3

Foot Soldier for Nixon

Throughout the 1950s, Congressman Gerald Ford made national news by turning a Quonset Hut trailer into a mobile office to more efficiently service the outer reaches of his home district. In a memo directed at incoming House Republicans in 1963, he acknowledged that while tending to public relations might seem time consuming, it remained politically crucial:

I think it’s important for you to determine at the outset whether cases are a chore or an opportunity. In our office, we adopt this attitude—and sometimes I confess that it is a little difficult—but you will receive numerous communications from constituents, and at first reading you will feel that the inquiry is a bit senseless. And you wonder why he or she will have bothered you with this inquiry. In our office we always look at the inquiry from the point of view of the person who wrote it, not from our point of view, sitting in Washington.¹

In fact, Ford had stopped waiting for his constituents to write to him. Instead he began seeking them out. He trolled for their concerns in his mobile office, which enabled him to visit dozens of communities on a very tight schedule. With a similar openness to innovation, soon after self-developing film came on the market in 1948, Ford bought a Polaroid Land camera to keep in his Washington office so that visitors could get their pictures taken with their congressman, or seated at his desk if he was out. To Ford, a single Polaroid souvenir meant a loyal supporter for life. As House minority leader in the 1960s, Ford reached new heights in seeking voters, averaging three separate airline trips a week to speak on behalf of Republican causes and candidates—in thirty-two states in his first six months.² A typical such jaunt saw him completing his work on Capitol Hill around 3 p.m., dashing to Washington National Airport to get a flight to somewhere to make a speech, then racing to catch the last flight home. It would often be after midnight by the time he returned to the modest split-level home he and Betty had built in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1955. Even three decades off the gridiron, Gerald Ford still had the stamina to play the whole game, on both offense and defense.

Although Ford still had the fumbling syntax of a jock, too, his stump speeches were offset by his innate talent for public relations. He also had a knack for making people get along. As Republican conference chairman and later as House minority leader, Ford strove for cohesion and comity within his flock. Rather than strong-arm his cadre into sticking to the party line, Ford accepted differences of opinion within the fold. It made more sense to him to accommodate his members’ views than splintering apart into factions. So he played the good coach, giving his squad wide latitude to speak their minds. In exchange, he wanted no bickering. Ford’s open forum proved smart strategy. Whenever he needed broad cooperation on major votes, he could call on the goodwill his nice-guy approach had accrued to bring his colleagues in line.

It helped that Ford genuinely seemed less concerned about his own image than he did about the public’s perception of the Republican Party. He continually reminded his team how negative publicity tended to feed on itself, and how hard it was to stop. Using the House rules and his own influence, he took pains to steer individual representatives away from fulminating on divisive issues. ³ Again, the minority leader’s machinations focused on his main goal: keeping intraparty schisms from forming. In this effort he had the great advantage of never having to worry about his own reelection. Wes Vivian, a Michigan Democrat who served in the House from 1965 to 1967, told the journalist Richard Reeves, “There’s an old saying that if you get more than 55 percent of the vote back home, you haven’t used your potential—you could have offended more of your voters. Ford used his freedom in a different way because he wanted to be in the leadership. That’s a very different thing from voting for things that might cause trouble but won’t cost your seat—getting ahead internally depends on not offending anyone, avoiding entanglements, particularly ideological entanglements. You go to the gym, to the parties, you don’t make enemies—it’s a legitimate role inside the institution.”⁴

Unlike bullying congressional leaders like Lyndon Johnson, Ford did not coerce, and he did not seek ways to punish members who voted against the party on particular bills.⁵ Nevertheless, during his eight years as minority leader, fewer than a dozen House Republicans on average strayed from the GOP line on major votes.⁶ His style may have been plodding but it worked. In truth, he was successful because he was so unspectacular. There was nothing threatening about Gerald Ford, which encouraged others to let their guard down around him. Many pols underestimated just how effective a tactic this could be in the U.S. Congress.

“He’s an open tactician,” Illinois Republican Edward J. Derwinski remarked. “He doesn’t look for clever ways to sneak behind you. He does the obvious, which is usually common sense. He doesn’t try to be gimmicky.”⁷

Owing in part to Ford’s efforts in the House, by 1968 the Republican Party seemed to be coming together on the national level. After the GOP’s humiliating defeat in 1964, the vicious ideological rifts had healed to the point that the party’s old standard-bearer, Richard M. Nixon, appeared likelier to top the ticket than a more controversial choice such as California’s Ronald Reagan, New York’s Nelson Rockefeller, or Michigan’s George Romney.

In 1968 it was the Democrats’ turn to fall apart. President Johnson’s decision not to run for reelection opened the way for a bruising primary campaign, which was further marred by the tragic assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy. The party’s doom seemed sealed when the whole world watched as violent riots nearly tore apart that summer’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The Republicans’ gathering in Miami was a model of decorum by comparison. After only a rustle of dissent on behalf of Reagan and Rockefeller, the party faithful fell in behind Nixon’s candidacy on the first ballot. The nominee then assembled a number of GOP leaders, including Jerry Ford, in the candidate’s Miami hotel suite to discuss the bottom of the ticket. Naturally, the House minority leader’s name came up for the vice presidential slot. Ford remembered thinking about his now well-worn congressional scorecard. “At that moment,” he wrote in his memoir, “we had 187 Republicans in the House—and we had won forty-seven of those seats two years earlier. The Democrats were terribly divided by the Vietnam War and another big Republican win seemed a strong possibility. If we captured just thirty-one more seats, I’d be Speaker of the House. I thanked Nixon for his compliment but said I wasn’t interested.”⁸

Privately, Ford often expressed his preference for the Speaker’s post over the vice presidency. It was just as well, since Nixon didn’t intend to offer him the job. Many names were bandied about as possible running mates, including Reagan, Rockefeller, and Romney, as well as Oregon’s popular senator Mark Hatfield and two young politicians from Texas, Senator John G. Tower and Representative George H. W. Bush. Ford’s own preference was John V. Lindsay, New York’s telegenic mayor. Nixon, however, had already picked his man several weeks earlier: little-known Maryland governor Spiro T. Agnew.

A Baltimore lawyer and political operator who had been elected to his state’s top job in 1966, Agnew was considered a moderate Republican. “In talking with Agnew,” Nixon wrote in his presidential memoir, “I had been impressed by him as a man who seemed to have a great deal of inner strength. Though he had no foreign policy experience, his instincts seemed to parallel mine … . He expressed deep concern about the plight of the nation’s urban areas. He appeared to have presence, poise, and dignity, which would contribute greatly to his effectiveness both as a candidate and, if we should win, as Vice President.”⁹

Jerry and Betty Ford were sitting by the pool at their Miami hotel when they heard the stunning news that Nixon was putting Agnew on the ticket. In his memoir, Ford recalled thinking that Agnew “seemed like a nice enough person, but he lacked national experience or recognition. And now, after just two years as governor, he was going to run for Vice President. I shook my head in disbelief.”¹⁰ Agnew himself apparently agreed. After a brief floor battle over the choice was quashed in the interest of party unity, the vice presidential nominee proclaimed in his acceptance speech, “I stand here with a deep sense of improbability of this moment.”¹¹

As the 1968 GOP convention ended, national presidential preference polls indicated a wide lead for the Republican candidates over the Democratic ticket of Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota and Senator Edmund S. Muskie of Maine. The American Independent Party campaign of segregationist Alabama governor George C. Wallace and retired air force general Curtis LeMay, however, sapped support from the Republican right wing, leaving Nixon and Agnew struggling while the Democrats picked up steam through the autumn with promises of peace in Vietnam.

Although Nixon hung on for a slim win in November—beating Humphrey by less than one percentage point of the popular vote—his coattails pulled in only five House and six Senate seats for the Republicans. Gerald Ford, to his great disappointment, was stuck as minority leader for at least another two years. He blamed Nixon and Agnew’s clumsy campaign for the paltry Republican gains in Congress. Still, Ford felt heartened that at least he would finally have a Republican White House to work with as minority leader—although that, too, would prove a terrible disappointment.

One of the most perplexing failings of the Nixon administration was its willful refusal to nurture a good working relationship with Congress, even with individual congressmen from its own party. After all, Nixon himself had served in both houses of the legislature, and thus should have been an old hand at getting things done there. Perhaps his eight years in the executive branch as vice president had given him a sense of lèse-majesté toward Capitol Hill; maybe he had gotten so used to the swift workings of his New York law practice since somewhere along the line he had lost all patience with the unwieldy Congress.

For every president, dealing with the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue is like walking a tightrope in a shifting wind. No matter how much advance planning has been done, success still lies in sensitivity, in having the inclination as well as the skill to make adjustments at every step. By the time Nixon reached the White House, he had soured on Congress’s endless wrangling to the point that he opted to ignore it in favor of the instantly effective executive-order process. Even as Ford was happily anticipating a new era of cooperation with the White House, Nixon was brooding about being “the first president in 120 years to begin his term with both houses of Congress controlled by the opposition party.”¹²

With the Democrats controlling Congress, Nixon decided to consolidate executive power, largely ignoring the legislative branch on foreign affairs. The “Imperial Presidency,” as Nixon’s would come to be called, concentrated its power in a tiny cabal of handpicked White House aides, most of them new to Washington. Among the most influential was John D. Ehrlichman, a former land-use lawyer from Seattle whose only political loyalty was to Richard Nixon. Serving him first as counsel and later as White House Domestic Council director, Ehrlichman was in charge of the president’s legislative program, working with what he called “that Congressional herd of mediocrities.”¹³ Ehrlichman found the House minority leader emblematic of these “mediocrities,” and therefore no threat to the White House. “At my first meeting with our Republican leader in the House of Representatives, Gerald Ford, I was not impressed,” Ehrlichman later wrote. “It was clear in our first conversation in 1969 that Ford wasn’t thrilled to be harnessed to the Nixon Administration. Furthermore, he seemed slow to grasp the substantive information we were trying to give him. I came away from his office with the impression that Jerry Ford might have become a pretty good Grand Rapids insurance agent; he played a good game of golf, but he wasn’t excessively bright.”¹⁴

In truth, Ford was smart enough to figure out a way to keep the White House from bullying its programs through. He may not have had much imagination but he did know how to block and hold the line. His innate caution worked to his advantage in dealing with slickly aggressive types like Ehrlichman. And he wasn’t about to knuckle under to any administration’s arrogant disdain of the United States Congress, no matter what party they came from. Instead, he would just stall, and wait for them to learn how things were done. “As our proposals began to move to Congress,” Ehrlichman noted, “I discovered that Ford, when he disagreed with Nixon’s policies or programs, just didn’t work on our bills.” The standoff only grew tenser. In the Ninety-first Congress, the legislative branch proved relatively cooperative, voting with the White House’s preferences 80 percent of the time. By the end of 1970, however, that percentage began dropping precipitously.¹⁵ And the friction grew exponentially between Nixon and his supposed Republican friends in the House and Senate leadership.

Robert T. Hartmann, who worked on Gerald Ford’s congressional staff, felt as perplexed as his boss by the attitude and atmosphere Nixon had brought to the capital. “Deep down in his heart,” Hartmann averred, “Nixon had a classic case of contempt for Congress. He was a solo player; he didn’t understand the power of Congress—the kind of bonding of the patriarchs. We soon found out that what Nixon wanted from the House minority leader was to do little errands for him, most of them slightly dirty; if he was attacked by Teddy Kennedy, we were supposed to get up and denounce Teddy on the House floor.”¹⁶

If Ford felt his loyalties torn between the legislature he loved and the Republican president he seemed to be expected to serve, he had no such compunctions about taking on the judiciary. In 1969, Gerald Ford inexplicably set out to remove Associate Justice William O. Douglas from the United States Supreme Court.

The seventy-one-year-old Douglas had sat on the Court since Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed him in 1939. Douglas had a long and distinguished history on the bench, but his support for civil liberties and environmental conservation rankled many conservatives. The right wing also didn’t cotton to the justice’s bon-vivant lifestyle. Douglas was an obstreperous, hard-drinking womanizer who lived far beyond his salary. He made up for that in part by writing books, most of them about his travels to exotic spots around the globe. But Douglas’s 1969 book, Points of Rebellion, analyzed and for the most part defended the rising protest movement against the Vietnam War.

Gerald Ford had been incensed by the antiwar protests for years, seeing in them “the seeds of Communist atrocity.”¹⁷ In 1968, he strongly supported passage of the Campus Disorders Act, which aimed to withhold federal subsidies from any student who took part in campus protests. When Points of Rebellion came out in 1969, Ford was so outraged by it that he launched an investigation into its author. That November, Ford made the shocking announcement that he was drawing up plans to impeach Douglas. It was an unprecedented assault on a justice of the Supreme Court by a member of the congressional leadership.

Earlier in 1969, Justice Abe Fortas—another liberal—had been forced to resign amid charges of financial improprieties, exposing a new level of vulnerability in the Court and among its members, which no doubt helped inspire Ford’s machinations against Douglas. The search for Fortas’s successor jump-started the House minority leader to keep going.

To replace Fortas, President Nixon initially nominated U.S. Appeals Court judge Clement F. Haynsworth Jr., a Southern conservative. After the Senate discovered that Haynsworth’s ethical record looked at least as questionable as Fortas’s, it refused to confirm him. As Indiana Democratic senator Birch Bayh—who led the rapidly growing effort to reject the nomination—pointed out, Haynsworth had “sat on cases involving litigees in which he had financial interest.”¹⁸

It was just as the Haynsworth nomination faltered that Ford suddenly announced he was considering starting impeachment proceedings against Douglas. “If the United States Senate does establish new ethical standards for Supreme Court nominees,” Ford proclaimed, “then these same standards ought to be applicable to sitting members.”¹⁹ Ford was playing a poker hand, and for much higher stakes than he was used to.

The findings he hinted at came from the investigation he had ordered into Douglas’s antiwar book. The most salacious tidbit involved the publication of an excerpt in an issue of the Evergreen Review that also featured a pornographic photo spread. Ford also revealed that Justice Douglas had been receiving an annual salary from a foundation with ties to the Las Vegas gambling industry. But even though Ford publicly declared that his information came from independent research and with no input from the Nixon administration, the Justice Department was, in fact, feeding him leads.²⁰

In April 1970, after Nixon’s second choice, Court of Appeals judge G. Harrold Carswell of Florida, was rejected by the Senate (it was discovered that he had made a speech calling for white supremacy during his 1948 campaign for the Georgia legislature),²¹ Ford escalated his vendetta against Douglas. Calling the justice “unfit” to serve on the nation’s highest bench, Ford avowed in a speech to the House, “I would vote to impeach him right now.”²² To prove he meant business, Ford set up a special House subcommittee tasked with reassessing Douglas’s ethical standing.

“It’s an ugly mood,” a Democratic senator told the New York Times. “What we seem to be witnessing is McCarthyism directed not at personalities, but institutions.”²³

The tangled reasons for Ford’s bold crusade against Douglas grew out of the political complexities Richard Nixon had brought to town. It is telling that when Ford felt pressured by the Nixon administration to do something to bring Congress into line, he could not force himself to “get up and denounce Teddy,” as Robert Hartmann had put it. Congress remained sacrosanct as a place for conciliation in Ford’s eyes. But if he couldn’t bring himself to do Nixon’s bidding within the legislature, his own ambition demanded he find another way to satisfy the president.

That left the Supreme Court, and Ford’s bright idea was to turn the judiciary into a low-risk, high-profile arena for partisan battles too messy to fight elsewhere. In the end, Ford’s ill-considered effort to impeach Justice Douglas failed miserably, as did his larger design for the Court. What’s more, after such noisy public call-toarms the Douglas debacle left a scar on Gerald Ford’s benign reputation as a generally sensible politician. Perhaps that was what Nixon had in mind: to weaken the popular GOP House leader by getting him to paint himself as a puppet of the White House. In any case, Ford’s uncharacteristically mean gambit against Douglas permanently attached him to the Nixon administration, for better or for worse.

Despite Ford’s protests that he had been neither asked nor ordered to mount the attack on Douglas, notes that John Ehrlichman took at a White House meeting in 1969 indicate that Nixon did indeed order his aide to instruct Ford to “move to impeach” the offending liberal justice. Furthermore, Ehrlichman recalled that he did so, the very same afternoon. If Ehrlichman’s account as supported by the handwritten notes is accurate, then Gerald Ford had participated in the Nixon White House’s dirty tricks on at least one occasion. Ford, however, didn’t remember Nixon ever asking him to impeach Douglas. “Ehrlichman has no credibility on anything. I was close enough to Dick to pretty much ignore Ehrlichman and those guys, who were evil influences on him,” Ford recalled. “Sometimes I would go meet Dick privately, when those guys weren’t around, to speak my mind. I think he liked that I circumvented them.”²⁴ Rather than visit the White House, Ford would sometimes meet Nixon at Andrews Air Force Base, just to welcome him home and talk policy without henchmen listening in on their private conversation. “Standing in the rain at midnight Sunday to welcome me home, as you did last evening,” Nixon wrote Ford on August 4, 1969, “was far beyond the call of duty on any citizen for any President.”²⁵