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Public Enemy Number One

MEETING WITH THE PRESIDENT

November 6, 1974

8:30 to 9:07 a.m.

Oval Office

Alone

The doctor who’s the most brilliant on venereal disease, who talked about it all the time, suddenly becomes thought of as the venereal disease man. And that’s not a happy image.¹

If the most serious constitutional crisis in American politics since the Civil War was beginning to recede by the fall of 1974, our country’s economy was rapidly worsening, driving prices of everyday goods so high that millions struggled to afford them. As Ford entered his presidency in August 1974, inflation was reported at its highest level since the year 1919. Opinion polls consistently cited inflation as the nation’s top problem, at one point mentioned by up to 80 percent of the public.²

The spiraling inflation in the fall of 1974 meant that a ten-dollar bill was not purchasing nearly as much in groceries or gas as it had only months before. From October 1974 through May 1975, the American economy experienced one of its steepest economic declines since the Great Depression back in the 1930s.³ Few were immune to the pain of the economic downturn. The “Misery Index,” named by Dr. Arthur Okun, who had been the Chairman of Lyndon Johnson’s Council of Economic Advisors in the late 1960s, quickly became a telling analytical tool.

Economists were using the term “stagflation” to describe the unusual toxic brew of rapid inflation coupled with high unemployment and declining economic growth. Until the mid-1970s, many if not most economists had viewed inflation and recession as mutually exclusive. If products were getting more expensive, it was generally because demand was high and the economy was growing. But this seemed to be a new era, one in which the traditional monetary tools for fixing one problem, such as the Federal Reserve tightening the monetary supply to reduce inflation, could create another problem, in this case, by reducing economic growth and increasing unemployment.

Stagflation’s underpinnings seemed to be easier to understand than to remedy. The United States faced a $25 billion deficit in 1968 due to President Johnson’s decision to accelerate spending on both “guns and butter” without increases in revenues. President Nixon then adopted wage and price controls in August 1971, which had the federal government trying to control wages and prices in a free enterprise system, the folly of which I saw up close during my time as the Director of the Cost of Living Council.

Since the end of World War II, a good deal of U.S. manufacturing had moved overseas, squeezing the middle class, the backbone of the American economy. The year 1971 had been the first since 1888 in which the U.S. had experienced a trade deficit, importing $2.26 billion more in goods and services than was exported.⁴ Further, OPEC’s oil embargo, which began in October 1973 in response to the Yom Kippur War and lasted until March 1974, had quadrupled the price of oil. Because oil is necessary in the production of so many products, the prices of a great many things rose—some sharply.

Having served in Congress for decades from a state where the chief industry, automobiles, was closely tied to the nation’s economic trends, Gerald Ford was particularly sensitive when it came to economic issues. He was a master of the complex process in the Congress that governed federal spending, having served for years as a senior member of the powerful House Appropriations Committee. Because of Congressman Ford’s role on that committee, President Harry Truman once took him on a tour of the White House to demonstrate the pressing need for funds to shore up rooms that were on the verge of collapse. Truman had been so persuasive, saying at one point that the ceiling of the State Dining Room was staying up only out of force of habit, that Ford, then a freshman member of Congress, broke his antispending campaign pledge and voted for every penny President Truman had requested.⁵

Now in the presidency himself, Ford knew the American economy was in a precarious state. Many Americans were hurting in very direct ways, having less to spend on the necessities for their families. He wasted no time in addressing the issue. His first major economic address—which was also his first appearance before a joint session of the Congress as President—was on Monday, August 12, 1974, three days after he had been sworn in as President. There he asserted that, having traveled more than 118,000 miles and participated in some fifty-five press conferences as Vice President, he was convinced “the unanimous concern of Americans is inflation.”

“My first priority,” Ford continued, “is to work with you to bring inflation under control. Inflation is domestic enemy number one.”⁶

As had been proposed by Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield the previous week, the President directed the Joint Economic Committee of Congress to provide its findings on the best ways to combat the issue in six weeks rather than the six months that had been initially planned. The American people, Ford affirmed, “are as anxious as we are to get the right answers.”⁷ Still finding his footing as the country’s new chief executive, he was confident enough to know he didn’t have all the answers, and that combating inflation wasn’t something that any chief executive could take on alone from the Oval Office. His early speech was a punt, but a useful one.

Meanwhile the economic situation was worsening. In a September 19, 1974, memo to the President, Alan Greenspan, the new Chairman of Ford’s Council of Economic Advisors, advised the President that the Consumer Price Index (CPI) had recorded “the largest monthly increase since August 1973 and the second largest since during the Korean War. All major categories of the CPI—food, nonfood commodities, and services—contributed relatively equally to the advance.”⁸

At the end of September, the President convened a two-day “summit conference” on the economy and inflation, attended by, in Ford’s words, “some of the best economic brains from labor, industry, and agriculture.”⁹ As he convened the group that weekend, he received some unwelcome personal news that almost certainly distracted him. His beloved, Betty, who had discovered a lump in her breast, was being operated on. Late that morning, Ford received a call from a doctor, informing the President that Betty’s cancer was malignant and that her surgical team would proceed with a full mastectomy. The news shook Ford. With his friend Bob Hartmann present and sympathetic, the President broke down in tears at his desk in the Oval Office.¹⁰ Mrs. Ford, sharing her husband’s penchant for openness, publicly disclosed her battle with breast cancer—the first time the medical condition was ever discussed by a sitting First Lady. Her efforts undoubtedly led to an increase in awareness of breast cancer and may well have helped to save the lives of a number of women who sought mammograms as a result.

After visiting Betty in the hospital that afternoon, September 28, the President returned to the economic conference with an address in which he previewed what he labeled the “WIN Program,” a “volunteer citizens program” to “whip inflation now.” He petitioned the American people for support. “Right now, make a list of some ten ways you can save energy and you can fight inflation . . . and I urge you and ask you to send me a copy.”¹¹ Maybe it meant driving less to save more on gasoline. Or maybe it meant buying less expensive groceries. The speech did not include specifics. Ford’s entreaty may have been one of the first crowd-sourced presidential initiatives in American history.

This call to service and sacrifice, though genuine, raised questions. It left some feeling that the President might be shifting the onus of solving the country’s economic woes, not totally onto the American people, but certainly to some extent away from the White House, the government, and the nation’s elected officials. It seemed to be a shift from his August speech, in which he had forthrightly charged Washington, D.C., with supplying leadership. The WIN plan led to one of the first real policy debates inside the still-young Ford administration.

On the morning of October 8, with the President scheduled to speak that evening before a joint session of Congress to publicly unveil the so-called WIN program, the twentieth-largest bank in the nation had collapsed. Founded in 1926, New York–based Franklin National Bank, which had lost $63 million in the first five months of 1974, would become the first major financial institution in U.S. history to be wound down by federal regulators.¹² Although the bank’s fate was seen as primarily the result of fraud and mismanagement, the stunning news heightened apprehension about the health of the economy and its prospects. Some wondered if this might be the first of many dominoes to fall and whether a full run on America’s banks could be at hand.

The proposed final draft of the President’s WIN speech arrived on my desk only hours before the President was scheduled to deliver it. I found it worrisome. In the speech, Ford was to explain to Congress that since the summit, he had “evaluated literally hundreds of ideas, day and night,” relaying there was “only one point on which all advisors have agreed: We must whip inflation right now.” He outlined what was described as “a grand design” to whip inflation, which consisted of ten areas where the executive and legislative branches could work together to solve the problem. It was fiscally conservative in orientation, calling for $4.4 billion in spending cuts to hold the federal budget to $300 billion and imposing a one-year 5 percent surtax on corporations and upper-level individual incomes. It also laid out plans to encourage food production and to stimulate the housing industry.

But what stood out was the call for volunteerism to tame spending and increase savings, elaborating on his tease of the “volunteer citizens program” he had mentioned two weeks earlier in his inflation summit press conference. He announced that, in a week in Kansas City, before the Future Farmers of America, he would elaborate upon “how volunteer inflation fighters and energy savers can further mobilize their total efforts.” The idea of WIN, as Ron Nessen noted, “was that ordinary citizens could play a role in stifling inflation by such steps as cutting back on their spending, planting gardens to grow their own food, riding bicycles to work . . . cutting back on electricity, and so forth.”¹³ The President’s draft remarks concluded with him stopping just short of asking Congress to declare “war” on inflation, in terms similar to Lyndon B. Johnson’s so-called war on poverty.

The draft of the speech was plagued by rhetorical discrepancies and confusing lists of policy proposals. With only a few hours before the President left the White House for the speech, I felt a responsibility to caution Ford about what I was concerned could be its impact.

Knowing how the Ford White House speech shop tended to operate, I was concerned that the speech may not have been fully coordinated with the relevant Cabinet officials and senior White House economic advisors. In a normal presidential speechwriting process, a major address would be fact-checked and vetted and would receive a signoff from the relevant departments and agencies. I soon learned that Alan Greenspan, the White House’s top economist, had not seen a semifinal draft until eight o’clock the previous morning, at which point he had found five or six factual mistakes. The speechwriting team had unveiled the WIN campaign and distributed sample buttons to him. It was Greenspan’s first such experience in the White House, and one that almost sent him “racing back to New York.” “It was surreal,” he recalled. “I was the only economist present, and I said to myself . . .‘What am I doing here?’ ”¹⁴ The President’s senior economic staff advisor Bill Seidman, Treasury Secretary Bill Simon, U.S. Trade Representative Bill Eberle, the Chair of the Federal Reserve Bank, Dr. Arthur Burns, and noted economist Dr. Paul McCracken, all of whom would be needed to professionally discuss, explain, and support the program, had also received their copies of the landmark economic speech only hours before it was to be delivered.¹⁵ I saw a problem in the making—but unfortunately not the first I had witnessed from the new White House communications and speechwriting team in my very brief time as the new Chief of Staff.

The White House Press Office had not been functioning well in the later months of the Nixon administration nor in the early days after Gerald Ford had assumed the presidency. The slumping morale suffered an additional knock after Jerry terHorst resigned over the Nixon pardon. But the speechwriting operation posed still another problem.

The shop was headed by Bob Hartmann. Having been so close to Ford for years, Hartmann felt his thunder was being stolen by Ron Nessen, who had left NBC News as a correspondent to become the President’s Press Secretary, replacing terHorst. After accepting the White House appointment, Nessen asked the President whether he would also be a senior advisor. “Of course,” Ford replied. Hartmann, who was present at that meeting, spoke up. “You’d better tell him, Mr. President, that I have a lot of experience in the [press relations] field and that I’m going to be looking over his shoulder a lot.”¹⁶ Not an auspicious beginning.

Personal rivalries, which understandably concerned the President, on occasion led to leaks and unflattering newspaper articles, which concerned Ford even more.¹⁷ Zealously guarding his role as the President’s message crafter, Hartmann would resist circulating drafts of speeches or coordinating with White House policy experts. I told the President that the process was not sufficiently professional and, as a result, was having the effect of making the White House seem hapless.¹⁸ On a number of occasions, I had to ask Dr. Robert Goldwin to set aside other tasks to take a crack at trying to improve late speech drafts.

Ford understood the problem well. As mentioned, he had referred to the “Bob Hartmann issue” when he urged me to take over as the Chief of Staff. Still, the existing process, as clumsy as it might be, had worked for him before, the President told me. And indeed it had when he was in Congress, where speeches were often delivered extemporaneously and received little to no national attention. But the presidency is a different stage and the stakes were considerably higher.

The President thought the WIN program had been devised by the head of the White House’s editorial department, Paul Theis, who reasoned that a voluntary citizens’ program needed a campaign with a symbol. Ford further noted he was sold on the program by Bob Hartmann, who argued that WIN was “a great idea.”¹⁹ As to who was the progenitor of the voluntary citizens’ program, that remained something of a mystery. “I’m not sure who dreamed up the WIN program,” Ron Nessen later reflected. “Nobody claimed credit.”²⁰ (Apparently, the White House speechwriting office—with the assistance of New York–based advertising agency Benton & Bowles—had developed the idea and the branding behind WIN.)

Just hours before the President was scheduled to head to Capitol Hill for his nationally televised address, and armed with the information that the speech’s contents had likely not been fully vetted with the policy experts, I made a last-ditch effort to try to persuade the President to consider delaying the speech. I told him I was concerned the program might not provide the degree of confidence the country needed. I argued that instead he consider taking five minutes of prime time and state that the program being developed to deal with inflation was not yet good enough. I argued that the economy was too important for a less than fully vetted proposal. I lost. “Well, I think it’s a good program,” Ford told me. Understandably, he was reluctant to reverse a decision he’d already made, especially at the last minute. He also undoubtedly also knew such a reversal would reflect poorly on his close aide and friend, Bob Hartmann. The President got in the motorcade and headed to the U.S. Capitol, where he would deliver the speech.

The content of the speech was what it was, but arguably an even greater problem might have been the optics. The President strode to the rostrum, conspicuously wearing a WIN button. In the minds of some, the President seemed to be pinning the success of his anti-inflation program on a voluntary citizens’ program. No matter what else he said, listeners would remember the WIN button. Earlier the morning of his address to the joint session, we had all looked at the button. Ron Nessen and Russell Freeburg, Coordinator to the Citizens’ Action Committee to Fight Inflation, wanted the President to wear it. I did not want him to wear it and told him so.²¹

The President’s address—in particular the notion that small acts in your home could tame the broader economic forces—perplexed a number of our country’s top economists. Some reactions were stinging. “While some of his measures are good and some are questionable,” read a New York Times editorial, “they in no sense add up to a program for an emergency, and it is an emergency that confronts the nation and the world.”²² If the WIN program seemed to some to lack persuasive economic reasoning, that, in my view, was because it did. In his memoir, Ford guardedly recollected that “some” of his economic advisors were “skeptical,” but wrote “most” agreed WIN was worth a try.²³

Looking back, the President very well might have been right to press forward on the issue. To my amazement, although the media reaction to the speech was lukewarm at best, the initial public response to the WIN program was positive. A tiny staff in the White House faced 1,000 telephone calls a day and had to handle the more than 200,000 letters addressed to the President. In the first nine days alone, 101,240 WIN enlistment papers arrived in the White House, and the number of requests for WIN buttons was staggering.²⁴ “What we have been doing so far,” said Russell Freeburg, who was in charge of the WIN program, “is like building an airplane in mid-air.”²⁵ Hartmann went so far as to unfairly accuse Nixon administration holdovers of torpedoing the WIN program using “every dirty trick in their considerable bag to make it fail,” which of course was not the case.

There were also, it should be noted, some truly heartwarming responses to President Ford’s call to action. For example, Girl Scouts in eastern Tennessee held the price of their cookies during the January 1975 sale at the same level as the previous two years despite the higher cost of sugar. In Ohio, employees of the Gold Circle, a discount department chain, wore “Humbug on High Prices” buttons to remind shoppers to look for the lowest possible prices.²⁶

But this support proved short-lived, especially as media criticism dominated. Shortly before Thanksgiving 1974, Ron Nessen, President Ford’s replacement Press Secretary, appeared before reporters wearing what was by then an increasingly familiar piece of administration paraphernalia: a “WIN” button. Yet there was something obviously amiss about Nessen’s button; it was upside down, reading instead “NIM.” When asked what that stood for, he replied with good humor, “No Immediate Miracles.”²⁷ President Ford, he added, “had warned that there would be No Immediate Miracles in curing the nation’s economic ills.”²⁸ Nessen’s comment was an attempt to make light of the situation. Regrettably, the program had become the butt of some late-night-show jokes.

By late December, WIN’s staff consisted of only two full-time volunteers and two part-timers—with one hundred thousand letters to Ford remaining unanswered, some of which the speech shop farmed out to volunteers and typists on loan from other offices. “WIN was what the advertising world would call an over-promise,” noted Edward Block, an Illinois Bell Telephone Company executive from Chicago who had taken over as WIN’s volunteer executive director. “More was anticipated than was reasonable to expect.”²⁹

Still, President Ford was to be admired for making the effort. Inflation was a real and serious concern for millions of Americans. Even though no President could fix the problem overnight, no President who cared about working families, as Ford did, could ignore it. I was concerned about the scattershot approach in some elements of the White House operation in those early days, where messaging and speeches of this import continued to be less than fully coordinated and not vetted by the key policy experts. There were other aspects that suggested that the new White House was still a less than fully professional operation. An amusing example was that once in the Oval Office, when the President pounded the table for emphasis, Bob Hartmann popped into the room. Apparently the buzzer system in the President’s desk was overly sensitive. Another example occurred when the President requested some sort of a curtain at the back windows of the Oval Office, because the sun came in in the morning, right on his head and face, and was a problem. It took forever, it seemed, for us to get that problem fixed.³⁰

Shortly after his WIN speech, I expressed a concern to the President. As I noted at the time, I advised him that “the White House needs running, and he’s not doing it, and no one can do it for him, unless he decides that it has to be done by someone.”³¹

By the start of 1975, a number of prominent economic thinkers, from both inside and outside of government, had captured the President’s ear, convincing him there may well be better ways than volunteer efforts to achieve his goals. The economic numbers had not improved as much as had been hoped and concern was palpable. The White House had received various reports from around the country that the administration’s economic agenda was “destroyed,” “killed,” or “dead.”³² In December 1974, Robert Werner, then President of the Washington Forum, penned a scathing letter after visiting with dozens of the country’s largest investment institutions. The overriding concern, he conveyed, was “the Administration’s economic policies—its apparent failure to anticipate the deep recessionary characteristic.”³³

The President continued to declare that fighting inflation would remain the centerpiece of his economic agenda. I mentioned, first, that the unemployment component of the stagflation equation was accelerating. Second, and more important, I was concerned that he risked being seen as a Johnny One Note on “inflation,” a problem he wasn’t going to be able to solve—or at least solve in such a way that he would be seen as deserving of credit. I said to him, “The doctor who’s the most brilliant on venereal disease, who talked about it all the time, suddenly becomes thought of as the venereal disease man.” I added “that’s not a happy image.”³⁴ Given his focus on inflation, I doubted that it would be helpful for him to become known as “the inflation man.”

Heading into the midterm elections of 1974, the first national elections since the Nixon resignation, President Ford had wisely set expectations low. With Nixon consumed in his political crisis and Ford focused on restoring confidence in the presidency, the Republican Party had, in large measure, been without the most valuable asset, the bully pulpit of the White House. Although Ford had spent several days on the stump in the months before the election, logging thousands of miles and visiting some twenty states prior to the November midterm elections, his words and demeanor were missing the fire to energize the party. His heart wasn’t in red-meat attacks. After Watergate—and after his pardon of Richard Nixon—President Ford saw a need to be largely nonpartisan, even postpartisan, to help heal the country’s continuing divisions. A number of his conservative friends had urged that he attack Democrats to boost the party’s chances. But Ford, given his courteous nature, was inclined toward restraint. He was persuaded that robust campaigning could backfire. The American people, he felt, were looking for leadership more than politics.³⁵

A number of his advisors, including me, agreed that the President should not spend too much time on the campaign trail. GOP political advisors were resigned to Republicans taking a walloping. A grim postelection statement was prepared in late October, more than a week before voters had headed to their ballot boxes. The Ford campaign team, which was beginning to be assembled with the presidential election only two years away, was concerned that some in the party might use a sizable loss as reason to challenge Ford’s leadership. They knew that political capital was a valuable commodity for a President. Wasting it on what seemed certain to be a losing effort was an unnecessary risk. But Ford disagreed. He thought a President, who is also the leader of his party, has a responsibility to campaign for his team regardless of the likely result or impact. More to the point, many of the members of Congress running were his personal friends. And Jerry Ford stood by his friends.

On November 5, the day of the election, preparations were made for a long and difficult evening. Those responsible for the White House mess were instructed to be open through the night to provide food for those who would inevitably be working late. Three television sets, coffee, and light snacks were brought into the Roosevelt Room across the hall from the Oval Office so staffers could come and go without creating disruptions in the President’s office. Most of the senior staff watched the all-too-expected returns until 12:30 a.m.³⁶

The Democrats indeed steamrolled the GOP. Back on October 8, Bill Timmons, the President’s wise Assistant for Legislative Affairs, had predicted the GOP would lose fifty seats in the House.³⁷ He was close. The results showed the Democrats had made a net gain of four seats in the Senate, giving them a majority in that chamber, and they had gained forty-nine seats in the House, giving them a majority above the two-thirds mark in that chamber. The Democrats also picked up a net of four governorships. In state legislatures, Democrats increased their control by 14 percent in the lower houses and 12 percent in the upper houses.³⁸ “Watergate and the Agnew scandal,” several historians later noted, “had taken their toll on the reputation of a party that not long before had been considered more honest and upright than the Democrats.”³⁹

In the days after the 1974 election, members of the GOP engaged in extensive discussions about how best to move forward. As for President Ford, his instinct was to be the same person he had always been. I suggested that he place the legislative burden on the Democrats. “We should let it be known we took a licking—that we are down—that they have an overwhelming majority—that they have responsibility,” I noted in a memo on November 6, 1974. I pressed this point by suggesting that events would inevitably arise at home and abroad that would require leadership—the type of leadership that only the White House can provide. Congress, on the other hand, would remain culpable: “a collection of 435 in the House and 100 in the Senate individual human beings with very poor leadership and no structure and no drive.”⁴⁰

*  *  *

On January 13, 1975, two days before his State of the Union address, the President delivered a televised speech to the American people. “This speech,” I penned to Ford, “will almost certainly be the most important of your Presidency.” I recommended “bitter medicine” as the theme, to reflect the number of difficult policy decisions he had made—and he was going to have to make—to cope with stagflation. Individuals rewriting and editing the draft of the speech had gotten “cold feet” and were attempting to “sugar-coat” those difficult decisions. “A first step in restoring confidence,” I suggested, “is to convince the American people that you understand the seriousness of the current situation and share their assessment of it.”⁴¹ That was step one. Step two, I believed, was filling the void left by the President’s anti-inflation campaign, which was increasingly being characterized as long on rhetoric and short on solutions.

The U.S. economy was by then declining even deeper into recession. Unemployment was increasing. Modestly reducing the prices of goods and services would hardly satisfy folks without much income. The administration had to take steps that would get people back to work. Before his first joint session of Congress in August 1974, the President had announced that while the state of the economy was “not so good,” the state of the union was “excellent.” In his January 1975 State of the Union message, he conceded: “I must say to you that the state of the Union is not good: Millions of Americans are out of work.”⁴² “Without wasting words,” Ford had begun, “I want to talk with you tonight about putting our domestic house in order. We must turn America in a new direction. We must reverse the current recession, reduce unemployment, and create more jobs.”⁴³

Some within the White House suggested it was less the words and more Ford’s delivery that was lacking. I thought he was most persuasive when he was himself. Others counseled the use of image gurus. The latter camp won out. In response to his January 13 address, one critic suggested someone must have talked the President “into gesturing with his hands and otherwise [acting] like a Dale Carnegie student”—a pointed reference to the prominent self-improvement guru and author of the book How to Win Friends and Influence People.⁴⁴ Press reports reinforced that impression. The Los Angeles Times ran a story that quoted Ford’s top speechwriter, Bob Hartmann, unhelpfully explaining publicly that he had coached Ford with a teleprompter six times, and emphasized the importance of using his hands.⁴⁵

It’s not as if the President didn’t already face enough opposition from the left. The “Watergate Babies,” as the recently elected new members of the Democratic-controlled Congress were dubbed, threw their considerable weight around, further limiting the President’s policy options. As one of the largest classes of freshman Democrats ever elected to the House, they pushed for massive spending to create government jobs, especially after unemployment rose to 7.2 percent in December 1974.⁴⁶ Frustration, nevertheless, inspired one of the most fruitful and potent revolutions in U.S. economic history.

In December 1974, an obscure, thirty-four-year-old economist named Dr. Arthur Laffer sat down with me and Dick Cheney at the Two Continents restaurant on Fifteenth Street in Northwest Washington, D.C. Venting about the administration’s flagging WIN campaign, he pulled a pen from his pocket and sketched on a napkin a “curve” illustrating the relationship between the tax rate and tax revenue collected from salaries, corporate profits, and investment income. The concept was, very simply, that at a zero tax rate the federal government would receive zero revenue, and at a 100 percent tax rate, the federal government would likely also receive zero revenue, having eliminated any incentive to work or produce. However, at some tax rate in between zero and 100 percent, revenues can be maximized. There, in a few sentences and a drawing, was what became known and heralded as the “Laffer curve” and “supply side” economics, which, over time, turned Keynesianism, the standard of economics of the twentieth century, on its head. Supply side economics, in dramatically reduced form, advocated the idea that tax cuts—especially for businesses, the “suppliers”—partially paid for themselves by boosting economic activity. To spark growth, consumers and corporations needed the ability to spend money. “What we had to do,” recalled Ford, “was reverse completely the economic strategy.”⁴⁷ The word reverse wasn’t an exaggeration. When a reporter asked whether the new economic agenda constituted a 180-degree shift, Ron Nessen sardonically responded it would be “only a 179-degree shift.”⁴⁸

In his State of the Union address on January 15, 1975, President Ford proposed a one-year $16 billion tax reduction. In March, only weeks later, Ford signed the Tax Reduction Act of 1975, which called for a $22.8 billion tax cut. The stage had been set for the impressive and previously unanticipated recovery that occurred on President Ford’s watch and presaged the Reagan Revolution and the economic boom of the 1980s. As for the WIN buttons, Nessen confirmed they “went into desk drawers, never to reemerge.”⁴⁹

Ford, before leaving office in January 1977, managed to lasso the stormy trends that had threatened, and he did so during the expensive but needed defense investments to counter the Soviet Union’s military investment and buildup. Unemployment, though still high, was heading down. Inflation had been more than cut in half from an annual rate of 12 percent to 4.8 percent. “[T]he economic recovery is on track after all,” the Wall Street Journal reported in late 1976, calling the signs “a vindication of the general thrust of Gerald Ford’s economies policies.”⁵⁰