Before he died last week at 93, Ford had also become an imposing figure in American history. The 38th president, who will be mourned at services this week in Washington and Michigan, helped shape America in two different centuries. He was a product of the Depression, a World War II Navy hero, a cold-war leader in the House and
vice president and president at a time when America was struggling to get past an unpopular war in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal of Richard Nixon.
For a reminder of what a difference it made that Jerry Ford became president in August 1974, think of this: if Congress had let Nixon nominate his first choice for vice president after Spiro Agnew’s resignation in disgrace, ex-Texas governor John Connally would have been the 38th president. That same month, Connally was indicted for perjury and obstruction of justice in a separate scandal. (He was later acquitted.) Would faith in our system have survived after we watched a president and vice president quit, only to see a new president indicted as he was sworn in?
The student of history can detect Gerald Ford’s influence on America from Watergate to Iraq, from the presidencies of Richard Nixon to George W. Bush. President for just 29 months, Ford changed the way we live, rescuing the White House from scandal, restoring a measure of confidence in politics and articulating a philosophy of robust executive power that influences President Bush even now. After leaving office he was critical of the War Powers Resolution, which requires congressional consultation on issues of force, and he passed on his skepticism about a constrained presidency to his last two chiefs of staff, Vice President Dick Cheney and ex-Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Ford’s vision of power, then, has molded Bush 43’s.
Ford’s most controversial decision, of course, was to pardon Nixon for any crimes he might have committed in his White House years. In that dark September 1974, there were charges of secret deals, and complaints that Ford had foreclosed the possibility that justice would be done. Yet as the years passed, more Americans came to see the pardon as an act of unusual statesmanship. “I was hurt by the lack of understanding of what I did,” Ford told NEWSWEEK’s Jon Meacham in 2004. “In retrospect, I look back and I understand it, but boy, at the time, as you know, I caught unshirted hell. That so many people came to see my reasoning, and agree with it, makes me feel pretty good.”
Ford had reason to glow: in the space of 30 years, he completed the journey from historical footnote and mid-1970s punch line to statesman. As he grew older, he also increasingly moved to the center. He was privately critical of Bush’s Iraq war and was also surprised by Cheney’s growing hawkishness.
In September 1995, at the suggestion of NEWSWEEK’s then editor, the late Maynard Parker, I called on President Ford one afternoon in Beaver Creek for a conversation about his life and career. Our ground rules were that I would divulge nothing about our talk until after his death, which would allow him to speak more freely than normal. Reminded of these, Ford replied in lawyerly fashion: “I accept.”
In hindsight, what stands out most from our talk was Ford’s frustration that the Republican Party had lurched so far to the right. “If I’d been elected in ‘76,” he told me flatly, “the party wouldn’t be as far right as it is at the present time … I sure hope it comes back to the center.” Ford went on to complain about the 1992 GOP convention in Houston, where Pat Buchanan–who had challenged President George H.W. Bush for that year’s party nomination–demanded that conservatives “take back our culture.”
Ford told me, “My wife and I are moderate Republicans. We felt uncomfortable at the last [1992] convention. And … unless things change, we’ll feel uncomfortable in the next one– if we go.” (They went.) Ford lamented that George H.W. Bush had not reversed their party’s rightward movement: “I was disappointed that George didn’t fight a little harder against the hard right.” Asked to reply to the remark last week, the senior Bush said: “He never told me that, but that’s not surprising. He was a much more moderate guy in his later years.”
In Beaver Creek, Ford reminded me that he and Betty were “pro-choice.” He criticized Bush Senior’s public avowal that he had come to oppose abortion rights. “I know damn well that he and Barbara are pro-choice,” Ford told me. “Why didn’t they get up and say it? That really disappointed me more than anything.” Ford’s comment, Bush says, was off the mark. “That’s wrong,” he says of Ford’s suggestion that Bush was secretly pro-choice. (Barbara Bush wrote about her own pro-choice views in her 1994 memoir.)
Bush 41 was not the only Republican successor Ford criticized in our talk. He complained that Ronald Reagan had cost him the 1976 election by challenging his nomination. Ford told me that in the spring of 1976, “we thought we would have a tough time [winning] anyhow, and then to get diverted for six months or more in a very rigorous [primary] campaign–it made it difficult to be president and campaign simultaneously.”
Ford said that during his fall campaign against Jimmy Carter, “the only time [Reagan] appeared with me … was when … we had a nice, vigorous rally [at a fund-raising dinner] in Los Angeles … He made no other campaign appearances on my behalf … I never understood that. If he had made an appearance in Ohio … Louisiana and Mississippi, we would have won, I’m sure.” Ford added: “I never asked him about it. There was no point … I can’t imagine him wanting Jimmy Carter to be president. What went through his mind, I don’t know.” (In fairness to Reagan, the ex-California governor did make TV spots for the Ford-Dole ticket that fall.)
Despite what he considered to be Reagan’s damage to his candidacy, Ford campaigned enthusiastically when Reagan was nominated against Jimmy Carter in 1980. “I felt that Carter had been so mediocre on domestic policy that we had to have a change,” Ford told me. Foreign policy, too: Ford speculated that he and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger “could have gotten the shah to handle his problems differently” to prevent Iran’s turn to Islamic fundamentalism.
After Reagan’s election, Ford was disappointed that the 40th president didn’t consult him “as much as I would have expected.” In our talk, Ford inveighed against Reagan’s budget deficits: “With all his pronouncements about … the federal budget, his eight years were about as bad as any in the history of the country.” Still, he said that in office, Reagan “did a much better job than I expected.”
Ford knew the best-known act of his own presidency would be Nixon’s pardon. He had no second thoughts: “I felt so strongly that I had to get this damn thing off my desk.” He admitted that “sure, I would have appreciated it” if, in return, Nixon had made a stronger statement confessing guilt for Watergate offenses, which would have helped shield Ford from the firestorm the pardon created.
In our conversation, Ford said he suspected that the reason Nixon had refused to sign such a confession was that Alexander Haig, the chief of staff he had inherited from Nixon, had tipped off his exiled old boss that Ford was going to pardon him. (Haig strongly denies this.) Ford said he was “shocked and saddened” when he discovered years later (from James Cannon’s 1994 book “Time and Chance”) “what the role of Al Haig turned out to be. At the time, I had no idea. I assumed he was totally loyal to me … I’m sure what Haig apparently transmitted to Nixon convinced Nixon that he didn’t have to make an outright admission of guilt.”
Historians will treat Ford kindly. He was a decent man who came to symbolize an American longing for bipartisanship and courage. We may marvel that Ford could remain so good-hearted in such a toxic political era. In our talk, Ford recalled that when he was vice president during Watergate, his “old friend” Nixon kept offering him his private “personal assurance” that there was nothing to worry about. " ‘Of course, Jerry, I had nothing to do with it! I was so preoccupied with foreign-policy decisions–the Soviets, China’."
The 38th president looked directly at me and asked, “Wouldn’t you believe him?”
