CHAPTER 23

The Ford Interlude

ON OCTOBER 10, 1973, Spiro T. Agnew resigned as vice president of the United States—the first vice president since John C. Calhoun to do so, and not, like Calhoun, because he felt the job was not big enough for him. Envelopes passed to Agnew, each with as much as twenty thousand dollars in cash, were kickbacks from Maryland contractors. I reacted to the news of Agnew’s resignation by going up to Capitol Hill. In the Speaker’s Lobby off the floor of the House of Representatives, I ran into Barber Conable of New York, a member of the House Republican leadership.

“Bob, I shouldn’t tell you this, but I just can’t keep it to myself,” Conable said. Gerald R. Ford, the Republican leader of the House and a close ally of Conable, had approached him an hour earlier in the GOP cloakroom. Ford informed Conable that President Nixon was about to disclose an appointment for vice president under the new Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution, and asked Conable whether he planned to attend the White House ceremony. Conable replied that he had not planned to go, but Ford said softly to him, “Barber, I really would like you to be there.” Conable concluded to me: “I can’t guarantee it, Bob, but I’m pretty sure that Nixon’s going to name Jerry vice president.” Conable’s tone was one of wonder. In an Evans-Novak profile of Vice President Ford in the Atlantic Monthly the next year, I wrote, “at 60, Ford simply was not considered among the front rank of Republicans.” But thanks to Conable, I had an exclusive that I reported on Channel 5 WTTG.

When Agnew fell, Nixon was sure he could survive and was not necessarily looking for the best qualified presidential successor. Nixon wanted no part of either Rockefeller or Reagan, neither of whom he trusted. His choice was John B. Connally. Mel Laird gave Rowly and me the story of how he dissuaded Nixon from picking Connally. Laird had resigned as secretary of defense at the beginning of Nixon’s second term but was back in the White House with Haig six months later for a Watergate rescue operation replacing Haldeman and Ehrlichman. Haig took charge, but Laird’s advice and personality were found uncongenial by Nixon, and he was ignored—except in this case, as I wrote in the Atlantic:

Connally, Laird told the President, simply would not do. He had come too recently into the Republican fold; whatever his qualifications, he would never be confirmed by Congress. Democrats feared his ability and scorned him as an apostate. Republicans were not about to turn over to an acolyte of Lyndon Johnson the fortunes of the Grand Old Party for the next decade. Having warned Nixon for more than an hour that he had damn well better consider his party and not just himself, Laird then guaranteed that the Democratic Congress would confirm Ford as Vice President “within two weeks.”

Laird convinced Nixon to name Ford, but he was wrong about two weeks. The Saturday Night Massacre poisoned the atmosphere on Capitol Hill and delayed Ford’s confirmation for seven weeks.

         

I DID NOT worry about Ford being another Nixon. What concerned me was my interview with Ford in his Executive Office Building office for the Atlantic piece. When I asked whether he felt expanded power had endangered the presidency as an institution, I recorded in the article what happened next:

Ford went to his desk and picked up a copy of The Twilight of the Presidency by George Reedy, Lyndon Johnson’s onetime press secretary, given to him the week before by reporter Marjorie Hunter of the New York Times. In a gloomy pre-Watergate view of presidential decline, Reedy indicts the remoteness of the kingly presidency in the last third of the twentieth century.

Yes, Ford said, no doubt about it—and he wasn’t singling out Richard Nixon. What has happened, Ford said, is that “Presidents develop this aura of infallibility. They all sort of operate the same way—even Eisenhower [Ford’s favorite president]. Anybody that’s hired over there [at the White House] ought to read this book,” because what it describes is “avoidable.”…

“I’m simply saying that I think Presidents and their staffs have to have a somewhat different attitude to the Congress and to the job.”

I did not comment in the article on this remarkable position by the president-in-waiting, but I thought it strange. While other presidents prepared to enter the Oval Office intent on maximizing their power, Ford was concerned with minimizing his. Of the ten presidents I have covered, only Ford was a believer in congressional supremacy.

I thought the Atlantic profile offered a sophisticated analysis of Ford, but one reader was not impressed—my father. I had discerned that Maurice P. Novak, an unreconstructed liberal Republican, was distressed by my rightward drift. But he never had criticized me until he read the Ford profile (making sure these remarks were made out of earshot of my adoring mother). “I thought you were too soft on Ford,” my father told me. “He’s a political hack. Nixon is a crook, but he is a man of substance. Ford will be a disaster as president. Wait and see.” My father did not live in the world of politics, but his political assessments were consistently prescient.

         

ON SEPTEMBER 6, 1974, in the fourth week of the new presidency, I was called by Robert T. Hartmann, a former newspaperman who was Ford’s political adviser and chief speechwriter and now a counselor with cabinet status. He said he had to see me immediately. I scheduled lunch with him that day at Sans Souci.

Bob Hartmann was not my buddy. A member of Stanford’s class of 1938 and a World War II Navy veteran, in 1974 he was fifty-seven years old—part of an older generation. When I arrived in Washington in 1957, he was chief of the tiny Los Angeles Times bureau. The LA Times was then still a virtual component part of the California Republican Party, and Hartmann was part of a tough-talking band of Republican-oriented Washington bureau chiefs from just such newspapers. In 1964, Hartmann was hired by Mel Laird and five years later went to work for Ford when Laird left for the Pentagon. Since I had ready access to both Laird and Ford, I had no contact with Hartmann until Ford became vice president. I then took him to lunch once at Sans Souci without getting much out of him.

The September 6 lunch was entirely different. Hartmann was on a mission, and it began even before we ordered prelunch drinks. He started with one of the truly classic quotes I ever recorded: “The White House staff run by Haig is still functioning in the interest of Richard Nixon and the walking wounded of a lost war.” He gave me a second delicious quote after asserting that Al Haig must leave as chief of staff: “Until that happens, the President will be the Prisoner of Zenda in his own house.” These quotes were buttressed by a wealth of detail.

It was two fifteen p.m. when I returned to our office a half block away. This was Thursday, the deadline for our Sunday column, which already had been teletyped to Chicago (headquarters for the renamed Field Syndicate). But the material given me by Hartmann was so hot that Rowly and I agreed we could not wait until Monday to publish it, and I would write this story as a new Sunday column superseding the old one. The column was Evans & Novak at its best or worst, depending upon the outlook. It began:

An urgent feeling by President Ford’s closest aides that Gen. Alexander Haig must be removed as chief of staff soon—perhaps immediately—hit fever pitch in two backstage developments last Thursday.

Development No. 1: Haig entered the Oval Office with a commission for Mr. Ford to sign nominating Pat Buchanan, Richard M. Nixon’s longtime political adviser and speechwriter, as ambassador to South Africa. Despite Haig’s fervent arguments, the President delayed his decision.

Development No. 2: The General Services Administration was instructed by Haig deputy Jerry Jones to move furniture into two Executive Office Building suites next door to the White House for two ex-Nixon aides now in San Clemente [Nixon’s California home]: Room 352 for ex-press secretary Ron Ziegler; Room 348 for ex-appointments secretary Steve Bull.

Describing Ford’s “own aides” (meaning Hartmann) as “thunderstruck,” I went on to label Buchanan as “the symbol of bloody-nose Nixon politics” and Ziegler as “the bad old days incarnate.” I then cataloged Haig’s efforts to manipulate the Ford presidency, from opposing his amnesty plans for Vietnam War draft evaders to blocking his new White House portraits of his favorite presidents (Lincoln and Truman) in place of Nixon’s (Teddy Roosevelt and Wilson).

Although Hartmann talked to me off the record, I slipped in both those beautiful Hartmann quotes (attributing the first to “one Ford man” and the second to “one aide”). Hartmann’s name was not mentioned until the next to last paragraph of a fifteen-paragraph column: “Hartmann and a handful of Ford men simply cannot compete with the Haig system. Thus, they feel President Ford must cut loose Al Haig.” Even if the Washington gossip circuit had not reported Novak and Hartmann lunching at Sans Souci two days before the column appeared, it would not be difficult to ascertain its source.

The Washington Post played the column at the top of the Sunday op-ed page with a four-column headline: “Mr. Ford’s Advisers: Gen. Haig Must Go.” I was enjoying this in my office off the family room, when Geraldine knocked on the door a little after seven a.m. to tell me the general was on the phone.

Haig apparently had read his Post and immediately called me without giving it much thought. He was shouting: “Novak, this is full of lies, all lies. You have libeled me, and you, my friend, are going to pay for it. I am going to sue you for five million dollars.” “Al,” I protested, “you’re out of luck. I don’t have five million dollars.” Haig shouted something unintelligible, then hung up.

Of course, Haig never sued me. Nor did he ever mention this incident to me again in the course of many contacts in ensuing years. This column, however, was often mentioned years later by Pat Buchanan, after we had become friends. Pat often noted that I had cost him the privilege of representing our country in Pretoria.

Less than three weeks after the “Haig Must Go” column, the general was, in effect, replaced by Don Rumsfeld. Soon Buchanan, Ziegler, Bull, and the other prominent Nixonites were gone too.

         

THE VOLCANIC TELEPHONE call from Al Haig did not end my adventures that memorable Sunday, September 8, 1974. At the suggestion of Senator William E. Brock, we had breakfast at the Hay Adams before his appearance on Face the Nation, where I would be the non-CBS questioner. The guests were the chairmen of the Senate Republican and Democratic campaign committees, Senators Brock and Lloyd Bentsen. In our off-the-record breakfast talk, Brock and I shared our disappointment with the first month of the Ford presidency, particularly its muddled economic policy.

We were nearly finished, when one of the senator’s aides approached our table with news. He informed us that President Ford had just issued a complete and total pardon for Richard M. Nixon. Brock shook his head in disbelief. While the pardon in time would be praised for saving the nation from a painful experience, on September 8, 1974, it seemed a Republican disaster.

The stunning news obviously changed the direction of that day’s Face the Nation. Noting Nixon’s just-released statement from San Clemente—“I can see now that I was wrong in not acting more decisively and more forthrightly in dealing with Watergate.”—and remembering that Brock had been the unattributed author of the Henry II analogy, I asked on the air whether Nixon should say more in expiation of his sins. “I don’t see that it would add much to the process,” Brock now said on national television. “I don’t want to see President Nixon abject himself in an effort to achieve penance.” So much for scourging.

         

THE REPUBLICAN PARTY was staring into a midterm election abyss on Thursday, October 31, when Ford touched down in Sioux City, Iowa, a late stopping point in a twenty-one-state tour. I was covering the president there and on his next stops in California.

Ford was in Sioux City to promote the candidacy of the Republican district’s congressman, Wiley Mayne, a stodgy standpatter who, on the Judiciary Committee, voted against all Nixon impeachment counts. My Iowa political sources considered Mayne dead, less because of his stubborn loyalty to Nixon than the faltering farm economy for which farmers blamed the administration’s agricultural policy. Ford supported Mayne at the Sioux City rally by defending his farm program, causing local Republicans to wince. I wrote in a column published the day before the election: “How anyone was helped by the President’s Sioux City speech defending that policy defies the imagination.”

The presidential campaign went on to California for a five-hundred-dollar-a-plate party fund-raising dinner Thursday night at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles. I had telephoned Maureen Reagan, the governor’s daughter, in advance to see whether we could get together for a drink. I had met Maureen while covering California politics the previous spring, and found her excellent company and an inexhaustible source of political intelligence. She was thirty-three, a stunning blonde (in between overweight periods), irreverent, and frightening to most politicians. Because I was not a politician and she didn’t frighten me, we got along.

Maureen got me into the VIP reception at the Century Plaza prior to the black-tie dinner. (The White House press pool reporter wrote disdainfully: “Novak managed to get on the inside of the reception ropes with the rest of the Republicans.”) “I’ve got so much to tell you,” Maureen said with her trademark giggle and arching of her eyebrows, “but it will have to wait.” We arranged to meet for drinks at midnight at a small bar in the hotel.

The dinner was another mini-disaster for Jerry Ford, who was supposed to boost Houston Flournoy’s uphill campaign for governor against Democrat Jerry Brown. Ford’s thirty-five-minute speech, I wrote in the Monday preelection column, “was dull, overly long and badly delivered (following Bob Hope and Reagan, two brilliant platform performers).”

I shook hands with Flournoy at the reception, and he invited me to his hotel suite for a postdinner drink. Flournoy was the youngest of the liberal Republican state assemblymen to whom I had grown close a decade earlier during the 1964 California presidential primary when they were supporting Rockefeller against Goldwater, and I had enjoyed drinking and talking with him on both coasts.

Immediately after the dinner, I found Flournoy relaxing in his hotel suite, a drink in his hand and his tuxedo jacket and tie removed. I told him what he had not heard: Ford would visit his seriously ill predecessor the next morning. Flournoy could only utter a four-letter expletive.

In my midnight drink with Maureen Reagan, I asked what she thought of Ford’s speech. “He’s still a turkey,” she replied, adding: “Compared to this guy, even Flournoy [who was a notoriously dull speaker] is William Jennings Bryan.” Both those quotes found their way, attributed to a “Reagan insider,” into my Monday column.

Then Maureen dispensed the inside dope she had for me. On Thursday evening when Air Force One landed at Los Angeles International Airport, secretly waiting in the presidential limousine was Governor Reagan. The thirty-minute drive to the hotel enabled Ford and Reagan to have their first confidential chat. That represented an abrupt change in attitude by Ford and Bob Hartmann, who had wanted no part of Reagan in August when everybody and his brother (including me) was being ushered in to see the new president. Hartmann had not disguised his view that Reagan was a used-up relic. Everything was changed by Ford’s precipitous postpardon drop in the polls and leaks from Sacramento that Reagan would run for president.

Maureen told me the secret Ford-Reagan “summit” continued another thirty minutes in the Century Plaza presidential suite. Ford, she said, did his best to ingratiate himself with her father. The president sought his advice on specific personnel and policy decisions and told Reagan he would continue to do so even after he left the governor’s office on January 6, 1975.

However, Maureen advised me not to be misled by this or by anything I might be told by Reagan’s aides or by Reagan himself. She guaranteed me that Ronald Reagan would challenge Gerald Ford for president in 1976.

Ford did visit Nixon in his Los Angeles hospital room the next morning, Friday, November 1, depressing Republican prospects three days before the election. After his politically foolhardy sick call, Ford resumed his disastrous campaign to help struggling Republican candidates. The next stop on Friday: Fresno in California’s Central Valley, where Bob Mathias was seeking reelection to Congress.

Like Mayne in Iowa, Mathias was burdened not only by Watergate but the rotten farm economy in a Central Valley district that was eighty percent agricultural. Mathias had been the world’s greatest athlete, only seventeen years old when he won the gold medal in the Decathlon in the 1948 Olympics and then again in 1952. I had interviewed Mathias on January 1, 1952, in the locker room of the defeated Stanford football team at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California. As a student journalist, I was struck how inarticulate Mathias was for an international celebrity. As I listened to Mathias address the Fresno rally, his eloquence did not seem to have advanced much in the intervening twenty-two years. Ford’s speech was even drearier.

On election day, November 5, Houston Flournoy lost in California, Bob Mathias lost in Fresno, and Wiley Mayne lost in Sioux City. Democrats picked up forty-nine House seats to increase their margin over the Republicans to an overwhelming 145 seats. A gain of four Senate seats gave the Democrats a sixty-one to thirty-nine majority. The Democrats gained four more governorships, giving them thirty-six out of fifty. This was the political legacy of Richard M. Nixon.

         

WE NEVER MENTIONED Israel or the Middle East until three years after Evans & Novak was launched. The notion is sheer fantasy that Evans started the column with a prearranged agenda he had plotted with his Arabist pals at the State Department. He became fascinated by the Israeli question during a reporting trip to the region shortly after the Six Day War of 1967. During the next twenty-one years, Rowly wrote hundreds of columns from Washington and on the spot in the Middle East with the theme that Israeli intransigence sowed the seeds of war.

I wrote no columns about Israel during those twenty-one years, but my name appeared on every one of them and I agreed with my partner. The issue just was not at the top of my priority list, then or now. After Rowly’s retirement in 1992, I wrote a handful of columns about Israel that all followed the Evans line.

Amid hundreds of critical letters about Israel sent to the column, perhaps a dozen signed by people with Jewish surnames were addressed personally to me. They asked how I as a Jew could be critical of Israel. One was from a University of Illinois fraternity brother who became a rabbi, and sent me a postcard expressing his disappointment in me.

Another was from Morrie Beschloss, who in college beat me out as sports editor of the student daily. I had heard that the mild-mannered campus politician had been transformed, now that he was a rich industrialist, into somebody unpleasantly dogmatic who tolerated no ideas differing from his own. The letter was shrill, comparing me to Jewish trusties in Nazi concentration camps who collaborated in the extermination of their brothers and sisters. Of all the venomous letters (now e-mails) I have received over the years, this was the first from somebody I knew.

(A few years later, Morrie Beschloss wrote me again without any reference to his earlier attack on me. He told me his son Michael, a historian, was coming to Washington and asked me whether—for old-times’ sake—I could help him. Michael Beschloss turned out to be not only a brilliant historian, but a warm and engaging personality who became a good friend of Rowly’s and an amiable acquaintance of mine. He reminded me a little of the way his father was in college, only smarter and more talented.)

One day in the summer of 1975, an editor from the Newark Star-Ledger was in town and asked to have lunch. I took him to Sans Souci, and we had a jolly time during which we talked politics and he told me how much he liked the column. Finally, he came to the point. Advertisers were not happy with our “anti-Israel” columns. He asked: Could you ease up on this subject? It would make life a lot easier, he added. I gave an evasive answer about watching our language.

Within the year, the Star-Ledger cancelled our column. It was one of about a hundred newspapers that we lost in a surprisingly short period of time. Whatever the reason—and I had my suspicions—we never built back our base.

         

IN REVIEWING Evans & Novak columns during the brief Ford presidency, I am surprised in two ways. First, the columns are unrelenting in criticizing Ford. No wonder my seventeen-year relationship with him did not survive after he entered the Oval Office. Second, palace politics—to use Bob Hartmann’s phrase—was unremitting. More than under any other president, struggles for power were leaked to reporters (including Rowly and me) in abundant detail.

Jerry Ford, the nicest person to be president during my career, was ill equipped for the job. He was a quintessential product of the House and of the minority Republicans, suffering from a pernicious side effect of perpetual minority status: lack of a clear ideology guaranteeing the absence of a clear agenda.

         

WHEN I RETURNED in early July 1975, from a three-week, eight-nation reporting trip in Asia, I found Ford drifting into conduct that would cause him incalculable difficulty. He had declined an invitation to attend an AFL-CIO dinner in Washington on June 30 honoring the Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn, recently awarded the Nobel Prize for literature and a heroic figure in the eyes of anticommunists.

My reporting produced a July 17 Evans & Novak column in which an “unimpeachable” source described in detail a “personal memorandum” to Ford from Henry A. Kissinger, simultaneously serving as secretary of state and national security adviser. My source would not let me quote it verbatim but supplied enough details so that I could write that Kissinger used “his often dogmatic concept of détente” to inform the president that it would be “politically inadvisable” to attend the AFL-CIO banquet.

The memorandum added, however, it would be acceptable for Mr. Ford to meet the great anti-Communist novelist at some White House reception. The converse, by implication: a private Ford-Solzhenitsyn meeting would not be acceptable.

I went on to report that neither Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger nor White House Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld, both of whom would have recommended that Ford see Solzhenitsyn, was consulted. Nor was the issue brought before the NSC. I wrote that the incident reflected qualities “more typical” of Nixon than Ford: “lack of informed political consultation, gross insensitivity, equivocal explanations, just plain bad manners.”

While the State Department had barred its officials from attending the AFL-CIO dinner, other administration officials did show up: Secretary of Defense Schlesinger, Secretary of Labor John Dunlop, UN Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and John Lehman, deputy director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. If someone guessed that the “unimpeachable” source of the Kissinger memo was on that dinner list, he would be correct. It was Pat Moynihan.

Two weeks after the dinner, on July 13, after nearly daily consultation with his aides, Ford issued a press release saying he would see Solzhenitsyn if the Russian asked for it. Appearing the next day on Meet the Press, Solzhenitsyn said he did not come to America to see government officials. I wrote that Ford’s “belated, backhanded invitation” was “rejected with deserved contempt.”

A follow-up column on July 20 was written by Evans using details provided by AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer (and future president) Lane Kirkland, who played poker regularly in the same group with Rowly. Evans reported that Kirkland on July 14 hosted an intimate, unpublicized dinner party in his home honoring Solzhenitsyn and attended by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. Shortly before the evening ended at eleven thirty p.m., Rockefeller informed Solzhenitsyn that Kissinger greatly admired him and his writing and would like to meet him—in private, of course, without publicity. No private meetings, Solzhenitsyn replied curtly. Two days later, on July 16, Kissinger publicly denounced Solzhenitsyn as a threat to world peace. Rowly was too much of a reporter not to write this about his friend Henry (though he added the implausible caveat, over my objection, it was “unclear” whether the Russian’s counter-snub had led to the secretary of state’s outburst).

         

SHORTLY AFTER THE Solzhenitsyn snub in the summer of 1975, Geraldine and I were invited to dinner at the middle-class suburban home in Bethesda, Maryland, of Fred Ikle, who as director of ACDA was head of disarmament for the Ford administration. I hardly knew Ikle, and I knew personally only one other person there. It was John Lehman, Ikle’s deputy director at ACDA. Richard Perle, Senator Scoop Jackson’s national security aide who was then a close friend and future business partner of Lehman (a partnership that destroyed the friendship), introduced us late in 1974. Perle sold me on doing a column late in 1974 on the efforts of liberal staffers on Capitol Hill to block Lehman’s confirmation as ACDA deputy. Lehman was on Kissinger’s NSC staff, but the Democratic Senate staffers had it right. He was a hard-liner on Soviet policy, as was Ikle. The column about Lehman’s confirmation was the last one I wrote mentioning his name while he was at ACDA. Like Perle, Lehman became a covert source for me.

Everybody at Ikle’s dinner party, whether government officials or people from think tanks and educational institutions, was connected with arms control. All were alarmed by the U.S. march toward another arms agreement with the Soviets being driven by Kissinger. During predinner cocktails, I was introduced to Lieutenant General Edward Rowny, the Pentagon’s representative at arms control negotiations. “Well, Ed,” somebody greeted him, “I hear you just got back from Moscow.” “Yeah,” he replied. “One of these days, I hope we’ll go there and not concede all the bargaining points as soon as we see the towers of the Kremlin.” Rowny, a tough-looking career army officer, glanced at me, as if to make sure I was taking this in.

I had been poaching on Rowly’s coverage of international affairs to write about arms control. I think Ikle invited me to dinner that night because I had not bought into the news media’s euphoria over arms control and particularly the Vladivostok agreement of 1974. Ford had painted the agreement as a miraculous breakthrough, which was so reported by the press. Based mainly on information from Perle, I reported on November 28 that the agreement gave the Soviets a major advantage in permitting multiple warheads on their huge missiles.

After the Ikle dinner, my reporting on arms control became more frequent and more trenchant. On July 24, I reported that Kissinger’s “negotiating posture dangerously omits power, size and accuracy of nuclear weapons while concentrating on numbers.”

On August 14, I reported “informed opinion high in the government that Kissinger will endanger a SALT agreement by not sticking to the Pentagon position on critical questions affecting long-range security of the United States.”

My criticisms reflected not only an ongoing tutorial on arms control conducted for me separately by Perle and Lehman but also occasional conversations with Secretary Schlesinger in his Pentagon office. Schlesinger was on a collision course with Henry Kissinger.

Kissinger explained to Rowly that it was necessary to cut arms control deals with the Kremlin because he did not believe the overwhelmingly Democratic Congress would spend enough to keep up with the Russians. Having since then read everything Henry has written, I believe he also doubted the West’s moral fiber. Schlesinger was more straightforward, pressing for caution on arms deals and aggressiveness on defense spending.

When on September 20, 1974, I wrote about the “pipe-smoking, donnish” Schlesinger’s “professorial style of exposition” turning off Ford, Schlesinger angrily telephoned me to complain that his hard-line policies ought to please me. They did, I replied, but he simply was not “Churchillian.”

A month later, the office of the secretary of defense called me with a virtual order to accompany Schlesinger to Jacksonville, Florida, on Friday, November 8. This was the weekend of the annual football game between the universities of Florida and Georgia (“the world’s largest outdoor cocktail party”), its nonstop drinking and frivolity each year broken at a Friday luncheon featuring a major speaker. Schlesinger was the 1974 speaker and insisted that I accompany him on his Air Force executive jet so that I could be there firsthand to hear him deliver a saber rattler avowing the American will to prevail in the cold war. “Was that Churchillian enough for you?” Schlesinger asked me as we flew back to Washington.

It did not help Schlesinger with Ford to play Churchill. Nothing helped. He was only forty-four years old when he became secretary, but seemed a much older man. He was sarcastic, caustic, and politically incorrect—not the House of Representatives style. I wrote in my column of July 24, 1975: “On a subject so puzzling as SALT, there has been no contest between the immensely persuasive Kissinger seeing Mr. Ford for one hour every morning, and the slow-talking Schlesinger, visiting the Oval Office occasionally.”

On Monday, November 3, 1975, Ford pulled the trigger for what would be known as the Halloween Massacre. Vice President Rockefeller was bumped from the 1976 ticket; Schlesinger was fired and replaced at the Pentagon by Rockefeller’s archenemy, Don Rumsfeld (who was replaced as White House chief of staff by his thirty-four-year-old deputy, Dick Cheney); CIA professional William Colby was fired as DCI (and replaced by George Bush). The conventional wisdom was that Rumsfeld at the Pentagon would acquiesce in Kissinger’s plans. Like much else in the Ford interlude, this was a massive miscalculation.

The Evans & Novak column of December 6 reported that the Kissinger-led national security bureaucracy was drafting major concessions to the Soviet Union in the quest for a SALT II agreement. I quoted “one outraged Administration official” as saying: “I think it’s a disaster.” That official was ACDA Deputy Director John Lehman.

Lehman was then thirty-three years old and could be described as dashing, combining scholarship with bravado. An upper-class Catholic from Philadelphia, he had earned his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, was a U.S. Naval Reserve aviator (who would go on to a spectacular tenure as secretary of the navy just six years in the future), and flew his private plane to his place on the Jersey shore.

Neither Lehman nor I thought he was being disloyal to Ford but was trying to deflect the president from a disastrous course for the nation plotted by Kissinger. I considered him a patriot of great courage. We decided we could not be seen together in public or go to each other’s offices. John picked a place where we were sure nobody we knew ever went—the Café de Paris, a one-room dump on Georgetown’s M Street—for breakfasts starting at seven thirty a.m. Two odd stories about my meetings with Lehman at the Café de Paris:

One morning just before eight a.m., a senior Washington journalist entered the restaurant. Lehman flinched, but not as much as the journalist did. Accompanying him was a sexy young lady who was perhaps a third the reporter’s age. He obviously would recognize John, and I had known the reporter well. He quickly avoided my gaze and headed for an opposite corner of the single room, confirming my judgment that he had just spent the night with the young lady, who was not, of course, his wife. None of us there that morning had anything to fear because of mutually feared destruction.

Geraldine learned from me that my very early trips from our home in the Maryland suburbs, starting at six forty-five, were to the Café de Paris. That sounded pretty exotic. So when our friend Lee Cerrell from Los Angeles visited Washington, Geraldine invited her to lunch at the Café de Paris. They were stunned to discover a crummy place with a crummier clientele.

Lehman told me he thought Rumsfeld would in the end prove a bigger problem for Kissinger than Schlesinger because he was more clever, would keep his cards shielded, and would stay on good terms with Ford. The final paragraph of my December 5 column read:

Donald Rumsfeld, Schlesinger’s successor, was the silent new boy Nov. 28 on the Verification Panel [setting U.S. SALT policy] and, even when settled in his new job, will surely reserve his advice for the President’s ears only. The advice, if any, Rumsfeld gives next week may decide SALT II and influence the future of this country.

On January 26, 1976, the Evans & Novak column reported that in two months as Secretary of Defense, Rumsfeld had “won few admirers and fewer friends but has convinced the Pentagon that he has plenty of what his better-loved predecessor grievously lacked: sufficient influence at the White House to challenge…Kissinger on arms control.” I recounted with obvious admiration how Rumsfeld had deftly interfered with Kissinger’s SALT plans while quietly restoring defense budget cuts that Schlesinger had been powerless to stave off. I concluded that while Rumsfeld lacked the expertise to become a “great” Secretary of Defense, “he so clearly exceeds his predecessors in influence that he could surpass them in shaping the course of history.”

Working beneath the radar, Rumsfeld was instrumental in the death of SALT II. Schlesinger became a resource for anybody, Republican or Democrat, who was running for president against Ford and wound up in the cabinet of the next Democratic president. Like much else he attempted, the Halloween Massacre did not work out for Jerry Ford.

         

AS 1975 ENDED, Ford made a presidential decision that enhanced my view that he had no public purpose and that extended his negative impact decades beyond his presidency.

Justice William Douglas, a left-wing Democrat who had served on the Supreme Court for a record thirty-six years, suffered a debilitating stroke at the age of seventy-seven and resigned on November 12, 1975. Ford had the opportunity to nominate a young person who was Douglas’s antithesis as an advocate of judicial restraint, limited government, and free markets. The ideal choice would have been Solicitor General Robert Bork. But lacking a public purpose, Ford was interested only in finding a nominee who would easily be confirmed by the Democratic Senate. Bork did not meet that test.

John Paul Stevens did. He had been named five years earlier to the U.S. Court of Appeals in Chicago, where he had served without distinction or controversy. The fifty-five-year-old Stevens belonged to a rich Republican Chicago family that had built the massive Stevens Hotel on Michigan Avenue (later bought by Hilton and renamed the Conrad Hilton). After the tumult created over the preceding decade by the Supreme Court nominees of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, everybody seemed ready to acquiesce in so pedestrian a choice as Stevens—which was exactly Ford’s intention.

Everybody but me. The Evans & Novak column of December 4, 1975, contended that in “seeking the best qualified nominee likely to win confirmation,” Ford “furthered a trend toward capture of the nation’s highest court by the organized legal profession that could convert it into a body of legal mechanics rather than law givers.” I accused Ford of “a timid inability to seize the challenge and opportunity of a coveted court vacancy. The end product comes over as the politics of blandness.” By accepting the credo of the American Bar Association president Lawrence E. Walsh (about whom much more would be heard in years to come) that previous judicial experience was required for a Supreme Court nominee, I wrote that Ford eliminated academicians such as the University of Chicago’s Philip Kurland and congressmen such as California’s Charles Wiggins. He also, the column continued, would have blackballed past justices John Marshall, Roger Taney, Louis Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter, Charles Evans Hughes, and Earl Warren, and current justices Lewis Powell and William Rehnquist.

For his first decade on the court, Stevens performed as expected: a swing vote whose positions could not be classified ideologically. However, as the Reagan administration raised basic questions before the high court in the 1980s, Stevens increasingly became identified with liberal causes. By the 1990s he was lionized by leftists as a savior.

John Paul Stevens was the only lasting legacy of the Ford interlude, an immutable vote on the Supreme Court against everything Republicans hold dear. I am not sure that Jerry Ford in retirement realized this, or cared much if he did.