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Morning Coats and Wolf Furs: Ford Abroad

MEMORANDUM FOR THE FILE

November 20, 1974

He never protects himself from having other people see him in a relaxed situation.

Can a great leader let down and still inspire?¹

At seventy years of age, the “shy, frail, white-haired man,” as President Ford recalled, greeted the President’s delegation warmly.² In itself this was a small moment in a busy day, but a remarkable, even unprecedented, moment in the history of free people. Only three decades earlier, Emperor Hirohito was the scourge of the Western world and the sworn enemy of Americans enlisting in World War II after Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor—men like a young Gerald Ford, and so many others, including my father, George Rumsfeld, each of whom served aboard a ship in the war against Japan. Now Ford and Hirohito faced each other, not as enemies, but as tested allies—critical allies, in fact, in the middle of the Cold War. This historic meeting, however, would start on a modestly discordant note.

The President’s Far East trip—with important meetings in Japan, South Korea, and the Soviet Union—was Gerald Ford’s first set of meetings as President outside North America. (He had been to Mexico the previous month, but only for a day.) So it was, not surprisingly, noted by the press as “his first major test in personal diplomacy.”³ His weeklong trip through East Asia offered the first glimpse many would have of this new, unknown, and untested President of the United States.

In Washington, Ford’s decision to even make the trip had come under scrutiny. A few critics wondered publicly if the President, so new to the presidency, might need more time to become comfortable in the position before launching into high-stakes diplomacy. The tremors from the Watergate scandals were still causing ripples in and around his new administration, a recession was emerging, and Nelson Rockefeller had not yet been confirmed by the Congress as Ford’s successor as Vice President. Because of the vacancy in that post, if something terrible happened on the trip, Ford’s successor as President would have been Carl Albert (D-OK), the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and the third American President in less than four months. Seizing on such concerns, Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia bluntly stated, “I don’t think this trip is necessary.”⁴

The President discounted those concerns. He believed that this was a time to let the world see that, despite the unprecedented turmoil surrounding the Watergate scandals and the double resignations, America was not shirking its responsibilities abroad. In fact, his view was that a demonstration of American resolve was desirable if not essential.

The President’s trip to Japan aboard Air Force One had been a rough ride, running into severe turbulence during a portion of the fifteen-hour flight, which left some reporters—situated, per tradition, in the rear compartment of Air Force One—slightly the worse for wear.

Although the U.S. had officially returned control of Okinawa to Japan in 1971, militant left-wing groups continued to oppose the presence of U.S. military forces remaining on the U.S. base there. Four days before we arrived in Tokyo, militants had carried out a firebomb attack against the U.S. Embassy there. About two miles from the airport, an estimated 2,000 far-left activists clashed with some 400 helmeted Japanese police.⁵ The Japanese government had mobilized 160,000 police officers, the equivalent of ten infantry divisions, for the duration of Ford’s four-day visit.⁶ In Tokyo alone, 25,000 police officers were assigned to the President’s entourage each day.⁷ The President’s Secret Service detail, of course, had a say with respect to the President’s itinerary, and it successfully argued against several events that had been prepared, including an exhibition baseball game between the New York Mets and a Japanese team.⁸

From the airport, helicopters whisked us on the ten-minute trip to the Akasaka Palace not far from the Imperial Palace near downtown Tokyo. Built on the site of the old Edo Castle, the Akasaka Palace was the former residence of the Japanese Crown Prince. It somewhat resembles Buckingham Palace, but its three floors of brick and granite evoke Versailles. In 1967, the Japanese government had decided to make the Akasaka Palace Japan’s State Guest House. President Ford and his delegation were the first official state guests to stay in the recently renovated structure.

After a welcome overnight respite, the official arrival ceremony was held on Tuesday in the front garden of the State Guest House. There, the honor guard from the Japan Self-Defense Forces played the national anthems of the U.S. and of Japan. Below a bright blue sky, it also honored Michigan’s Maize and Blue by serenading the President with “Hail to the Victors,” the football fight song of the President’s alma mater.⁹

President Ford’s arrival in Tokyo, on November 18, 1974, ended what the Associated Press dubbed “a historical absurdity.”¹⁰ Gerald R. Ford was the first sitting U.S. President who had ever visited Japan. President Nixon had prepared to visit the island nation in 1973, an event all the more important and sensitive because the Japanese had come to feel slighted that the Nixon administration had made a decision to keep private his highly secret overtures to the People’s Republic of China. While a date for President Nixon’s visit had still been active on the calendar, Nixon’s presidency was not. After Nixon’s resignation, Ford thought it desirable to follow through on the planned presidential visit. Japan, for both economic and security reasons, as widely noted in the media at the time, was then and remains today “America’s major ally in East Asia.”¹¹ It became President Ford’s task to personally demonstrate to Japan and to the world the seriousness and sincerity of America’s commitment to the Land of the Rising Sun. In his visit, he did this and he did it well, but with one problem—a minor but visible wardrobe malfunction.

The requisite attire for the occasion was the most formal of formalwear, that reserved for only the most elevated venues, such as the Royal Ascot in England—morning coats, black-and-gray-striped trousers, gray vests, wing-collared shirts, and black and gray ascot ties.¹² Most of us with President Ford were able to find suitable stand-ins, and avoided what was for us highly unusual attire. The President could not. Unfortunately, the trousers in the President’s outfit he had been provided by the tailor were short by about two inches, ending a bit above his ankles.

When I saw President Ford step out in his getup, I was concerned. He would have had every reason to be furious over this slipup, and to take out his frustrations on anyone who happened to be near him. Other Presidents might very well have done just that. But while this was a far from ideal situation, Ford, who did occasionally have a temper, saw no purpose in that. Having no time for any adjustments, and without even a hint of embarrassment, the President did what he had to do, and he did it well and with good humor. “I’m going out there,” he said. He gamely met not only the many assembled dignitaries—but, unfortunately, a U.S. traveling press corps always eager for a story.¹³

Ford handled the awkward moment as well as anyone could. Noting that he was a former Eagle Scout, the President joked that “on occasion I still go around in short pants.”¹⁴ Of course, this did not satisfy some in the media who found in the incident, which was most certainly not in any way his fault, the beginning of a theme they would repeat, quite unfairly, to criticize President Ford throughout much of his term: a sense of haplessness.

To little avail, Press Secretary Ron Nessen complained about the press corps’ eagerness to focus on such trivial matters. Helen Thomas, of UPI’s White House Bureau, expressed the media’s typical perspective and approach to news, asserting, “The president’s pants being too short was a big story, and you can’t expect us not to write about it.”¹⁵

There was a bright side to the incident. Gerald Ford’s relaxed demeanor, coupled with his even-humored response to his minor wardrobe problem, only enhanced his image and reputation as an upfront and cheerful American leader. He had made the most of the situation by handling it with the grace of a seasoned diplomat. And he worked his personal charm on the man who had been there to greet him.

Emperor Hirohito, the leader who personally had surrendered to the Americans three decades earlier, appeared precisely at 9:30 a.m. to welcome the U.S. President. Dignitaries who had visited Japan on previous occasions often had found it hard to keep up a conversation with the Emperor, who, as a largely ceremonial figure, did not discuss or engage in political matters. But Ford, who had spent his adult life successfully establishing human connections, found that he easily connected with the Emperor. For one thing, they shared a common love: baseball. And the President, having learned beforehand that the Emperor was one of the world’s leading authorities on jellyfish and corals, had read up on a bit of marine biology.¹⁶

After the arrival ceremony, the President met with the besieged Prime Minister, Kakuei Tanaka, who was engaged in fending off corruption charges. (He would have to resign only days later.) Ford later described Tanaka as a “burly, aggressive man.” He said he couldn’t warm up to him easily, and that Tanaka “never let diplomatic niceties stand in the way of blunt speech.”¹⁷ His career was on the ropes, but Tanaka, a strong-minded patriot and a senior member of the Diet, whom I had dealt with a number of times over the preceding decade as one of the founders of the U.S.-Japan Parliamentary Exchange, was still dedicated to serving his country. Japan was wrestling with soaring living costs, diminished food supplies, and a spike in oil prices after an OPEC embargo. The two leaders agreed on a need to reconvene General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) talks as soon as possible. Ford importantly assured Tanaka that he was a proponent of fair trade—reciprocal trade—as opposed to free trade and that he would not bow to U.S. domestic pressures to impose new quotas on Japanese goods.¹⁸

On Thursday, the President traveled to Kyoto, Japan’s ancient capital from AD 794 to AD 1868, and the country’s third-largest city. There were hundreds of protesters in Kyoto, but they rarely got close to the President’s party. The President visited the old Imperial Palace of Flowers where Emperor Hirohito had been enthroned in 1928, the 371-year-old Nijo Castle—a white-walled compound built for the Shogun—and the Buddhist lakeside Temple of the Golden Pavilion, covered in twenty-two-carat gold foil.¹⁹

That evening, the President’s delegation enjoyed five-hundred-year-old historic Kaiseki cuisine at Kyoto Tsuruya restaurant.²⁰ The ten-course meal featured delicacies including dried fish soup and skewered sparrow. Geishas attended the group during the meal and danced at the conclusion, but not before engaging our visiting U.S. delegation in a parlor game that involved passing a straw held from their upper lips and noses to ours. The ever-present White House photographer David Hume Kennerly was there and snapped a few memorable photos. Several ended up in the media. And for a couple of years, one of a geisha giggling at my antics was on the packet of Tyrrell’s wasabi-coated peanuts.²¹

Kennerly was on the President’s team so his documentation of the visit was both skillful and in good humor. The same could not be said of the U.S. reporters with respect to some of their coverage of the President’s trip. It’s widely thought the President’s “reputation as a blundering klutz”—as Time magazine asserted—began after his injured knee from his college football days gave out and he tumbled down a few of the Air Force One steps after landing in Salzburg, Austria, in June 1975.²² In my view, that misimpression started earlier, during Ford’s time in Japan, with a media effort to portray the President as less than competent. Of course, there was the issue with his trousers being a bit short, which was blown way out of proportion. Next, Fox Butterfield, reporting for The New York Times, felt it was newsworthy that the President “seemed to have some difficulty” with the slippers required to enter the Golden Pavilion in Kyoto. “On another occasion,” Butterfield continued, “the visitor from Grand Rapids, Mich., appeared to have a language problem. A question about the date of a well-tended garden elicited from a guide the answer yes, a polite ambiguity that puzzles foreigners.” The “occasion” was inconsequential, but a reporter from The New York Times was apparently trying hard to portray the President as parochial and out of his depth by referring to him as “the visitor from Grand Rapids, Mich.”²³

Frank Cormier of the Associated Press piled on. He wrote that the President, while touring Nijo Castle, was asked to try playing a koto, a traditional stringed instrument, but the picks didn’t fit his fingers. “He tried his hand at it, but the noise he produced was not exactly musical.”²⁴ Further, an article in The New York Times featured a large photograph of Ford dining with a geisha at his side who had a somewhat skeptical look on her face. “Here,” read the snidely phrased caption, “the President is experiencing some of the Westerner’s usual difficulties in handling chopsticks.”²⁵ The President felt different. “I even became fairly adept in handling the chopsticks in my left hand,” he wrote in his memoir. Ford added, “I was enjoying myself thoroughly.”²⁶ The President was indifferent to what was being said about him. He informed the potshot-taking press that he thought his visit to Japan was “going wonderfully” and that it “couldn’t be better, substantively and otherwise.”²⁷

On Friday, the President’s last day in Japan, he took a U.S. Marine helicopter for the short trip back to Tokyo. Emperor Hirohito was at the State Guest House to say good-bye to the President. Ford moved down a line of what seemed to be a hundred foreign diplomats and shook hands. A band played a medley of tunes, including the 1933 sports anthem, “You Got to Be a Football Hero,” and Rudy Vallée’s 1930, “Betty Co-ed,” in tribute to the First Lady, who was still recovering from her breast cancer surgery back in the U.S.²⁸ We commuted to Tokyo Haneda Airport and then flew westward three hundred miles in Air Force One to Osaka before continuing to South Korea.

Kissinger told the press corps that the President’s visit to Japan had achieved “the optimum of what one had hoped for.”²⁹ As usual, Henry’s diplomatic performance was excellent. His intelligence and wit had impressed his audiences.

As I look back on that first state visit, President Ford’s instincts and intellect served him well. He had, in fact, achieved all the objectives laid out before he had left the White House. Ford had restored confidence in our ally, Japan, that the U.S. would maintain trade and our important military alliance commitments.

It is useful to note that President Ford’s success was not simply the result of his careful preparation. Importantly, he possessed personal qualities that were helpful in achieving his goals. He benefited from his long experience in dealing with parliamentarians from many backgrounds and many nations. As I was with him throughout the trip, it was clear to me he enjoyed meeting, visiting, and being on the move—and those with whom he met genuinely reciprocated. He was in his element—an engaging and highly successful former legislative leader, briskly shuffling from one element of a constituency to another, eager to discover unique personalities and to grapple with new challenges. It helped that he sincerely liked and was interested in other human beings.

*  *  *

The President then flew from Japan to the Republic of Korea, an important American ally. President Park Chung-hee met President Ford and his delegation at the airport in Seoul. Park declared the U.S.–South Korea alliance had been “confirmed in blood” during the Korean and Vietnam Wars, and he termed President Ford “our partner” in the effort to establish security in Asia.³⁰ The President affirmed that the purpose of his visit was “to reaffirm our friendship and to give it new life and meaning.”³¹ He had been to a war-ravaged South Korea as a member of Congress in 1953. He was the third sitting U.S. President to visit that country, after Presidents Dwight Eisenhower in 1960 and Lyndon Johnson in 1966.

The South Korean people seemed ecstatic to have the President of the United States visiting their country. The visit had been declared a national holiday. An estimated two million people—an amazing 40 percent of Seoul’s population—lined the motorcade’s twelve-mile route to the hotel. If, in Japan, there might have been some modest lingering resentment on the part of a few toward their old victorious foe from decades before, I did not sense it. However, in South Korea, there was absolutely nothing but genuine gratitude toward the nation that had sent hundreds of thousands of our forces across the ocean to fight for the freedom of the Korean people.

Police officers were posted every fifty feet on the outskirts of the city and every fifteen feet downtown. The President’s arrival and his motorcade were carried live on television. Large portraits of Presidents Ford and Park were displayed seemingly everywhere, and a stamp was even issued to commemorate the occasion.³²

After a short break at the hotel, we traveled by helicopter northeast of Seoul to Camp Casey near the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) to meet with the U.S. Army’s Second Infantry Division. Several Generals were on hand, including Richard G. Stilwell, who had fought in Normandy, commanded the Fifteenth Infantry Regiment during the Korean War, and served as General William Westmoreland’s Chief of Staff in Vietnam. Ford was sporting a varsitylike sweater emblazoned with the insignia of the Second Infantry Division and delivered rousing remarks. The troops responded enthusiastically. They were clearly fine examples of military discipline and dedication. Most ran four miles every day before breakfast and played combat football, a sport the object of which was to get a ball into the opposing team’s goal through “any means short of an actionable felony.”³³

We took a helicopter back to Seoul, where the President met for two hours with President Park Chung-hee, “[a] trim, poker-faced man who doesn’t mince words.”³⁴ Park was seeking a pledge from the U.S. to increase our military assistance for the modernization of South Korea’s military and also for President Ford to agree to maintain U.S. troop levels at thirty-eight thousand. In 1971, the U.S. had promised $1.5 billion over a five-year period after deciding to transfer the Seventh Infantry Division from Camp Casey back to its former garrison at Fort Ord in California. U.S. congressional budget cuts had held up delivery of the aid. Ford pledged that U.S. troops would stay and that there would be no future slowdowns. He then arranged to have a private meeting with President Park.³⁵

The President of South Korea was an authoritarian. Some went so far as to claim that Ford’s presence in South Korea, albeit brief, was a stamp of approval for their government. Dr. Edwin O. Reischauer, Harvard professor and the former U.S. Ambassador to Japan back in the early 1960s, unhelpfully called the decision to go to Korea “an awful blunder.”³⁶ Secretary Kissinger had usefully and pointedly tackled the minor controversy, saying that the visit was the “natural consequence” of a trip to Asia, explaining correctly that circumvention would have raised doubts about U.S. security commitments.³⁷

When Ford was alone with President Park, he spoke with him about the important but politically sensitive issue of human rights. The President left with the impression that the South Korean government under Park might modify some of its more criticized policies. Park Chung-hee’s government was certainly less than democratic. Indeed, there had never been a democratic government on the Korean Peninsula—and very few in all of Asia. My personal view was that South Korea was prosperous and a success for the U.S.—and that the situation, while not perfect by our standards, was vastly better than the alternatives of anarchy or Communism.³⁸ During the Cold War, American Presidents of both political parties understandably sought allies where they could find them.

The Soviet Union, now decades behind, was still a potent force back in the mid-1970s, determined to outlast the capitalist systems and aggressive in its efforts to export its brutal socialist revolution across the globe. And the USSR had at that time as its leader a wily dictator, who likely looked forward to testing Gerald Ford and determining his mettle.

*  *  *

President Ford’s journey to the Soviet Union from Seoul demonstrated the unusual, and occasionally hostile, relationship that the Communist empire had with the free world. Because the Soviet Union had supported its fellow Communists, the People’s Republic of China and North Korea, during the Korean War, it did not officially recognize the existence of the Republic of Korea. So to travel to the USSR from Seoul, South Korea, the President’s aircraft was required to execute a diplomatic pirouette. Air Force One had to fly from the Republic of Korea back to Tokyo’s Haneda Airport, touch down, taxi, and then take off again.³⁹ Moscow would not have “recognized” President Ford’s inbound flight had the aircraft departed directly from the Republic of Korea.

We arrived at a military airfield near Ussuriysk in the USSR—conspicuously close to the North Korean and Chinese borders—during the afternoon of Saturday, November 23. There the well-known Minister of Foreign Affairs, Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet Union’s Ambassador to the U.S., Anatoly Dobrynin, and the leader of the USSR, General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, were on hand to greet President Ford. Snow was everywhere. The airport was desolate. It brought to my mind scenes from the film Doctor Zhivago.⁴⁰

Brezhnev, whose formal title was General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, had been in power for a decade, assuming his powerful position from the ousted Nikita Khrushchev. Once he was in charge of the Soviet Union, its military investment and capabilities had expanded significantly. A large bear of a man, whose face was adorned with unusually prominent eyebrows, Brezhnev became the author of the so-called Brezhnev Doctrine, which declared that any effort to convert a socialist/Communist state to capitalism was a direct threat to the USSR. As such, he and the Soviet Union were quick to support Communist regimes and guerilla movements across the globe—from North Vietnam to Cuba to Angola, to Eastern Europe and Central America.

Like other Soviet leaders, Brezhnev had a penchant for fashioning a cult of personality. One way he did so was to have awards presented to himself—reportedly more than one hundred during his tenure. When he turned sixty, he bestowed on himself the honor of “Hero of the Soviet Union.” And he gave himself that same honor three additional times. When he turned seventy, he was named Marshal of the Soviet Union, the highest military honor the Communist regime awarded a Soviet citizen.

Brezhnev, Nixon, and Kissinger had developed a seemingly good relationship, or at least as good as relations between the world’s leading capitalist and the world’s leading Communist nations could have been. The men had met at three summits during Nixon’s presidency, and both sides were keen to pursue arms limitation agreements. Brezhnev went to some lengths to flatter the more-formal Nixon, cracking jokes and lauding his intellectual prowess.⁴¹

By contrast, Ford and Brezhnev had not known each other. They had met in Washington, D.C., the previous year when Ford was still the Minority Leader of the U.S. House of Representatives, but only briefly. This summit was an opportunity for Ford and Brezhnev to establish a personal rapport.

It is a measure of how vast the Soviet Union was that Brezhnev and his entourage had traversed four thousand miles through seven time zones to meet President Ford at this distant location, yet they had never left the territory of the Soviet Union.

“I understand you are quite an expert on soccer,” President Ford said as he shook hands with the General Secretary.

“Yes, I play the left side,” Brezhnev replied, “but I haven’t played in a long time.”

“I haven’t played football for a long time, either,” Ford said, adding, “I wasn’t very fast, but I could hold the line.”⁴²

We boarded an ornate green- and gold-colored train from the airfield to travel to the site of the two-day summit: a spa on the outskirts of the Siberian port city of Vladivostok, a facility used by state officials and trade union members. (Although the meeting would become known as the Vladivostok Summit, it actually took place in the small town nearby called Okeanskaya.) The ride from the airfield was an hour and a half, and the only scenery was snow-covered hills.⁴³ Henry Kissinger helped break the ice, at least metaphorically. We were huddled around a linen-covered table featuring cookies, pastries, and mints. “Henry simply couldn’t resist them,” President Ford later recalled. Over ninety minutes, and to the great amusement of the Soviets, Henry finished off three plates.⁴⁴

As we arrived, and were being escorted to our dacha, Brezhnev joked with Ford, “Why did you have to bring Henry Kissinger here?”

“Well, it’s just very hard to go anywhere without him,” Ford replied in jest.

“Kissinger is such a scoundrel.”

“It takes one to know one,” Ford quickly replied.⁴⁵

The Soviets had reportedly spent ten days laboring to spruce up the spa with fresh paint. But as Ford later noted, “It still looked like an abandoned YMCA camp in the Catskills.”⁴⁶ The U.S.–Soviet summit commenced at 6:00 p.m. The meeting was held in a conference room overlooking a glass-enclosed garden. The two delegations sat across a long table, communicating through translators, while smoke from Ford’s pipe and from Brezhnev’s ever-present cigarettes filled the room.⁴⁷

The overriding purpose of the summit was to try to establish the basis for a ceiling on strategic offensive arms, a key element in a new Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT), which was a priority for the President. Kissinger found Ford to be a different kind of negotiator than Nixon. As Ron Nessen later recounted, “He said Ford was more personable and seemed to get along well with the gregarious Brezhnev. Henry told me that while Nixon preferred to follow a prepared script, Ford was comfortable with a genuine give and take. Kissinger added that for some reason President Nixon seemed not to look foreign leaders in the eye.”⁴⁸ Hedrick Smith, a reporter with The New York Times, echoed that assessment. “In some ways, Mr. Ford with his outgoing personality and his reputation for easy-going candor is personally more akin to the ebullient, joke-telling Soviet Communist party leader than was the more aloof Mr. Nixon.”⁴⁹

In their discussions, Ford sat through what was standard procedure among Soviet (and Russian) leaders: a long, less than stimulating lecture about the failures and evils of the United States that seemed designed more for an internal Soviet audience. Ford listened to it all with a patient expression, waiting for his time to respond.

After one of their sessions, President Ford invited Kissinger, Nessen, and me to his dacha for a late-night bite. But first the President wanted to discuss his impressions of the meeting. Because all of our rooms were certainly bugged, that meant all confidential conversations had to be held outside in the cold. So we walked along a dark road to talk, our breath forming clouds of vapor in the frigid temperature.⁵⁰

Ford believed the sessions the previous day had “far exceeded” his expectations.⁵¹ Ford had taken Kissinger’s suggestions in the meetings—to be polite, but firm on our positions. Ford, for example, had calmly refused demands to cancel production of our B-1 bombers scheduled to replace our aging B-52s. The Soviets, Kissinger advised, eventually would bend. Indeed, Ford and Brezhnev achieved what earlier had been less than certain, an agreement on numerical equivalence of missiles. The U.S. and the Soviet Union were each to limit their nuclear arsenals to a total of 2,400 long-range offensive missiles and bombers. Further, no more than 1,320 of the missiles could be made capable of carrying multiple independently targetable warheads (MIRVs). “It was,” as Ron Nessen later noted, “one of the rare times in history when adversaries had mutually agreed to limit their arsenals.”⁵² The two delegations sat down to a late lunch of bear meat and venison, which was followed by an official signing ceremony and champagne toasts.⁵³

That evening, Ford accompanied Brezhnev in the backseat of a Russian limousine for a tour of Vladivostok thirteen miles away. On the way back, Brezhnev reached over and held Ford’s left hand. He squeezed harder and harder as he spoke. He explained that he wanted to save his fellow citizens the pain they suffered during World War II and that he wished to finish what they had started. Ford assured him he felt the summit was an important step toward avoiding “a nuclear holocaust.”

“I agree with you,” Brezhnev answered, adding, “This is an opportunity to protect not only the people of our two countries but, really, all mankind. We have to do something.”⁵⁴

On our departure from Russia, a train took the President back to the airfield near Ussuriysk, where Ford demonstrated a gracious act of diplomacy.

Throughout their encounter, President Ford had sensed that General Secretary Brezhnev had admired his rather unusual coat. Made of mottled gray, brown, black, and white Alaskan wolf fur, the large, shaggy coat had been given to the President by Jack Kim, a furrier and personal friend, during a refueling stop at Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage, Alaska on the way over. As Brezhnev escorted the President up the ramp to Air Force One, Ford took off his coat and presented it as a gift to Brezhnev, who seemed delighted and grateful.⁵⁵

Ford’s trip to East Asia was in every sense a success, but particularly the summit with the Soviets. Exhausted, Nessen downed a bit of vodka during the train ride to the airfield. Shortly after takeoff in Air Force One, he told reporters that what was agreed and signed at Okeanskaya was “one of the most significant agreements since World War II.” Then, before heading to the VIP lounge and going quickly to sleep on a couch, he boasted, “Richard Nixon could not achieve this in five years. President Ford achieved it in three months.”⁵⁶ Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, his offhand comment became the lead for the 11:00 p.m. news the following day. President Ford was too pleased with his trip to express his views to his enthusiastic Press Secretary.

*  *  *

U.S. News & World Report branded the East Asia trip “a historic journey” in which Ford “achieved the primary goal of his first venture in global diplomacy,” adding, “The President proved that he was ready to take over in his own right the world-leadership role Richard Nixon held until he was toppled from office.” Time magazine confirmed that “as he traveled, he was visibly performing as a global leader and dramatizing the fact that on the world stage, no one is more important than the U.S. President.”⁵⁷ I had noted during our visit to Japan: “He probably would be good in a crisis and could be seen as great in that event.”⁵⁸ Over the next six months, the President would be given the chance in spades to demonstrate his skill, starting almost immediately with a situation in the Pacific Ocean that was the stuff of Cold War lore.

As for the President, I observed that he didn’t particularly enjoy orating or wrestling with abstractions. Yet I also observed he was unflappable, likable, and impressively persuasive, whether one-on-one or in larger groups. He looked relaxed and fit. He was serene in his manner and charming in personal conversation. Reporter John Herbers in The New York Times attested that President Ford was “smiling through it all,” “showed no sign of fatigue,” and “Went about his activities with . . . good humor.”⁵⁹ I had great faith in the President. But I did wonder whether there might be a bit of a disadvantage to his characteristic down-home relaxed demeanor. I noted privately at the time: “He never protects himself from having other people see him in a relaxed situation. Can a great leader let down and still inspire?” I asked myself.⁶⁰ In fact, looking back I may well have underestimated the positive impact of the President’s natural approach. That he was completely comfortable with himself seemed to be seen, accepted, and even valued by those he dealt with.

The President, in the face of some doubts at home, had performed skillfully his responsibilities as Commander in Chief, demonstrating and projecting confidence. His demeanor, absent artifice or hesitation, proved to be his way to sway foreign as well as domestic audiences and led one and all to come to the realization that the United States of America had honest, credible, competent leadership. Ford had taken his oath of office as President only four months earlier, at a time when foreign allies and adversaries alike had reason to question whether America had veered off the rails. By the time Gerald R. Ford returned from East Asia to Washington, D.C., after his week abroad, he had made it clear that our country was firmly back on track. The center was holding.