Ford, Not a Lincoln

Somehow the idea of a scoop and the name Gerald R. Ford do not mate. And indeed, the subtitle of this work is misleading.

Few people who followed the career of Jerry Ford (and I did in a modest way as a baby editor and fill-in World-Wide column writer at the Wall Street Journal at the time) will find anything astonishing here. The revelation being pushed hardest by the marketers–that then-Vice President Ford blurted out to DeFrank in April 1974 that he knew that events would soon remove Richard Nixon from the White House and make the former House Republican leader the new chief executive–now seems small beer, though it might have been nitroglycerine at the time. (Nixon, of course, resigned in August.)

In any event, DeFrank, a longtime White House correspondent for Newsweek and now the New York Daily News‘s Washington bureau chief, promised the then-veep that he wouldn’t report that remark until Ford was dead. And from then on, and especially between 1991 and 2006, the politician and the reporter, by now great pals, had numerous off-the-record chats in which Ford would ruminate freely and securely.

The former president didn’t want to deal with the recriminations or, apparently, the hurt feelings that would flow from the premortem release of his observations. He generally loved to be liked. So DeFrank had to wait until December a year ago for Ford to go to his reward and the reporter to his computer to polish up his many, many conversations with the Giant of Grand Rapids.

Of course, readers must bring skepticism to postmortem works of this kind: The subject is not around to comment on the accuracy of the quotes. Still, DeFrank is an honorable man, and we can take the book on faith. But there may be too many conversations here, which might have worked better as a long magazine article. And there’s an odd randomness about it: a quotation about this, a quotation about that, then a quotation about this yet again. It’s not really pulled together, and kind of flops around.

Which isn’t to say there isn’t a lot that’s engaging. With so many years of remarks by such a genial public figure, there almost has to be. For example, referring to John F. Kennedy, Ford said: “John [Ford didn’t call him Jack] was great, but all John had was the press. He was still an elitist; he didn’t like the rope line. This guy [Bill Clinton] loves the rope line–and the rope line loves him.”

Ford was a famously nice man, with a moderately good sense of humor, and capable of making some perceptive and interesting remarks about his times. But there is much tautology in this volume, as the author insists on repeating what are effectively the same remarks. And some of them are simply boring, even to an admirer of Ford (including me). The Man from Michigan was a smart politician, but rarely prone to eloquence, and sometimes to such verbal gaffes as not seeming to realize in the disastrous 1976 presidential debate with Jimmy Carter that the Soviets dominated Eastern Europe. (What he meant, I think, was that they didn’t accept the domination.)

Write It When I’m Gone has been selling remarkably well for a volume about a politician all too often considered plodding and, lamentably, without scandal. Which may be one reason for its success after the foreign and domestic churn of the past few years. Jerry Ford seems a comforting historical figure these days, as the economic and political traumas of his time in power have receded in memory. He had the benefit of a very long political retirement, during which his charms expanded in the public mind and his flaws virtually disappeared. Toward the end, even the likes of the Kennedys were giving him an award for pardoning Nixon! The pipe-smoking Ford seems almost out of Currier & Ives.

Nevertheless, he had his tart moments, too. Ford expresses dismay over Jimmy Carter–saying, in 1980, “God help us” if he were reelected. Ford didn’t like or respect Ronald Reagan, whose choice not to campaign for him in 1976 he considered “one of the four reasons” for his loss to Jimmy Carter. For that he never forgave Reagan, although he showed compassion when the latter developed Alzheimer’s disease. He said of his rival for the 1976 nomination: “Totally off the record, he was not what I would [call] a technically competent president,” considering him a lazy showman. And regarding the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Ford said of Clinton: “He’s got a sex sickness; I mean that.” (As for Al Gore: “He’s such a bore.”)

Many of the final pages are a sometimes-tedious description of Ford’s declining health, the clinical details of which will surprise few people of a certain age. Ford lived to be 93 years old, and was in good health until near the end. His death was no tragedy. But what Write It When I’m Gone does evoke more than any other thing is a certain kind of “normal,” stolid, kindly Main Street Republican of the first three-quarters of the 20th century: leery of big change, affable in a certain way, generous and quietly confident that a traditional Middle American upbringing would produce competence for any duty that could be thrown at him, including the presidency. (In Ford’s case, that upbringing was by a mother and a stepfather who was a far better father-figure than Ford’s biological father, whom the former president castigates as a notably selfish, infantile, and nasty man–one of the best passages in the book.)

I remember many such figures from my own Midwestern/small-town New England families, and miss them in this frantic, attention-deficit-addled age. Not that things were particularly soothing in Jerry Ford’s brief vice presidency and presidency. Does anyone remember the high inflation, the first energy crisis, the ignominious evacuation from Saigon, the Communists’ mass murder in Cambodia? And of course, some of my middle American relatives were every bit as nasty as Jerry Ford’s father.

Robert Whitcomb, editor of the editorial pages at the Providence Journal, is the coauthor of Cape Wind: Money, Celebrity, Class, Politics, and the Battle for Our Energy Future on Nantucket Sound.