2

Man of the House

Gerald R. Ford arrived in Washington, D.C., over the New Year holiday weekend. Eager to clean out and set up his office, Ford and his administrative aide, John P. Milanowski, showed up at the House Office Building in overalls. When a Capitol policeman barred the scruffy pair from entering the near-deserted building, Milanowski piped up, “’S all right, Officer. He’s the new congressman from Grand Rapids. I’m his assistant.”¹

Sandy-haired and still lineman-solid at thirty-five, with his unhurried Midwestern manners, Gerald Ford seemed a bit unsophisticated for the nation’s capital when he took his seat in Congress on January 3, 1949. But the earnestness in his approach was simply part of the man. For all his time at Yale, his exposure to the New York fashion world, and his four years in the U.S. Navy, Ford still had the down-home air of his Michigan origins. He may even have cultivated it—if acting the Rotarian meant taking nothing for granted, claiming no greater knowledge than he actually possessed, and seeking the counsel of his elders.

In truth, Ford was at least as ambitious as any of his new peers in the Eighty-first Congress, but quietly so. Behind his humble, nice-guy demeanor—which had the advantage of being as genuine as it was appealing—he held a no-nonsense, businesslike view of the future and his optimal position therein. His first congressional aide recalled that Ford had designs on the House leadership from the start. “We talked about how nice it would be for Jerry to be Speaker someday,” Milanowski said. “That’s where all the patronage was, the power.”² The Speaker of the House of Representatives, as leader of the majority party, oversees debates, shepherds through legislation, sways committee appointments, and stands second in line to succeed the president of the United States, if need be.

Several of Ford’s fellow congressmen during his early years in the House openly coveted the White House. One of them, Massachusetts Democrat John F. Kennedy, occupied the suite across the corridor from Ford’s in the House Office Building. “The net result was, Jack Kennedy and I became good friends because we walked back and forth from our offices to the House chamber when the House bell rang,” Ford recalled decades later. “Our staffs became very close. We were pals. I was not familiar with his health problems, but I had many suspicions about his philandering. That was none of my business.”³ Another ambitious colleague made a point of introducing himself right after Ford had taken his first oath of office. “I’m Dick Nixon, from California,” he began with extended hand. “I heard about your big win in Michigan, and I wanted to say hello and welcome you to the House.”⁴ The two young Republican navy vets soon became friends, and—more significant—political allies. They would stay close for life. “Incidentally, if I had been a sportswriter during the time you played center for Michigan,” Nixon wrote Ford in 1994, just months before his death, “you would have been on my All-American football team.”⁵

Years later, when discussing his early congressional career, Ford recalled two indelible visual memories: sitting in the House chamber hearing General Douglas MacArthur deliver his “Old Soldiers Never Die” valedictory and watching Richard Nixon zealously investigate Alger Hiss for treason on the House Un-American Activities Committee. “Both moments stayed with me in a very real sense for very real reasons,” Ford recalled. “General MacArthur, after all, had led our efforts in the Pacific where I served during World War II. And Dick Nixon was my close friend and there he was creating a national ruckus by prosecuting Hiss. In MacArthur’s case I was impressed by the power of oratory. In Dick’s case it was more the power of dogged diligence.”⁶

It didn’t take Ford long to learn that Nixon was a foreign policy wizard. “We had a shared vision about the Soviet Union,” Ford recalled. “But Nixon could actually tell you about all the political parties in any country. He was that micro.” Ford truly respected Nixon’s acumen. Both Republicans enthusiastically endorsed the Marshall Plan and U.S. military intervention on the Korean peninsula. “Our political views on global issues were nearly identical,” Ford recalled. “I even agreed with him on Hiss. Domestically we were almost mirror images.”⁷ Something else, however, bonded them even more. Both men had gone through the Great Depression on the slum side of the socioeconomic tracks. “We understood what it meant to rise on merit, not privilege,” Ford recalled. “We had a mutual love of football which really sealed the deal of our friendship … . Our personalities [however] were different. I tried to stay optimistic. Dick could turn dark and moody at the drop of a hat. Once at a Washington cocktail party he was slapping everybody on the back. He was in high spirits. On my way out I saw him on the curb waiting for a car, mumbling to himself. He seemed sad and detached.” Ford also was fascinated at the way Nixon played piano at social functions. “There was a zest to his sing-alongs,” Ford recalled. “He pounded down on the keys full-force, as if playing harder would make it sound better.”⁸

Because Ford and Nixon were seeing each other socially, there was no need for an epistolary relationship. Yet one developed. After Nixon became vice president in 1953 he would occasionally drop Ford a note promoting their “friendship” and his “continued loyal support” for any legislation Ford supported. A mutual personal loyalty had been forged. But it wasn’t until Nixon lost his 1962 race for governor of California that he fully appreciated what a stand-up guy Jerry really was. Most Republican politicians at the time pronounced Nixon finished, a washed-up pariah who couldn’t get elected dogcatcher. Everybody enjoyed kicking Nixon while he was down—but not Gerald Ford. “I kept in touch with Dick as a friend,” Ford recalled. “I knew how lonely he could get. And whenever somebody badmouthed him within my earshot I spoke up. That’s what friends do for friends. When Alger Hiss went on TV and started smearing Dick I guess I spoke out.”⁹

Nixon never forgot Ford’s decency. “We go back a long time,” Nixon wrote Ford in 1993. “As you pointed out, we are among the last of the original C & M [Chowder and Marching Club]. One action of yours for which I will always be grateful was your going on a TV program when ABC had the bad manners to put Alger Hiss on to nail my coffin shut after my defeat for governor of California. I have often said that when you win, you hear from everyone—when you lose, you hear from your friends. You have always measured up in that respect and I shall always be grateful.”¹⁰

While his boldest peers like Kennedy and Nixon eyed the presidency during the 1950s, Ford kept his sights trained on the Speaker’s chair. His pursuit inspired him to learn everything there was to know about the House of Representatives, where knowledge really is power, if one knows how to use it. Ford set out to find the swiftest, most surefooted route to his goal. He and John Malinowksi combed through the House archives to see who had succeeded to the top in the past. The key seemed to become a star among one’s party loyalists while making a reasonable splash on a high-profile committee. He noted that three past Speakers—and President James A. Garfield—had served as chairman of the House Appropriations Committee,¹¹ which made sense to him, because the people who controlled the money in any endeavor tended to run the show. Ford also realized that finance generally bored the flashier types he feared most as political rivals. He thus made it his mission to get a seat on the House Appropriations Committee, and went out of his way to befriend its chairman, Democrat Clarence Cannon of Missouri, and its ranking Republican, John Taber of New York.

The problem with Ford’s ambition—and the reason few freshmen in Congress would have wasted their time angling for a spot on the Appropriations Committee—was that openings were rare. To get on Appropriations, one had to break a vicious cycle; the committee members tended to keep their seats largely because their constituents didn’t want them to lose their place on the powerful committee. But fortune smiled on Ford’s aspirations. “As has happened so often in my life,” he noted in his memoir, A Time to Heal, “I received a break.”¹² Just as likely as also happened so often in his life, he no doubt saw it coming.

In the autumn of 1950, one of the Appropriations Committee’s Republicans—a man from Michigan, coincidentally—resigned to run for a U.S. Senate seat. John Taber saw to it that Ford took his place. Given that he had not yet completed his first term, the appointment gave the young man a conspicuous boost in Congress. What’s more, he instantly proved capable at work. Regarding the job as his mandate to safeguard the nation’s expenditures, he followed in his adoptive father’s footsteps and became adept at drawing a tight noose around every dollar he could. Unsentimentally—and, in the opinion of some of his colleagues, unwisely—Ford even voted against programs aimed to benefit the navy, Michigan, or Grand Rapids if he considered the outlay unnecessary.

The Appropriations Committee also proved an ideal vantage point for learning the workings of the House. By the time Ford finished his first full term on the committee—and his second in office—he understood more than most of his colleagues about the flow of money and power within Congress. As a near-instant insider in Washington and a rising GOP star, Ford was asked by a group of Michigan Republicans to make a bid for the Senate in 1952, against a Democrat who had been appointed to the seat after Arthur Vandenberg’s death the year before. Ford seemed the perfect choice to succeed Vandenberg, both as a Grand Rapids native and as an ardent internationalist. But the congressman wasn’t persuaded. The Senate had greater prestige, but the House had more real power over day-to-day legislating, especially in monetary matters. In any case, Ford felt he already had a jump on his career in the House. He saw no reason to start over in the higher chamber.

After two decades of Democratic control over the White House, Dwight D. Eisenhower won the presidency back for the Republicans in 1952. Ike’s popularity across the country even spread to Congress, where the GOP squeaked into the majority by one seat in the Senate and four in the House. House Minority Leader Joseph W. Martin of Massachusetts became Speaker. A former newspaper publisher, Martin was a reasonable and congenial presence in the halls and anterooms of Congress. For the previous twenty years the Republican Party had defined itself almost entirely by contrast with the looming shadow of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, including during the administration of his successor, Harry S. Truman. Apart from the GOP’s opposition to FDR—and that was hardly across the board on the issues—it was difficult to say just where the Republicans stood as the 1950s progressed. President Eisenhower didn’t make it any clearer, deftly avoiding much controversy over policy. It may have been easy to like Ike, but it was tough to predict just what he would do on any particular issue.

Even at the time, both parties seemed to recognize the Eisenhower years as a frozen moment for politics as usual to take a breather after the rancorous New Deal and World War II era. Apart from the highly unusual sidelight of the Red Scare and Senator Joseph McCarthy’s bullying, the 1950s passed rather placidly in Congress, but, as the decade neared its end, the American legislature roiled with the undercurrents of contention that would swell and burst through the 1960s. In the Senate, Barry Goldwater conservatives prepared to face off against Hubert Humphrey liberals. In the House, battle lines were drawn even within the parties. In the GOP, the demarcation was generational: younger Republicans simply did not want to entrust the future to their elders in the leadership. They hadn’t even held on to Ike’s coattails, after all; the Democrats had retaken the House and Senate in 1954. By the end of the decade, the junior members of the House GOP believed they could do better, and organized what amounted to a coup against their leaders. Minority Leader Joe Martin, then seventy-four, was the first to be toppled, after the insurgents closed together on January 6, 1959, to challenge his twenty-year hold on the party’s top spot in the lower chamber. Blunt-spoken Indiana representative Charles Halleck, fifty-seven, led the revolt. Although the genial Martin still had friends in the House, not enough voted for him this time. “A lot of us,” one younger representative told the New York Times, “have come very reluctantly to the conclusion that we can’t allow personal friendship to stand in the way of the more vigorous guidance we need.”¹³

Desperate to hang on to the top office, Martin called in Ford and two of Halleck’s other allies for a last-minute meeting to appeal for their support. One of them decided to stand by Martin. Gerald Ford and the other man did not. They and their like-minded peers encouraged Halleck to go forward with the coup, in hope that the House Republicans’ days in the minority would end with Martin’s tenure at the top.

Ford had earned a reputation as a party loyalist via his predictable obedience to the leadership, yet as old Joe Martin got the gate, Ford looked to be one of the most dangerous members of the tough-minded new cadre of younger House Republicans. Each was loyal only to his own vision of the GOP in the legislature; beyond the need for cooperation in the fight at hand, the upstarts weren’t even loyal to one another. Gerald Ford’s lifelong image as the most ardent of his party’s faithful would stem largely from the fact that his view of the Republican Party in the House eventually prevailed. He didn’t go out of his way to double-cross his colleagues, but neither would he hesitate to do just that to any who stood in his path.

As the 1960 presidential election approached, most pollsters conceded the Republican nomination to Richard Nixon, Eisenhower’s vice president. Nixon nevertheless received only tepid support from the White House early on but ran as an “Eisenhower Republican” anyway—whatever that meant. What voters liked about Ike was not his adherence to ideology, liberal or conservative, but his trustworthiness in their eyes. Nixon lacked that innate appeal, and knew he would have a hard time making his “Eisenhower Republican” case. He needed another tactic for the general election.

Nixon’s only competition for the GOP nomination came from New York governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, the heir to one of America’s most storied fortunes, who had made himself the standard-bearer for the liberal wing of the Republican Party. When Nixon cut a deal with Rockefeller, exchanging input to the platform for the governor’s support at the convention, the GOP’s conservatives pitched fits.¹⁴ The move raised suspicions of liberal sympathies in the presumptive nominee.

To balance his potential ticket, or at least give that impression, Nixon arranged for Gerald Ford’s name to be circulated as a possible vice presidential nominee. Ford’s record in the House certainly cast him as a reliably firm conservative, having voted against costly programs for farms, education, housing, and even the military on a few occasions. Hailing from Michigan, the center of the nation’s automotive industry, however, he had enthusiastically backed the costly 1956 Federal Aid Highway Act, which created the interstate highway system, and as an avowed internationalist rarely voted against a foreign aid bill. On the domestic side, his record showed he generally favored progressive civil rights legislation, but he held a dim view of organized labor and its positions. In this mixture of stands—some conservative, some liberal—the ideologically dodgy nice-guy Gerald Ford was the epitome of an “Eisenhower Republican.”

“Interest in Jerry Ford is spreading with tremendous rapidity around the country,” exclaimed a Republican National Committeeman from Michigan to a reporter that spring.¹⁵ In July, Ford arrived at the GOP convention in Chicago as Michigan’s favorite son for the vice presidential nod, deplaning at Midway Airport to more than a hundred chanting, sign-waving supporters. In his final analysis, however, Nixon calculated that Ford could be of more use on his own solid turf in the House. Besides, the nominee figured, he could afford to take his party’s conservatives for granted; he couldn’t imagine too many of them bolting to his Democratic opponent, John F. Kennedy. So Nixon passed over his friend Jerry Ford, instead asking him to make the seconding speech for the vice presidential nomination of Boston Brahmin Henry Cabot Lodge, who brought diplomatic experience and Cold Warrior credentials to the ticket.

After the convention, Ford accepted another role in the Nixon campaign. He and two fellow House Republicans were dispatched to follow Kennedy around on the campaign trail, feeding reporters the GOP response to the Democrat’s every remark. Dubbed their party’s “Truth Squad,” the trio’s task was spin-doctoring. Ford took to his role with gusto, staunchly defending his side’s platform against the dynamic Massachusetts senator. Although disappointed by Kennedy’s victory that November, Ford had to admit that he still liked and admired his old hallmate in Congress, and would work closely with the new president on foreign affairs. “To know Jack Kennedy, as I did, was to understand the true meaning of the word [courage],” Ford would recall years later. “Physical pain was an inseparable part of his life, but he never surrendered to it—any more than he yielded to freedom’s enemies during the most dangerous moments of the nuclear age. President Kennedy understood that courage is not something to be gauged in a poll or located in a focus group. No advisor can spin it. No historian can backdate it. For, in the age-old contest between popularity and principle, only those willing to lose for their convictions are deserving of posterity’s approval.”¹⁶

Of course, Ford’s interest in presidential elections had more to do with their effect on the House of Representatives, and particularly on Republican fortunes there. Through the years he tracked the numbers of seats gained, held, and lost like a major-league baseball manager monitoring his ace’s pitch count. After steadily increasing Republican losses in both houses after 1954—capped in the 1958 midterm elections by plunges of fifteen seats in the Senate and forty-eight in the House—Ford couldn’t help but be pleased that the Republicans managed to pick up two Senate seats and twenty House seats in 1960. As with Eisenhower, it appeared that Kennedy’s squeaker of a victory reflected only his own popularity, and not the ascendance of his entire party. Ford could hardly wait for the midterm elections of 1962, when tradition would dictate healthy gains for the opposition party—his. But that, too, would turn out to be a disappointment, thanks to the electorate’s rallying around the president during the Cuban Missile Crisis less than three weeks before the 1962 elections. The GOP dropped a pair of seats in the Senate and gained only one in the House. In response, a group of younger House Republicans concluded that, where old Joe Martin had been friendly but ineffective, the current House GOP leadership came across as antagonistic but equally ineffective.

Gerald Ford eagerly joined the upstart group, as did a brash, thirty-year-old freshman representative from Illinois named Donald Rumsfeld. Soon after the new Congress convened in January 1963, his fellow “Young Turks” urged Ford to challenge sixty-seven-year-old Charles Hoeven of Iowa for his post as chairman of the House Republican Conference. Ranking third in the GOP leadership behind Minority Leader Charles Halleck and Minority Whip Leslie Arends of Illinois, the conference chairman supposedly consulted on policy matters and helped prepare new legislation. In practice, however, the post had become little more than an honorific, with nothing much expected from its occupant. The entire House seemed taken by surprise when the forty-nine-year-old Jerry Ford announced his run for the slot. Once again, he was mounting a political power play out of ambition rather than ideology. And once again, in choosing to enter the fray, Ford proved loyal to his image of a strong Republican Party rather than to any individuals who happened to hold sway over it at the time.

“I was picked as the lamb for the slaughter,” Hoeven remarked when he lost his leadership post to Ford, adding, “This should serve as notice to Mr. Arends and Mr. Halleck that something is brewing.” ¹⁷ In truth, Arends was safe for the moment; it was Halleck about whom the Young Turks had misgivings. Calling himself a “gut-fighter,”¹⁸ the tough-talking Halleck was given to high-pressure tactics, which clashed with Ford’s conciliatory style, especially within the party. Halleck offended Ford more, however, with his open-armed approach to the Democratic House members from the South, conservative “Dixiecrats” who often voted with the Republicans, particularly on domestic social policy. Ford, by contrast, felt the time was ripe to regain the majority by bringing in Southern Republicans, even if backing their candidacies meant alienating a few Dixiecrats. Ultimately, he believed the result of such a shift would be a new version of the Democrats’ “Solid South”: still solid, but Republican in everything, including name.

On November 22, 1963, all such partisan concerns disappeared in the shadows of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Two days after the president was shot in Dallas, the prime suspect, Lee Harvey Oswald, was himself killed by Jack Ruby, a mob-linked nightclub owner. Left with no prospect of a trial to look into the murky circumstances of Kennedy’s death, the new president, Lyndon B. Johnson, announced the formation of a commission assigned “to satisfy itself that the truth is known as far as it can be discovered, and to report its findings and conclusions to him, to the American people and to the world.”¹⁹ Headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren, a Republican, the commission was made up of Democratic congressman Hale Boggs of Louisiana; Republican senator John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky; former CIA director Allen Dulles; former World Bank president John T. McCloy; Democratic senator Richard B. Russell of Georgia; and Congressman Gerald Ford. “I wanted to find who killed Jack,” Ford later recalled. “I wanted the murderer put away for eternity.”²⁰

Ford appreciated the honor of being named to the Warren Commission, but admitted that he didn’t really have time to concentrate on the investigation. “The Appropriations Committee was a full-time job,” he explained in his memoirs. “The Republican Conference chairmanship demanded another hour or two every day and I didn’t see how I could handle new responsibilities without obtaining additional help.” He therefore deputized two aides to analyze the investigation materials as they came available, as well as to prepare questions for him to ask at the commission’s hearings.²¹

Ford concurred with the Warren Commission’s overall conclusion that Oswald had acted alone in the assassination of President Kennedy. As the final report on the investigation was being prepared, however, he contended that Oswald’s sole culpability could not be proved by the available evidence. Thanks to Ford, the Warren Report backed away from categorically stating that there had been no conspiracy to kill JFK. Instead, the conclusion read: “The Commission has found no evidence that either Lee Harvey Oswald or Jack Ruby was part of any conspiracy, domestic or foreign, to assassinate President Kennedy.”²²

Hoping to have the last word on the matter, in 1965 Ford and John R. Stiles, one of his assistants on the ten-month investigation, coauthored a book summarizing the Warren Commission’s findings, Portrait of the Assassin.²³ Nevertheless, through the coming years Ford would face more questions about the Kennedy assassination investigation than any other topic. In truth, he had left the door open to all manner of conspiracy theories by inserting the clarification that the Warren Commission had “found no evidence” of a plot, thereby allowing the possibility that such evidence might exist. Indeed, when asked in 1975 on CBS’s Face the Nation whether new disclosures warranted revisiting the investigation, Ford remarked that “if there is some additional … constructive information available, I think it ought to be reopened in that very limited area.”²⁴

In 2003, at age ninety, Ford was the only surviving member of the Warren Commission. He still bristled whenever somebody—like Hollywood director Oliver Stone—floated JFK conspiracy theories for mass consumption. “I’d like to tell you I never saw Stone’s ridiculous film,” Ford said. “But I was flying from New York to Los Angeles on American Airlines, and what did they show? I had no choice. The film is filled with inaccuracies and omissions. It bothered me so much because it was so wrong. But what can I do about it? At some point, I was so upset with Oliver Stone I was tempted to challenge him to a debate. I had people on my staff who said, ‘All you’ll do is highlight his movie and he’ll get the benefit, etc.’ So I backed off.”²⁵

In the 1964 election, Lyndon Johnson and the Democrats were able to ride on the coattails of JFK’s tragic death. The national Republican Party, by contrast, hit its nadir. At the GOP convention at San Francisco’s Cow Palace that July, the party’s right wing seized enough control to boo Nelson Rockefeller off the podium before a word of his speech could be heard. It proved a turning point. With archconservative senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona installed at the top of the ticket, the Republicans suffered their worst electoral defeat since the 1930s. Johnson trounced Goldwater, 486 electoral votes to 52 and with 61 percent of the popular vote, on a surge of electorate support for the Democrat’s proposed humanitarian Great Society programs. Jerry Ford’s scorecard clearly indicated the ripple effect from what he termed Goldwater’s “negative landslide.”²⁶ The House Republicans had lost thirty-six seats. Not only were they even deeper in the minority, they were left in the dust, with 140 representatives to the Democrats’ 295. Ford was frustrated; at this rate he would never get to be Speaker. Somebody had to do something to save the party, so he swung into action with his own remedy for the GOP’s ills in Congress. In a January 1965 article he wrote for Fortune magazine, Ford laid out a new Republican strategy calling for the congressional minority to assume a more activist role, matching the Democrats’ legislative efforts with constructive moderate and even liberal proposals of its own. The goal, he wrote, was to chart a course for the future, “between the shoals of simple obstructionism and inert me-tooism.” What he advocated was a strong, steadfast, optimistic approach straight out of the winning playbook of Gerald R. Ford.

“We must stake out our positions independently of any preplanning with the southern Democratic leadership,” he exhorted, “so as to correct the frequently distorted image of a Republican-southern Democratic coalition.” To his colleagues in the House, every line of his attack was aimed straight at Charles Halleck, the right-leaning, Dixiecrat-courting minority leader. “I believe the basic Republican position we must regain is the high middle road of moderation,” Ford continued. “We welcome into the party Republicans of every reasonable viewpoint. But we must firmly resist the takeover of our party by any elements that are not interested in building a party, but only in advancing their own narrow views.”²⁷

Ford’s manifesto was more than sour grapes. He was genuinely determined to return his party to the American political mainstream. The Goldwater conservatives, who seemed more interested in airing their opinions than winning elections, had succeeded only in giving the electorate the impression that the Republican Party had swung somewhere to the right of Genghis Khan. What rankled Ford was how wide a swath this allowed the Democrats to claim in the well-reasoned ideological middle. Ford’s strategy proposed to recapture the middle for his own party by pushing the opposition’s image off to the left.

Just before the Fortune article appeared, Ford stunned Halleck with the announcement of his challenge for the minority leader’s post. Few observers thought that Ford had a prayer of toppling Halleck. After all, when Representative John V. Lindsay, the erudite, liberal New York City Republican, made a few disgruntled noises of his own about his party’s leadership in the aftermath of its 1964 drubbing, he was warned by his elders to stop rocking the boat. “It is impossible to rock a boat resting at the bottom of the ocean,” Lindsay replied dryly.²⁸

As it turned out, Ford didn’t even have to rock any boats. Thanks to his bold new agenda for the party, he scored a surprise 73–67 win in the closed-door House Republican caucus vote on January 5, 1965. Front pages across the country highlighted the news, while Republican National Chairman Dean Burch quipped that it was time for the GOP to “put away the switchblades and take out the Band-Aids.”²⁹

Having climbed his way to the top of his party, Ford told anyone who asked, “My aim and my ambition are to be Speaker of the House of Representatives,”³⁰ which could only occur if the Republicans recaptured a majority of seats. Down by 155 seats, his party had a long way to go, but the GOP made progress in the 1966 congressional elections, gaining 47 House seats. Ford noted with satisfaction that the Grand Old Party “convinced the American people that we were the moderates and the president was on the left side of the spectrum.” Ford’s attention to the South was also paying off. “We can’t win 50 percent of the House seats from only 75 percent of the country,” he had railed during the midterm campaign. In January 1967 he welcomed twenty-eight new Southern Republicans to Washington.

On the day’s most important issue, however, Ford and his fellows missed the chance to corner the Democrats on the Far Left. When it came to Vietnam, neither major party managed to find the sensible center. A Cold War inertia had engulfed Washington, and Ford was part of the myopia. Yet he was more cautious and reflective about the possible dire consequences of America’s intervention into Southeast Asia than most of his GOP colleagues.

Ford recognized early on that the Vietnam War was taking a terrible toll on the United States, and not just in lost American lives. He often cited the latest casualty figures in his speeches, though he was certainly no antiwar dove. In fact, he advocated escalating the war effort, including an expanded aerial bombing campaign against North Vietnam. Instead of drawing distinctions between his party’s position and that of the Johnson administration, Ford seemingly underlined for the electorate that all the Republicans had to offer on Vietnam was more of the same. In a rare display of political tin ear, Ford passed on the GOP’s best chance to co-opt the war issue. A Senate Republican Policy Committee study released in 1967 suggested new ways to look at the political consequences of the Vietnam conflict and the possible strategies to end it. As the Senate committee report pointed out, “Republicans for two decades have believed the United States must not become involved in a land war on the Asian continent; we are so involved today.”³¹

The study then tried to define the real scope of the war while questioning the Republican role in prosecuting it—opening the possibility of redefining the GOP as the party for peace in Vietnam via international diplomacy. Ford unfortunately rejected the study’s ideas out of hand, maintaining that House Republicans overwhelmingly supported President Johnson on the war. They may well have, but their acquiescence to LBJ’s escalations was not in the country’s best interests and it certainly didn’t help the Republican cause.

William Proxmire, a Democratic senator from Wisconsin, had played football on the freshman team Gerald Ford coached at Yale in the 1930s. “In many ways, [Ford] is the same kind of man now that he was then,” Proxmire reflected, “solid and square. He is not a man of imagination.”