15 

Last Campaign

MEETING WITH THE PRESIDENT

September 8, 1976

10:35 a.m. to (President left meeting about 11:32) and meeting continued thereafter . . .

PRESENT: The Ford Campaign people

The President opened the Cabinet meeting and a lot of people were introduced.

Doug Bailey said the people vote on personal qualities, not on the issues—four qualities are important: vision, compassion, confidence, integrity—together they comprise leadership. . . . Talked a bit about Carter. . . . He is now being measured as to the four qualities mentioned above.

Then he said they have the following eight objectives with respect to the Presidentia1 campaign (1) show the President’s personal history (2) show his common sense and his personal conduct of the Presidency (3) the compassion dimension (4) the record of accomp1ishment in the past two years in the context of the difficult national condition when the President took office which too many people in the country seem to have forgotten, and which is a tribute to his leadership (5) the future goals of the Administration (6) they want to cut Jimmy Carter down to size (7) want to provide some momentum to the campaign when we need it in the last three weeks and reflect movement to the President (8) want to paint a comparison between Carter and the President, experience versus inexperience, explicitness versus studied vagueness, open policy versus manipulative, President versus candidate for President. . . .

Kissinger spoke at the meeting and gave his . . . assessment on the issues saying that we are making an error if we run on only two years of foreign policy, we should run on eight years he said. Second, he said we should [be] the Party of Peace against the Party of War, not by their desire, but by their approach, and the fact that people then have to overcompensate for the vacuum of power and deal with the convulsive maneuver which ends up in war. The Republican Party has ended those wars and not gotten us into wars.¹

In the summer of 1976, Kansas City, Missouri, was ground zero of what became a lively, hotly contested intraparty contest, which reflected one of the largest splits in the Republican Party since Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft had competed in 1912. It is also fair to say that the 1976 convention offered some of the most unusual moments in recent political history. The tension between the Ford and Reagan delegations was intense and, in at least a few cases, long lasting. Two friends from Mississippi who wound up as delegates on opposite sides of the Ford-Reagan battle would not speak to each other again for at least forty years.² Then there was the unusual introduction of First Lady Betty Ford to the convention by the actor Cary Grant. The legendary film star, who was by then up in years, intended to salute Mrs. Ford’s outspoken support for women’s rights issues by suggesting with a smile that “women had been one of his causes, too.” The famous actor’s reference to “pillow talk” raised some eyebrows.³

Perhaps as telling, however, was the tale of a gigantic inflatable elephant. Originally conceived by a downtown Kansas City community group to welcome President Ford, Governor Reagan, and the thousands of Republican delegates and supporters to their city, the mammoth balloon weighed 1,700 pounds, loomed 40 feet tall, and stretched 55 feet from end to end. The plan, on which Missourians had invested $2,300, was to float the polyethylene GOP mascot high above Kemper Arena, where the convention was being held.⁴ Unfortunately, it never rose to its intended height. This particular elephant, apparently, was not able to fly. In fact, it seemed not even able to stand upright. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that when workers initially tried to inflate it the Sunday shortly before the convention kicked off, “They couldn’t get enough air in the balloon, so it looked more like a flattened-out blimp.” Whatever the exact circumstances, the slow and public demise of such a potent symbol of one of the two great political parties was hard to miss. The Post-Gazette wryly noted that “it may have been a bad omen for things to come” and quoted a “local wit” as saying, in a reference to the Democratic Party’s nominee, Jimmy Carter, “It’s an ill wind that blows from Georgia.”⁵

As far as the Ford campaign team was concerned, however, that “wind” was blowing not from Georgia, but from the West. A certain former Governor from California was threatening to make life difficult for the incumbent President, if not actually seize the nomination from him altogether.

*  *  *

Through the summer of 1976, the media carried stories of Reagan’s momentum and the prospect of a floor fight at the convention. While Ford long had resisted responding to Reagan’s periodic comments against his administration, the President’s rhetoric toward Reagan had become sharper by the close of the primary season. “Governor Reagan and I do have one thing in common,” Ford would say on the campaign trail. “We both played football. I played for Michigan. He played for Warner Brothers.” Ford, as an incumbent President, was in a far stronger position than his challenger. The President was the clear choice of Republicans nationwide, leading Reagan in Gallup polling by double digits all through the spring and into the summer.⁶ The delegate count, too, was in the President’s favor, if narrowly. But neither candidate had amassed the 1,130 delegates required to clinch the presidential nomination outright.⁷

There were enough uncommitted delegates remaining who could conceivably tip the balance in favor of Reagan during the formal balloting. The Ford team believed that the best way the California Governor could win would be if he mounted an aggressive floor fight in Kansas City over delegate counts and credentials.

Reagan’s team began to believe that their man needed to do something more dramatic to turn the edge away from the incumbent President. As Reagan advisor Ed Meese put it later: “We had kind of run out the string of things to do in terms of what would generate news and keep the campaign in the news.”⁸ On July 26, they had made an unorthodox move. Without having won his party’s nomination, and before the convention had even opened, Reagan called a press conference to announce he had selected his running mate: Richard Schweiker, a liberal Senator from Pennsylvania. This was clearly a play for Pennsylvania’s important bloc of delegates as well as an effort to appeal to moderates skeptical or even fearful of the Californian. The announcement was a shock.

Ford, for one, thought Reagan’s selection was a joke when he first heard it, since Schweiker had already come out for Ford.⁹ Once he was persuaded it was true, Ford believed that the choice was a costly misstep. Schweiker might even have been to the left of the widely disliked Rockefeller and the selection would likely infuriate what many called “the True Believers,” the conservative delegates.¹⁰ The Schweiker move seemed to buttress the Ford team’s effort to portray Reagan as more political and calculated than his reputation as a conviction-driven conservative suggested. As Ford and his senior campaign advisor Stu Spencer noted, “Reagan had taken in more taxes and spent more money than any governor in California history.”¹¹

Perhaps the charges leveled by the Ford campaign team during the heated primary to the effect that Reagan might be too far right to beat the Democratic nominee in the fall had gotten to Reagan and his team, leading them to an attempt to balance out his ticket. But if that was the case, picking one of the most liberal Republicans in the U.S. Senate was an overcorrection. As Ford had predicted, reaction from conservative Republicans was swift and almost universally negative. “Privately,” the Chicago Tribune’s Washington bureau chief noted, “many old Reagan loyalists were complaining that their standard-bearer had forsaken principle for political expediency—thereby sacrificing the one quality they had always believed distinguished him from other conservatives like Gerald Ford.”¹²

John Connally had throughout the campaign season been playing both sides. But he knew when to move to a winning side. The former Texas Governor and Nixon favorite called Ford after Reagan’s selection of Schweiker to say that Reagan’s decision showed that Ford was “unmistakably” the better choice. Ending his very public neutrality, Connally offered to endorse Ford publicly. Ford suggested that he do just that.¹³

Reagan’s selection of Schweiker increased pressure on President Ford to accelerate his own plans for announcing his preference for the GOP nominee for Vice President. Reeling from the reaction to their gambit, the Reagan team pointed to the announcement of the Schweiker choice as demonstrating Reagan’s transparency. Why, they asked, was Ford keeping his choice of a running mate a secret from convention delegates? But Ford held off. His plan apparently was to name his vice presidential candidate in what was then the traditional manner: only after his nomination for President was assured. To do otherwise, Ford believed, was presumptuous and, as Reagan had shown, a sizable gamble.

The President had asked me, among a number of others, to suggest a short list of potential vice presidential nominees. My initial list consisted of three Senators who I thought would garner respect from most segments of the party and would help the President govern. They included Howard Baker of Tennessee, Jim Buckley of New York, and Pete Domenici of New Mexico. I also suggested former Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, and George H. W. Bush. To gain confirmation as CIA Director, Bush had pointedly removed himself from consideration for Vice President, but I believed Ford could make a case for him anyway had he decided to do so. Later I wondered if I should have added a “wild card”—a Democrat and a towering intellect who had served earlier as an advisor to President Nixon, my friend and former colleague Senator Pat Moynihan of New York. Pat was a sizable talent with a wonderful sense of humor who was outstanding at everything he did. But although Moynihan was respected by many Republicans, adding a Democrat to the ticket would have been too great a risk, so I left his name off.¹⁴

The convention officially came to order at 10:30 a.m. Central Time on Monday, August 16.¹⁵ From the outset, the Ford and Reagan delegates tried to outdo each other at every turn, most notably with cacophonous chanting duels. They even competed to see who could give a more rousing cheer to their candidate’s wife, when First Lady Betty Ford and Nancy Reagan made their official entrances on Tuesday.

One pro-Ford delegate stumbled and broke her leg shortly before a key procedural vote. But since the alternate who would have taken her place was apparently a Reagan delegate, the injured delegate stayed on the floor to take part in the vote instead of being rushed to the emergency room in the nearby hospital. Tom Korologos remembered that a doctor was found among one of the delegations, and he “put a splint on her leg made out of convention programs . . . and she stayed there for an extra hour until after the vote.” Only then was she taken to the hospital for assistance.¹⁶

Politics can sometimes be a contact sport. Vice President Nelson Rockefeller demonstrated that when he engaged in a personal altercation with a delegate from North Carolina. Rockefeller had been trading barbs with nearby North Carolina Reagan delegates from his seat among the New York delegates, and reportedly grabbed the sign from a North Carolina man named Jack Bailey. According to the Associated Press, Bailey “asked Rockefeller to return it, but the Vice President refused.”^{17 18} A Utah delegate reportedly tried to intervene, ripped a telephone off the wall in anger and had to be taken off by security before things calmed down.¹⁹

Anticipating that Reagan forces would likely try to put forward a number of platform planks to create issues with Ford, Stu Spencer had a standing instruction for Ford delegates to give the Reagan team almost anything they wanted.²⁰ One such gambit in particular, however, concerned the President and, particularly, his Secretary of State. Called the “Morality in Foreign Policy” proposal, the Reaganites commended Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, reminding delegates of the Ford “snub,” attacked détente, and criticized so called “secret agreements” in foreign policy. All of these were seen as criticisms of Henry Kissinger, Ford’s Secretary of State, and his foreign policy positions and were intended to get under Ford’s skin.

“They are trying to humiliate us publicly,” Kissinger said to the President, urging a battle with the Reagan forces on the matter. Brent Scowcroft agreed, and said the Reagan delegates should not be allowed to get away with this obvious repudiation of the Ford administration’s foreign policy.²¹

In a meeting with Ford, Cheney, Spencer, advisor Tom Korologos, and others, Kissinger reportedly dug his heels in, refusing to accept a change to the party platform that would reflect badly on him and his policies—the policies he had helped to fashion and implement in both the Nixon and Ford administrations. He threatened to resign over it.

At one point, Tom Korologos, ever quick with a humorous quip, spoke up. “Hey, Henry, will you resign now?” he asked. “We need the votes.”²²

Though strongly sympathetic to Kissinger’s concerns and an advocate for the policies that were being criticized, Ford was persuaded by his political advisors not to hand the Reagan forces a fight they not only would likely win, but one that might conceivably reinvigorate their chances for the nomination. As a result, what was seen as a antidétente plank was eventually added to the platform by the Reagan delegates. Depriving Reaganites of badly needed oxygen, Ford was easily nominated on the first ballot, with a margin of 117 votes.²³ With feelings between the Reagan and Ford forces strained, there was apparently not any serious consideration given to inviting Governor Reagan to join the ticket. Though Reagan appeared to have changed his stance at the last minute, the Ford and Reagan camps had apparently previously agreed that whoever won the nomination, the VP question would be off the table.²⁴ Instead, Ford chose Kansas Senator Bob Dole, a well-liked, sharp-witted conservative, and a friend of Ford’s and mine from our days in the Congress.

The President’s acceptance speech had been a subject of considerable discussion by his campaign team. His remarks after securing the nomination would have to unite Republicans, most importantly those who had supported Reagan, but also set his general election campaign on a strong footing to compete with his Democratic challenger, Jimmy Carter of Georgia.

Overall, the speech Ford delivered in Kansas City largely related his long-standing themes. Ford spoke forcefully despite the late hour and the stress of the previous, tension-filled days. Early on, he acknowledged the unusual circumstances that had brought him to this point: “I have been called an unelected President, an accidental President,” he said. “Having become Vice President and President without expecting or seeking either, I have a special feeling toward these high offices. To me, the Presidency and the Vice-Presidency were not prizes to be won, but a duty to be done.”²⁵ That was vintage Ford.

He reminded the audience of the words he had spoken two years before, proclaiming that “our long national nightmare is over.” “It was an hour in our history that troubled our minds and tore at our hearts,” he recalled. But we were able to right the ship and now we were set on a better course.

As he closed his remarks, he did something that was unusual, wise, and gracious. He invited Governor Reagan to come up to the stage with his wife, Nancy, to address the convention. In doing so, Ford made another act of healing—this time for his party. He decided to put his personal feelings aside and reach out to a man who was not only a skillful orator, but one who had repeatedly raised questions about Ford’s ability and judgment. “We are all a part of this great Republican family,” Ford proclaimed to the audience. “I would be honored, on your behalf, to ask my good friend Governor Reagan to say a few words at this time.” Reagan was undoubtedly taken by surprise, but with Nancy beside him, he graciously came up to the stage.

Reagan thanked President Ford warmly, and gave a thoughtful nod to his political team’s successes in securing many, if not most, of their positions on the party platform, calling the final version adopted “a banner of bold, unmistakable colors with no pale pastel shades.” Despite not having prepared remarks, he launched into the soaring rhetoric that set him apart from the more plainspoken Ford. He said to the delegates he had been asked to write a letter for a time capsule in Los Angeles, and had thought about the people who would read it in a hundred years’ time: “Will they look back with appreciation and say, ‘Thank God for those people in 1976 who headed off that loss of freedom? Who kept us now a hundred years later free? . . . This is our challenge and this is why we’re here in this hall tonight.”²⁶ At the end of his elevating remarks, he did not offer a specific full-throated endorsement of President Ford, as might have been expected. Instead, he said that Republicans “must go forth from here united” and quoting a “great general,” admonished that “there is no substitute for victory.”²⁷

Even then, as he conceded defeat, Reagan’s presence filled the convention hall. It was clear to many observers that his days in public life were far from over. But moving toward the general election of 1976, it was clearly Ford’s turn. He had emerged bruised from the tough contest, but stronger and more seasoned. He had been nominated for the Presidency by his party in his own right. Now he was determined to do everything he could to win the general election against what proved to be another formidable rival.

*  *  *

If many in Washington, D.C., thought Governor Jimmy Carter offered the attributes the country desperately needed in a national leader, then they kept it a closely guarded secret. The relatively obscure one-term Georgia Governor appeared on the national scene almost out of nowhere. Many Ford supporters were slow to take him seriously as a candidate for the presidency. The Ford campaign team considered him uninformed on how the federal government worked, which he was, and a bit arrogant. He appeared to them to be something of a political chameleon, running for Governor as a candidate somewhat to the right of his party, and then moving to the left.

In a July 15, 1976, memo to White House aide David Gergen, Bob Mead, a campaign advisor, pointed to Carter’s appeal to religious voters. A Southern Baptist, Carter had made a point of discussing his faith, and his nominating speeches at the Democratic convention had reflected that. “I realized during the nominating speeches that an air of the Gospel was flowing from my television set,” the advisor wrote. “Speeches were more like testimonials or confessionals. Phrases used i.e. ‘when you come to know him the way I do’ (used by Jesus’s disciples) and ‘. . . he can lay that burden down . . .’ (in obvious reference to the plight of racism) are typical of how the campaign has been going.”²⁸

When it came to potential opponents, Ford had a preference of his own—the veteran Democratic Senator and former Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey. Humphrey and Ford hardly saw eye to eye on policy matters, but the two men had a mutual respect for each other and a warm friendship. Ford also saw in Humphrey what he did not see at the time in Carter—a worthy opponent for the presidency. Whenever Humphrey came to the White House, Ford encouraged him to linger. Then he’d put his arm on Humphrey’s shoulder and say, “Hubert, you know you’re my candidate.”²⁹ Humphrey would laugh good-naturedly, but something held him back from running. Later that fall Humphrey was operated on for bladder cancer. In the heat of a close general election campaign, Ford still took the time to visit his old friend, who offered the President unexpected news. “Mr. President,” Humphrey disclosed, “I want to confide in you. You’re going to be getting some votes from the Humphrey family.”

In an era in which the public was open to an unknown candidate who promised, in an obviously intended contrast to Nixon, to “never lie to you,” Carter had fashioned an opening. Indeed, he built a sizable thirty-three-point lead in the polls over Ford through the summer, though the margin had closed to thirteen points by the close of the Republican convention. This left a good deal of ground for Ford to try to make up, but after the successful convention, Ford seemed ready to meet the challenge.

At his first Cabinet meeting after the G.O.P. convention, at the end of August, the President seemed reinvigorated. He told the Cabinet he was ready to make bold moves. He laid out guidelines for foreign and domestic policy, declaring, “I won’t be timid.” He told the Cabinet: “I don’t want anyone to hesitate to make recommendations because they think they aren’t politically palatable.”³⁰ It may have been an election year, but Ford was encouraged by his success at the convention and wanted to get back to the business of doing the right things for the country, rather than focusing on the politics of the presidential race. The Cabinet was told to keep governing well and that the politics would take care of itself.

From Ford’s perspective, his admonition to pursue good policies for the country over what may or may not have seemed to be good politics extended to a Strategic Arms Limitation (SALT) arms control agreement, which the President badly wanted to achieve. Some of us at the Department of Defense remained concerned that the terms, as they then stood, were not good enough, and might be improved. As the Democratic candidate for President, Carter was blasting the President on the campaign trail for failing to come to an agreement with the Soviets. But, despite the President’s strong desire for an agreement, Ford held with the military and civilian recommendations from the Department of Defense and kept working with Kissinger to try to achieve better terms.

By early September, Ford’s focus turned to his first debate with Governor Carter, which was scheduled for the end of the month. To help him prepare, the President wanted a detailed list, with dates and locations, of “where Carter said what.” He undoubtedly believed that his considerable knowledge of the federal government, particularly national security issues and the federal budget, would compare favorably to Carter’s. The President approached his preparation with a focus on details, asking to be reminded of the costs of specific initiatives—for instance, the cost of an Army division and various missile systems.³¹ As with all of the federal departments, at Defense we provided the White House with whatever they needed for preparation. Meeting with Cheney on a Saturday, I asked Dick what else they needed. “Just creativity, really,” he responded.³²

Though public opinion polls were still showing Carter with a sizable lead, I was told the Ford campaign’s internal polling was showing the margin closing to single digits. Cheney reported that the President was relaxed and pleased with the way the campaign was going. I hoped that would put him in a confident mood for his first debate.

Dean Burch, a senior White House advisor and one of the GOP’s most knowledgeable campaign experts, and his wife came over to our house to watch the first debate, which was broadcast from Philadelphia on September 23. The President did well, though I was concerned that he may have lost some momentum in that Carter did better than I had expected and committed no major mistakes. Still, watching their exchanges on television, something seemed off about Carter. When I met with the President a few days later, he mentioned the importance of the closing statements in the debates, and that he was thinking about some useful analogies or anecdotes. He was considering ways to be able to contrast his positions with Carter’s.³³

Though the election was looming, I was focused on leading a sizable government department, and I was interested in the President’s guidance. We discussed his thoughts about the Defense Department.³⁴ I brought up a specific issue that was on my mind. Echoing his concerns during his primary contest with Reagan, I had heard he was interested in precisely how we ought to be characterizing the fact that the Soviets had been investing heavily and were trending up, while the United States had seen our advantage narrowing.

I said to the President, “I’m telling the truth the way I’m saying it.”

“That’s fine,” the President responded, “but we ought to be positive about what the Congress has done.” I agreed with him. The President had persuaded the Democrat-controlled Congress to boost U.S. military investments, thereby reversing a long-standing downward trend relative to the Soviet Union, and he was rightly proud of that accomplishment, as he fully deserved to be.

We needed to find the right balance.³⁵

As it happened, the phrasing on this issue, while important, would not be Ford’s major foreign policy headache. The headache would come on October 6, 1976, at a crucial moment during the second presidential debate, when Ford was asked a question by panelist Max Frankel of The New York Times:

Mr. President, I’d like to explore a little more deeply our relationship with the Russians. They used to brag back in Khrushchev’s day that because of their greater patience and because of our greed for—for business deals that they would sooner or later get the better of us. Is it possible that despite some setbacks in the Middle East, they’ve proved their point? Our allies in France and Italy are now flirting with Communism. We’ve recognized the permanent Communist regime in East Germany. We’ve virtually signed, in Helsinki, an agreement that the Russians have dominance in Eastern Europe. We’ve bailed out Soviet agriculture with our huge grain sales. We’ve given them large loans, access to our best technology and if the Senate hadn’t interfered with the Jackson Amendment, maybe we—you would’ve given them even larger loans. Is that what you call a two-way street of traffic in Europe?

The President replied that we have “negotiated with the Soviet Union since I’ve been President from a position of strength.” Citing several examples, he dwelt on his signing of the Helsinki Accords, over which he’d been criticized for some months. “In the case of Helsinki,” he said, “thirty-five nations signed an agreement, including the Secretary of State for the Vatican—I can’t under any circumstances believe that the . . . His Holiness, the Pope, would agree by signing that agreement that the thirty-five nations have turned over to the Warsaw Pact nations the domination of the . . . Eastern Europe.” Then Ford finished with a statement that would have become instantly viral, if the internet had existed back in 1976. “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration.”

Taken aback, Frankel pressed Ford. “Did I understand you to say, sir, that the Russians are not using Eastern Europe as their own sphere of influence in occupying most of the countries there . . . ?” In response, Ford doubled down on his comment:

I don’t believe, uh—Mr. Frankel that uh—the Yugoslavians consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union. I don’t believe that the Romanians consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union. I don’t believe that the Poles consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union. . . . the United States does not concede that those countries are under the domination of the Soviet Union. As a matter of fact, I visited Poland, Yugoslavia and Rumania to make certain that the people of those countries understood that the president of the United States and the people of the United States are dedicated to their independence, their autonomy and their freedom.

This was a statement that would dog the President for the rest of the 1976 presidential campaign. Few people listening to that debate could have imagined what Gerald Ford was thinking. It was certainly clear and well understood that the Soviet Union was in fact still subjugating Eastern Europe and that those captive nations were part of the Warsaw Pact. Watching the debate with Joyce at home however, I knew immediately what the President was thinking, what he had meant to say, and indeed what, as it turned out, he was absolutely convinced he had said.

The source of Ford’s answer was his strong conviction that someday the captive nations would be freed. What he was thinking and without question what he meant to say, and what he was absolutely convinced he had said, was that he did not and would not concede that the countries in Eastern Europe would be “permanently” subjugated. The problem was he had left out the word permanently. What he intended to convey was that he was confident that their subjugation by the Soviets would not be permanent and that he held out hope for liberty among the people of those oppressed nations.

I knew well his line of thinking went back to our days in the Congress, when many members of Congress, Democrats and Republicans alike, would mark annual Captive Nations Week by drawing attention to the plight of those nations that were caught in the grip of the Soviet Union’s totalitarian rule. On the occasion of Captive Nations Week back in 1969, for example, then Congressman Gerald R. Ford had observed: “There is a truth that no arms and no occupation can kill. The truth is that within the hearts of the enslaved peoples there burns a love of liberty which is a constant threat to their rulers—a yearning for freedom which will ultimately prevail.” Ford even cited specifically the Polish protesters in the city of Poznan who had been gunned down by Communist forces in 1956. He concluded by declaring that “America must never accept the view that freedom is foreclosed for the now-enslaved peoples of the world.”

I and many other members of Congress who made remarks in the U.S. House of Representatives each year during Captive Nations Week would regularly make similar statements, referring to our hope for freedom for the people of these nations in the future. In various ways, we were saying that we believed someday those countries would be free, that we did not “concede” that they would remain “permanently” subjugated.

Looking back, there was an incident during Ford’s preparation for his first debate in September that may have foreshadowed this mistake. During a discussion, he mentioned he had been going over statements made by Communist leaders in the mid-1940s, when a number of them vowed to be independent of Moscow. Even though he knew today that they were not truly independent, as far back as the 1940s, they aspired to be.³⁶

For whatever reason, the President did not quickly realize that he had left out the word permanently. I was told later that Cheney and Scowcroft, who were with Ford at the debate, had met with the President immediately after his debate and forcefully attempted to explain how his remark was being received. Only after several attempts were they able to get the President to recognize the gaps between what he was firmly convinced he had conveyed and what he had actually said and how it was being understood. But by the time they were able to convince him, too much time had passed.

It was Cheney and Scowcroft who met with the media right after the debate. The first question asked was simply: “Are there Soviet troops in Poland?” Scowcroft, of course, answered “Yes,” and then provided an estimate of how many Soviet troops were in Poland before he was snidely asked by a reporter: “Do you think that would imply some Soviet dominance to Poland?”

He explained to the media that what the President knew well and meant. Cheney went on to add that the “policy of his administration is that we are interested in separate, independent autonomous relationships with governments like Yugoslavia, Romania and Poland.”³⁷ President Ford finally explained as much the next day, and told reporters that the United States “firmly supports the aspirations for independence of the nations of Eastern Europe.”³⁸

The President’s reluctance to immediately correct his mistake had made the problem linger. Before the second debate, Ford had pulled almost even with Carter, and was behind by only two points. Carter’s lead moved back up to six.

Carter was not without his errors on the campaign trail, however. For one, he gave an ill-advised interview to Playboy magazine, which ran in its November 1976 issue, in which he made the comment, “I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust. . . . I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times.”³⁹ His personal comment was probably intended to convey his openness, but it was perhaps better suited to a private conversation. Carter raised objections to a Ford campaign ad that contrasted the cover of the Playboy magazine featuring Carter’s interview with the cover of Newsweek carrying an article on Ford. The President had responded simply: “I don’t think the President of the United States ought to have an interview in a magazine featuring photographs of unclad women.”⁴⁰ Some voters, particularly in the South, seemed to agree. As Dick Cheney noted in a memo to the President, “Governor Carter has begun to campaign more actively in the South which you take as an indication that he too is aware of the problems he has in the once solid South.”⁴¹

On October 22, the day of their final debate, I had breakfast with Henry Kissinger. Kissinger told me he was pleased with the relationship between our two departments. Once again, though, he suggested the possibility that he was ready to leave government. But if the President won, I hoped he would be willing to stay on. And if he stayed, I believed there was a lot of good we could do.

That evening, the Dean Burches had the G. H. W. Bushes, Joyce and me, and a few others for dinner and to watch the final debate, which turned out to be easily the best of the three for the President. He was relaxed—he was “letting it roll.” The voters apparently thought so, too. After that debate, the President pulled even with Carter in the polls once again. On a personal level, I was pleased for him. After rough spots that were inevitable in an instant presidency, he had become an excellent President—thoughtful, confident, and decisive—and I was convinced he would lead the country ably were he elected to a full term of his own.

Election Day generally seems to be a quiet day. And I had a less-than-typical day as Secretary of Defense. I brought our three young children to the White House in the morning to see President Ford arrive, marking the official end of his campaign. Later, I went by helicopter to the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. After a brief stop en route due to an oil leak, we arrived and I had a look at some military equipment. I briefly drove one of our M-60 tanks as well as a German Leopard tank—quite a change from flying S2F Trackers as a reservist naval aviator. I even tried my hand at tank gunnery, landing three or four rounds on or at least near the target.

I returned home that evening in time to watch the election returns with our family. In the final Gallup poll before Election Day, President Ford was shown as having pulled ahead by a point, besting Carter 49–48. After being buffeted by the Republican primary contest, a tough convention, and a general election campaign somewhat overshadowed by his innocent mistake, he still had a chance to come out ahead. Later that night Joyce and I briefly stopped at the election night gathering at the Sheraton Park Hotel before leaving the crowds behind and getting home sometime after midnight. We were in bed before 2:00 a.m., believing the President still had a chance, but knowing it would be close.

It was so close, in fact, that nobody was able to call the race until around three-thirty in the morning. Governor Carter had won by two percentage points in the popular vote. To add a final unfortunate note, President Ford had lost his voice from the campaigning and was unable to make his concession remarks, so he stood by as Betty read them.

To friends of the President, the final outcome was heartbreaking. Ford had been fighting from the minute he took office—fighting the ghosts of the Watergate scandal and the ghosts of the unhappy ending of the Vietnam War, working to counter an aggressive Soviet Union, taking important steps to improve a faltering economy, fashioning and directing his new White House team, and then fending off Governor Reagan, and in the end losing in a close contest to Carter. In the movies, the good guy—and Jerry Ford was the quintessential good guy—who after fighting against all odds, wins in the end. That Gerald Ford had come so close made his loss even harder to accept.

MEETING WITH THE PRESIDENT

November 3, 1976

Had good healthy view of [the loss] and demonstrated himself to be the kind of man we have known he is.⁴²

Gerald Ford, of course, spent most of his time in the days and weeks that followed his narrow loss bucking everyone else up, doing his job as President, wishing President-elect Jimmy Carter well, ensuring a smooth transition for the new incoming President, and ending his decades of public service on a high note. To one friend who said sadly, “Damnit, we should have won,” and wondered where things went wrong, Ford said bluntly, “Hey, there are more important things to worry about than what happens to Jerry Ford.”⁴³ The President was not bitter. There were no recriminations. He cast no blame on others. He wasn’t going to dwell on the what-ifs, though he was human and occasionally they must have crossed his mind. What if he had handled the pardon of Nixon differently? What if Reagan hadn’t challenged him?

Some years later, the former President came to Illinois for a speech and to personally deliver a golden retriever puppy to Joyce and me. In the car taking us from the airport where I greeted him, he handed me a copy of his memoir, A Time to Heal: The Autobiography of Gerald R. Ford, saying with a smile, “Don, you’re not going to like it.” I asked why. He said, “Because I blame Brezhnev and you for our not getting a SALT deal.” I said with a smile, “Mr. President, I can live with that.”

It was left to Ford’s son, Jack, to sum up the President’s philosophy of life and politics. “If you can’t lose as graciously as you had planned to win,” Jack said, “then you shouldn’t have been in the thing in the first place.”⁴⁴ Ford quoted that line proudly. It was exactly what he felt.

Everyone who was Jerry Ford’s friend when he entered the White House remained a friend when he left it—an achievement that is all too rare in Washington, D.C. In time, of course, the American people would come to value Ford’s admirable qualities and appreciate his long service. He was, as one observer once put it, the President we always wanted that we didn’t know we had.