Assigning a reporter to the daily White House beat is often justified in the news business as manning a “death watch.” That is, keeping someone on hand to cover what, at a moment?s notice, will be a sensational story: The assassination of a president.
As a reporter at The Washington Post in the summer of 1974, I was assigned to a sort of political death watch; sticking to then-Vice President Gerald R. Ford Jr. as the Watergate scandal closed in on President Richard M. Nixon, making Ford his successor.
For weeks before Nixon?s shocking resignation in the face of approaching impeachment for his Watergate cover-up, I traveled with Ford as he tried loyally to disbelieve the truth about the man who had elevated him to the second-highest office in the land.
Nixon had made Ford the first unelected vice president upon the resignation in disgrace of Vice President Spiro T. Agnew in October, 1973, forced by a foolproof case of accepting bribes from Maryland contractors as a county executive and then governor.
Now the threatened resignation in disgrace of Nixon himself put Ford on the brink of a presidency he never sought. He was among the last prominent Republicans to accept Nixon?s guilt, and only the pleadings of close friends finally persuaded Ford to face the prospect thatthe leadership of the nation was about to be thrust upon him.
Ten days before the roof fell in on Nixon, I sat with Ford aboard Air Force Two past midnight, as he sat in shirtsleeves puffing his pipe and warding off my questions about a Ford presidency. He said he knew he was hurting himself politically by continuing to stand by Nixon, but as long as the embattled president was telling him he was innocent, he was not going to abandon him.
As we flew back to Washington after a speaking tour in defense of Nixon, Ford talked only around the edges of how he might operate in the Oval Office, and forbade me to use anything he had said as long his ascendancy was no more than a prospect.
What came through most strongly was his sadness about Nixon?s impending fate. I wrote the next day: “One senses a sense of personal sympathy, even compassion, toward Mr. Nixon that transcends Mr. Ford?s best political interest.”
Barely more than a week later, I stood on the South Lawn of the White House in the East Room as Ford bade goodbye to Nixon. Later, in the same East Room, he took the oath of the presidency, famously declaring that “our national nightmare is over” and pledging “to follow my instincts for openness and candor, with full confidence that honesty is always the best policy in the end.”
After only a month in office, he followed those instincts in a way that brought back to me his compassionate words toward Nixon uttered on that late-night flight aboard Air Force Two. Without warning on a clear Sunday morning, he announced his unqualified pardon of the deposed president.
If doing so was an act of personal sympathy and compassion, it certainly was not one in his best political interest. The pardon brought a firestorm of condemnation down on Ford, along with speculation of a smarmy deal with Nixon to hand over the presidency to him.
Ford denied it and defended his action. He said his conscience had told him “I cannot prolong the bad dreams that continue to reopen a chapter that is closed,” and that he had to “proclaim domestic tranquility [and] use every means that I have to insure it.”
The Nixon pardon thereafter hung as a deep shadow over the brief Ford presidency. The deed later was cited by many as the main reason he was denied a term in his own right, defeated by his righteous-sounding Democratic opponent, Jimmy Carter, in the 1976 campaign.
Even after that defeat, however, Ford remained to millions of Americans a beloved president ? a well-meaning regular guy who never expected to lead the nation, but did his best in good spirits when the task was thrust upon him.
Jules Witcover, a Baltimore Examiner columnist, is syndicated by Tribune Media Services. He has covered national affairs from Washington for more than 50 years and is the author of 11 books, and co-author of five others, on American politics and history.
