6

The Pardon Meets Whip Inflation Now

Ford’s inauguration was eclipsed by Nixon’s teary farewell that same day, with the media portraying Ford as a dull coda to the monstrous Nixon saga. The image of a lip-biting Nixon flashing the double-victory sign from the steps of his helicopter was immediately seared onto the national memory for posterity. Nobody heard Ford leaning over and whispering into his wife’s ear, “We can do it!” Aside from Washington, Lincoln, and FDR—America’s big three—it’s difficult to recall a president who took office amid less favorable circumstances. The true public courage exhibited that day didn’t emanate from Nixon fleeing Washington but from Ford, who was anxious to heal a deeply divided nation. He was being asked to assume the presidency in a White House sinking in the quicksands of Vietnam and Watergate. Ford said “yes” not because he wanted power but because it was his duty.

The new president’s White House transition team wasted no time removing every visible trace of Richard Nixon from the Oval Office, scurrying about replacing his mementos with photographs of Gerald Ford in notable company and settings. The transfer of power had been elegantly executed in accordance with the U.S. Constitution. Capitalizing on the sense of pride in America this had engendered, President Ford began by revolutionizing the presidency’s political style. By quickly highlighting his contrasts with Nixon, Ford redefined the public image of the office as well. “Within an hour of his swearing-in,” Jerald F. terHorst reported, “Ford appeared in the White House press room, where he told waiting reporters of his hopes ‘for the kind of rapport and friendship we’ve had in the past. And I don’t ask you to treat me any better. We will have an open … and candid Administration. I can’t change my nature after sixty-one years.’”¹

Where Nixon had barricaded himself in the White House behind the shield of “executive privilege,” Ford spent most nights during his first week as leader of the free world at his house in suburban Alexandria, Virginia. News photographers clicked away madly early his first full day as president when Ford came out on his front step in his pajamas to get the morning paper.²

Everything about the chief executive had changed—except, at first, the top personnel advising the president. Ford, a firm believer in the collegial approach to decision making, kept on Nixon’s entire cabinet and White House staff, in the interest of continuity. Two of the holdovers immediately asserted their claims to what had been their considerable turf under Nixon. The first to stake out his territory was Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who portentously warned Ford that any change in U.S. foreign policy—which was to say, in Kissinger’s foreign policy—would betray America’s Watergate-weakened state to the world, with potentially dire consequences. “Henry is a genius,” Nixon had told Ford before resigning, “but you don’t have to accept everything he commends. He can be invaluable, and he’ll be very loyal, but you can’t let him have a totally free hand.”³

Ford didn’t need Nixon to convince him that Kissinger was a genius diplomatist. Back in the early 1960s, when Ford was head of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, Kissinger, then a Harvard professor, used to invite the Michigan congressman to address his class. “I was really impressed with the guy,” Ford recalled. “We had some wonderful times together in Cambridge. He was smarter than me and I liked that about him. Later we’d see each other in New York or Washington, D.C. I was fond of him. Not everybody can make you think and laugh at the same time.”⁴

Next to make his work known was Chief of Staff Alexander Haig, who “made it clear that he had been running the government for the last eight or ten months of the Nixon Presidency,” according to terHorst, who was about to become Ford’s White House press secretary.⁵ The former army general left a strong impression with his snap-to manner and crisp grasp of White House operations. The new president soon took to leaning heavily on Haig’s judgment, to the dismay of the long-standing advisers Ford had brought with him from his congressional staff. At the Republican National Committee, George H. W. Bush remained cautiously hopeful that Ford would build a solid White House. “My own views are that the Vice President can make it as President,” Bush confided to his diary on August 6. “He is a latter-day Eisenhower … without the heroics but he has that decency the country is crying out for right now.”⁶

Ford left no doubt about his desire to change the executive branch with his first and most important political appointment, which he had to make as soon as possible. For the second time in a year the vice presidency was vacant, meaning that Speaker of the House Carl Albert would be in the White House should anything happen to Gerald Ford. After listening to the suggestions of many advisers, the new president went with his own gut in picking his understudy. On August 20 he nominated former New York governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, the multimillionaire GOP liberal. Rockefeller had little in common with the Midwestern conservative president whose dad had sold paint for a living. In fact, he disagreed with Ford on many policy issues. But “Rocky” had star quality and Ford’s PR instincts told him that was what his new administration needed most. The bumptious, broad-grinning Rockefeller was the civic-minded icon of a genuine American dynasty, with merry eyes behind his big, square black glasses, and a deep interest in global affairs. “Even with governors like Franklin Roosevelt and Thomas Dewey,” Richard Reeves reported, “New York had never had a foreign policy until Rockefeller came along.”⁷

Meanwhile, the American people accorded Ford a honeymoon for simply not being Richard Nixon. The new president enjoyed sky-high popularity ratings. A Gallup poll commissioned by the New York Times in late August showed that 71 percent of those surveyed approved of his performance, with only 3 percent disapproving.⁸ Ford immediately took advantage of his popularity. First, he made a genuine effort to reach out to groups that traditionally did not support Republicans. He saw himself primarily as a conciliator, and sincerely wanted to mend the old rips in the nation’s fabric. He courted African-American political leaders, inviting the Congressional Black Caucus to meet with him at the White House just three days into his presidency. Ford also invited AFL-CIO president George Meany in to talk about labor issues. “I wasn’t considered pro–Big Labor,” Ford recalled. “But I respected the power of Big Labor.”⁹

Then, at the Veterans of Foreign Wars national convention in Chicago, on August 19, Ford overturned a firm Nixon policy, proposing conditional amnesty for Vietnam War draft dodgers and deserters. “I am throwing the weight of the presidency on the side of leniency,” he announced. Coming from a conservative Republican who had once been as hard on Vietnam protesters as any politician in the country, Ford’s amnesty announcement was surprisingly well received, and his popularity remained high. “The VFW speech was the most striking example to date that Richard Nixon was gone,” Richard Reeves observed, “showing a President compassionately aware of the divisions among Americans.”¹⁰

But Nixon didn’t stay gone for long, and his reemergence as a public issue dramatically ended Ford’s honeymoon. To Ford’s chagrin, at his first press conference, on August 28, nearly one-third of the questions were related to Nixon’s legal plight. If Ford wanted to move America forward, he would have to put Watergate behind him. On Sunday, September 8, 1974, President Ford, after taking the Holy Communion at St. John’s Episcopal Church, in Washington, D.C., made a far less unifying surprise announcement than his amnesty program had proved to be. He appeared on national television that Sunday morning to tell the nation he was granting “a full, free and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offenses against the United States … he … may have committed.”¹¹

Ford’s pardon decision was met with high-octane jeers. “The decision seemed baffling, shocking,” Bob Woodward recalled. “Though there had been some published speculation that Ford would pardon Nixon, conventional wisdom, which I embraced, held that Nixon was radioactive.”¹² Woodward—like many Americans—smelled a rat. He felt betrayed by Genial Jerry, the supposed exemplar of no-frills Midwestern straightforwardness. So too did his Washington Post colleague Carl Bernstein. The dreaded word “betrayal” was being bandied about Washington officialdom regarding Ford; it hung around the accidental president’s neck with the finality of a tombstone salutation. Had Ford cut a quid pro quo agreement with Nixon (that is, resignation in exchange for pardon)? Why were the pardon terms so favorable to the ex-president? Did White House Chief of Staff Alexander Haig—the key link between Nixon and Ford—cut a deal between the two leaders? What legal information justified the pardon decision? Who advised Ford to make such a bold reversal? Questions like these rained down on Ford. Most reporters agreed with Woodward, who succinctly deemed the pardon “secret and dirty.”

Ford may have shown mercy to Nixon, but the newspaper editorials were merciless on Ford. The New York Times claimed that this “blundering intervention” was a “body blow to the president’s own credibility.” The Boston Globe chimed in that the pardon was “a gross misuse, if not abuse, of presidential power.” The Washington Post went even further, declaring that Ford’s grand forgiveness was “nothing less than the continuation of a cover-up.”¹³ The conservative columnist George Will wrote: “The lethal fact is that Mr. Ford has now demonstrated that … he doesn’t mean what he says.” ¹⁴

The first Gallup poll after the pardon reported that 59 percent of the public disapproved of it. The honeymoon was over. The historian Barry Werth, in his fine book 31 Days, correctly deemed September 8 the “Day of the Avalanche.” Hundreds of protest letters began piling up in the White House mailroom while the switchboard lighted up with calls running 8 to 1 against the pardon. The American Civil Liberties Union compared the pardon to the Nuremberg Trial “in which the Nazi leaders would have been let off.” U.S. District Court Judge John Sirica, who had sent more than a dozen White House aides to prison, was livid over the pardon, later writing that if Nixon “had been convicted in my court, I would have sent him to jail.”

The widespread suspicion that the pardon came out of a secret deal between Nixon and his handpicked successor irredeemably tarnished Gerald Ford’s political career. Intended to put Watergate behind the nation once and for all, Ford’s pardon of his predecessor did just the opposite in the minds of many Americans, who saw it as an extension of Nixon’s unlamented “imperial presidency,” stained with the same reliance on “executive privilege.” Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory turned her trenchant pen on Ford, speaking for many in sneering, “He said he was ‘healing the country.’ What he was doing was a favor to an old friend while simultaneously trying to sink a nasty situation well before his own re-election campaign.”¹⁵

In fact, the Nixon pardon should not have come as such a surprise. To begin with, Gerald Ford had never pretended to be anything but a pure politician, a profession in which long-term success depends on justifying the means with the ends. And in his very first remarks as president, “Our long national nightmare is over,” he had made his desired end—a determination to leave Watergate (and, more to the point, Richard Nixon) in the past—clearly obvious.

What’s more, speculation about a pardon for Nixon had begun almost a year before, at Ford’s vice presidential confirmation hearings. There, on November 5, 1973, Ford had responded under questioning that he didn’t think the public would stand for a president halting legal proceedings against a guilty predecessor. (And he was certainly right about that.) In the weeks after Nixon resigned, the debate flared up again. Newsweek’s August 19 issue contained an analysis headlined “Should Nixon Be Granted Immunity?” in which it warned that a Ford pardon of Nixon would “smack too much of a deal between the two men.”¹⁶

The matter appeared to have been put to rest by the end of August. Watergate special prosecutor Leon Jaworski resumed looking for ways to address the case against Nixon through judicial process. Jaworski later revealed that just before Nixon resigned, Haig had come to him to float the notion of terminating the case against the president once he forsook the nation’s highest office. Jaworski was quick to add that Haig’s gambit had failed, and no agreement concerning Nixon’s fate had been reached with him. What gave the story significance was its revelation that Ford wasn’t the only power broker Haig had approached to discern—or perhaps determine—Richard Nixon’s fate.

For his part, Ford continued to deny that he had made any deal regarding Nixon’s pardon, and a certain logic backed up his claims. By the time Haig called on Ford on August 1, Nixon’s resignation was virtually assured, leaving his vice president no reason to negotiate. Ford was going to be his replacement; the only question was whether it would happen through Nixon’s resignation or by his impeachment. If Ford promised him a pardon, the speculation went, Nixon would resign immediately; if not, the wounded president would drag the nation through a long and ugly impeachment process. The specter of such an arrangement came to haunt Ford from the moment he announced the pardon.

Deal or no deal, Richard Nixon never had much to fear from Gerald Ford, and he knew it. He had watched Ford prove his character through his twenty-six years in politics: aggressive with the strong but forgiving toward the weak, he may have been the least vindictive pol in Washington. Nixon also knew it was Ford’s natural inclination to dispel trouble rather than prolong it; in fact, his antipathy for contention had guided many of his actions as House minority leader. In retrospect, even his antic defense of Nixon over the previous year looked like an attempt to schmooze the Watergate problem away. As vice president, Ford had made a point of keeping his distance from the scandal, so it hardly seemed likely that he would help let it fester on as president.

Given all he knew about Gerald Ford, it is a stretch to think that Richard Nixon truly feared that he would ever go to prison. He had picked his successor too well; a pardon of some sort was inevitable. Jerry Ford, his friend since 1949, wouldn’t let him down. All that remained was the timing. And something, or several things, suddenly drove Ford to reverse his public stances on granting Nixon a pardon early in September.

According to Ford aide Robert Hartmann, the new president first mentioned the possibility of a pardon on August 30, when he told his most trusted advisers that he was tired of spending so much of his time addressing questions about Watergate. “Matter-of-factly,” Hartmann recalled, “Ford said he was very much inclined to grant Nixon immunity from further persecution as soon as he was sure he had the legal authority to do so. There was a deafening silence. There is an antique clock on the Oval Office wall … . At this moment it shattered the silence like a burst of machine-gun fire.”¹⁷

Philip Buchen, Ford’s long-ago law partner, now serving as White House counsel, and his bright young colleague Benton Becker immediately set to poring over legal precedents regarding presidential pardons. Before long the pair produced a 1915 U.S. Supreme Court case, Burdick v. United States, that not only established that a pardon could be granted before any indictment had been handed down but that a pardon, once accepted, “carries an imputation of guilt, acceptance, a confession of it.”¹⁸

In fact, the case had redefined the whole concept of a pardon. Issuing a pardon did not mean exoneration of the recipient, as most people thought. Instead, a pardon rendered a verdict without a trial—or punishment. Ford seized on the point. It just might be enough to make pardoning Nixon palatable. Thus the president wanted to make it clear to Nixon that if he accepted the pardon, he would in effect be admitting his guilt. To drive the point home, Becker was dispatched to San Clemente to go over all the ramifications of a pardon with Nixon in person.

As it turned out, Nixon already knew what Becker had come to tell him, just as he already knew what Ford was thinking at every step. Al Haig had been keeping his old boss informed of everything that was said in the supposedly confidential Oval Office discussions about a pardon for Nixon.¹⁹ Ford should have known better than to trust his predecessor’s take-charge chief of staff, but he couldn’t grasp the level of deviousness Nixon had provoked in his staff. Gerald Ford’s mistake lay in believing that his White House could operate according to his pledge of “candor and openness” when it remained packed with Nixon holdovers—a number of whom had at least as much reason to want Nixon pardoned immediately as the former president himself did.

For high-level Nixon associates such as Al Haig, Donald Rumsfeld, and Pat Buchanan—not to mention Henry Kissinger—a full-scale trial of the former chief executive posed many potential dangers. At best, such a proceeding would only further cement their ties to the nation’s most scandal-mired administration; worse, a trial might open up new avenues of investigation these aides preferred to remain unexplored.

Among the more controversial aspects of the pardon Ford came to grant was that it did not cover those who had already been indicted for or convicted of Watergate-related crimes. Ironically, it would serve to protect those who had not yet been charged, however likely they were to be, as Nixon’s pardon would effectively put an end to future Watergate investigations. Without Nixon, the impetus for further inquiries would simply lose steam. Knowing this, every White House holdover had good reason to root for Nixon’s quick pardon, and those with influence over President Ford undoubtedly pushed the idea whenever they spoke with him.

In any event, during the first week of September, Ford certainly seemed in a rush to grant the pardon. He did so that weekend, without consulting any members of the House Judiciary Committee or Special Prosecutor Jaworski. Robert Hartmann suggested that Ford may have been warned by any number of intermediaries that Nixon’s health was failing under the stress of his situation, or perhaps even that the disgraced ex-president was contemplating suicide. Those possibilities might indeed have accounted for the swiftness of Ford’s action. On the morning of September 8, shortly before he informed the nation what he had done, Ford explained his decision to Jerald terHorst, who had just handed the president his letter of resignation over the pardon. “It was not an easy decision for me to make,” Ford told his soon-to-be-ex-press secretary. “I thought about it a lot and prayed, too … . I’m not concerned about the election in 1976 or the politics of it … . I know there will be controversy over this, but it’s the right thing to do and that’s why I decided to do it now. I hope you can see that.”²⁰

Whether anyone could or not, once he announced Nixon’s pardon on September 8, at least Ford knew his real work could finally begin. As he remarked later, “I felt I had come to the conclusion that I had an obligation—which was my own decision—to spend 100 percent of my time on the problems of 230 [sic] million people, rather than 25 percent of my time on the problems of one man.”²¹

The pardon of Richard Nixon brought a quick end to the brief era of good feeling toward Jerry Ford. When Ford traveled to Pittsburgh the day after to deliver a speech on inflation, he was met by frenzied protestors chanting, “Jail Ford!” and one even waving a placard that read, “Up Yours!” The next afternoon the U.S. Senate passed a resolution by 55 to 24 urging Ford not to pardon anyone else associated with Watergate until the defendants had stood trial. The pardon was, simply put, bad politics. It was open season on Ford. Americans of every political stripe denounced the move with a vehemence that proved just how agonizing the Watergate crisis had been for the country—a new Gallup poll showed Ford’s approval rating having instantly sunk from 71 to 50 percent.²²

Ford’s tenure abruptly entered its middle phase the day he pardoned Nixon. However controversial his choice may have been, and no matter how suspiciously rushed his announcement of it had seemed, the fact remained clear in Ford’s mind that it had been his decision to make, and he stuck to it. A month later, the president took the near-unprecedented step of agreeing to appear at a public hearing for questioning by a House Judiciary subcommittee. During the two-hour hearing on October 17, broadcast live on national television, Ford repeated that he had granted the pardon “out of my concern to serve the best interests of my country.” Although he revealed for the first time that he had discussed the possibility of a pardon with Al Haig a week before Nixon resigned, under harsh questioning Ford pounded the witness table and thundered back, “There was no deal, period.”²³

A year and a half later, Ford still stuck to his guns when asked about the Nixon pardon. “I did it, I did it at the right time and I am convinced that it was right,” he replied. “I am convinced it was right in the national interest, and I would do it again.”²⁴ In announcing the pardon, Ford had explained himself by asserting that the Nixon family’s saga “is an American tragedy [and] someone must write and end to it. I have concluded that only I can do that. And if I can, I must … . As a man, my first consideration will always be to be true to my own convictions and my own conscience.” Even veteran political reporters believed this, coming from Ford, and admired his steadfastness on the subject even if they despised his granting the pardon. Indeed, “no matter what the consequences,” wrote Richard Reeves, “Gerald R. Ford, Jr., did it because of who he is—and he probably would have done it if he knew for certain it would destroy his Presidency.”²⁵

That rock-hard moral core defined Jerry Ford, as a man and as president. Ford’s bedrock certainty of his own ethics enabled him to weather even the denunciation of most of his own countrymen. In fact, it was in that lonely moment after he pardoned Nixon to such a negative reaction that Ford seemed to rise to his new office for the first time. Unrattled by the speed of events or by their uneven consequences, Gerald Ford remained the steadiest of public men, certain of his course and confident in his ability to keep to it. He may have landed in the White House without planning to but he proved well prepared for the nation’s highest office, intellectually as well as emotionally. In truth, if there was any artifice in Ford’s approach to the presidency, it lay in his tendency to simplify himself and his ideas. On the personal front, his wife, Betty, was diagnosed with breast cancer in late September, leaving him in low spirits for months. But he never moped.²⁶ Unlike most statesmen, he consistently underplayed his own sophistication, or at least allowed others to. “Either by luck, happenstance, or divine grace,” the historian Walter Isaacson summarized, “the nation’s constitutional process had come forth with an unexpected president who was right for the moment.”²⁷

That said, Ford also understood that to be an effective president would take more than coming across as a regular Joe, welcome as the contrast was with Richard Nixon’s arrogant aloofness. For all his colleagues’ claims that the president remained the same good ol’ Jerry Ford they had always known, it was by breaking with his GOP partisan past that Ford would truly grow into the role of chief executive. As a member of Congress, Ford had rarely strayed from his beloved Republican Party’s line. As House minority leader, he even more readily accepted the GOP’s insistence on espousing only its partisan views. As Nixon’s vice president he served much the same function, operating like a sort of Republican whip in the executive branch. As president, by contrast, Ford ignored his party’s constraints to a surprising degree, becoming a far less political animal than at any other point in his long career.

He loosened his party ties deliberately, out of respect for his extraordinary position as the only U.S. president never to be elected to national office. Unlike all his predecessors (save George Washington), he had never slogged through the mud of a presidential campaign. Thus arriving in the White House with neither an untoward gratitude for those who had supported him nor any lingering animosity toward those who hadn’t, Ford gained an unobstructed view of his enormous and widely diverse constituency. Outside the Fifth District of Michigan, he rarely encountered anyone who had ever voted for—or against—him. Ford fully grasped the special obligation this imposed on him, and felt honor bound to fulfill it.

Ford’s record in the White House betrayed a remarkably evenhanded nonpartisanship regarding policies, as well as appointments. The onetime rock-solid conservative Republican chose as vice president the man who had given his name to the GOP’s leftliberal wing, and he also brought a significant number of Democrats into his administration. Had Ford stayed closer to his roots instead of opting to forgo partisanship in favor of national unity, his party’s conservative base might well have supported him. But at least he would leave the presidency in far better shape than he had found it, and perhaps even healthier than it had been in decades.

This feat appeared all the more impressive in light of the state of the nation whose leadership he had inherited. When Ford took over the presidency, Congressional Quarterly published a long list of the pressing issues facing him, including labor discontent, agriculture, commodity shortfalls, serious job losses in the housing industry, and many more—and that was just on the domestic side. Topping this dire agenda was a whole complex of troubles in the U.S. economy, which was not just ailing but lying almost flattened by a condition so mysterious it had never been diagnosed before. Among all the economic models conjured by the dismal science, none could account for 1974’s baffling combination of rampant inflation and unemployment higher than at any time since the tail end of the Great Depression in 1940.

In standard Keynesian theory, inflation indicates an overheated economy, which on the bright side generates new jobs. Under the same models, unemployment denotes a stagnant economy, in which demand for products stays so low that prices deflate. The contrary, lose-lose situation of 1974 was perplexing enough to call for a new term: the appropriately dispiriting “stagflation.” This new financial malady sent economists scurrying to discern how and why a populace that was ostensibly earning less income seemed so willing to spend an ever larger portion of it. At the same time, the experts also warned that the U.S. economy was on the verge of falling into a major recession—accompanied by yet more inflation, presenting yet a further contradiction.

True to form, Ford tackled the nation’s economic crisis head-on via a PR campaign. With inflation hovering around 12 percent annually and unemployment holding at 5 percent, the president leaped at a staff suggestion, seconded by syndicated finance columnist Sylvia Porter, that the way to end inflation was through a grassroots civic movement. In his memoir, Ford would explain the idea with a touching simplicity. “Once you had 213 million Americans recognizing that inflation was a problem and joining in the effort to do something about it, positive results would have to follow,” he wrote. “If both the government and the people tightened their belts voluntarily and spent less than they had before, that would reduce demand, and the inflation rate would start going down.”²⁸

In an attempt to gin one up, on October 8 Ford unveiled his volunteer-driven “Whip Inflation Now” program, complete with red-and-white WIN buttons and Sylvia Porter’s exhortations that Americans build “Victory Gardens,” following the example of World War II.²⁹ Echoing Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s calls to the citizenry to conserve for the war effort, WIN made a commonsense pitch to Americans to stop wasting money and resources, especially fuel. “If we all drive a least five percent fewer miles, we can save—almost unbelievably—250,000 barrels of foreign oil per day,” President Ford informed the nation.³⁰ He also urged his constituents to stop wasting so much food, pointing out the economic foolishness of buying more than they could eat and throwing the rest out. As sensible as Ford’s 1974 economic initiative and the truths behind his speech were, unfortunately, the vast majority of Americans weren’t buying it. They were too busy enjoying lower-priced gasoline, after the end of the Arab oil embargo of the previous winter. Sometime after World War II it seemed the nation had lost its capacity for self-sacrifice in the broader interest, no matter how worthy and smart the cause—and effects—might be. Thanks to this obtuseness, in late 1974 most Americans—including some of the president’s own economic advisers—just laughed WIN off. Not surprisingly, Ford’s well-intentioned appeal failed to put a dent in the country’s economic problems.

Alongside the announcement of WIN on October 8, President Ford put forth a ten-point plan to right the U.S. economy. The centerpiece of the plan, a tax increase for corporations and high-income individuals, aimed to help control inflation while offsetting the deficit spending Nixon had bequeathed to his successor. Apart from its WIN component, the plan was largely the work of the Economic Policy Board, chaired by Secretary of the Treasury William Simon, a Nixon appointee and former Wall Street bond broker. As the newly created board’s executive director, Ford recruited William Seidman, as a fellow Michigander who had made a fortune in the accounting business. The third member of Ford’s economic troika, fiscal conservative Alan Greenspan, was a think-tank veteran whose nomination by Nixon to chair the Council of Economic Advisers made it through the Senate only after the presidency changed hands, becoming effective on September 1, 1974.

Another Nixon hand climbed to a higher rung under Ford later that month, but in this case by maneuvering out the ex-president’s erstwhile right hand. Indeed, Donald Rumsfeld may have been the only operator in Washington savvy enough to get rid of Al Haig. Having evaded any connections to Watergate by taking the job of U.S. ambassador to NATO in February 1973, Rumsfeld returned from Europe to engineer himself back into the White House the old-fashioned, backroom way: by getting Haig kicked way upstairs and out of the country, to serve as supreme allied commander Europe as well as commander in chief of American forces in Europe—two military positions too prestigious to turn down.

With Haig out of the White House by the end of September 1974, Ford immediately boosted the overall efficiency of the operation, though in a style so combative it engendered internecine feuds that put those during the Nixon administration to shame. It would prove to be Rumsfeld who before long would see to the departures of both longtime Ford adviser Robert Hartmann and Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, as well as the marginalization of Vice President Nelson Rockefeller and even superstar Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

As his top deputy, Rumsfeld chose Dick Cheney, a self-effacing thirty-three-year-old from Wyoming who had been assisting Rumsfeld in various positions for several years. “Cheney’s ascent in the Ford White House,” James Mann averred in his book The Rise of the Vulcans, “served as an illustration of how an individual can rise to the top by virtue of his willingness to take care of the mundane chores that persons with larger egos avoid, thereby establishing reliability and learning all the inner workings of an organization.”³¹ The Ford White House’s power-playing pair would quickly gain as much clout with their president as Haldeman and Ehrlichman had enjoyed with Nixon.

However efficiently his staff performed, nevertheless Gerald Ford found it hard to notch much progress. The president campaigned hard for Republican candidates in the November 1974 congressional elections, but with his administration’s highlights to that point consisting of Nixon’s pardon, the proposed tax hike, and WIN buttons, Ford proved of little help to his party. The Republicans lost five seats in the U.S. Senate and forty-eight in the House of Representatives. Although his career ambitions no longer hinged on the outcome, Ford still put enormous store in the midterm election results. He knew that without a congressional majority, his administration’s ability to affect the legislative process would be hamstrung. Moreover, with Democrats holding enough votes to override a presidential veto, Ford knew that his chances of getting anything done through Congress would be slim.

What Ford realized, however, was that the midterm election wasn’t just about the pardon. The public wanted government at all levels sanitized from Nixon contamination. When President Ford woke up on December 22, headed to Vail, Colorado, for Christmas, for example, he read an astounding New York Times story by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, headlined “Huge CIA Operation Reported in U.S. Against Anti-War Forces.” According to Hersh, the CIA had files on more than ten thousand Americans, filled with counterintelligence information garnered from illegal domestic wiretaps and postal snooping.³²

Quickly Ford distanced himself from the CIA shenanigans. He had only been president for four months and knew nothing about CIA “watch lists” or spying on civil rights and peace activists traveling abroad. The only new Ford administration intelligence program was a heightened approach to dealing with “lost or stolen nuclear weapons and special nuclear materials, nuclear bomb threats, and radiation dispersal threats.”³³ Nor did Ford know anything about the FBI bugging Martin Luther King Jr. or César Chávez.

But the New York Times revelations soon led to three investigations of domestic intelligence abuses. On January 4, 1975, Ford established the U.S. President’s Commission on CIA Activities to investigate illegal surveillance by the CIA. (It became known as the Rockefeller Commission because it was chaired by the vice president.) Meanwhile, on January 27, the Senate created the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, chaired by Democratic senator Frank Church of Idaho, which became known as the Church Committee. A few weeks later, the House launched an investigation into CIA expenditures and effectiveness. All three created a media sensation. Stories appeared about the CIA trying to assassinate foreign leaders, including Cuba’s Fidel Castro and the Dominican Republic’s Rafael Trujillo. Astutely, Ford distanced himself from the revelations, making sure he wasn’t tainted by the misdeeds from the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations. The Rockefeller and Church investigations, for Ford, were lessons on how he didn’t want to operate as president. He returned the country to more traditional Cold War policies, working through NATO and promoting the burgeoning European Community.³⁴