VICE PRESIDENT JERRY FORD GOT the top job by succession after Nixon left office on August 9, 1974. The former congressman from Grand Rapids, Michigan, inherited a terrible mess—an angry, bitter, and divided country, residual hatred for Nixon, the tragic endgame of the Vietnam War, and a very weak economy. He did the best he could during his two and a half years in office, one of the shortest terms in American history, but it wasn’t enough.
Yet, again and again, those who worked most closely with Ford and saw him in all his moods—the stewards and crew members of Air Force One—expressed admiration for him. They said he was a decent man and a hard worker who deserved better than the hand Fortune dealt him. “He was a homespun family guy,” recalls Howie Franklin, a retired chief steward. “He was friendly and he interacted with the crew very well. President Ford was like a crew member. It was like we were on a baseball team and we were teammates.”
Adds Charles Palmer, another former chief steward who served Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan: “President Ford probably treated the whole crew better than any other president”—always inquiring about their families, and even inviting them to the White House for presidential birthday parties or to social occasions at his Palm Springs, California, home.
James Cannon, a senior Ford domestic policy adviser, made a broader point: “Gerald R. Ford was an ordinary man called to serve America in extraordinary circumstances. In his plain ways and plain speaking, in his forthrightness and genial nature, in his trust in others and their trust in him, Ford was Everyman become president.”
Yet Americans wanted a leader they could be proud of after the Nixon scandals, and Ford carried too much baggage, especially after September 8, 1974, when he pardoned his predecessor of any crimes he may have committed as president. This outraged many voters, who suspected a corrupt deal that traded Nixon’s resignation and Ford’s elevation to the presidency in exchange for the pardon. Others simply felt that Nixon deserved to be prosecuted for his transgressions.
But history has been kind to Ford. Presidential scholars today give him high marks for this attempt at national reconciliation. In 2001, in fact, Senator Edward Kennedy and members of his family presented Ford with the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award in recognition of the pardon, even though Edward Kennedy had criticized Ford vigorously for it over the years. Ford told me in a 2002 interview that this was one of the most important events of his life. He felt vindicated.
AT FIRST, FORD benefited from the contrast to his predecessor, and he played upon it. “Nixon, by nature, was a recluse who preferred to deal with problems through paperwork rather than through people,” Ford wrote in his autobiography. “I don’t do business that way. From the first I sought an ‘open’ Administration. One thing I wanted to do right away was to eliminate the trappings of an ‘imperial’ Presidency, so even before being sworn in, I asked Al Haig to tell the Marine band that I didn’t want to hear ‘Hail to the Chief’ or ‘Ruffles and Flourishes’; the ‘Michigan Fight Song’ would suffice. I also asked Haig to make sure that the Oval Office was swept clean of all electronic listening devices—there would be no bugging or taping during my Administration.” One of his first acts was to formally change the name of the presidential aircraft from Nixon’s grandiose Spirit of ’76 back to Air Force One. “Everyone knew it as Air Force One, and I decided that was the name it should have,” Ford recalls.
Added Ron Nessen, who was Ford’s White House press secretary: “Ford wanted to be Speaker of the House and he realized the Republicans were never going to take control of the House in his time, so he told Betty he was going to run one more time and retire. And then the next thing you know, he’s vice president and president, without ever running for it. These guys who spend twenty years of their life lusting after the presidency, their personalities get distorted. Whatever they need to say, they say. Ford never went through that.”
“The other thing was, Ford was one of life’s winners,” Nessen argued. “You know the joke that if Nixon had only made the Whittier College football team, he never would have turned out that way. But Ford did make the football team. He was a high-school football hero, a college football hero. He got into Yale Law School when he really didn’t think he would. And he married the woman he loved and stayed married to her his whole life. All this gave him an inner self-esteem, self-confidence. He didn’t have to prove anything to anybody.”
Ford’s normalcy was not an inconsequential trait after the strangeness of Richard Nixon. He even enjoyed the company of his wife, Betty, who would ride with him in the presidential compartment, where Nixon had operated alone. He just wanted her near him. His tastes in food were ordinary, even bland. He liked cottage cheese with A.1. Steak Sauce or ketchup for lunch, pork chops or stuffed cabbage and navy-bean soup for dinner, and he had a sweet tooth. Ford loved lemon sponge pudding and chocolate angel food cake.
He was also normal in not trying to shut himself off from human contact. On Air Force One, he didn’t want only the chief steward serving as his personal attendant in his stateroom, preferring to rotate that duty around the stewards, so he could get to know them all better. Ford also directed the flight crew to leave the door to his stateroom open. This order wasn’t long-lived, however, because too many aides kept walking in on him and he didn’t have enough time to himself. He enjoyed quiet contemplation, reading, or talking with key aides as he smoked his pipe. About a month after taking office, he began to close the door.
Likewise, Ford didn’t mind people calling him “Jerry” at first, especially his longtime friends and advisers. But within a few weeks, as he realized the importance of sustaining a level of dignity, it was “Mr. President.”
What didn’t change was Ford’s gregarious nature. He made a habit of wandering through the plane, chatting with staff members and guests—something Nixon had rarely done. He would stop in the cockpit and venture into the crew’s areas, just to say hello at the start of every flight.
Ford also asked the stewards to place a Bible on the desk in his stateroom whenever he was aboard so he could read a passage and find a bit of solace in times of stress. It is a tradition that continues to this day.
FORD MADE SOME solid decisions as president. He helped persuade the nation that Vietnamese refugees should be welcomed in the United States, not kept out. He continued Nixon’s policies of rapprochement with Moscow. And he made progress on arms control. “Ford was President for 895 days,” wrote James Cannon. “At the beginning he was such a welcome relief from his predecessor that popular opinion rated him better than he was. Inevitably, as with all new Presidents his popularity declined as he confronted and dealt with the real world.”
The Vietnam War was ending badly, resulting in a humiliating evacuation of all Americans and as many South Vietnamese loyalists as possible from a besieged Saigon. Inflation was rampant, unemployment was up, energy shortages were on the rise, and national confidence was ebbing. As Ford wrote in his memoirs, “The years of suspicion and scandal that had culminated in Nixon’s resignation had demoralized our people. They had lost faith in their elected leaders and in their institutions. I knew that unless I did something to restore their trust, I couldn’t win their consent to do anything else.”
But his connections to the hated Nixon, and his image as a plodding, old-style politician in the television age were huge drawbacks.
HIS ADVISERS TRIED their best to use Air Force One as a political tool. For one thing, they arranged for the plane to make a pass over just about every major airport before landing, to give TV reporters and photographers some extra pictures of the plane in flight.
At the start of the 1976 Republican National Convention in Kansas City, the race was up for grabs between Ford and conservative challenger Ronald Reagan for the GOP nomination. The night before the opening, Reagan was scheduled to speak at a rally just before the prime-time TV shows and Ford was scheduled to arrive at about the same time. But Ford and his aides had Air Force One circle the airfield and land three minutes after the newscasts began. The networks cut away from the Reagan rally to show Air Force One swooping into Kansas City on arrival—a bit of one-upmanship that delighted Ford and his staff, and may even have helped burnish his image a bit.
But overall, these gambits weren’t enough.
In fact, Ford’s image was badly hurt by a mishap that occurred as he was disembarking from Air Force One, which had done so much to boost the reputations and enhance the dignity of his predecessors. The problem came when he stumbled on rain-slick stairs as he got off the plane in Salzburg, Austria, in June 1975. He landed awkwardly on one knee with both hands planted on the ground, while ubiquitous news cameras recorded the embarrassing fall for all to see. He didn’t think the incident would amount to much at the moment it happened, and even came up with a quip when he recovered and turned to his host. “Thank you for your gracious welcome to Salzburg,” Ford said, “and I’m sorry that I tumbled in.”
Ford recalled it this way: “What happened was this: Betty and I were descending the steps. I had my right arm around her waist to help her, and I was carrying an umbrella in my left hand. Two or three steps from the bottom of the ramp, the heel of my shoe caught on something. I had no free hand to grab the rail, so I took a tumble to the tarmac below.
“I jumped to my feet, unhurt, and thought nothing of the fall. So I was quite surprised when Ron Nessen told me later that reporters covering my trip were bombarding him with questions about my ‘missteps.’ … I told him not to worry about them… . I was wrong. From that moment on, every time I stumbled or bumped my head or fell in the snow, reporters zeroed in on that to the exclusion of almost everything else.”
Ironically, flight steward Charles Palmer had offered to hold the umbrella for Mrs. Ford just as the couple walked out onto the steps, but the president brushed him off. “No thanks,” he said gallantly. “I’ll hold the umbrella for Betty.” It was a mistake.
Nessen, Ford’s press secretary, exited the plane from the rear stairs and never saw his boss take the spill. Moments after he stepped onto the tarmac, reporters began asking, “What’s wrong with Ford?” That question was on everyone’s mind within a couple of hours, as the TV image of the fall spread around the world. “I mean, it was the most embarrassing thing you can think of—with the TV of the world focused on you,” Nessen said, “so all day long there were questions: What’s wrong with Ford? What’s wrong with Ford?”
That evening, Ford and his confidants felt compelled to send the White House doctor to meet the press and explain that nothing was wrong with the president except for an old knee ailment. But the damage to his image was done.
That moment, more than any other, gave Ford the image of a clumsy oaf, a national embarrassment—and it was driven into the popular consciousness by frequent skits on Saturday Night Live in which comedian Chevy Chase brilliantly portrayed Ford as a nincompoop. It didn’t help that he beaned an onlooker with a golf ball on the links one afternoon. This also became part of White House lore.
It was unfair, since Ford, who was 6 feet tall and weighed a trim 195 pounds, had been a gifted football player in his youth, remained a lifelong athlete, and was a bright man who had graduated from Yale Law School. But Ford blamed no one but himself, not even his tormentors in the media. “He was very mad at himself for doing that,” Nessen recalls. “He just wanted to be sure that nobody thought there was anything more to it than that he had slipped on the step.”
Ford maintained what Nessen calls “a very placid disposition” even amid other cases of media overkill. Once, when he was on a ski holiday at Vail, Colorado, the cameras caught him in a spill and again broadcast his image around the world. Nessen joined him for a drink that evening, and Ford’s reaction was mild. “You know, those reporters get most of their exercise on the barstools,” the president said ruefully—and left it at that.
Recalls David Gergen, a Ford adviser at the time: “… [T]he press turned on him with ridicule that was severe and merciless. Now he was the man who played too many football games without his helmet, the president who bumped his head when he turned to wave from his helicopter.
“Those images of bumbling shadowed Ford for the duration of his presidency,” Gergen writes. “Throughout 1975, the press seized upon every verbal or physical miscue and magnified it beyond all bounds… . The fact that an aide left behind Ford’s tuxedo and the President showed up at a dinner in Tokyo with trousers two inches too short caused merriment as well, as did his occasional falls on the ski slopes of Colorado.”
Yet Ford retained his sense of humor. Once, a prankster in the press corps dressed up in a chicken suit and showed up at a Ford news conference at the base of Air Force One after a stop in San Diego, where a man in a chicken costume had become the local mascot. As reporters shouted their questions, Ford (who had been tipped off to the prank) paused and said seriously, “Next question—let’s see—from that chicken there in the back.”
Nessen says the most revealing anecdote he knows about Ford’s character took place one Christmas while the president and his family were vacationing in Vail, Colorado. They were eating dinner in their rented chalet and one of their dogs messed on the floor. A White House steward started to clean up, but Ford took the rag away and did the job himself. “No man should have to clean up after another man’s dog,” the president told the steward. But such everyday decency was lost on the American public.
THERE ALSO WERE the dark moments that reflected the nation’s overall social troubles. On September 6, 1975, Ford left the Senator Hotel in Sacramento, where he had spent the night after addressing the California Legislature, and walked across the capitol grounds to meet with Governor Jerry Brown. He started shaking hands with spectators across a rope line and spotted a woman (subsequently identified as Lynette Alice “Squeaky” Fromme, a young disciple of mass murderer Charles Manson) wearing a red dress in the second or third row. When he slowed down, she moved closer, and pointed a .45 caliber pistol directly at him. The weapon failed to fire, and Secret Service agents wrestled her to the ground and hustled Ford away from the scene.
Amazingly, there was another assassination attempt two weeks later, on September 22. Heading for his limousine, Ford left a downtown San Francisco hotel and, as he waved to thousands of bystanders lining the sidewalks and across the street in Union Square, he heard a shot. For a moment he froze in place, a stricken look on his face. But he wasn’t hit. As they had done in Sacramento, his bodyguards hustled him away, this time pushing him into his limousine, jumping on top of him, and ordering the vehicle to speed to the airport and the safety of Air Force One. It turned out that a political radical named Sara Jane Moore had pulled out a .38 caliber revolver and fired at him from 40 feet away, but missed when a bystander pushed her at the last moment.
His Secret Service agents wanted to hustle him onto the plane immediately, but Ford insisted on shaking hands with the cops who had escorted his motorcade and others who were guarding his plane and were standing dutifully on the tarmac. As soon as he boarded, the president walked into his compartment with a handful of aides and ordered a tall drink. He took a large swallow, then he and his staff, with drinks in hand, waited until Mrs. Ford arrived from a separate series of events in the Monterey area.
When the First Lady stepped into the presidential cabin, which was by then crammed with senior advisers, she smiled sweetly and asked, “How did they treat you in San Francisco, dear?”
Clearly, no one had told the First Lady about the assassination attempt, and the president’s aides began looking nervously at each other, hemming and hawing. Meanwhile, a steward brought Mrs. Ford a drink.
The president broke the silence. “You mean, you haven’t heard?”
“Heard what?” she replied.
More awkward silence.
Finally, White House Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld blurted out, “Don’t you know that someone took a shot at the president?”
Mrs. Ford was surprised but could see immediately that her husband was fine—he was, after all, sitting right in front of her. Dazed, she took a sip from her tall glass and said nothing.
The tension broke during the five-hour flight back to Andrews Air Force Base. It featured a large dose of gallows humor—including the half-serious question that aides kept asking each other: whether the president’s life insurance was paid up. And there was joking that the two attempted assassinations, both by females, represented the next phase of the “women’s lib” movement.
More than anything, there was the consumption of a considerable amount of alcohol, to the point where some staffers got tipsy. Ford had a couple of martinis, extra dry, and Mrs. Ford had vodka tonic on ice as everyone tried to relax and count their blessings. President Ford, never much of a worrier, phoned his children to tell them he was all right, ate a big steak dinner, and went to sleep.
But the assassination attempts had serious repercussions. The country’s jitters got worse, with fears multiplying that a rancid strain of the American character was reemerging, as it had in the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King in the 1960s. From then on, the Secret Service strongly urged the president to wear a bulletproof vest whenever he was in close proximity to the public, a practice that Ford followed for the remainder of his time in office.
ONE EMBARRASSMENT that was kept quiet was his wife’s drinking.
The first couple were devoted to each other, but the president could do nothing to help his wife end her addiction to alcohol, which they managed to keep secret throughout his presidency. After their White House years, she admitted she was an alcoholic and also suffered from an addiction to arthritis medication.
Air Force One stewards and presidential staff members say Betty Ford enjoyed vodka tonic on ice at all hours of the day or night, even in the morning as a trip began. Sometimes she got soused on the plane, they say.
In the evening, particularly with dinner or after the last stop of the day, the president joined her with his own Gilbey’s martini, extra dry. Steward Charles Palmer said he saw President Ford get tipsy only once, on a trip to the Soviet Union. He had consumed a few drinks before boarding the plane and didn’t stop there. “He was meeting with the Russian premier,” Palmer said. “We got away at seven or eight at night. We gave him two or three martinis flying home. We put him to bed. In the middle of the flight, he came out in his underwear and said, ‘Where is the head?’ Normally, he knew where the head is. He could walk. He was slurring his words. It was the one time he overindulged and was tipsy.”
Another mishap involving Air Force One was also publicly revealed only years later. It was when a military aide misplaced what military advisers call the football—the locked briefcase containing the codes the president would use to launch a nuclear strike. It is supposed to be near the commander in chief at all times in case of a surprise attack.
But during a trip to Paris in November 1975, the aide left the football on Air Force One. He realized his mistake as soon as he boarded the motorcade, and was about to contact the plane when a crew member radioed him and asked discreetly if something important was missing. Relieved, he said something important most certainly was missing, and the crew member rushed to the motorcade and passed the briefcase to him before he left the airport. It was a horrible breach of security, but there was no harm done.
THINGS GOT WORSE. Late in his 1976 reelection campaign, Ford was deeply embarrassed during an October 6 debate in San Francisco with Democratic challenger Jimmy Carter when he misstated his views about Eastern Europe. “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford administration,” the president declared. This was an obvious misstatement, since the U.S.S.R. had dominated Eastern Europe for a generation; this was taught in every high-school history class. The incident made him seem ignorant and fed the notion that he was too dumb to be president.
The next day, as Air Force One was flying to Los Angeles, some of Ford’s loyalists, including National Security Adviser Scowcroft and Press Secretary Nessen, decided that the president needed to make a “clarifying statement.” By then, U.S. representatives of Polish-American and other Eastern European groups were up in arms, fearing that Ford was signaling an abandonment of support for democratic movements in the region. The media also were in full frenzy, and Ford needed to stop the hemorrhaging.
Then–White House Chief of Staff Dick Cheney privately agreed with the need for a statement, and told Ford so on this flight, but Cheney refused to allow Scowcroft or others to make their case directly with the president. This was done out of deference, because Cheney knew how upset and angry Ford was with himself. What he meant to say, he told Cheney, was that although the Soviet Union dominated the territory of Eastern Europe by stationing troops there, it didn’t dominate the heart, soul, and spirit of the people in those countries. The president just hoped the whole issue would blow over, and he shut himself in his private cabin for the flight.
“I can be very stubborn when I think I’m right, and I just didn’t want to apologize for something that was a minor mistake,” Ford recalled in his autobiography.
When Nessen and Cheney finally said bluntly that he should admit the mistake, Ford said, “I’m not inclined to do that.”
It wasn’t until two days after the debate that he agreed to explain himself and admit his error, but by then the harm was irreparable. If he had taken the advice of his aides on Air Force One and admitted his gaffe immediately, he might have greatly limited the damage. “He made it sound like he didn’t know that Poland was dominated by the Soviet Union,” Scowcroft recalls, “and what he really meant to say was, the Polish spirit was undaunted and unconquerable. And if he said that right away it might have been different.” Adds Nessen: “It reinforced the bumbler image, that Ford was a guy who couldn’t think straight, who couldn’t walk and chew gum at the same time.”
FORD’S FINAL FLIGHT on Air Force One at the end of his 1976 campaign was a wake. En route back to Washington from Colorado, Ford was told by his pollster that he would lose. The exit polls showed that he could not quite overtake Jimmy Carter’s lead, and the atmosphere was somber.
Howie Franklin, the flight steward, came into the presidential stateroom to pass along the crew’s best wishes. “He was crying and she was crying and I was crying,” Franklin recalls. “This had nothing to do with politics. It was on a personal basis. We were sad to see him leave because we enjoyed the camaraderie with him.”
Even later, after Carter’s inauguration, Ford would phone the plane, say hello to the pilot, and inquire about the flight crew, “How are the boys doing?”