He didn’t like my questions, which were about Nixon and Watergate. He kept puffing on his pipe and avoiding eye contact as he delivered a string of canned or monosyllabic answers. Plainly, he wasn’t enjoying himself, or my company. After each question, he’d glance at his wristwatch.
The vibes were horrible. Mercifully for both of us, after fifteen minutes of nonanswers I was given the bum’s rush out the door. For my taste, Ford had just validated H. L. Mencken’s celebrated advice: the only way to look on a politician is down.
I walked out of his office in a huge funk. It wasn’t just that as a citizen I had come away monumentally unimpressed with the guy my bosses were certain would be in the Oval Office before long. My angst was way more selfish than that. Jerry Ford was going to be the next president of the free world, and he and I had bombed with each other. That would be my problem, of course, certainly not his. I’d just been handed a plum assignment with a guaranteed ticket to a prized White House posting, and after fifteen minutes on the beat I was already in the Dumpster.
Improbably, our relationship gradually mellowed, helped along by endless journeys together in a tiny twin-engine propjet that in a pre-imperial era seemed like a pretty adequate Air Force Two. There were only seven press regulars on the plane, and before long, Ford was routinely topping off those impossibly long days on the road with martinis and chitchat in the press cabin. Eventually, some personal bonding developed.
For whatever reason, he seemed to like us, and even his political adversaries would readily concede it had always been hard work to dislike Jerry Ford.
Who couldn’t like a guy, for instance, who seldom passed up a chance to poke fun at himself? One late night, heading back to Washington after eighteen grueling hours on the road, Ford wandered up to the press section to rehash the day’s events.
“Say, what did you think of my speech?” he wanted to know.
Usually, there was not a polite answer for that query; with rare exceptions, Ford was a dreadful orator. So none of us ventured an opinion.
“Not worth a damn, was it?” he answered himself, unleashing that signature raucous Midwestern laugh that was so infectious.
More to the point, Ford was a shrewd judge of character. He hadn’t survived Washington’s cutthroat political combat without being able to figure out who could be trusted and who couldn’t. Unless burned, he always gave associates and acquaintances the benefit of the doubt. Our tiny band of reporters never violated his many late-night confidences. Somewhere along the line, we all passed his trust test.
In my case, I’ll always believe our professional relationship was cemented in the spring of 1974 during a short chat in Palm Springs, in a hotel not far from where he died. Infuriated by a disparaging remark from a Nixon loyalist and goaded by me, Ford blurted out an amazing political indiscretion, then asked me not to print it. I was literally petrified, especially after the vice president of the United States grabbed my tie and rather forcefully informed me I wasn’t leaving until I agreed to forget what I’d just heard. After what seemed like an eternity of gut-churning negotiation, we reached an understanding, and shook hands. I’ve kept my word to him.
The genesis for this book—even its very title—traces to that brief, powerful Easter encounter. In 1991, after he’d been out of office for fourteen years, I asked him to let me begin a series of regular “obit interviews” that could be published only after his death. In my proposal, passed through Bob Barrett, his first retirement chief of staff, I argued that he could be far more candid with this sort of arrangement, which would be better for history (and for me, of course, which I didn’t point out). A few days later, Barrett called back and said we had a deal.
My inspiration for the idea was our April 1974 encounter, although I didn’t mention it when making my pitch. I’ll never know if that epic exchange was also on his mind when he agreed to this arrangement; regardless, I’ll always be grateful he trusted me enough to make this book happen.
Some skeptics have already concluded that Ford saw this arrangement as a way to spin his legacy or settle scores from the grave. I doubt it. He was the most remarkably guileless political figure I’ve ever known. He had a modest Machiavellian side, but it surfaced only occasionally—like at the 1980 Republican convention in Detroit, when he consciously maneuvered the silly notion of making him the running mate of a guy he didn’t like into well-deserved oblivion.
As for our embargoed interviews, I believe the only calculation at play was the impulse, hardwired into his DNA like nothing else, to be a nice guy.
This is not a conventional biography, or a biography at all; several good ones are already in print. Nor does it pretend to be a policy tome. I offer instead what might be called “Conversations with Jerry”: an anecdotal memoir of his vice presidential and presidential career, which I covered, anchored by hours of off-the-record reminiscences and remembrances of his twenty-eight years of government service.
The Jerry Ford who emerged from our conversations was profoundly different from his steady if colorless stereotype: funny, reflective, chatty, gossipy—and unusually candid. I’m content to leave the heavy lifting to historians; this book simply attempts to present the human side of an everyday guy, talking—and occasionally dishing—as other former presidents have never done.
Over the years, Ford talked about what he really thought of Richard Nixon, his contempt for Nixon’s palace guard, and why he never socialized with Spiro Agnew in retirement although they lived a few miles apart in the desert; his experiences on the Warren Commission; how his disdain for Jimmy Carter finally ended, while his profound bitterness toward Ronald Reagan was papered over at best; his never-before-revealed relationship with Bill Clinton, including the astonishing conversation they had during Clinton’s impeachment proceedings; why he’s been predicting for years that Hillary Clinton could be America’s first female president; and why he thought his protégé Dick Cheney was the right running mate for George W. Bush in 2000 but the wrong one in 2004.
I’ve endeavored to produce a conversational narrative, leavened with numerous anecdotes, illuminations, and reflections on the news, history, and culture of the times in which Ford lived. His commentary is entertaining, surprising, heartwarming, and in some cases historic.
Thirty-two years and 260 days after that 1974 epiphany in the desert, my wife, Melanie (who, like our son, Andrew, has also experienced Ford’s generosity of spirit), and I joined thousands of mourners in the Washington National Cathedral to bid farewell to one of the capital’s most revered adopted sons.
It was a sunny but bitterly cold Tuesday morning, with swirling gusts driving the wind-chill index into the teens.
Listening to the tributes beneath the massive Gothic arches, I knew Ford would have been embarrassed by the hoopla; in life, he was always politely urging his audiences to sit down and stop applauding, as if he didn’t rate a standing ovation.
If ever a piece of music fit a funeral, it was Aaron Copland’s aptly titled “Fanfare for the Common Man,” performed by the United States Marine Band.
Of course, Ford had nobody else to blame for the pageantry; he’d planned it all himself. The military, which by law runs every ex-president’s state funeral, pulls together an off-the-shelf operations plan, then requires the eventual deceased to fill in the blanks during his life. The title of Ford’s ops plan was as plain-vanilla as he was: Scenario 38.
As the eulogists celebrated an ordinary man who steered the country through extraordinary times, I remembered a conversation we’d had several years earlier, during a visit to his Rancho Mirage, California, home.
As he walked me to the door of his office after one of our interviews, Ford matter-of-factly volunteered that he’d put me on the guest list for his funeral.
“And I’m going to be damned sore if you don’t show up,” he said, totally serious.
“Mr. President, I’ve been saying for years that you’re going to outlive us all,” I replied, “but in the unfortunate event that I’m wrong about that, I’d be honored to attend.”
“Good,” he said. “I want you there.”
As promises go, it may have been the easiest one I’ve ever had to keep.