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“Give Me Hell”

MEETING WITH THE PRESIDENT

(Dictated December 3, 1974)

Next we talked about the Nixon issue—the “CREEP issue”—dirty tricks . . . the problem that Gerald Ford would have is the competence issue . . . governing under the best of circumstances is tough . . . under the worst of circumstances, which he has, is impossible—that we have one arm tied behind our back.¹

Even the most harmonious presidential transition is a pressure-filled full-time undertaking, involving meetings between the outgoing and incoming officials, deliberations about Cabinet nominations and key White House Staff positions, preliminary discussions with foreign heads of state, intelligence briefings and national security updates, and initial exchanges with key members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. In normal circumstances, the presidential transition process takes several months. Ford had little more than twenty-four hours.

Assuming the presidency at an extraordinary time, Gerald R. Ford made a number of necessarily quick but critical decisions about how to handle his unique circumstance. Most of those decisions were wise. A few caused some difficulties and required some adjustments later.

*  *  *

Gerald Ford began his first day as President the way he had begun most days—at his home in Virginia, pouring a glass of orange juice, popping an English muffin into the toaster, and retrieving the newspaper from his front porch in his pajamas.² Amidst that calm suburban setting, only The Washington Post’s front page suggested that August 9, 1974, was to be astoundingly different from the previous twenty-four hours: “NIXON RESIGNS,” “FORD ASSUMES PRESIDENCY TODAY.”³

Gerald Rudolph Ford Jr., a Grand Rapids, Mich. lawyer, who never aspired to national office but had it thrust upon him as a result of two of the greatest scandals in American history, will become the 38th President of the United States at noon today. He will be the first American president not elected to national office by the people.⁴

Just minutes after noon on August 9, 1974, Ford took the oath of office as President of the United States in the East Room of the White House, where only minutes earlier a departing Richard Nixon had received a long standing ovation from his Cabinet and senior staff after delivering a largely extemporaneous, uncomfortable, and painful farewell. There, an emotional Richard Nixon quoted Theodore Roosevelt’s 1910 “Citizenship in a Republic” speech, more commonly known by its famous line referencing “the man in the arena,” called his mother a “saint,” and discussed his father’s humble, hard luck beginnings, saying he had “the poorest lemon ranch in California.” Having listened to what he found a generally maudlin speech by his predecessor, Ford noted he was struck by one line in particular: “Always remember others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win, unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.” Ford felt Richard Nixon might have avoided his tragic predicament had he taken his own advice.⁵

Wisely, Ford struck a contrast to the tenor of Mr. Nixon’s remarks. His eight-minute speech, written with the able assistance of his speechwriter and senior aide Robert Hartmann, served several purposes. It was an introduction, an exhibition of stability to the sizable global audience, and an overture to all Americans urging them to move past recent years of recrimination and bitterness. As a symbolic demonstration of this new beginning, Ford’s small vice presidential staff thought to change the seating arrangements in the White House East Room for the members of the media so that their chairs faced in the opposite direction than they had when Nixon had spoken earlier.⁶

Ford was keenly aware of the challenges he faced. Writing about the moment in his memoir, he recalled a story that he had heard from a Chicago Daily News reporter who had traveled to Greece during its civil war in the 1940s. There the reporter had encountered a villager who was emigrating to the United States. The villager asked his war-weary neighbors what he might send back from America after he arrived—Money? Food? Clothes? No, his neighbors replied, “You should send us a ton of tranquility.” This was what Ford felt he needed to strive to bring to America as he prepared to take the oath of office—a sense of calm. The American people had lost faith in their leaders. Many had lost faith in their institutions. “I knew that unless I did something to restore their trust,” Ford later recalled, “I couldn’t win their consent to do anything else.”⁷ What was needed was a gentle nod to a scandal-ravaged, war-weary nation that everything was, finally, going to be okay. This was the origin of what would be one of his most famous rhetorical phrases.

“My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over,” he announced with confidence. “Our constitution works. Our great Republic is a government of laws, and not of men. Here the people rule.”⁸ “I assume the presidency under extraordinary circumstances never before experienced by Americans,” Ford acknowledged upfront. “This is an hour of history that troubles our minds and hurts our hearts.” He offered listeners what he called “just a little straight talk among friends.” And, in implicit contrast to his two predecessors, who each had acquired a reputation among many for dishonesty, he pledged “to follow my instincts of openness and candor with full confidence that honesty is always the best policy in the end.”

Ford’s remarks were viewed on television by tens of millions of Americans. I was one of the interested few not among them. At that moment, I was flying across the Atlantic Ocean from Europe to Washington, D.C., at the urgent request of my friend, the new President of the United States.

INFORM CONSULATES: PRESIDENT NIXON HAS JUST ANNOUNCED HIS RESIGNATION TO TAKE EFFECT AT 12 NOON WASHINGTON TIME FRIDAY, AUGUST 9. VARIOUS DETAILED INSTRUCTIONS WILL FOLLOW WITHIN THE NEXT FEW HOURS. VICE PRESIDENT FORD WILL BE SWORN IN AS PRESIDENT AT NOON FRIDAY WASHINGTON TIME.⁹

This was the flash telegram sent by the Secretary of State on August 8 to every U.S. diplomatic post across the globe. The telegram sent to me as the U.S. Ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization had arrived at the U.S. Mission to NATO at my office at the military alliance’s headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, on Boulevard Léopold III. But I was not there to receive it.

Joyce, our children, and I had been largely isolated from the unrest in Washington, D.C., in the days, weeks, and months immediately preceding the Nixon resignation. My family had left for a brief vacation in Switzerland and northern Italy without me due to a crisis in the Eastern Mediterranean, which required me to stay at my NATO post in Brussels.¹⁰ On July 25, a coup d’état had deposed Cypriot President Archbishop Makarios III. It had been ordered by the military junta in Greece, our NATO ally, and staged by the Cypriot National Guard in conjunction with the OKA-B, a Greek Cypriot paramilitary organization. Five days later, the Turkish military, another NATO ally, invaded, starting with an amphibious incursion into Pentemilli on Cyprus’s northern coast.

On August 8, the day President Nixon announced he would resign, we had departed San Remo, Italy, by car. As I was driving, Joyce caught up on the news, reading the Paris Herald Tribune. At one point, she urged me to find a place to stop the car and pull over to read the newspaper account of the historic events that were taking place in Washington, D.C. I drove through Cannes to St. Tropez, where we found a place to stop. Only then did I pause to read the paper. I quickly understood what Joyce had been intimating, but had not wanted to discuss in front of our young children, each of whom had met President Nixon during my time in his Cabinet. The reports left us both with the unmistakable impression that the U.S. government was unraveling.¹¹

Having served in the Nixon Cabinet and as Counsellor to the President in the White House, it came to my mind that I might be able to be helpful to the new President during his transition. As it happened, the same thought had occurred to him. That evening we drove from St. Tropez to Grimaud in southeastern France, where we had been scheduled to spend time with André de Staercke, the Belgian Ambassador to NATO and the Dean of the NATO Council. There, I received a call from Leona Goodell, my assistant in my office at NATO Headquarters in Brussels, telling me that Vice President Ford had requested that I return to Washington, D.C., immediately.¹²

The next twenty-four hours were a whirlwind. I slept a few hours at Ambassador de Staercke’s home in Grimaud, France, got up at 4:30 a.m., made the two-hour drive to the Nice airport, where at 7:00 a.m. I boarded an Air Force T-39 Sabreliner that had been ordered by the White House and headed for Heathrow Airport in London. There I caught a Pan Am flight to Washington, D.C., where I arrived at Dulles International Airport at 1:55 p.m. Friday afternoon, shortly after Vice President Gerald R. Ford had been sworn in as President of the United States.¹³

Three people were waiting for me at my arrival gate at Dulles Airport. One was a man dispatched by Ford’s office with a note from the new President requesting that I serve as Chairman of his transition to the presidency. The second individual was John King from the State Department, one of the talented foreign service officers who had been assisting me in Washington, D.C.¹⁴ The third was my young former aide and friend, Dick Cheney, whom I had asked my office to call and request that he be available to give me a hand in my new assignment assisting the new President.

Though the Nixon White House had been officially focused on salvaging his presidency and refusing to even entertain the idea of resignation, I was informed that a small unofficial group of the Vice President’s aides and friends had met quietly to begin to think through what a transition to a Ford presidency might require—if it were to happen. The group had been assembled by Phil Buchen, Ford’s former law partner in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Other than the three or four members, no others were aware of the team’s existence—not President Nixon, not his key lieutenants, and, as I understand it, not even Vice President Ford.¹⁵ Once Ford had been informed by President Nixon he would become President, he urgently began to organize his official transition team, consisting of individuals he knew well and trusted, all from his days in the Congress: former Pennsylvania Governor and former Congressman Bill Scranton; former Maryland Congressman and Nixon’s Secretary of the Interior Rogers Morton; my friend, former Democratic Congressman from Virginia and former Assistant Secretary of Defense Jack Marsh, who was by then serving on Vice President Ford’s staff; and finally he asked me to serve as the Chairman.

When I entered the Cabinet Room of the White House for the first meeting of our transition team with the brand-new President, having just landed from my flight to Washington, D.C., from Europe, I took special note of my friend. He was in one sense his familiar self—his receding dark blond hair graying at the temples—flashing his open, expressive smile. But he had, in tangible and intangible ways, been transformed by his new position and what he must have sensed were its unmatched burdens and responsibilities.

This was my first glimpse of Gerald Ford as President of the United States. I hadn’t known quite what to expect. The weight of the office, and literally the world, had suddenly fallen on his shoulders. How would he handle it? Might he be shaken? In fact, I found him to be very much the same person I’d known since my early days in Congress.

Like many others, I found the Nixon-Ford contrast remarkable. A distant and often secretive man, Richard Nixon was a deep thinker, a strategist immersed in and fascinated by the nuances of policy, a person interested in, and on occasion suspicious of, the motives of others, opponents, even advisors and friends. Kissinger, who had worked closely with President Nixon, had been struck by how difficult it could be to gauge his intentions. “When I saw Nixon,” Henry told me, “I figured whatever he said was not what was going to happen. . . . You never knew what game Nixon was playing.”¹⁶

As President, Gerald Ford was determined to be accessible and, due to his nature, he was naturally un-Nixon-like. One of the first symbolic things he did was to order the removal of any recording devices—which apparently had been in existence in various forms and locations off and on since the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt—from all White House offices.¹⁷ He instructed his aides to cut down on the playing of the grandiose “Hail to the Chief” when he appeared at ceremonial events; the University of Michigan fight song—“Hail to the Victors”—would suffice.¹⁸ He referred to his sleeping quarters in the White House as “the residence,” instead of the term that had been in vogue during the Nixon years—“the executive mansion.” And he even urged his Secret Service agents to smile once in a while.¹⁹

Prior to the formal proceedings of our transition team, the new President walked around the Cabinet Room’s long, oval table, which was positioned under the two golden, nineteenth-century Empire-style chandeliers that had been installed at President Nixon’s request. Ford looked each member of his personally selected transition team in the eyes and shook their hands. He then opened our initial session by acknowledging that it was a difficult time and thanking those of us present for our assistance to the nation. Be willing to “give me hell,” he urged the small group of his friends and former colleagues—an instruction I knew he truly meant. But from my experience in the Nixon White House, I also knew well that for most individuals giving a President of the United States “hell” was easier said than done.

After some preliminary discussion, it became evident our transition team’s role was not to fashion policy proposals, at least at the outset. Instead, the new President asked us to promptly tackle the key organizational and personnel matters. His priority was to energize the White House staff and leadership across the executive branch of the federal government.²⁰

One of the early issues he asked us to address was the circumstances of the embattled senior members of the Nixon White House staff, whom Kissinger had likened to “shipwrecked sailors thrown together on some inaccessible island.”²¹ These were individuals known for their skills, their experience, their accomplishments, and their loyalty to President Nixon. Among them were Pat Buchanan, a talented speechwriter and close advisor who famously called President Nixon, his longtime friend and patron, “the old man”; John McLaughlin, the highly visible speechwriter and former Catholic priest who had cautioned that a “parade of horrors” would follow should Nixon be impeached; Alexander Butterfield, the solid Deputy Assistant to the President who, during televised testimony before Congress, accurately revealed the existence of President Nixon’s secret taping system; and Rosemary Woods, Nixon’s longtime secretary and confidante, who had taken responsibility for what had become known as the Watergate tape’s 18.5-minute gap.

The unraveling of the Nixon presidency, coupled with the arrival of the few largely untested members of the Ford vice presidential staff, made the transition less cordial than one might have expected or hoped. Ford himself found that some of Nixon’s people seemed defensive, territorial, and suspicious. “Their man was going down,” as he put it to me.²² He fully understood their feelings. It was not an easy time for either team. And Ford was reluctant to replace these seasoned, loyal public servants. He worried that having them quickly follow Nixon out of the administration might unfairly taint them with the Watergate stigma.

Privately, I suggested to Ford that he nonetheless consider taking an approach that would unambiguously establish a Ford presidency. “Mr. President,” I said, “I can’t argue with your position that if someone in the Cabinet is doing a good job they shouldn’t be removed. But let me argue it anyway.”²³

I emphasized that—in the earliest hours and days of his new administration—the taint of the Watergate scandal would quite understandably call for a fresh start. “It is tough to govern in the best of times. This is the worst of times,” I told Ford. Not fashioning a new, fresh “Ford administration,” I feared, could lead to a perception that it was business as usual.²⁴ He listened to my argument, but disagreed.²⁵ He thought stability was more important than optics, and, in time, I came to realize he was probably right.

Ford did bring into the White House several people with whom he had previous relationships. Bob Hartmann, who had been his Chief of Staff while Ford was Vice President, was promptly named the President’s chief speechwriter and political advisor. He was born in Rapid City, South Dakota, the year America joined World War I. A Stanford graduate, Hartmann worked at the Los Angeles Times, enlisted in the Navy, and served in the Pacific during World War II as a public information officer for two outstanding naval officers—Admiral Chester W. Nimitz and, later, for Admiral William F. Halsey. After the war, Bob returned to the Los Angeles Times where, for more than two decades, he was an editorial writer, Washington bureau chief, and Middle East bureau chief. In 1966, he went to work for the House Republican Conference before becoming the senior aide to then Congressman Gerald Ford. A highly skilled speechwriter, Bob had the major role in many if not most of Gerald Ford’s finest speeches.

Jerry terHorst, a veteran journalist with the Detroit News, was announced as the new White House Press Secretary. The son of Dutch immigrants, he was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1922. He received a degree from the University of Michigan in 1946, after serving in the Marine Corps in the Pacific theater during World War II. TerHorst, then a member of the press, had happened to be in the presidential motorcade during the assassination of President Kennedy.

Jack Marsh, a former Democratic Congressman from Virginia and National Security Advisor to then Vice President Ford, was named Counselor to the new President. Marsh, born in Winchester, Virginia, in 1926, enlisted in the Army in 1944 and was selected for Officer Candidate School at age eighteen. He served in the Army of Occupation of Germany and was a long-serving and dedicated member of the U.S. Army Reserve. Jack graduated from Washington and Lee in 1951, served with distinction in Vietnam, and then was elected as a Democrat to the U.S. House of Representatives from Virginia’s Seventh District serving from 1963 to 1971. When we were in Congress, Jack’s and my office were only a few doors apart, and we had become good friends. Jack was nominated to be the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Legislative Affairs in 1973, a position he held for just short of a year before being asked by Ford to join the Office of the Vice President. President Ford and I had both come to respect Jack enormously while we had served together as colleagues in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Marsh’s appointment inadvertently demonstrated the tensions that lingered in the White House. When Ford announced in a meeting that Jack Marsh would become Counselor to the President—and focus on foreign policy and defense—I noticed Al Haig wince. Haig, whom Ford had announced he would keep on as his White House Chief of Staff, was sensitive to the fact that designating Marsh’s responsibilities in that manner could be seen as infringing on Kissinger’s carefully guarded portfolios as both the National Security Advisor and the Secretary of State. Jack Marsh was equally sensitive to the problem and immediately suggested to the President that his title not include a focus on foreign policy and defense.²⁶

Haig had been President Nixon’s second White House Chief of Staff following H. R. (Bob) Haldeman. Born near Philadelphia, Al earned degrees from the U.S. Military Academy, Columbia Business School, and Georgetown. He went on to a successful Army career, serving during the Korean and Vietnam Wars, rising to the rank of General after holding high-level positions in the Department of Defense and on the National Security Council in the Nixon White House. Replacing H. R. Haldeman, General Haig had earned praise for providing crucial leadership during the hardest days of the Nixon administration, when the President was increasingly embattled, isolated, and distracted.²⁷ Leon Jaworski, the second special prosecutor appointed during the Watergate investigations, and no Nixon partisan, later wrote, “In my own view, General Haig . . . performed in the highest and noblest tradition.”²⁸

Ford, who had gotten along well with Haig while he served as Vice President, overruled detractors within his camp and in the media and announced immediately that the general would remain in the role of Chief of Staff, continuing to manage White House staff access to the President, assisting in setting the executive agenda, and managing relationships with the Cabinet and the various executive agencies. As talented and experienced as these men were, and each was both experienced and highly skilled in their roles, some critics noted that the discredited Nixon’s two most visible aides—Kissinger and Haig—would be continuing in the White House in the same exact roles.

MEETING WITH THE PRESIDENT

August 9, 1974

5:30 to 6:30 p.m.

Cabinet Room

The President indicated that he planned to start the day a little before 8:00 a.m., and as a regular thing have a CIA briefing with Jack Marsh present, see Bob Hartman [sic], do some office work, see Marsh on legislation, some press things, and at 10:00 a.m. start his visits. He said he was a better listener than a reader and that he did like to have things to read at home at night.²⁹

The President explained that he intended to have an open Oval Office door for Cabinet officers—provided they had something substantive and important to discuss. The definitions of “substantive” and “important” he left to those seeking the meetings. He was notably uncomfortable with the public characterization of the Nixon White House as having had an “imperial character,” which had been attributed to Nixon’s senior aides Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. They, along with Kissinger, had been given the moniker “the Berlin Wall,” for seeming to be ferociously guarding access to the President. My view was different, having served in the White House and in the Nixon Cabinet during most of the first four years of the Nixon presidency. I had observed and believed that Kissinger and Haldeman were without a doubt each performing in a manner that was what President Nixon requested and expected, though I was not as knowledgeable as to whether that was the case with Ehrlichman.

In any event, Ford was determined to upend what he saw as this insular approach. In his view, too few people with access to the Oval Office meant too few opportunities to broaden the knowledge of a President and of those of his key advisors. “The President has made it clear,” attested Dr. Bob Goldwin, whom I had brought in as the Ford administration’s unofficial “intellectual-in-residence,” “that he wants to be an accessible President with a steady flow of information, opinions, and imaginative suggestions reaching the White House.”³⁰ Ford called his preferred style a “spokes of a wheel” approach, with the President at the center and a range of advisors reporting to him.

In this new setup, a good many senior officials (the spokes) would theoretically each enjoy ready access to the singular President (the hub). That was the approach he had used with considerable success in the Congress as the Republican Leader. On a great many more than one occasion, I cautioned the President that that approach would not work well in the White House and that he could be “consumed” by it.³¹ So many people would have access to him, each understandably believing his or her respective issues were of the upmost importance, that he would have little time to assure that the administration’s key executives were concentrating on his priorities. Continuing with the “spokes of the wheel” analogy, I reminded him that what could happen was that the lubricant at the hub of the wheel would overheat and that the wheel might need to be replaced. My recommendation was that he get the U.S. government working off his “outbox”—his priorities—rather than he, as the President, working off his “inbox”—everyone else’s priorities.

Ford had been Vice President for only eight months—246 days, to be exact, and had never served in an executive position. Conversely, since his service in the Navy in World War II, he had been a legislator for almost a quarter-century. As such, the Congress was his frame of reference when it came to decisions about management, organization, and personnel. As a member of Congress, he had not been required to manage a staff larger than perhaps a dozen or so people. As a result, the “spokes of the wheel” approach had been a well-developed pattern for him. Indeed, as a legislator and the leader of a group of elected legislators his role was to listen to them and lead. The presidency—needless to say—is an entirely different situation, with dozens of senior officials from the executive departments, agencies, boards, and commissions, plus the senior members of the Congress, as well as a great many important individuals outside of the government all vying for a President’s attention and each, more often than not, with an understandably strong sense of urgency.³²

The next morning at ten o’clock, I joined the President as he held his first Cabinet meeting. All of us were Nixon holdovers. But anyone there could sense that things were different. One change was cosmetic, but telling. On the wall in the Cabinet Room during the Nixon presidency were portraits of three Presidents: Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Nixon’s affinity for Dwight Eisenhower, whom he had served with as Vice President, was understandable, as was his respect for Abraham Lincoln. Woodrow Wilson, a liberal Democrat who was an intellectual force behind a powerful and large federal government, was a bit puzzling. Ford decided to replace the Wilson portrait with that of a man who he believed better fit his approach, the plainspoken midwesterner Democrat Harry S. Truman, a “people’s president,” as President Ford called him.³³ Truman had also served as Vice President and become President by a historical event not of his choosing—the death of Franklin Roosevelt.

One of Nixon’s most memorable Cabinet meetings, at least for me, had occurred immediately after his landslide re-election in 1972, when he had won forty-nine out of fifty states. Fresh from his historic triumph, Nixon entered the Cabinet Room to rousing cheers and an extended standing ovation. But rather than enjoying the moment and expressing warm appreciation to his team, the President began a meandering yet colorful lecture with seemingly no clear point. He spoke of various British Prime Ministers he admired, tossing in unusual comments, like, “Richard Nixon doesn’t shoot blanks.” Then he mentioned “exhausted volcanoes,” a phrase he said Benjamin Disraeli had used to describe public servants drained of their energy and inspiration. As the session ended, Nixon exited the Cabinet Room to more muted applause and a few confused looks as to exactly what had just transpired, leaving his powerful Chief of Staff, H. R. Haldeman, to promptly—and without preface—ask each of the Cabinet members to tender their resignations and, moreover, to provide summaries of their responsibilities that could be helpful to whoever might replace them.³⁴

A similar request might well have been anticipated by members of the Nixon Cabinet during their first meeting with President Ford. Instead Ford caught them by surprise. He thanked all of them for their service and then said he was counting on them to stay on. Going further to make his point absolutely clear, he said he would not accept any resignations that might be tendered.³⁵

Of his predecessor, Ford expressed a surprising level of admiration and affection. In his first speech to the nation, he had closed by asking his fellow citizens to pray for Nixon and his family: “May our former President, who brought peace to millions, find it for himself.” His instructions to the Cabinet were in keeping with that tone, adding that nothing about his administration should reflect negatively upon the previous administration. Ford also put forward an assessment of the political atmosphere that differed sharply with the one many pundits and political analysts were providing. He said he believed there was a reservoir of sympathy for former President Nixon across the country. He further suggested it would last—and possibly even increase—particularly if Nixon’s adversaries were to continue efforts of harassment or revenge.

With respect to any legal steps he might take with respect to Mr. Nixon, the President phrased his comments carefully. He simply advised, “Time is a healer.” He closed his remarks by requesting those gathered not to speculate about a “pardon,” though talk of a pardon was clearly in the air.³⁶

It was characteristic of Ford to feel sympathy for the beleaguered former President. Nixon had been through a great deal, Ford believed. He and his family had been disgraced. But Ford’s basic human decency may have led him to not fully sense the lingering anger and deep disappointment of a great many Americans and, for some, how much they had come to disapprove of the former President. To many, Nixon’s departure was taken not as a denouement, but as a beginning.

After his remarks on Nixon, Ford opened a discussion of his plans for selecting a Vice President. He indicated he had asked the Republican National Chairman to solicit suggestions from GOP leaders across the country. He requested suggestions from the Cabinet members and from his senior advisors, asking that they be funneled through Al Haig.³⁷

After Ford concluded his remarks, Kissinger, as Secretary of State and the senior Cabinet member, was the first to speak. He pointed out that an opportunity to perform a national service was what had initially brought people to serve in the federal government. He assured the President he could count on total loyalty and unflagging support from the members of the Cabinet. As his final comment, he forcefully advised that “the fate of the country—and the world” depended upon the success of the Ford administration.³⁸

Peter Brennan—then Secretary of Labor—said we all owed allegiance to the new President and needed to get on with the tough task of piecing the country back together. Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz suggested a need to prevent erosion of conservative support on Capitol Hill. The President shifted the tone, demurring that he had not had time to think about the politics of the situation.³⁹

In words that almost certainly hadn’t been uttered in the White House in years, the President then urged members of the Cabinet to improve the administration’s relations with the media, to be less defensive, and to be more “affirmative.”⁴⁰ To underscore this, he led by example, moving smartly from his first Cabinet meeting as President to the White House press room to personally introduce to reporters Jerry terHorst, the man he had selected to be his new Press Secretary.

At least a few Nixon veterans resentful of the media must have considered the President’s hopeful tone a bit naïve. Many had been hunkered down in struggles against what they saw as the liberal media for years. When he was Nixon’s Vice President, Spiro Agnew memorably called the members of the press corps “nattering nabobs of negativity.” But the gesture was pure Jerry Ford. He had enjoyed excellent relations with reporters as a member of Congress and sincerely believed that should and could continue. Yet the move also likely involved a calculation—and a shrewd one on his part—that such unexpected openness and candor might help to bleed some of the prior administration’s lingering toxins from the political bloodstream.

President Ford’s strikingly different approach proved effective. As he began his new administration, there was a sense of optimism in the public and even among many in the media. “[I]n the person of Gerald Ford, the United States just may have proved itself once again to have the greatest of national assets: good luck,” wrote the liberal columnist Anthony Lewis. “When President Ford took the oath of office and said his few words of reassuring modesty, it was as if a cloud had lifted. Words once more had a simple, direct meaning.”⁴¹ The New York Times, a leading critic of Richard Nixon, opined, “Out of the morass of Watergate, the nation has planted its feet on solid ground once again. Out of the tragedy of Mr. Nixon has evolved the triumph of America.”⁴²

Defying the bitter atmosphere of the moment, Gerald R. Ford’s open and earnest approach earned him an impressive, and almost unimaginable 71 percent approval rating upon his taking office.⁴³ The American people, and even the Washington, D.C., press corps, seemed willing to give the new guy a chance, though it wasn’t clear for how long.