If you’re tired of being overwhelmed by the presence of President Trump, you’ve come to the right place. The subject here is Gerald Ford, the so-called accidental president who took over when Richard Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974, and served until January 20, 1977.
Ford was never elected vice president or president. He was a historical anomaly. But he was different in other ways, too. He was kind. He was humble. He sought to get along with everyone and usually succeeded. He was conservative, though more pragmatic than ideological.
His greatest success was healing a bruised nation after the Watergate scandal and Nixon’s demise. Indeed, Ford’s presidential memoir is titled A Time to Heal. Put another way, he’s gotten credit for putting a divided country back together.
But credit for vague achievements is insufficient, says Donald Rumsfeld, Ford’s chief of staff then his secretary of defense. “To this day his crucial service to our nation during an unprecedented time of testing has neither been fully understood nor appropriately valued.” Correcting that oversight is why Rumsfeld has just written When The Center Held: Gerald Ford and the Rescue of the American Presidency.
It’s a wonderful book, serious, important, and very readable. Ford and his aides are funnier than you might think. As president, Ford was relaxed and rarely upset. “His instinct was to be the same person he had always been,” Rumsfeld writes. He never became a Washington creature, as so many have.
This leads to a question: Was Ford too nice a guy to be a tough, decisive president today? Rumsfeld isn’t explicit, but his gist points to no, and after reading his book I’m inclined to agree. I learned more from it than in covering Ford’s presidency from beginning to end for the Washington Evening Star. Readers will have to make up their own minds.
Let’s look at three categories—Ford and the getting-along business, dealing with a hostile Congress, and politics. The idea isn’t to compare Ford with other presidents, but to judge him on his own. Since Rumsfeld was often at Ford’s side, he has revealing stories to tell.
Ford had met Soviet general secretary Leonid Brezhnev only once, when he was still House minority leader, before their first summit in Vladivostok in 1974. The president broke the ice.
“I understand you are quite an expert on soccer,” Ford said while they shook hands.
“Yes, I play the left side, but I haven’t played in a long time,” Brezhnev replied.
“I haven’t played football for a long time, either,” Ford said. “I wasn’t very fast, but I could hold the line.”
They didn’t become friends for life, but their chat eased the way into negotiations.
When they arrived at their dachas, Brezhnev joked about Ford’s secretary of state. “Why did you have to bring Henry Kissinger here?” the Soviet leader asked mischievously.
“Well, it’s just very hard to go anywhere without him,” Ford said. To which Brezhnev said, “Kissinger is such a scoundrel.”
“It takes one to know one,” Ford shot back. Rumsfeld doesn’t say whether that prompted guffaws, but I suspect it did.
One might worry that this chumminess could lead to disastrous concessions in arms talks. In Vladivostok, Ford signed a treaty in which the Soviet bid to block production of B-1 bombers was denied. The treaty went nowhere. Brezhnev did get a gift. It was Ford’s coat that Brezhnev had admired.
After the Democratic landslide in the 1974 midterm election, Ford faced an unfriendly Congress. The hottest issue was further military aid to the South Vietnamese government, which was on the brink of collapse as North Vietnamese troops advanced toward Saigon.
Democrats and the media regarded the war as a lost cause. Yet Ford went to Capitol Hill to lobby for the bill. It was soon clear the bill wouldn’t pass. The president was advised his best move, politically, was to give up.
Ford refused. “If South Vietnam goes down the drain, I want a record of having gone up there [to Congress] even if I lose,” he told Rumsfeld. “There’s no way to make a record to the public if you haven’t gone and instead just say, ‘I wish I could but I know I won’t get it, so I didn’t even try.’ ”
An aide advised Ford he would wind up being the villain in Vietnam, but he wasn’t fazed by that possibility. “Ford held to his course valiantly and with determination for one reason only,” Rumsfeld writes. “He believed deeply, regardless of the politics, that it was the right thing to do.” He lost heroically. Villain? No.
Ford was committed, in his own mind, to run for election in 1976. But he balked at announcing officially and creating a campaign organization. He wasn’t worried about rumors that he actually wasn’t running. “I don’t want to worry about it,” he said, referring to a presidential race.
He had a reason, it turned out. “Nixon had this great big organization and they did everything wrong,” he told Rumsfeld. Worse, Nixon’s huge victory may have encouraged aides to commit dirty tricks such as bugging Democratic headquarters in the Watergate building.
Rumsfeld couldn’t change Ford’s mind. “We are going to have to think about whether or not we can find some outside vehicle to take care of it because I’m going to be spending my time doing my job [as president] and not the other,” he said.
But Ford had the shadow of Reagan hanging over him and eventually announced, days before the ex-California governor did. The president’s effort to discourage Reagan from running had consisted of offers of cabinet positions. Reagan wasn’t interested.
Ford’s aides had been right. A better strategy was to quit dawdling, set up a campaign team, and prepare to confront Reagan in the GOP primaries. That worked. Ford fooled his doubters, beating Reagan and almost knocking off Democrat Jimmy Carter.
So was Ford too nice to be a strong and capable president nowadays? He surely made the best out of a bad situation, when America was at its weakest. Don’t you think?
