Taos, New Mexico
This book is hardly the work of an impartial observer of history. Gerald R. Ford was my colleague in the U.S. Congress in the 1960s and a man I had known for more than a decade before he became our nation’s thirty-eighth Commander in Chief. Of the four Presidents I have been privileged to serve, Gerald R. Ford was the only one who had been a longtime personal friend.
The circumstances that allowed me to come to know President Ford date back to the middle of the last century. After leaving the U.S. Navy in 1957, I served as the Administrative Assistant to Congressman David Dennison, a Republican from northeast Ohio. After Dennison, a fine and dedicated legislator, was defeated for re-election in 1958, I joined the staff of Congressman Bob Griffin, where I learned a good deal about his colleague from Michigan, Jerry Ford, and, before long, met Ford in person. Immediately after I was elected to Congress from Illinois in November 1962, Griffin recruited me to solicit support for Ford from the other newly elected members of Congress in his upstart bid to become the Republican Conference Chairman, the number-three position in the House GOP leadership team. Ford was challenging the senior incumbent Congressman Charles Hoeven of Iowa.
I joined Ford’s effort and our small team went to work. Ultimately, in a coup for the so-called Young Turks of the GOP, Ford won. During that time, I quickly came to appreciate what so many others have seen in Jerry Ford over his lifetime of service—his honesty, integrity, and basic human decency. Decency can be an underappreciated quality in general, but especially so in a competitive place like Washington, D.C., where brashness and sharp elbows are often heralded. Gerald Ford’s kindness, midwestern politeness, and willingness to put other people’s interests ahead of his own were so distinctive. Indeed, they were qualities that were desperately needed when he became President. As his political opponent, the Democratic Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Tip O’Neill, later reflected, “God has been good to America, especially during difficult times. At the time of the Civil War, He gave us Abraham Lincoln. And at the time of Watergate, He gave us Gerald Ford—the right man at the right time who was able to put our nation back together again.”
Perhaps because Ford’s time in the presidency was brief—895 days—and was bookended by Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, sizable personalities far better known to the American people, he became, in a sense, the man in the middle. To this day his crucial service to our nation during an unprecedented time of testing has neither been fully understood nor appropriately valued. President Ford, of course, would never have believed he was owed anything. He did what he did out of his love of country and his deep respect for public service. That was at least in part what made him such a trusted figure at a time when trust for the presidency was at its nadir.
In American political history, the arrival of Gerald R. Ford to the presidency was what might be called a “Black Swan” event. Whoever would have contemplated that within two years of the landslide victory of the Nixon-Agnew ticket, both the duly elected President and Vice President would be swept out of office in separate corruption scandals? I would submit that Ford was likely one of the very few public servants able to lead America back from what careful observers characterized as the brink of civil and political collapse. Restoring public trust in the presidency and in the federal government was his “biggest” achievement, concluded historian Michael Beschloss, during a 2006 PBS NewsHour segment on Ford’s legacy. Ron Nessen, Ford’s second White House Press Secretary, added that it was President Ford’s personality “that was . . . one of the contributions he made to healing and changing the mood of those times.”1 His demeanor, down-to-earth yet uplifting, heartened everyone who knew the gentleman from Grand Rapids, Michigan—all the way back to his college football teammates. Which brings me to the title of this book.
In football, the “center” is among the least glorified positions. Nonetheless, it is of central importance. In the middle of the offensive line, it is invariably the center’s responsibility to handle the football at the start of every play on offense. If the play goes well, one of the other players on the team receives the plaudits—a tailback who breaks a long run, a quarterback who launches a Hail Mary pass, or a receiver who catches the ball and races for the winning touchdown. Though fans may take little notice, the center’s teammates recognize and appreciate his importance.
From 1932 to 1934, Ford was the center on the University of Michigan varsity football team. In 1932 and again in 1933, the Michigan Wolverines went undefeated and became national champions. His final season, 1934, however, was tough. While the team won only one game, Jerry Ford—at center—remained its heart.
Many years later, in a time unique in the two-hundred-year history of the United States, our country was urgently in need of its “center,” and the largely unheralded Gerald Ford was on hand. Irish poet William Butler Yeats might have been describing the chaos America was experiencing in 1974 when he wrote back in 1919:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.2
In the wake of the historic Watergate scandal during the Nixon administration, it seemed our nation was hurtling headlong into an abyss—a “widening gyre.” With chaos at the highest levels of our nation’s government, some believed anarchy might be loosed upon our country and, from there, possibly the world. The American people were deeply disillusioned and gripped by a lack of trust in their government. Our “ceremony of innocence” was being drowned.
In that poisonous, ugly atmosphere in August 1974 stood a largely unknown American. In stunning contrast to every other individual who had ever served as our nation’s President and Commander in Chief, Gerald Ford’s name had never appeared on a ballot either for the presidency or for the vice presidency. He had fashioned and tested no national campaign team, no seasoned group of policy advisors. He had neither organized nor managed anything larger than his congressional staff and the U.S. House of Representatives’ Minority Leader’s office. He had neither sought nor earned a national constituency. His base of support was Michigan’s Fifth Congressional District—the Grand Rapids area of the state. Yet suddenly, there he was, thrust into a tumultuous, even desperate environment in which America’s durability as a functioning democracy was being tested and questioned as never before.
Despite his decades of public service—aboard the aircraft carrier USS Monterey, in the Pacific theater during World War II, over two decades in the U.S. House of Representatives, and, only briefly, as an unelected Vice President—the former football star and Yale Law School graduate had never received a hero’s laurels, nor had he ever sought them. He simply performed his duty while others received the acclaim.
As he took the oath of office as President of the United States on August 9, 1974, Gerald Ford was once again reporting for duty. Without fanfare, he would steady the ship of state, restore balance to our country, and lead his fellow Americans out of the national trauma of the Watergate scandal and the unprecedented resignation of both the elected Vice President and the elected President. In this case, fortunately, the poet Yeats’s frightful vision went unfulfilled. To be sure, things were coming apart, but, to our nation’s great benefit, the “center” held.
I was privileged to be at his side during that unprecedented juncture in our nation’s history—first at the new President’s request as Chairman of Ford’s transition team, and then as his White House Chief of Staff and still later as his Secretary of Defense. As Chief of Staff during Ford’s crucial first year or so in office, I had multiple conversations with him each day—in the Oval Office, at Cabinet and National Security Council meetings, on Air Force One, and during his domestic and foreign travels.
After each of our meetings, to keep the work of his presidency moving, I would immediately dictate a brief note that members of my outstanding staff—Brenda Williams and Barbara Hildreth—would promptly type up. Those many hundreds of quick action memos enabled me or my young assistant, Dick Cheney, to follow up on the President’s requests, to make notes to myself, to Dick and to key staff members, and also to keep my mind refreshed on what the President had been told and on what the President was planning or considering on a full range of subjects. What my notes—the many hundreds of action memos—in effect became was a real-time, raw, running log of the Ford presidency from its inception. They were largely unedited and were in no sense a journal. I make generous use of them in this book. They provide unvarnished insight into what was happening in those early months of the presidency of the only person to serve in the Oval Office having never been elected either President or Vice President. Many of these and others which have never been made public will also be included on my website, www.rumsfeld.com.
Knowing that those who are closest to a President and are seeing him frequently owe him their unvarnished advice, I was not sparing in offering suggestions. Gerald Ford had the self-awareness and the confidence to recognize that as a legislator he had not run a large department or agency. Apart from our friendship and our close working relationship in the House of Representatives, one of the reasons he insisted I leave my post as the U.S. Ambassador to NATO and return to the White House to assist him was that I had recently run two large organizations during the Nixon administration—serving for the better part of four years overseeing the Office of Economic Opportunity and the Economic Stabilization Program, and serving in the White House as a Counsellor to President Nixon before becoming U.S. Ambassador to NATO. Further, I was so solidly for President Ford’s success that he had no doubt I was on his side; as a result, he encouraged me to offer the candid, personal opinions that thread through many of my memos.
Because they were not meant for anyone but me and my very small circle of aides, and because it was such a fast-paced environment, these memos contain numerous misspellings and grammatical errors. In many cases, standing alone, the comments lack context. Some of these memos, out of necessity, have been lightly edited and, on occasion, modestly redacted to remove sensitive or clearly inaccurate or unfair references. They do however portray, indeed reveal, Gerald Ford as the impressive leader he became. Further, they provide real-life examples of the magnitude of the problems he was confronting on behalf of our nation from his first moments as President.
Today, we read and hear a good deal of talk about dysfunction in Washington, D.C., as if it were a new phenomenon. The 2016 election, we were repeatedly told, was the most divisive election ever. We are still, many months later, warned of “permanent gridlock.” As of this writing, trust in our public institutions remains low. But, in truth, the Washington, D.C., of today is not entirely different from that of 1974, when for the only time in our nation’s history an elected leader had resigned and surrendered the presidency to a man with whom little of our country—and even less of the world—was even passingly familiar.
This is that story, told by one who was privileged to have been there and who had the chance to see a friend rise to the occasion just when our nation needed him most.