“Our constitution works. Our great republic is a government of laws, not of men.”
—Gerald R. Ford
Gerald Ford’s real name was Leslie Lynch King. He took his adoptive father’s name in the 1920s.
Ford was an Eagle Scout and an accomplished football star at the University of Michigan. He played one exhibition game for the NFL’s Chicago Bears, but decided to go to Yale Law School rather than play professional football.
President Ford survived two assassination attempts within seventeen days
To Gerald Ford fell the job of cleaning up the wreck of Watergate and healing the nation’s divisions when he became president in the summer of 1974 following Richard Nixon’s resignation. As the nation’s only president who was never elected to national office, and facing a large and unruly Democratic majority in Congress, no incoming president has ever had a weaker hand. The lack of an electoral mandate diminished Ford’s legitimacy and moral authority in office. Never having won a national election, Ford was at a profound disadvantage against an assertive Congress. But the new president’s character was a strength he could draw on in a very weak position.
Ford, Henry Kissinger observed, “did not engage in elaborate maneuvers about who should receive credit” and “was sufficiently self-assured to disagree openly.” Only a person with such self-assurance could have stepped into the devastated Oval Office, unelected, with no transition period in which to work out his own priorities, saddled with his predecessor’s White House staff, cabinet, and ongoing initiatives, and function as well as Ford did.
The public perception of Ford is at odds with the reality of the man. Ford has always been portrayed as something of a hapless figure: think of how he is called “good ol’ Jerry Ford” or how comedian Chevy Chase mercilessly lampooned his many pratfalls. In reality, Ford was far from hapless. He possessed a strong, solid character reflective of the heartland district in Michigan from which he came. “Eisenhower without the medals” is how Ford was often described. It was Ford’s misfortune to preside, without benefit of popular election, at a low ebb for America. In many respects the Ford-Carter years were the time of maximum peril for the United States and its allies in the West.
Nixon had reportedly included Ford on his list of potential running mates in both 1960 and 1968, But Nixon may simply have been returning a favor; Ford had been among congressional Republicans who urged Eisenhower not to dump Nixon from the ticket in 1956. The irony of Ford’s appointment to the vice presidency following Spiro Agnew’s resignation in the fall of 1973 is that Ford, after twenty-five years in the House, was seriously considering retirement from politics in 1974. Nixon’s first choice for vice president was John Connally, while party regulars recommended either Governor Nelson Rockefeller or Governor Ronald Reagan. Congressional Republicans suggested Ford. The Democratic Congress was not about to confirm former Democrat Connally, nor Rockefeller, nor Reagan, and provide the Republicans with a possibly strong incumbent president for the 1976 election. The Democratic House Speaker Carl Albert told Nixon that Ford was the only confirmable choice. In other words, Congress dictated its own choice for the chief of the executive branch. Ford accepted, despite the misgivings of his wife, Betty.
Ford’s plain-spoken, middle American persona—“I’m a Ford, not a Lincoln,” he modestly proclaimed—was a welcome relief to the Watergate-weary nation after Nixon finally resigned. Like most incoming presidents, Ford was greeted with a wave of public support and congressional goodwill, magnified by the fact that he had come from the ranks of the House. Ford, Pat Moynihan wrote, was “the most decent man I had known in American politics.” “Our long national nightmare is over,” Ford told a relieved nation. But the good mood vanished abruptly when, barely a month in office, Ford pardoned Nixon for any and all crimes he might have committed, even though no indictments had yet been brought. It was a supreme and necessary act of mercy, as even Nixon-hating liberals have come to admit over time. (Three decades after the fact, the Kennedy family gave Ford one of their “Profiles in Courage” awards for the Nixon pardon.)
But the timing of the pardon was awkward for Ford. “Will there ever be a right time?” Ford asked when his aides second-guessed him. Congressional Democrats and media cynics, deprived of the culminating satisfaction of seeing Nixon before a jury, thought the fix was in: Nixon must have named Ford to the vice presidency in return for a promise of pardon. Congressional Democrats called for an investigation and darkly hinted that another impeachment might be necessary. Ford denied any pardon deal and took the extraordinary step of testifying before the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Criminal Justice—becoming the first president since Lincoln to appear before Congress. Perhaps Ford had little choice. His dramatic appearance blunted the congressional uproar and derailed the momentum for an investigation that would have tied the White House in knots for months. But it was also another subtle indication (and encouragement) of congressional dominance.
Ford had already divided and upset Republicans with his choice for vice president. According to one account, the White House had conducted a quiet survey of Republicans leaders, and the leading pick was George H. W. Bush. But Ford decided to nominate Nelson Rockefeller, the most hated liberal Republican in the party. As Pat Buchanan put it, “There was no one who could rattle the cages of the Right like Nelson Rockefeller.” Rockefeller’s abiding interest in becoming president was no secret. Indeed he was widely thought to have been making plans to run in 1976 against Spiro Agnew with the hope of succeeding Nixon, until Watergate upended everyone’s plans. The conservative wing of the Republican Party thought the fix was in. It was feared that Ford, having hinted privately that he was undecided about running for the Oval Office in his own right in 1976, would hand off the nomination to Rockefeller. “Mr. Ford’s first big appointment has become his first big albatross,” William Safire wrote in the New York Times. Even before Congress confirmed Rockefeller, Safire predicted that Ford would have to dump Rockefeller from the ticket in 1976, whereupon “Democratic candidates will charge that Rockefeller is being dumped to ‘placate the right wing.’” Lou Cannon pointed out in his chronicle of Reagan’s rise, “More than any other single act of Ford’s, or indeed all of them combined, it was the selection of Rockefeller which fueled national interest among conservatives in a Reagan candidacy.” Though it should be added that Ford’s outspoken wife, Betty, contributed mightily to conservative disaffection with her candid comments on 60 Minutes about her children’s potential marijuana use and premarital affairs, as well as with her endorsement of abortion.
But Ford’s greatest handicap was that he was not equal to the supreme political demand of the television age—he was not a great communicator. He wasn’t even a good one. George Will put the problem succinctly:
Rhetorical skills are not peripheral to the political enterprise; and they are among the most important skills a person can bring to the presidency. . . . Ford is a passable head of an administration, but an unsatisfactory chief of state. A President is the chief articulator of collective aspirations, or he is not much. He is articulate, or he is inadequate. . . . There never has been a great inarticulate President. Ford is the most inarticulate President since the invention of broadcasting. . . . [A]n inarticulate president is like a motorcycle motor installed in a Mack truck.”
And Ford’s physical clumsiness didn’t help. Ford was arguably the most athletic man ever to be president, but he repeatedly tripped, fell, or bumped his head, usually in the presence of cameras, recalling Lyndon Johnson’s slur that “Jerry Ford can’t fart and chew gum at the same time.” Reporters joked that not only should Ford not have played college football without a helmet, but he shouldn’t play president without one, either. Maybe he’s trying to sew up the klutz vote, comedians joked. Even major news media made jokes about Ford.
Behind the scenes, the record shows, Ford was a sure-footed and decisive leader, but his physical clumsiness seemed a metaphor for his handling of domestic issues. Ford inherited a rapidly deteriorating economy. Inflation was skyrocketing. Prices jumped 3.7 percent in just the month of July 1974. Unemployment was heading toward 7 percent. The deadly and unprecedented combination of rising prices and unemployment came to be known as stagflation. The federal deficit was projected to balloon to $51.9 billion (out of a $350 billion budget), at that time an unheard of and alarming level.
TIME magazine quipped, “The only thing between Nelson Rockefeller and the presidency is a banana peel.” Both Rockefeller and Ford tripped when they walked together into the Senate chamber for Rockefeller’s swearing-in ceremony.
Orthodox Keynesian economics held that policy can fight inflation or unemployment, but not both at the same time. Ford’s economic advisers, a group that included Alan Greenspan and William Simon, argued that fighting inflation was more important than fighting unemployment, which they viewed as a cyclical phenomenon. Inflation was the more pervasive threat to the long-term health of the economy. Choosing to fight inflation, Ford proposed to get it under control with the orthodox remedy of a tax increase. He proposed a one-year 5 percent surtax on businesses and upper-income individuals to close the deficit and dampen inflation at the same time. His advisors were undoubtedly right to argue that inflation was a greater danger than unemployment in the long term, but the short-run political cost of addressing inflation ahead of unemployment was heavy for Republicans—especially when Ford, struggling vainly to change the subject from unemployment, denied that the nation was in a recession.
For the announcement of his tax surcharge proposal, Ford wore a campaign-style button that read WIN. The button, Ford explained, stood for “Whip Inflation Now,” which was the name of a volunteer organization in which Ford hoped citizens would enroll. Amazingly, over 100,000 did. Millions more requested WIN buttons. It was one of the dumbest stunts in the annals of democratic propaganda.
The sagging economy was the lesser of Ford’s major problems. The greatest misfortune of Ford’s tenure in office was having to preside over the last chapter of the long Vietnam War saga, including the final collapse of South Vietnam in 1975. What made the episode so ignominious was not simply that a long-suffering American ally was defeated, but the fact that—in the grips of a mood of self-flagellation—the U.S. refused to come to the aid of an ally whose survival had been the bipartisan commitment of five presidents. Ford made a last-ditch appeal for emergency military aid to South Vietnam in a speech before a joint session of Congress, but the heavily Democratic Congress, dominated by anti-war leftists, refused to lift a finger (except the middle digit, figuratively speaking) to help out an ally for whom more than 50,000 American soldiers had given their lives. At least Ford tried. The repercussions of and recriminations over the fall of South Vietnam would last more than a decade, well into the Reagan years. Americans on all sides of the Vietnam controversy have consoled themselves ever since that the fall of South Vietnam was inevitable. But while corruption, military ineptitude, poor leadership, and flagging morale doubtless weakened the prospects of the South Vietnamese, their defeat was by no means foreordained. It required the United States deciding to look the other way. “There is no doubt in my mind,” Henry Kissinger wrote, “that, with anything close to an adequate level of American aid, they would not have collapsed in 1975.”
While he eventually dismissed most of the staff he inherited from President Nixon to replace them with his own appointees (among them Richard Cheney as his chief of staff and Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defense), Ford kept Henry Kissinger, the chief architect of détente, as secretary of state until the end of his term. Ford and Kissinger nearly reached a new arms control deal with the Soviet Union, but the biggest milestone of the time was the Helsinki Accords of 1975. The Helsinki Accords, signed at an international meeting in Helsinki, Finland (from whence the name derived), was a bitter compromise that conservatives despised at the time. In exchange for the Soviet Union supposedly recognizing human rights, the West would recognize the legitimacy of Soviet rule over the nations of Eastern Europe. Conservative critics pointed out that a pledge to observe human rights means little in regimes without a free press or a judicial process to secure those rights. The Helsinki Accords prompted Ronald Reagan’s first public criticism of Ford: “I am against it, and I think all Americans should be against it.”
Henry Kissinger later made a persuasive case that in the long run the human rights provisions of the Helsinki Accords were of use to dissidents behind the Iron Curtain, and some anti-Communist activists such as the Czech Vaclav Havel corroborate this view. But at the time the Helsinki Accords appeared to be an expression of weakness on the part of the West. This perception was deepened by Ford’s craven decision around the same time to refuse a meeting with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize winning author of The Gulag Archipelago, who came to the United States after the Soviet Union expelled him. Solzhenitsyn strongly criticized détente, and Ford, acting on Kissinger’s advice, decided against meeting Solzhenitsyn because the meeting would offend the Soviets.
The White House initially said “scheduling problems” prevented a visit, an unpersuasive excuse that was then amended to an even less persuasive one: Solzhenitsyn, the White House said, was in the U.S. “to promote his books,” and the president did not wish to lend himself to “commercial purposes.” The week before, however, Ford had posed for photographs on the White House lawn with “the cotton queen” and soccer star Pele. Some White House aides muttered about Solzhenitsyn’s mental stability, while Ford privately called Solzhenitsyn “a goddamned horse’s ass.” Finally the White House came clean, admitting that Ford had decided against meeting with Solzhenitsyn “on the advice of the National Security Council,” which meant Kissinger. Kissinger issued a statement: “From the point of view of foreign policy the symbolic effect of that [meeting with Solzhenitsyn] can be disadvantageous.” Kissinger had lobbied the Soviets to allow Solzhenitsyn to go into exile, and promised Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin that the U.S. would not exploit Solzhenitsyn for political purposes. From his point of view, he was only living up to his end of an honest bargain. Solzhenitsyn returned the insult, attacking Ford for signing the Helsinki Accords, which he said represented “the betrayal of Eastern Europe, [and] acknowledging officially its slavery forever.”
Ford’s snubbing of Solzhenitsyn ignited a firestorm of criticism. “Not even Watergate,” George Will wrote, “was as fundamentally degrading to the presidency as this act of deference to the master of the Gulag Archipelago.” William F. Buckley Jr. poured contempt on Ford: “For a horrible moment one was tempted to wonder whether Mr. Ford knew who Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was.”
Ford’s weak handling of foreign policy amazingly enabled the Democratic Party and its 1976 nominee, Jimmy Carter, to run to the right of Ford. The Democratic platform in 1976 criticized Ford’s détente as little more than “bad bargains, dramatic posturing, and the stress on general declarations. . . . We must avoid assuming that the whole of American-Soviet relations is greater than the sum of its parts, that any agreement is superior to none, or that we can negotiate effectively as supplicants.” Ford’s confused and weak approach to the Soviet Union may have ultimately cost him the close election in 1976, when in a debate with Carter, Ford inexplicably said, “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford administration.”
Say what? Could Ford really be saying that the Captive Nations were no longer captive? Jimmy Carter pounced on Ford’s gaffe: “I would like to see Mr. Ford convince the Polish Americans and the Czech Americans and the Hungarian Americans in this country that those countries don’t live under the domination and supervision of the Soviet Union behind the Iron Curtain.” Over the next few days, Carter compared Ford to George Romney (the present Republican presidential candidate’s father, who had dropped out of the 1968 Republican presidential primaries after a gaffe about being “brainwashed” into supporting the Vietnam War), conveying the none-too-subtle double implication that Ford had been brainwashed by Kissinger, and was too dumb to know it. Newsweek ran the headline “Jerry Ford Drops a Brick.”
Facing a very liberal and heavily Democratic Congress intent on expanding its power and adopting bad policies, Ford made strong use of the president’s most powerful tool—the veto over congressional legislation. Ford vetoed sixty-six bills in eighteen months—a record. Democrats overrode twelve of those vetoes. Among bills that were passed into law over Ford’s veto were the Freedom of Information Act (a statute granting a fishing license for activists to requisition confidential government documents) and several budget-busting spending bills, including one for research on electric cars—sound familiar?
“A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.”
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Gerald Ford
When Ford served as the Republican minority leader in the House, he had led the unsuccessful attempt to impeach the far-left Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. So it came as a great disappointment that when Douglas retired from the Court during Ford’s presidency, Ford’s sole appointment to the Supreme Court was a jurist nearly as liberal as Douglas: John Paul Stevens. Stevens is one of the worst Supreme Court appointments ever made by a Republican president—continuing a string of incompetent appointments going back to Eisenhower. Stevens moved steadily to the left during his nearly thirty years on the Court. He flipped from opposing to supporting affirmative action quotas, supported abortion, and voted against gun rights. He sided with the liberal wing of the Court in Bush v. Gore in 2000. His most significant and damaging opinion came in Chevron v. NRDC in 1984—the most cited opinion in the history of the Supreme Court—which greatly expanded the constitutionally dubious power of unaccountable administrative bureaucracies to impose rules and regulations. The Chevron decision diminished the responsibility and accountability of Congress, and reduced the ability of citizens to rein in arbitrary government power. By farming out unpopular decisions to “swarms of officers” who are just as unelected as and many times more numerous than the ones Thomas Jefferson complained about in the Declaration of Independence, our elected representatives have deprived the people of their right to vote their oppressors out of office. Stevens openly scorned interpreting the Constitution according to the original intent of the Founders.
While Ford’s use of the veto against a runaway Congress and his general demeanor in conducting himself in office in the aftermath of the Watergate disaster count strongly in his favor, his appointment of Stevens knocks his constitutional grade down to a C+.