11

Retirement Decades

On January 3, 1977, Richard Nixon, who was working on his memoir, RN, the first of seven books he’d write as an ex-president, sent a letter to the White House aimed at jump-starting Ford’s sagging morale. “As your years in public office draw to a close,” Nixon wrote, “I thought you might find it heartwarming to reflect on the theme of a little rhyme I can across recently in my book research.” The inspiring verse came from Robert Farnon’s Tough at the Top, a Broadway musical from 1949, when Ford and Nixon first became congressional colleagues and friends. “This is not the end this is but a beginning,” Nixon wrote in longhand. “When the fight is lost / there’s a fight worth winning/Nothing is wasted, nothing is in vain/the seas roll over but the rocks remain.”¹

While much has been made of the special friendship Ford developed with Carter once both men left the White House, the odd role Nixon continued to play in his pardoner’s life has been neglected. Essentially, whenever Ford (or his wife, Betty) got criticized in the press, Nixon rose to his defense. A case in point is when Ford’s former press secretary, Ron Nessen, wrote a memoir that disparaged Betty Ford as having a serious alcohol problem. “I thought Ron Nessen’s comments on Betty were contemptible,” Nixon wrote Ford on May 14, 1978. “Tell Betty her many friends won’t believe him. And for her few enemies: The hell with them.”²

The most pressing concern the Fords confronted in their first year out of the White House was financial solvency. All their years in public service had left the Fords cash strapped. In March, both Jerry and Betty signed lucrative publishing contracts for their memoirs, A Time to Heal and The Times of My Life. That same month Ford returned to the White House for the first time since leaving office, discussing the Middle East, the Panama Canal, and other issues with President Carter. The combination of this visit, plus reliving his days in power while writing his memoir, made Ford, at fleeting moments, want to get back into the political fray. In the fall of 1978 Ford even flirted with the idea of running for president again. “It definitely crossed my mind,” he recalled. “Carter wasn’t doing well and I’d already proven that I could beat Reagan. There was an opening but I passed. We were enjoying our life out here in the desert and I was just starting to make some money.”³

Amid widespread press speculation that he would run, Ford pulled the plug on the notion on March 16, 1980. “America needs a new President,” he said. “I have determined that I can best help that cause by not being a candidate for President, which might further divide my party.”⁴ But the name Gerald Ford still had magic to it. As Americans grew weary of Carter’s double-digit inflation, long gasoline lines, and terminal Iranian hostage crisis, there was a longing for the pipe puffer from Michigan. At the Republican National Convention in Detroit, in fact, representatives from Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford attempted to work out the details of having Ford on the ticket as Reagan’s vice presidential nominee. CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite called the potential team-up a “co-presidency”; however, it never happened.⁵ Always the loyal Republican, Ford contented himself stumping for Reagan across America. On the Sunday before the election, Ford appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press criticizing Carter for his handling of the Iranian hostage debacle. “Believe me,” Ford said. “Ronnie and I had our differences. But I thought he would be better than Carter.”⁶

Reagan, of course, won and Ford grew content raising money for his Presidential Library in Ann Arbor and his Presidential Museum in Grand Rapids. Unlike all the other presidents since Herbert Hoover, Ford opened two separate facilities in his name to be administered by the National Archives. (The museum was more of a shrine, while his government papers were housed at his alma mater. Both edifices opened in 1981.)

A tragedy in the Middle East brought Ford back to center stage that autumn. On October 6, 1981, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat was killed, gunned down in a hail of automatic gunfire at a military parade in Cairo that left eleven dead and forty wounded. In A Time to Heal Ford had written about Sadat in glowing terms, describing him as a combination of a “professional soldier’s erect posture with an aristocratic air of elegance.”⁷ Both men enjoyed lighting up a pipe while they spoke. As president, Ford learned three fundamental imperatives about negotiating with Sadat that all worked in America’s favor: he never lied, he desperately wanted to avoid a confrontation between Egypt and Israel in the Sinai Peninsula, and he disdained the bullying tactics of the Soviet Union. Without the diplomatic spade work conducted by Ford and Kissinger from 1974 to 1977, President Jimmy Carter would never have been successful at Camp David in brokering the historic peace accords between Egypt and Israel in 1979.

It was at Sadat’s funeral that Ford and Carter, old political adversaries, deepened their friendship. An easy camaraderie developed between the two ex-presidents, sustained in the coming years as their wives, Rosalyn and Betty, also grew close, lobbying together on such worthwhile causes as alcohol and drug prevention, the Equal Rights Ammendment, and health care policies toward the mentally ill. “On foreign policy our views are similar,” Ford recalled in 1995, “so we can work together on joint projects very effectively.”⁸

On the long flight back from the funeral, Carter accepted Ford’s offer to cohost an upcoming two-day conference at his presidential library in Ann Arbor; in turn, Ford offered to cochair Carter Center programs in Atlanta. Later, they coauthored articles in leading periodicals and issued numerous joint statements. But mostly they worked together on issues pertaining to the Middle East peace process. ⁹ The Carter-Ford team, in fact, made international news in 1981 by boldly stating that the United States had to start talking with the Palestine Liberation Organization if any meaningful peace settlement was to be reached in the Middle East. “We thought it was wrong to label Palestinians as terrorists,” Ford recalled. “We would have to start negotiations with the PLO if peace was going to be achieved. A pre-condition, of course, was the PLO recognizing Israel’s right to exist.”¹⁰

While on the surface it looked as if the Fords had the ideal retirement lifestyle going, in truth they were grappling with household dysfunction. Ever since her bout with breast cancer, Betty Ford had struggled with alcohol and pill addiction. Eventually, through the loving intervention of her family, she enrolled in a chemical dependency program at the Naval Hospital in Long Beach, California. Jerry understood that only one out of ten marriages survived an alcoholic wife, and he immediately came to Betty’s bedside. He visited her regularly in Long Beach, gave up drinking his scotch, and helped her launch a modern detox center—The Betty Ford Clinic—in Palm Springs. The Fords, along with their neighbor Leonard Firestone, himself a recovering alcoholic, opened the world-class treatment facility at the Eisenhower Medical Center on October 3, 1982. “We’re proud of you, Mom,” Ford said at the podium, fighting tears. “We want you to know that we love you.”¹¹

Throughout the 1980s, Ford’s name would appear in newspaper articles pertaining to the number of corporate boards he sat on. According to the historian Mark K. Updegrove, he signed on with Amax, Inc.; American Express Company; Shearson/American Express; Santa Fe International Corporation; Texas Commerce Bank; Tiger International, Inc.; Beneficial Corporation of New Jersey; and 20th Century Fox Film Corporation.¹² He caught some squawks for “being greedy” or “selling out” to corporate America. While Ford was collecting his one-hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year government pension, he netted more than a million dollars in supplemental income from these corporations. “I’m a private citizen now” was Ford’s answer to the carping. “It’s nobody’s business.”¹³

What saved Ford from damaging his integrity was, ironically, his sense of humor. Instead of being angry at Chevy Chase, they became good friends. Against everybody’s advice, Ford, along with Henry Kissinger, gave a cameo performance on the ABC soap opera Dynasty. In 1986 he hosted a symposium on “Humor and the Presidency” and a year later published a book on the topic. And at a 1989 conference on his presidency at Hofstra University, Ford seemed to enjoy poking fun at himself, our most athletic president who had been portrayed in history as a stumbler.¹⁴ Hofstra published two volumes of scholarly papers from the symposium with the net effect of giving Ford’s presidency a big thumbs-up.

The true opening salvo of Ford revisionism was fired by the veteran journalist Richard Reeves in a December 1996 article for American Heritage titled, “I’m Sorry, Mr. President.” Reeves apologized for having written a highly critical book in 1975 titled A Ford, Not a Lincoln, in which he called Ford “slow,” “unimaginative,” and “not very articulate.” But now, two decades later, Reeves revisited his bestseller and found it wrong-minded. Even though Reeves clung to his thesis that Alexander Haig had secretly brokered the pardon, he now believed that Ford’s pardon had been right. “Whatever his failings as a leader,” Reeves wrote of Ford, “and there were many, he was right about the big one.”¹⁵ When the article appeared, Reeves had just published an acclaimed biography of John F. Kennedy and was deemed one of the top “presidential historians” working the circuit. “I was grateful that Reeves had the guts to apologize,” Ford recalled. “Most journalists don’t do that. His article confirmed my belief that history would judge the pardon favorably. It just took time for people to get to that conclusion … a couple of decades.”¹⁶

Just a few months after the Reeves article appeared, Bob Woodward began researching the Nixon pardon for his book Shadow: Five Presidents and the Legacy of Watergate. On September 22, 1997, Woodward interviewed the eighty-four-year-old former president for the first time. They met at the Waldorf Towers in New York City. Ford admitted that Haig had offered a deal, but he had declined it. “Yes, on paper, without action it was a deal,” he said, “but it never became a deal because I never accepted.” Woodward conducted a follow-up interview with Ford in Rancho Mirage eight months later. This time he focused on why Ford hadn’t pressed Nixon to admit his guilt publicly. It was a good question, and Ford had a ready answer. The ex-president pulled out his wallet and fumbled for his frayed clipping about the 1915 Burdick v. United States Supreme Court decision. He handed it to Woodward to read. Dutifully, the veteran reporter did, slowing down for the key phrase, “Most important, the justices found that a pardon carried an imputation of guilt, acceptance, a confession of it.”

Ford beamed. Hearing that legal phrase caused him to interject that according to the 1915 decision, Nixon, by accepting the pardon, had admitted guilt in the Watergate cover-up. “That was,” Ford told Woodward, “very reassuring to me.”

All great reporters have what Hemingway called “built-in bullshit detectors,” and Woodward was surely no exception. He emerged from his interviews with Ford convinced that the pardon was not just justified but was downright heroic. “Ford was wise to act,” was Woodward’s conclusion. “What at first and perhaps for many years looked like a decision to protect Nixon was instead largely designed to protect the nation. Watergate was a poison that would not go away. There was more to it than I saw at the time. Over the years the periodic release of new Nixon tapes shows new criminality and smallness. Ford wanted to protect his presidency, a proper goal because the president is an extension of the nation. The only way out of the Watergate atmosphere was to move fast, to short-circuit the process. Preoccupation with Nixon’s fate could have continued for years.”¹⁷

Winning over journalistic kingpins like Reeves and Woodward did not happen by chance. Quietly, but with great determination, Ford always stuck to his guns, insisting the pardon was a national necessity. But Ford, as ex-president, had made it a policy to treat even his critics with uncommon graciousness. His body language exuded kindness and honesty. There were no equivocations or downcast eyes. Any street-smart cop interrogating Ford would have reached the same conclusion: this man had nothing to hide. Besides exuding integrity, Ford appealed to liberals in the media because he disagreed with GOP conservatives on such social issues as affirmative action, gun control, abortion, and gay rights. Liberals who abhorred the Reagan Revolution were more willing to embrace Ford’s unthreatening Republican centrism. In a 2003 interview, Ford deemed his standing up to the Republican Right his greatest lifetime achievement. “My wife and I are moderate Republicans,” Ford said. “We are pro-choice and speak out openly on that. We understand people who have different views who are opposed to abortion, but I don’t think the hard right wing of the Republican Party can get re-elected with any candidate against Roe v. Wade. I think the party has to have somebody in the middle who invites people from both the left and right. And I illustrate this by showing that when the Democrats were recognized as left-wing liberal, they didn’t win anything. Mondale, Dukakis, moving down the list. Only when Clinton came along and talked a good moderate game, did they win. I’m not ashamed to be called a centrist. I’m proud.”¹⁸

Oddly, it was Ford’s defense of Bill Clinton in late 1998 that further endeared him to the left. Although President Clinton’s lewd behavior during the Lewinsky affair—particularly lying to the American people—offended Ford, he thought impeachment was a mistake. Instead of staying quiet, on October 3, 1998, the eighty-five-year-old Ford wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times recommending that Clinton be “rebuked” in Congress but not impeached. He framed it as a compromise.¹⁹ Written as the House Judiciary Committee prepared to evaluate the ten-thousand-page Starr Report and then determine Clinton’s fate, the op-ed was quickly embraced by Democrats. While Clintonians didn’t cotton to the rebuke idea, they fully agreed with Ford’s position that GOP politicians were witch-hunting the president to the detriment of the nation. “Gerald Ford is a man who has been there, who understands a situation like this and understands the importance of deferring to Constitutional standards under all circumstances,” Gregory Craig, the special counsel to the president, told the Times. “President Ford is absolutely right: this kind of conduct simply doesn’t rise to the level of impeachable offense.” Overnight, Ford became a hero of the Left.²⁰

Shortly before Christmas, in a second Times op-ed, Ford and Jimmy Carter promoted the idea of a Senate “censure” of the president. ²¹ The former presidents were, in essence, pleading the case of reasonable punishment for Clinton. They wanted his ears boxed, but they didn’t want to see him driven from the White House. Republicans, like Congressman Tom DeLay of Texas, were furious at Ford, deeming him a turncoat. “DeLay wrote me the nastiest letter imaginable,” Ford recalled. “He was downright rude. But I didn’t care. I thought the House impeachment was enough. If I could pardon Nixon then we could certainly censure—not impeach—Clinton in the Senate. It was the centrist position. And it’s what was right for the country.”²²

For his entire public life, Ford had warred with the Republican Right—things didn’t change just because he was an octogenarian. Conservatives were infuriated, for example, when Ford, once again using the New York Times op-ed page as his forum, defended affirmative action as a legitimate criterion for admission to the University of Michigan. Right-wing talk radio lit into Ford as being soft-skulled, a buffoon. This animosity only grew when, on August 11, 1999, President Clinton praised Ford and awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. When in the 2000 presidential election, George W. Bush squeaked out a victory over Al Gore among widespread reports of voter fraud in Florida, Ford publicly worried about the state of American democracy. He couldn’t celebrate a GOP victory when voter disenfranchisement might have occurred. Instead of merely worrying about it, Ford took direct action, joining forces with Carter as cochairs of the National Commission on Federal Election Reform.

All of these events were a buildup to what Ford considered the most redemptive honor of his life. Every year, the John F. Kennedy Foundation announces winners of the “Profile in Courage Award,” given to elected officials who “withstood strong opposition from constituents, powerful interest groups or adversaries to follow what she or he believes is the right course of action.” In April 2001 the award went to Gerald Ford for his controversial decision to pardon Richard Nixon. When the announcement appeared in newspapers, veterans of the Watergate wars rubbed their eyes in disbelief. After all, Senator Ted Kennedy, who was slated to present the award at a ceremony, had denounced Ford for the pardon vociferously back in 1974. Like many Americans, however, Kennedy had come full circle. “I was one of those who spoke out against his action then,” Kennedy explained. “But time has a way of clarifying past events, and now we see that President Ford was right.”²³

The biggest promoter of Ford winning the award was Caroline Kennedy, daughter of the thirty-fifth president. She had recently visited the Ford Library and her gracious tour guide was President Ford himself. “For me it was especially meaningful to hear stories of other times,” she wrote in a thank-you note, “and people I have heard about all my life.”²⁴ She had been touched by Ford’s softspoken Kent County charm. Another award advocate was the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David McCullough, who had spoken at the Ford Museum in Grand Rapids a couple of times. He had grown extremely fond of the ex-president. When the prize committee debated who deserved the 2001 award, McCullough threw his support wholeheartedly behind Ford. It proved to be an inspired choice. The story of the Kennedys thanking Ford for pardoning Nixon led the news. Letters came pouring in praising the surprise choice. “I am glad they finally caught up with the courage and wisdom required to grant Nixon a pardon when you did,” Notre Dame president Theodore Hesburgh wrote Ford. “The Kennedy Award says a good deal and all of it is vindicating the wisdom of your action at a difficult time.”²⁵ James Callaghan, the former British prime minister, wrote Ford that the award had inspired the press to “re-evaluate your presidency and recall what a good president you were, at a time of the greatest difficulty in the United States.”²⁶

Four months later, the 9/11 terrorist attacks took place. A stunned Ford headed to Washington, D.C., to help salve the nation’s despair. On September 14, Jerry and Betty, holding hands, attended the National Day of Prayer and Remembrance ceremony at the National Cathedral. “That day I just cried and cried,” Ford recalled. “Those poor, poor people. Our poor, poor country.”²⁷

Ford had transcended being the “accidental” or “pardon” president; he was now seen as America’s bipartisan, elder statesman “healer.” Even former enemies treated him with reverence. Honors came raining down on Ford from all corners; for example, the National Collegiate Athletic Association created an annual leadership award in his name while the National Archives hosted a symposium to honor his public service achievements. Simply put, Ford had become beloved.

On November 12, 2006, it was safe to say that Ford’s stubbornness, his insistence that the Nixon pardon was a national imperative, had won converts. He was now, at age ninety-three, the oldest president in American history, having surpassed Ronald Reagan. It had taken over thirty-five years, but a historical revisionism had firmly taken root. History was starting to congeal in Ford’s favor. A consensus was emerging that the Nixon pardon was the right thing to do.

The end, however, was nearing for Ford. His health was failing terribly. Twice that year he had been hospitalized for heart problems. Given his precarious health, detailed plans were adopted for his funeral, which, unlike Reagan’s state funeral with all the pomp, would be low-keyed and Trumanesque. There would be, for example, no horse-drawn procession through the streets of Washington. Just simple ceremonies at St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church in Palm Desert, California, and at the National Cathedral, followed by a service in his hometown of Grand Rapids, where he’d be buried. His longtime political aide Bob Hartmann had already been asked to be a pallbearer, as had his former chiefs of staff Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.

Gerald Ford died on December 26, 2006, at his home in Rancho Mirage, California. His obituary ran for three full pages in the New York Times. The word used over and over again by commentators analyzing what his life meant was “healer.” His wife, Betty, issued a simple statement, saying that Ford’s life had been “filled with love of God, his family, and his country.” Old photographs of him playing football at the University of Michigan were flashed around the world on cable television. The photographer David Hume Kennerly spoke for many when he noted that Ford had the “least guile” of anybody he ever met. “There were no ‘two Gerald Fords,’” Kennerly said. “There was no other agenda, no secret life.”²⁸

When the thirty-eighth president was brought back to Washington for the last time, his motorcade stopped briefly at the World War II Memorial, where members of the armed services and a contingent of Eagle Scouts paid tribute to him. To honor Ford’s long service in Congress, his body lay in state not only in the Capitol rotunda but also at the doors of both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Over the course of the New Year’s weekend, thousands of Americans lined up to pay tribute to him, and Ford’s children greeted many of them personally. On New Year’s Day, the members of the University of Michigan football team wore a patch with the number 48, Ford’s jersey number, in tribute to him. At the service at the National Cathedral, former president George H. W. Bush said that Gerald Ford was “a Norman Rockwell painting come to life,” and Henry Kissinger said that knowing Ford was a “badge of honor.” There was a lighthearted aspect to the service, with Tom Brokaw recalling the ugly plaids that Ford would wear. But, mainly, everyone was focused on Betty Ford and the fifty-eight years of marriage she had shared with her husband.

Even the New York Times editorial page, long a critic of the Nixon pardon, praised other aspects of Ford’s character so heartily that it bordered on hagiography. “Mr. Ford deserves to be remembered for more than the pardon,” the Times said. “Marking the end of a national nightmare is no small thing.”²⁹ And if the public outpouring of affection for Ford was any indication, he had risen to the rank of “near-great president” in the minds of many Americans. The long healing process was finally complete.