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Fritz Coldcockin posted:I like how he implicitly argues in favor of the Articles of Confederation in his zeal to poo poo all over a thread that doesn't have any of his poison in it yet. Well apart from all those posts early on where he kept complaining about people blaming the left for not voting the right way like anybody was even loving talking about that. Because he doesn't read the thread, you see.
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May 24, 2020 02:00
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Fritz Coldcockin posted:I like how he implicitly argues in favor of the Articles of Confederation in his zeal to poo poo all over a thread that doesn't have any of his poison in it yet. how was your takeaway from "George Washington shot a bunch of soldiers for expecting to be paid" that the government that asked him to do so was both cool and good?
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May 24, 2020 02:04
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Angry_Ed posted:Well apart from all those posts early on where he kept complaining about people blaming the left for not voting the right way like anybody was even loving talking about that. I guess I blocked that out. Anyway, I'm working on Ford Part 2: the pardon, Whip Inflation Now, the end of Vietnam, and the 1976 election are just some of the topics.
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May 24, 2020 02:05
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Yeowch!!! My Balls!!! posted:how was your takeaway from "George Washington shot a bunch of soldiers for expecting to be paid" that the government that asked him to do so was both cool and good? gently caress off and take your leftist Ben Shapiro argument style with you.
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May 24, 2020 02:09
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Fritz Coldcockin posted:I guess I blocked that out. Anyway, I'm working on Ford Part 2: the pardon, Whip Inflation Now, the end of Vietnam, and the 1976 election are just some of the topics. Cool. Looking forward to reliving* the great moments of Ford's presidency, like (checks notes) not believing that there was Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. Should be interesting. * I wasn't actually alive during Ford's presidency, but that's one of the only highlights I can remember hearing about it.
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May 24, 2020 02:11
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F_Shit_Fitzgerald posted:Cool. Looking forward to reliving* the great moments of Ford's presidency, like (checks notes) not believing that there was Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. Should be interesting. You forgot the asterisk on the word "great"  Ford's Presidency, like the man himself, was a glass of tepid water.
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May 24, 2020 02:14
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Fritz Coldcockin posted:gently caress off and take your leftist Ben Shapiro argument style with you. seriously, give me a hand here, i'm not seeing the implicit argument for the Articles of Confederation being a good thing did I miss something
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May 24, 2020 02:17
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Yeowch!!! My Balls!!! posted:the modern American system of government owes its existence to some damned uppity farmers expecting to be paid for their military service during the Revolutionary War, who nearly toppled the whole system of government until their former commander killed some sense into them. this is not hyperbole. this is a statement of cold, hard, historical fact. Shay's Rebellion. it's a thing. history is mute on if this was viewed with eager bloodthirst or as a tragic necessity, but this is not likely relevant to the dead. Washington wasn't involved in Shay's Rebellion. In addition to several other things wrong with this post
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May 24, 2020 02:42
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Yeowch!!! My Balls!!! posted:did I miss something yes you did nobody here disagrees that the us government is bad and does bad things nobody here disagrees that the articles of confederation are trash nobody here disagrees that Washington shooting soldiers is bad do you know what everyone here does disagree with though? you throwing a temper tantrum in this thread like a petulant child because a certain thread got locked everyone knows what you're doing it's incredibly obvious stop being a child grow up, you're an adult (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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May 24, 2020 02:43
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Yeowch!!! My Balls!!! posted:Shay's Rebellion Shays'*
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May 24, 2020 03:10
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Just so we're clear: - this is not a thread for Bidenchat, dammit - linking historical events to current events is potentially permitted in this thread but step very carefully - arguing about current events is not because it results in big annoying derails - wrongposting about shays' rebellion is permitted and, in fact, amusing
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May 24, 2020 03:10
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Back on topic, quoting from “The American Century” by Harold Evans: Jerald terHorst (that’s how it’s spelled), his first press secretary as president, best summed up Ford’s politics: If he saw a school kid who needed clothing, “he’d give him the shirt off his back, literally. Then he’d go right into the White House and veto a school lunch bill”
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May 24, 2020 05:16
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Keith Atherton posted:Back on topic, quoting from “The American Century” by Harold Evans: 
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May 24, 2020 05:33
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Haha that’s great. I thought it was a typo in the book until I googled it
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May 24, 2020 06:03
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Wait are we actually debating the legality of the battle of Trenton
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May 24, 2020 06:37
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I hope not
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May 24, 2020 06:48
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Worth pointing out that terHorst was a decent person who resigned in protest after Ford pardoned Nixon.
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May 24, 2020 16:13
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Keith Atherton posted:Back on topic, quoting from “The American Century” by Harold Evans: So Ford was a really dumb motherfucker is what Jerald was saying?
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May 24, 2020 18:45
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Orange Devil posted:So Ford was a really dumb motherfucker is what Jerald was saying? "Jerry Ford is so dumb that he can’t fart and chew gum at the same time." - Lyndon Baines Johnson
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May 24, 2020 19:52
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Part 2: The Caretaker When we last left Gerald Ford, he’d completed one of the most wild and unusual rides to the Presidency in American history. Ascending to the Vice Presidency after the resignation of its former occupant, then ascending to the Presidency after the resignation of its former occupant, Ford must have felt like everybody’s understudy--a proto-Joey Bishop, if you will. What America was hoping, after the resignation of Richard Nixon, was that perhaps their government might give them some reason to trust again. We had been so burned after over a decade of Vietnam policy, scandal, lying, cheating, and backstabbing that all we were looking for was someone to stand behind the seal of the President and tell us the truth. America was an abused spouse, and Richard Nixon was a drunk, tank-top-undershirt-wearing batterer screaming about how his dinner wasn’t cooked correctly. Ford was anxious to heal a deeply wounded and divided nation. He hadn’t sought the Presidency, but he’d been given the job, and he was now going to do it to the best of his ability. What would follow instead, however, were two of the strangest, most tumultuous years in modern American history...and instead of becoming the healer-in-chief he wanted to be, Ford divided the nation even more. Settling In  Upon entering the White House, Ford’s transition team wasted no time in stripping every visible trace of Richard Nixon from the Oval Office, removing his mementos and replacing all the pictures of him with Ford’s official Presidential picture. The transfer of power was, once again, a testament to the United States Constitution--and in a funny way, many people took pride in that. There was no blood or a coup or civil war; one man just stepped down and allowed another to take his place. Ford knew he had to highlight his contrasts with Nixon quickly. Within an hour of being sworn in as the nation’s 38th President, he appeared in the White House Press Briefing Room, where he told waiting reporters of his hopes “for the kind of rapport and friendship we’ve had in the past. And I don’t ask you to treat me any better. We will have an open...and candid administration. I can’t change my nature after sixty-one years.” Where Nixon had barricaded himself in the White House under a shield of executive privilege, Ford spent most nights during his first week as leader of the free world at his house in suburban Alexandria. When he went out on the porch on the morning of his first full day as President to grab the newspaper, clad in his pajamas, photographers clicked madly away. Nearly everything changed overnight--with the exception of some of the top people advising the President. Ford was a firm believer in the collegial approach to decision-making, so for now, he retained all of Nixon’s Cabinet and lower-level White House staff. Two high-level holdovers, however, included Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Chief of Staff Alexander Haig. Kissinger wasted no time. He informed Ford that any change in U.S. foreign policy--Kissinger’s foreign policy, really--would betray America’s Watergate-weakened state to the world with potentially dire consequences. “Henry is a genius, but you don’t have to accept everything he commends. He can be invaluable, and he’ll be very loyal, but you can’t let him have a totally free hand,” Nixon had told Ford. Ford, for his part, needed no convincing of Kissinger’s ability. In the early 1960s, when Ford was head of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, Kissinger, then a professor at Harvard, used to invite Ford to address his classes. “I was really impressed with the guy,” Ford remembered.  Whatever, Jerry. I guess being a war criminal was sexy in Republican circles even then.As for Haig, he made it clear to Ford, according to now-Press Secretary Jerald terHorst, that “he had been running the government for the last eight to ten months of the Nixon Presidency.” A former Army General, Haig’s “snap-to manner” and his firm grasp of White House operations impressed Ford, who soon took to leaning heavily on Haig’s advice and judgment--much to the chagrin of Ford’s longer-standing advisors. Republicans, for their part, were optimistic. RNC Chairman Bush wrote in his diary a couple days before Nixon resigned, “My own views are that the Vice President can make it as President...he is a latter-day Eisenhower, without the heroics but he has that decency the country is crying out for right now.” Uh...no. Still, Ford’s first major task as President was to pick someone to replace him as Vice President. Once again, with the office vacant, it meant that Speaker of the House Carl Albert (D-OK) was next in line to the office, and Republicans were clamoring for Ford to rectify that as soon as possible. Ford listened to his advisors, sure--but ultimately he went with his gut...and in doing so, he fulfilled a political destiny that was nearly 15 years in the making.  Former New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller had little in common with Ford. “Rocky”, as the nation knew him, was an East Coast multimillionaire and a representative of the GOP’s ever-shrinking liberal wing. His interest in foreign affairs made Rockefeller unique among New York governors--historian Richard Reeves said, “Even with governors like Franklin Roosevelt and Thomas Dewey, New York never had a foreign policy until Rockefeller came along.” Still, Ford chose him because he felt the administration needed star power--and the bumptious, broad-grinning Rockefeller would grant it. After being considered and passed over for the job twice, Rocky finally got his shot. With his new Vice President in place, Ford enjoyed a wild honeymoon from the American people by virtue of nothing other than the fact that he was not Richard Nixon. Indeed, a Gallup poll in late August 1974 showed Ford with a 71% approval rating and a mere 3% disapproval. For his part, I will say this: Ford took nothing for granted in the early going. He made a real, genuine effort to reach out to constituencies that were not traditionally GOP-leaning--he courted African-American political leaders, even inviting the Congressional Black Caucus to meet with him at the White House just three days into his Presidency. He also brought in AFL-CIO President George Meany to talk labor issues. “I wasn’t considered pro-Big Labor, but I respected the power of Big Labor,” Ford remembered. That’s a bit of a twisted way to look at it. Why bother if you don’t actually care? Perhaps the most surprising bit came, however, at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention on August 19. There, Ford overturned a longstanding Nixon policy, proposing conditional amnesty for Vietnam War draft dodgers and deserters. “I am throwing the weight of the presidency on the side of leniency,” he announced. This was truly stunning, coming from a man who so hated the protest movement he actually tried to strip student loan funding from any students who participated in them. The announcement was surprising and gratifying for many who had been wary of Ford, and his popularity remained high. “The VFW speech was the most striking example to date that Richard Nixon was gone,” historian Richard Reeves observed. “It showed a President who was compassionately aware of the divisions among Americans.” Yes, for Jerry Ford, everything was coming up Milhouse. For now. You Know What This Section Is About, Don’t Play Dumb  For all the pomp and circumstance and relief, Richard Nixon would not stay gone. The ignominious end of his tenure in office hung over Ford like a cloud, and it brought a dramatic and abrupt end to the honeymoon. At Ford’s first press conference on August 28, nearly a third of the questions were related to Nixon’s legal plight--remember, he was still in a ten-piece bucket of trouble. Resigning the Presidency hadn’t made it go away. Consequently, Ford made a fateful decision--one upon which, historians contend, his entire political future would hinge. He decided that if he was going to move America forward, Watergate would have to be put behind it--and on Sunday, September 8, 1974, President Ford, after taking Holy Communion at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Washington, he went back to the White House and made a far less unifying (though no less surprising) announcement than his amnesty program. That morning, he went on television and granted a “full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offenses against the United states...he...may have committed.” Pardon language notwithstanding, this touched off a political firestorm the likes of which we hadn’t seen in decades. “The decision seemed baffling,” Bob Woodward, one of the Washington Post stringers who’d broken the Watergate story, recalled. “Though there’d been some published speculation that Ford would pardon Nixon, conventional wisdom, which I embraced, held that Nixon was radioactive.” Woodward, like many Americans, immediately smelled a rat. The people who had cheered for this supposedly simple, authentic man suddenly felt betrayed and angry all over again. Indeed, the word “betrayal” was being hung around Ford’s neck with the finality of a tombstone inscription. The questions began to fly. Had Ford cut a quid pro quo deal with Nixon--that is, resignation in exchange for a pardon? Why were the pardon terms so favorable to the ex-president (what the public didn’t know is that Nixon’s people had struck down Ford’s suggestion of a statement of contrition; Nixon still felt he’d done nothing wrong and refused to apologize)? Was Alexander Haig, the still-incumbent White House Chief of Staff, responsible? After all, he was the key link between Nixon and Ford. What legal information guided the decision? Who advised Ford to make such a bold reversal? Ford may have shown mercy to Nixon, but the newspapers showed no such mercy to him. The New York Times was savage, calling it “blundering intervention” that was “a body blow to the President’s own credibility”. The Boston Globe added that it was “a gross misuse, if not abuse, of presidential power.” The Washington Post went even further, declaring that Ford’s decision was “nothing less than the continuation of a cover-up”. Even Ford’s natural allies were upset. “The lethal fact is that Mr. Ford has now demonstrated that he doesn’t mean what he says,” conservative columnist George Will wrote. Americans were mad as hell, and a Gallup poll commissioned after the pardon proved it. 59% disapproved of Ford’s decision. The American Civil Liberties Union compared the pardon to the Nuremberg Trial “in which the Nazi leaders would have been let off.” Even better? U.S. District Court Judge John Sirica, one of the central figures in the Watergate criminal trials, was livid over the pardon, later writing that if Nixon “had been convicted in my court, I would have sent him to jail.” The pardon was instrumental in tarnishing what had previously been a sterling political career. It was intended to put Watergate behind the country, but it did just the opposite in the minds of many Americans--people saw it as an extension of Nixon’s “Imperial Presidency”. “He said he was ‘healing the country’. What he was doing was a favor to an old friend while simultaneously trying to sink a nasty situation well before his own re-election campaign,” columnist Mary McGrory wrote in the Washington Post. OK. Phew. With me so far? Good, cause I think I’m about to make you guys very, very mad. Other historians contend that the Nixon pardon shouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone. Here’s Douglas Brinkley. Again: this is not an endorsement of the pardon, just an attempt to understand why it was done. quote:To begin with, Gerald Ford had never pretended to be anything but a pure politician, a profession in which long-term success depends on justifying the means with the ends. And in his very first remarks as president, “Our long national nightmare is over,” he had made his desired end—a determination to leave Watergate (and, more to the point, Richard Nixon) in the past—clearly obvious. Point is, people had the right to be angry--but maybe they should have been savvier about expecting it. Ford continued to deny, even under intense questioning, that he had made any deal regarding Nixon’s pardon, and there was a certain logic to back up his claims. On August 1, when Haig called Ford, Nixon’s resignation was virtually assured. Ford was going to be President either way. Ford held all the cards--he had no reason to negotiate anything with Haig or Nixon. Reporters--and, indeed, any person in America who was politically engaged, thought the process had gone like this: if Ford promised Nixon a pardon, he’d resign immediately. If not, Nixon would have dragged the country through a long, ugly impeachment process. Writer’s note: I take issue with characterization of impeachment as “ugly”. The founders put the process in there for a reason. It was intended as a peaceful way for Congress to check the President’s power and, in situations such as this, remove the President from office if need be. There’s nothing ugly about it--it is, in fact, rather elegant. Douglas Brinkley explains, however, why Nixon knew he’d ultimately get what he wanted. quote:Deal or no deal, Richard Nixon never had much to fear from Gerald Ford, and he knew it. He had watched Ford prove his character through his twenty-six years in politics: aggressive with the strong but forgiving toward the weak, he may have been the least vindictive pol in Washington. Nixon also knew it was Ford’s natural inclination to dispel trouble rather than prolong it; in fact, his antipathy for contention had guided many of his actions as House minority leader. In retrospect, even his antic defense of Nixon over the previous year looked like an attempt to schmooze the Watergate problem away. As vice president, Ford had made a point of keeping his distance from the scandal, so it hardly seemed likely that he would help let it fester on as president. This is absolutely vomit-inducing to think about, but it is probably true. Ford viewed allowing Nixon to suffer consequences from Watergate as “vengeful”, and Jerry Ford was not a vengeful person. Indeed, according to Ford aide Robert Hartmann, the pardon was first discussed as early as August 30, when he told his inner circle that he was tired of answering questions about Watergate. Hartmann was no less stunned. “Ford said he was very much inclined to grant Nixon immunity from further persecution as soon as he had the legal authority to do so. There was a deafening silence. There is an antique clock on the Oval Office wall...at this moment, it shattered the silence like a burst of machine-gun fire.” The part that had been left unsaid was that a full-scale criminal trial for Nixon posed dangers to people who had managed to avoid previous criminal charges and ingratiate themselves into the Ford White House. Al Haig, Donald Rumsfeld, Pat Buchanan, and Henry Kissinger, it’s speculated, could all have been implicated at one time or another. Yes, I’m aware that many of you are reading this and getting a massive historical case of blue balls. The fallout was tremendous. Jerald terHorst, the newly-minted Press Secretary, abruptly resigned the day the pardon was announced--because, Ford explained later, of the pardon. A Gallup poll showed Ford’s approval rating plunging from 71% to 49%--the largest one-month drop in the poll’s history. When he traveled to Pittsburgh the day after the announcement to give a speech on inflation, he was met by frenzied protestors chanting “Jail Ford!” and one waving a sign that read “Up Yours!” The United States Senate passed a resolution by a vote of 55-24 that urged Ford not to pardon anyone else involved in Watergate until the defendants had stood trial. And still, doggedly, incredibly, Ford stuck by his decision. He took the extraordinary step of appearing at a public hearing for questioning by the House Judiciary Committee. For two hours, the members fired questions at him, and Ford repeated that he had granted the pardon “out of my concern to serve the best interests of my country.” He did, for the first time, reveal that he had discussed the possibility of a pardon with Al Haig for the first time a week before Nixon resigned, but he was adamant as he pounded the witness table and said, “There was no deal, period.” Now for my take. I don’t do a lot of these outside of the one-liners between the paragraphs I write, but I feel it’s necessary here because people are mistaking my bloodlessness in some of these for implicit approval. I believe Ford was wrong. I do not know if there was a deal--my inclination is to say yes--but I believe Ford misunderstood the potential impact of a criminal trial on the nation. Seeing that no one, not even the President, is above the law would have done a great deal more to heal and unify the nation than giving Richard Nixon a free pass for the crimes he committed. The Nixon pardon is a watershed moment in American history. Had it gone the other way--indeed, if Ford had allowed Nixon to stand trial and not gotten involved--I think that instead of a slow slide into the Reagan and Bush years where Americans stopped trusting their government, the wounds of Vietnam and Watergate are instead healed. I do not know, for example, if Ronald Reagan is as effective in convincing Americans “government is the problem” if there is not already an endemic mistrust of government due to the events of the 60s and 70s, for example. Whip Inflation Now (And Other Catastrophes)  Let’s turn, now, to one of the quirkier (and some would say dumber) events of the Ford administration. When Ford took office, Congressional Quarterly published a long list of the pressing issues facing him--and this list didn’t include the Nixon question. Labor discontent, commodity shortfalls, job losses in the housing industry, and many more were on the list--and that was just domestic issues. Topping the list was a host of issues with the economy, which had gone from ailing to nearly terminal from a condition that had, as of yet, never been diagnosed before. Indeed, among all the existing models conjured by economists, none could account for 1974’s combination of rampant inflation and unemployment--numbers that were higher than those of the tail end of the Great Depression in 1940. OK, time for some economics talk. Try to stay with me. In standard Keynesian economics, inflation is an indicator of an “overheated” economy, which in theory is supposed to generate new jobs. Under those same models, high unemployment depresses demands for products, which usually results in deflation. But this thing that was hanging around in 1974 like a lingering fart? It perplexed economists enough that they needed a new term for it: thus, the term “stagflation” was born. Now, I know I have some people who read this thread and are perhaps better acquainted with economic theory than me, so I’m sure they already knew this is where stagflation was first encountered by modern economists. It sent them scurrying to answer a baffling question: why was a populace that was ostensibly earning less income rushing to spend more of it? To add insult to injury, we were on the precipice of a major recession. This would, in turn, lead to more inflation--which might, in turn, intensify the stagflation phenomenon. Ford knew that the response to the problem had to be equally as dramatic. With inflation at around 12% and unemployment at 5%, the President leapt at a staff suggestion--that the way to end inflation was through a grassroots civic movement. Incredibly, it was virtually the same poo poo that Jimmy Carter would catch no end of crap for five years later. “If both the government and the people tightened their belts voluntarily and spent less than they had before, that would reduce demand, and the inflation rate would start going down.” In an attempt to gin up enthusiasm for his plan, on October 8, Ford unveiled his volunteer-driven initiative. He gave this speech to Congress. https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/october-8-1974-whip-inflation-now-speech It’s not heavy on eloquence, but it is notable for what it is Ford’s people produced. It was the “Whip Inflation Now” program, complete with red-and-white buttons with “WIN” on them and economist Sylvia Porter’s exhortations that Americans should construct “Victory Gardens” in the example of World War II. One of these buttons is displayed below.  The WIN initiative was meant as a common-sense pitch to Americans to stop wasting money and resources, especially gasoline. “If we all drive at least five percent fewer miles, we can save--almost unbelievably--250,000 barrels of foreign oil per day,” Ford told the nation. He urged constituents to stop wasting so much food, for example, pointing out the economic foolishness of buying more than they could eat and throwing the rest out. I will say this: these are, in theory, good ideas. Americans should have followed them. Unfortunately, we were fat, greedy, and too busy enjoying cheap gas in the post-Arab oil embargo world from the previous winter. After World War II, the nation had lost its capacity for self-sacrifice in many ways, no matter how worthy and smart the cause might have been. In many ways, the failure of WIN--and the pillorying of Jimmy Carter--are indictments of the American people, not Ford and Carter. As I said, WIN went over like a lead balloon with America. The buttons, in particular, became objects of ridicule. People took to wearing them upside down so they read “NIM”, explaining that this new acronym stood for “No Immediate Miracles” or “Need Immediate Money”. The then-chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, Alan Greenspan, remembered thinking “this is unbelievably stupid” when the concept was presented to the White House. Historians contend that this is unfair, as the public campaign was never meant to be the centerpiece of the anti-inflation program, but then why spend so much money on buttons? Still, this wasn’t the only arrow in Ford’s quiver to fix the economy. Right alongside the announcement of WIN, Ford put forth a 10-point plan to right the ship. The centerpiece of the plan--are you sitting down? A tax increase on corporations and high-income earners. HOLY loving poo poo, A REPUBLICAN PROPOSED A TAX INCREASE. This was even more surprising given the people on Ford’s newly-formed Economic Policy Board. There were three men: William Simon, a former Wall Street bond broker and Treasury Secretary, William Seidman, the man who would eventually chair the FDIC in the 80s, and Alan Greenspan, a fiscal conservative who, as I mentioned, was the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors. Another Nixon hand managed to get a career boost in late September of that year, incidentally, and there’s a reason I’m telling you this. Why? Because it was this guy.  He’s back! Donald Rumsfeld had managed to avoid any entanglement in Watergate by getting himself appointed U.S. ambassador to NATO in February of 1973, and he managed to convince Ford to send Alexander Haig overseas as NATO Supreme Allied Commander. Haig had a faint idea what was going on, but this was a military position too prestigious to turn down. Rumsfeld became White House Chief of Staff in his place, and strangely it ended up boosting the overall efficiency of the Ford White House--though in a style so combative that several high-profile officials would end up either resigning or seeing their roles heavily reduced. The departures included advisor Robert Hartmann and Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, and Vice President Nelson Rockefeller and even Henry Kissinger found themselves now on the outside looking in. The reason this is such a big deal? Rumsfeld chose this young go-getter as his deputy.  Cue the Star Wars Imperial March. Richard “Dick” Cheney was, in 1974, just a 33-year-old Wyoming native who’d been at Rumsfeld’s side for several years in varying capacities. In his book The Rise of the Vulcans, author James Mann explains how Dick Cheney earned his stripes. It’s a little scary, to be honest. quote:Cheney’s ascent in the Ford White House served as an illustration of how an individual can rise to the top by virtue of his willingness to take care of the mundane chores that persons with larger egos avoid, thereby establishing reliability and learning all the inner workings of an organization. This is dressed up in some flowery language, but what it means is that Cheney got where he got to by being patient, by being the only one willing to get his hands dirty, and by attaching himself to the right people--all the while, paying close attention to all the nuts and bolts of the process. It’s rather sinister to think about. Indeed, Rumsfeld and Cheney eventually became as influential in the Ford White House as Haldeman and Ehrlichman had been with Richard Nixon. Despite the pair’s increased efficiency in greasing the White House’s gears, Ford didn’t gain much ground in the remaining months of 1974. It was a midterm election year--and Republicans, reeling from the one-two punch of Nixon’s resignation and Ford’s pardon of him, lost five Senate seats and 48 in the House. Democrats now held enough votes in both chambers to override a Presidential veto, a predicament Ford now knew would limit his ability to affect the legislative process. As if to add insult to injury, the sweeping Democratic victories in 1974 were not just about a reaction to the pardon. Indeed, America had made it clear that they wanted any trace of Richard Nixon washed out of all levels of government. On December 22, as Ford flew to Vail, CO for Christmas, he read an astounding New York Times article by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh: “Huge CIA Operation Reported in U.S. Against Anti-War Forces.” Hersh had found that the CIA had compiled files on more than 10,000 American citizens, filled with counterintelligence information garnered from illegal domestic wiretaps and postal snooping. Jesus Christ on a chariot-driven crutch. Ford quickly put as much daylight between himself and the CIA as possible. He’d been President for only four months and knew nothing about Nixon’s CIA “watch lists” or spying on civil rights and peace activists traveling abroad. He also knew nothing of the FBI’s bugging of Martin Luther King Jr. or Cesar Chavez, the labor leader. These revelations, however, required that action be taken--and it was. On January 4, 1975, Ford established the President’s Commission on CIA Activities to investigate the illegal goings-on inside the CIA. Since it was chaired by the Vice President, it became known colloquially as the Rockefeller Commission. A few weeks later on January 27, Sen. Frank Church (D-ID) became chairman of the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. That’s a mouthful. It became known as the Church Committee, at any rate. In mid-February, the House followed suit with their own investigation into CIA effectiveness and expenditures, and the combination of the three created an absolute media sensation. Stories abounded about the CIA trying to assassinate foreign leaders, from Cuba’s Fidel Castro to the Dominican Republic’s Rafael Trujillo. Ford was careful to distance himself from all of this, ensuring he wasn’t tainted by the misdeeds of the last three administrations. Indeed, this was a lesson for Ford--he put the country on more traditional Cold War footing, working through NATO and promoting the alliance that would eventually become the European Union. The World According To Jerry  1975, I said before, did not start on a high note for Ford. The pardon had badly damaged Republicans in the previous fall’s elections, and many of Ford’s fellow party members blamed him. His replacement as House Minority Leader, John Rhodes of Ohio, and Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-AZ), had warned Ford about the consequences of handing Nixon a “Get Out of Jail Free” card. “It doesn’t make any sense,” Goldwater had told Ford in early September. “He may be clear in your eyes, but he’s not clear in mine.” Goldwater had long advocated that Nixon stand trial, bizarrely enough. After the midterms, with their party far in the wilderness, the right now did everything it could to distance itself from Ford. Indeed, they did not want the “Accidental President” to be their nominee in 1976. To conservative Republicans in particular, Ford was now a quasi-enemy. In response, Ford did something he’d picked up from his predecessor: when in trouble at home, go abroad. After the 1974 midterms, Ford left to take a tour of Asia, including Japan (first time a sitting United States President did so!) and South Korea. His last stop? Vladivostok, the Soviet Union’s Asiatic port city. It was there he met this man for the first time.  Leonid Brezhnev was the current chairman of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, after Nikita Khrushchev was removed in 1964. Ford found in Brezhnev a kindred spirit in many ways. “Both were rugged outdoor men of action,” Bill Hyland, one of the American delegates, remembered. “They loved sports and good stories, and in other times or in other places they may have become genuinely friendly.” The purpose of the meeting, however, was no laughing matter: it was about extending the 1972 SALT I (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks) agreement. The battle lines on SALT were not drawn down party lines. Cold War hardliners, Democrats and Republicans, were opposed to even exploring a SALT II treaty on the grounds that America would be the only loser in the treaty. They felt it would unfairly limit the U.S. arsenal of precisely-targeted light warheads, whereas the Soviet arsenal of mostly heavier warheads on larger missiles would remain untouched. Detente, it seemed, was out of fashion in America. Still, Ford’s efforts were largely successful. The Soviets agreed to a stricter definition of “equality” in weapons, regardless of size or type. Ford left Vladivostok pleased. Surely Congress would be just as happy when he returned with a framework for SALT II? Yeah, no. Not happening. Indeed, Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson (D-WA), a Cold War hawk, began a personal Henry Cabot Lodge-esque crusade to derail the treaty, believing it riddled with holes. Chief among Jackson’s concerns was the fact that while America had been forced to take the new Tomahawk air-launched cruise missiles off the table, while the Soviets hadn’t included their new Backfire bomber. Americans themselves were no more accommodating. Indeed, many were angry that, as the American economy sputtered, the President left the country to share vodka toasts with the country’s sworn adversary. There was anger about the visit to Japan too--American manufacturers were resentful that inexpensive Japanese imports were making inroads into the domestic auto market. Henry Kissinger later complained that discontent among Americans with Ford’s visits to the Soviet Union and Japan was the reason that the administration didn’t get what it wanted with arms control. Ford was in a tight spot. His embrace of nonpartisanship was a recognition of how far in the wilderness the Congressional GOP was--and it left him little choice except aggressively courting the opposition. The only way to get Congressional Democrats on board?  Yup. It was 1975, and we’d been in Vietnam in some capacity or another for over fifteen years. If Ford wanted Congress on his side, he’d have to end the Vietnam War. It would not be easy. America was of the opinion that it had never lost a war, and many Americans would be damned if they were going to see the country lose this one. Here’s the thing though: not losing didn’t require winning, or really even ending the conflict. After all, the Korean Conflict had never actually ended--it was just held in stasis mandated by the compromise that had suspended the fighting over twenty years prior. In the same fashion, the Paris Peace Talks had left Vietnam similarly unresolved. Though it had yielded an agreement, it failed to address the consequences of what would happen if North Vietnam suddenly resumed hostilities against South Vietnam--and the agreement bound the United States to providing financial aid only. For their efforts, as many of you know, Le Duc Tho and Henry Kissinger, the chief negotiators of the Paris treaty, were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973. Tho, however, declined his share of the prize...largely because peace was not his goal. He knew that once America was out of Vietnam completely it would have no stomach to return, regardless of what happened. Indeed, Congress cut funding to South Vietnam by half in 1973, and then in half again in 1974. It was thought this might change when Ford took over the Presidency in August, as he ended his first day in office by meeting with the U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam, Graham Martin. Then it all went to poo poo, of course, when Democrats swept to victory in the 1974 midterms. Many of them won, in fact, specifically by campaigning against everything Nixon had stood for, including his so-called “peace with honor”. It wasn’t just liberals, either--moderates and some conservatives were joining them in calling for an end to the war. After all, it had cost nearly $150 billion by 1974 to keep sending American soldiers into the Vietnam meat grinder. America had simply had enough. We weren’t going to tolerate it anymore. In December 1974, the outgoing 93rd Congress overwhelmingly approved a foreign aid bill that cut aid to South Vietnam. Ford hoped that the aid would be restored in a supplemental grant later, but North Vietnam scented blood in the water--and they were less inclined to wait. On January 6, 1975, North Vietnamese forces captured the Southern provincial capital of Phuoc Binh. According to Henry Kissinger, “Phuoc Binh was the test case. If the United States reacted, there was still a chance for Hanoi to withdraw from the brink.” America did not. We were sick of fighting and sick of dying. And Congress had a much tighter leash on the chief executive than it did during FDR’s days. The War Powers Act, passed over Nixon’s veto in 1973, limited the President’s ability to keep troops in combat overseas for more than 60 days. It meant that despite the increasing Communist aggression in early 1975, all Ford could do was keep negotiating--and begging Congress for aid money. And Hanoi, well, they took full advantage. Emboldened by the new restraints on the U.S. President, North Vietnamese premier Pham Van Dong sneered that “even if we offered the Americans a bribe to intervene again, they would not accept it.” Throwing aside the Paris Peace Accords, Communist military leaders began drawing up plans to take Saigon, the South’s capital, in 1976 or early 1977. Under the North’s continuing and concerted military strikes, the South began withdrawing towards Saigon in early 1975. The retreat was anything but ordered--it was scattershot, unruly, and it only sped up the timeline of their defeat. Soldiers and civilians alike abandoned their country’s northern provinces, needlessly ceding strategic strongholds and valuable materiel. The fear among South Vietnamese troops was palpable--not just of North Vietnam’s advance, but of the sudden absence of American support. For the first time in 15 years, American troops were not forthcoming. Through the winter of 1974-1975, Ford tried one last time to push for financial support for South Vietnam through public appearances and appeals to Congress. His efforts went unheard. Among his top advisors, only Henry Kissinger kept pressing for more money for Vietnam. Others in the Ford inner circle felt this was an attempt by Kissinger to shift the blame for the failed peace onto Congress instead of himself. By March of 1975, North Vietnam had seized control of 15 more Southern provinces. “My guess,” said one Western diplomat, “is that a lot of Communist generals are wondering what they did right for a change.” It was clear now that unless the situation changed immediately, nothing would slow the North Vietnamese advance. Ford sent a fact-finding delegation to Saigon to find a solution. Its leader, Army Chief of Staff General Frederick C. Weyand, reported on April 5 that it would cost nearly $730 million just to set a defensive perimeter around Saigon. Yes, you read that right. $730 MILLION just to keep the Communists from taking the one city. Others were less sanguine. quote:Official White House photographer David Hume Kennerly, who had accompanied the delegation to Saigon, returned with a more candid report to the president. “I don’t care what the generals tell you,” Kennerly blurted with the bluntness Ford valued him for. “They’re bullshitting you if they say that Vietnam has got more than three or four weeks left. There’s no question about it. It’s just not gonna last.” Kennerly didn’t know it, but he had put the final nail in the Saigon government’s coffin. On April 21, South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu resigned his office. He made a speech accusing America of selling South Vietnam out to the Communists, and fled to Switzerland in exile. Ford made the $730 million request of Congress, but his heart wasn’t in it. He’d already decided what he was going to do. In an April 23, 1975 speech at Tulane University, in front of 6,000 students, he declared, “Today, America can regain the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam. But it cannot be achieved by refighting a war that is finished as far as America is concerned.” That was all she wrote, folks. We would no longer send American men to fight and die for Vietnam. The Tulane audience cheered as though their home team had just won a game. Indeed, the volume of cheering was so loud it took even Ford by surprise. The bleachers shook with the students’ enthusiasm. Here’s a video with some excerpts of this speech. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuoQe6f189g I don’t blame them. They now knew the war was over. The President had said so. They would all have a future--they would not have to go and die for a pointless cause none of them believed in. It marked a sea change in Gerald Ford’s outlook. The erstwhile internationalist had made it clear that he would not put America through any more pain for South Vietnam’s sake. What’s more, the once-staunch Cold War hawk had decided that there was no shame in walking off the field without a victory. Douglas Brinkley explains that this desire to heal was not new for Ford. quote:It was the same desire for renewal that had prompted Ford to pardon Richard Nixon. Like that risky decision, his move to pull America out of Vietnam grew from his expedient belief in facing the inevitable sooner rather than later. In both instances, Ford opted to make the hard choices fast. After the slow agonies that Watergate and Vietnam had put the nation through, seizing the first opportunities to move on from them just seemed the sensible thing to do. This speech, of course, was viewed as a slap in the face to his Secretary of State. Kissinger was upset that he had not been informed beforehand that Ford intended to declare Vietnam “finished”. By this point, however, even Henry Kissinger had seen the writing on the wall. He told Ford less than a month before, “Maybe you just put Vietnam behind you and not tear the country apart again.” His objection was more that he was not part of the decision-making process, not the result. “The line about the war being finished--Henry didn’t like that sentence,” Ford later noted. “I knew he wanted to keep fighting for more aid and that he blamed Congress. And I did, too. But having been up there on the Hill for thirty-five years, I just didn’t think it would be all that productive to give them unshirted hell. That’s where Henry and I disagreed. And I was right. I understood the system better.” Good for Ford, I guess, on reading the room? Now all that remained was the urgent need to evacuate the roughly 6,000 U.S. citizens still in South Vietnam. This was a problem: this number swelled by nearly six times when their spouses and children were involved. Ford pledged not to turn anyone away who wished to flee, including the South Vietnamese who had openly sided with the United States. He approved a massive exodus program that flew some 40,000 people--both American and Vietnamese--out of the Saigon airport even as the Communists bore down on the gates. When North Vietnam did reach Saigon, they opened fire on the departing planes, forcing the evacuation to switch to helicopters shuttling off the roof of the U.S. embassy to a waiting fleet of Navy ships massed off the coast. This phase of the extraction, in addition to removing nearly 2,000 Americans and over 5,500 Vietnamese, is immortalized in perhaps one of the most famous pictures in modern American history. I speak, of course, of the picture that heads this section--one of the final helicopters to depart before North Vietnam overran Saigon completely. Throughout all of this, Ford held firm to his promise that all the South Vietnamese who got out would find a new home in the United States, despite the objections of many of his countrymen and a number of members of his own party. As he saw it, it was the least we could do for Vietnam’s democratically-inclined citizens. He even went to San Francisco to welcome some of them in person. His aides marveled at how skillfully Ford handled this crisis--to aide Robert Hartmann, “Ford acted as if he’d been President all his life...I watched the President move calmly and confidently through the evacuation minefield.” Here’s Douglas Brinkley for some elaboration. quote:Some of the most compelling reading in the Ford Library on the final days of U.S. military involvement in Vietnam comes from the more than one hundred transcribed pages of authorized National Security Agency intercepts of helicopter radio messages sent during the frantic evacuation of the U.S. embassy in Saigon on April 29, 1975. Operation Frequent Wind, as the rescue mission was dubbed, takes on a dramatic new immediacy in the words of the pilots dodging mortar fire and gas bombs to save U.S. embassy staff members before attempting to rescue any South Vietnamese. “Reports are that there are 200 Americans left to evacuate,” an intercept reads. “Gunners Six to GSF Commander. Bring personnel up through the building. Do not let them [the South Vietnamese] follow too closely. Use Mace if necessary, but do not fire on them.”34 Despite firefights around the building, Ambassador Martin, the other remaining Americans, and the luckiest South Vietnamese nationals climbed the ladder and made it out safely to the United States. “The ladder was seen by everybody else as the symbol of our failure in Vietnam,” Ford later recalled. “But, being an optimist, I saw it as a symbol of freedom. Fred and Frank Meijer, both friends, eventually helped me bring that ladder back to the United States. They stood up against Henry [Kissinger] on that one, and won.” This instance with the ladder is the moment immortalized in the image atop this section. I leave it to you, readers, to decide whether it symbolized failure or freedom as Ford asserted. This ladder, by the way, was purchased by (as I mentioned) Frank Meijer, the owner of what would eventually become a very famous chain of grocery stores--and it is in the Ford Presidential Library today.
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Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 04:57 on Jun 9, 2020 |
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Helsinki Ford had done what the four men before him had not--he’d gotten America out of Vietnam at last. Despite this, he got mixed reviews. Americans did approve of his handling of the evacuation, but this was overshadowed by the postmortems--all of which said that America had accomplished very little in Vietnam, and the cost had been unimaginably high. “If we had pulled out ten years ago, Vietnam would have fallen then. If we had stayed on another ten years, they still would have collapsed when we pulled out. This is a battle we lost. You can’t win them all,” U.S. Army officer Harold Hannon said. He was right. 154,000 wounded, 58,000 dead, and over 8.75 million new veterans created in the 15 long years we had been sending troops to Southeast Asia, and the hawks in Congress were furious--to them, America, the richest and mightiest superpower in the world, had been humiliated by a bunch of ragtag Third World guerrilla fighters. What’s more, the story wasn’t over. Wait, what? Yep. Less than two weeks after Saigon fell, Southeast Asia was the site of another challenge to American power. On May 12, 1975, the U.S. merchant ship Mayaguez was seized by a Cambodian patrol boat, under the charge that it had illegally entered territorial waters in the Gulf of Siam. Here’s the dumb thing: the most valuable thing on this boat? The crew. It contained food, paint, and chemicals. That was it. But to the American government, it was the principle of the thing. Unfortunately, we had no idea where the boat was. Even dumber? The crew that took the Mayaguez wasn’t overly hostile. According to one of the merchant seamen, “They were a raggedy bunch and they didn’t know how to use things. The shower was a big hit. Once we showed them how to use it, they had a ball. One guy held the gun and the rest piled in under the shower.” The Americans described their treatment as bizarrely polite. “At first I thought the Cambodians were going to take us out and shoot us, but they were so nice, really kind. They fed us first and everything. I hope everybody gets hijacked by them.” Problem was, the American government didn’t know this. They had no loving clue what was going on. The uncertainty brought back memories of the USS Pueblo, a Navy intelligence ship the North Koreans had seized in 1968. Back then, 82 American sailors had been imprisoned for 11 months before the Johnson administration admitted to violating territorial waters in order to secure their release. No one in Ford’s White House wanted to relive that embarrassment that was born of the reluctance to use force. What’s more, we had reason to fear what was happening in Cambodia at the time. After all, this guy had seized power less than a month prior.  Pol Pot was the head of the Khmer Rouge Communists, and upon seizing power he had launched a massive campaign of genocide and repression. Eventually, he’d kill between 1.6 and 1.8 million Cambodians--nearly a quarter of Cambodia’s population. No one in America had any reason to think anything but the absolute worst. Henry Kissinger, in his memoirs, makes a point of saying that America needed to put its foot down. “Especially in the aftermath of Indochina’s collapse, the United States needed to demonstrate that there were limits to what it would tolerate.” The imperative was clear--get the Mayaguez crewmen out of Cambodian hands, quick as possible. Naval air reconnaissance on May 13 indicated that the ship was docked at the island of Koh Tang, so U.S. officials thought the crew would be on the island as well. I’ll let Douglas Brinkley tell the story of what happened next. quote:Late that night in Washington, Ford called together his national security team to go over the military options. The meeting was interrupted by the news that navy fighters had attacked a Cambodian flotilla heading to the mainland from Koh Tang Island. After sinking three of the boats, the squadron radioed that one pilot thought he saw “Caucasian faces” on another. Ford immediately ordered a halt to the attack—fortunately, since those indeed belonged to the thirty-nine Mayaguez crewmen. The next afternoon, still unsure where the American merchant sailors were, Ford ordered a full-scale military rescue operation. Helicopters would lower some marines onto the Mayaguez and others onto Koh Tang as U.S. jets bombed mainland installations to keep the Cambodians from sending in reinforcements. The first helicopter to near Koh Tang was shot down in a portent of the blistering defense the Cambodians mounted. Yet, two minutes earlier, the official Phnom Penh radio service had begun broadcasting allegations that the Mayaguez was a spy ship—followed by the announcement that they would release it. Whether the crew would also be released was not mentioned. Christ, it’s like the Keystone Kops in here. Anyway, Ford knew he couldn’t halt the attacks already in progress in time--but he did inform the Cambodians that the military operation would cease immediately upon the release of the 39 Americans that crewed the Mayaguez. Press Secretary Ron Nessen put it out on the national wire in the hopes that Cambodia’s ruling junta would see it. As the Marines tried to recapture the Mayaguez and fight off an unexpectedly strong Cambodian force on Koh Tang Island, they discovered that the captured merchant crewmen were being treated as cordially as ever. “The first man who spoke English greeted us with a handshake and welcomed us to Cambodia. He wanted to know if we were CIA or if we were FBI,” recalled the captain, Charles T. Miller. To their immense credit, Miller and his men convinced their captors that they were neither, and that their ship had nothing to do with American espionage or military operations. With that, they were released--a few hours after the rescue operation had begun. The Cambodians put them on a commandeered Thai fishing vessel, gave them white sheets to wave when they hove into the Navy’s view, and sent them off back to the Mayaguez. They were safely transferred off Koh Tang to an American destroyer. Here’s the dumbest part--even after this, it wasn’t over! We were still fighting the Cambodians on Koh Tang, and not only were they organized, they were well-armed--they shot down eight of the nine helicopters sent to the island. Forty-one men died. Captain Miller would later lament, “I talked to the Marine major in the first chopper that was shot down, who had about a quarter of his back torn off by shrapnel. I cried. People were being killed to save me.” Miller praised the Marines and Ford for their roles in the rescue, and the media back home was no less complimentary. Newsweek called the Mayaguez rescue “a daring show of nerve and steel...swift and tough--and it worked.” New York Times columnist Cyrus Sulzberger said that thanks to President Ford’s “resolute and skillful leadership” in the crisis, “a polluting American image of lassitude, uncertainty and pessimism” had vanished. Ford’s approval rating rose 11 points in the next Gallup poll, reflecting a waning of the gloomy national mood after Vietnam. It was these high approval numbers, perhaps, that encouraged Ford to do what he did next. In July of 1975, he announced his candidacy for the 1976 Republican Presidential nomination. He declared, “I will not forget my initial pledge to be President of all the people. I believe I can best represent my part, but this will be futile unless I unite the majority of Americans who acknowledge no absolute party loyalty. Therefore, I will seek the support of all who believe in the fundamental values of duty, decency, and constructive debate on the great issues we face together as free people.” Hang on! I know it sounds like I’m about to segue into electoral politics, but let’s put a pin in that and we’ll come back to it. Declaring himself in contention for the next Presidential cycle wasn’t the only thing to come out of the Mayaguez incident poll numbers. Three weeks later, Ford headed to the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, held that year in the Finnish capital city of Helsinki. The conference at Helsinki would have mixed results. One one hand, Ford’s participation cost him back home. Conservatives, many of whom had already marked him as an enemy after the Nixon pardon and the end of the Vietnam War, felt once again that Ford was giving away the store for nothing in return on an international stage. However, the calls for openness and the respect for human rights that eventually came out of the summit, in the paper known as the Helsinki Accords, would mark the unwritten beginning of the end of Soviet domination in Eastern Europe. Though his presence gagged the far right, Ford’s attendance substantially boosted the credibility of the Helsinki Accords, and they would eventually become one of the finest legacies of his Presidency. The conference opened on July 30, 1975, and it marked the largest assembly of European heads of state and government since the Congress of Vienna in 1815. It’s important to know that the treaty that was being hashed out wasn’t a new creation--the diplomats from each of the 35 countries that attended had been trying to work out a treaty to sign at this for three years prior. quote:The document that emerged from these prolonged negotiations appeared as tepid and universally unobjectionable as one might expect. The proposed treaty airily covered three broad areas of concern: respecting the sovereignty of nations and the inviolability of their borders; lowering barriers to economic, scientific, and cultural cooperation and exchanges; and recognizing human rights. The Helsinki Final Act made no mention of any particular situations to which its vague provisions might apply, nor did it spell out any consequences for noncompliance. Basically, it provided a guideline for future civilized conduct in Europe. Yet as toothless as the Helsinki Accords seemed, no previous agreement had ever offered any guarantee of human rights of citizens in Eastern bloc nations—including the Soviet Union. Much like the Civil Rights Act of 1957, it was merely a stepping stone to something much greater, but that last sentence--getting the Soviets to agree to even a nominal guarantee of human rights in the Iron Curtain nations--was what made the Accords groundbreaking. At home, however, conservative opposition was growing more strident. Remember, the hardliners at home were much like hardliners everywhere--none of them had ever embraced Nixon’s or Ford’s attempts to de-escalate. quote:America’s hawks had never embraced Richard Nixon’s forays at thawing the Cold War. They preferred that détente remain unsupported by any agreement outside the existing SALT I treaty, which dealt strictly with quantities of arms, not ideology. Hardliners on both sides fervently maintained that preserving the state of undeclared, unprosecuted war would allow their system to prevail eventually. What none of them knew, however, was Ford’s motives had less to do with promoting “security and cooperation”, and more to do with pushing SALT II. He was certain he’d made headway in Vladivostok, and he felt that if he could put the final pieces of it together with Brezhnev in Helsinki before the eyes of the world, it would virtually ensure the treaty’s success. For Ford, SALT II would stand as a hallmark of his Presidency and be a huge feather in his cap for the 1976 campaign. Indeed, to prove his commitment to the summit’s goals, Ford sat through all thirty-four of his counterparts’ speeches over the three days of the conference. Whatever that might have proved, Ford didn’t get what he wanted--talks with Brezhnev on SALT II went nowhere. Plus, when he got back home, the right opened up on him with both barrels. “The conference seating was all by alphabet,” Ford recalled. “You know where I sat? With Brezhnev on one side of me and Erich Honecker of East Germany on the other...the right lambasted me to pieces.” Indeed, the White House chief of protocol, Henry E. Catto, summed up in his memoir Ambassadors At Sea, “The right wing in the United States howled that the agreement was a sellout, which was nonsense, for the Helsinki agreement proved a splendid club with which to whack the Soviets when they violated human rights.” Well, maybe. As a result of the Helsinki Accords, a number of Helsinki Commissions on Human Rights sprang up across the Soviet Union, as well as its satellite nations. The American commission, originally sponsored by Rep. Millicent Fenwick (R-NJ) investigated not domestic but Soviet human rights violations, indicating the extent to which the Helsinki agreement focused on Communist states and how to fix them. On August 1, the Helsinki Accords were signed--by the United States, Canada, and most of Europe. It agreed to honor human rights, to cooperate in humanitarian, scientific, and economic affairs, and adhere to post-World War II national boundaries in Europe. It appeared to launch a new era of American-Soviet cooperation--as a symbol of the agreement, a U.S. Apollo spacecraft and a Soviet Soyuz docked in orbit, and the sight of astronauts and cosmonauts shaking hands in space was interpreted as rapprochement extraordinaire. All of this belied the reality--that the Helsinki Accords were, in fact, Ford’s greatest foreign policy achievement--and historians argue that it proved to be the first of many cracks in the Iron Curtain. “We went to Helsinki, and boy did I catch hell,” Ford recalled in 2003. “Well, that human rights provision was the catalyst that brought about the demise of the Soviet Union because it gave inspiration and justification to the dissidents in the Soviet Union...we got it started, then Jimmy Carter carried it on.” Wow. When’s the last time you ever heard a President credit his successor with anything when they were from opposite parties? New York, Rocky, and the Presidential Election of 1976  With 1976 and the Presidential election on the horizon, few gave Gerald Ford any chance for success. Yes, he’d declared his candidacy, but the Nixon pardon had corroded much of the goodwill he had with the very people he was trying to reach. To them, Ford was an impostor President--a glorified caretaker who never could win an election in his own right. Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld remarked late in 1974, “At the end of three months, the Ford administration will either have the smell of life or the smell of death...if it’s the smell of death, this White House is going to be torn to pieces by the press, by the Democrats, even by other Republicans who will challenge the President for the nomination in 1976.” Prescient. The pardon was, though, just one of Ford’s PR problems. Everything Ford had accomplished thus far was hurting his chances in 1976. Ironically, the problems came not from the left, but from the right--inside his own Republican Party. As we’ve talked about, many GOP leaders thought of Ford as too liberal, too conciliatory--and his trip to Finland sparked a near-civil war in the party. Ford was on the horns of a dilemma--do what it takes to win the nomination and doom himself in the general, or make himself competitive in the general but become more vulnerable in the primaries. It cannot be understated what a lovely position Ford was in at the start of 1976. Democrats held a firm grip on both houses of Congress, with a veto-proof majority in the House and close to it in the Senate. Ford had vetoed fifteen bills in his first three months in office, more than Nixon had in the eighteen months preceding his resignation. However, more of those vetoes had been overridden than any other twentieth century President, including Nixon. “You’ve got to consider how tough it was for me to operate from the center,” Ford remembered. “Liberal Democrats controlled the Senate and Congress. They wanted me marginalized. The conservative Republicans were all about Goldwater-Reagan….they disdained my pulling out of Vietnam, the Helsinki trip and draft amnesty promise. And the media, having forced Nixon to resign, was just overflowing with venom.” See, Jerry, you had me until the last sentence...now you just sound like a whiner. It wasn’t just that that antagonized conservatives. See, they didn’t like Nelson Rockefeller, Ford’s Vice President. At all. He was emblematic of everything they hated. As historian Herbert Parmet said, “His presence accelerated the rebellion from what Kevin Phillips called the ‘new right’.” Ford hadn’t intended to divide the party by picking Rockefeller. On the contrary--he had hoped that it would bring the party together, under a tent big enough to include both his up-by-the-bootstraps conservatism to the progressive stands on social issues that Rockefeller Republicans espoused. Ford was proud of his choice--proud enough, in fact, to say when asked in November of 1974 what his greatest achievement was in the first 100 days, “Number one, nominating Nelson Rockefeller.” “Rocky” had certainly been a good Vice President. He’d hewed loyally to the President’s positions and treated Ford with an appropriately humble deference. He did everything that was asked of him, including the well-regarded Rockefeller Commission on domestic espionage we talked about earlier. This wasn’t good enough for the conservatives, though, who had booed Rocky off the stage at the 1964 convention right before coronating Barry Goldwater. Rocky had attempted to appease them--even going so far as to appear with then-arch-segregationist governor George Wallace of Alabama, as well as reaching out to Goldwater and the others. Alas, they weren’t having it. What’s more, Ford knew that his homespun good-guy image wouldn’t cut it this time. After all, the man emerging as the likely Democratic nominee was co-opting it.  Yay! James Earl “Jimmy” Carter was the former governor of Georgia, and his born-again Christianity and peanut farmer populism, as well as his big toothy grin and genuine, down-to-earth manner, allowed him to define himself as just a really nice guy who wanted to be President. “Carter was running on ‘I’ll never tell a lie’,” Ford recalled. “I had the albatross of having pardoned Nixon, a known liar.” No sympathy, Jerry. You could just as easily not have pardoned him. YOUR choice. Ford was facing a tough environment. There was unrest in the Middle East, where the new Israeli government of Yitzhak Rabin was occupying the Sinai and refusing to leave. The U.S. backed government in Cambodia had collapsed, replaced by the murderous, Communist-backed Khmer Rouge. And to top it all off, the economy was still sputtering--by January of 1975 unemployment had risen a full 1%, translating to millions of Americans being out of work. Ford blundered into one tactical error after another--he tried to appease the right by naming Georgia-bred Secretary of the Army Bo Callaway to run his 1976 campaign, only to have Callaway begin viciously attacking Vice President Rockefeller and his fitness for the Republican ticket. Ford stood by and did nothing to defend Rockefeller. “My not defending Nelson at this juncture is my biggest professional regret,” Ford said later. “He was a good man. I should have gone to bat for him.” As if conservatives didn’t already have enough outrage fuel, who should add to it but the First Lady herself. Betty Ford appeared on 60 Minutes in August 1975, and while most of the American public liked and admired Betty for her rather lively independence, many conservatives took exception to the fact that she appeared unconcerned that her children had “probably” tried marijuana, not to mention her response that she “wouldn’t be surprised” if her teenage daughter, as “a perfectly normal human being like all young girls”, were to have a premarital “affair”. Even more offensive to conservative noses was Mrs. Ford praising the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision as “the best thing in the world...a great, great decision.” You know, I think I like Betty Ford now.  It sparked a firestorm. The National Review said that “Mrs. Ford ought to know that it is not up to her to rewrite the Ten Commandments on nationwide TV.” Well, you miserable pricks, the Ten Commandments aren’t the law of the land and Roe is. As for Ford, he issued a quick statement that said, in effect, that Betty’s opinions were her own, although he supported her right to speak out. Way to stick by your wife, Captain Courage. Ford hit the road, knowing that he’d need to make personal appearances across the nation in his campaign for the nomination. He wanted to look like a caring leader reaching out to his constituents--but it had another purpose as well. See, this guy hadn’t declared his candidacy yet, but he was stumping around the country and it was apparent that it was just a matter of time.  The old cockroach is back, folks. Former California governor Ronald Reagan was the champion of the conservatives--the guy who was gonna be Goldwater with a smile. Reagan was telling Republican audiences in city after city that he, not Ford, was the ideological heir to the 1972 landslide. “The mandate registered by the people still remains,” Reagan declared. “The people have not changed in philosophy.” This rather backhanded swipe at Ford’s claim to the party leadership effectively undermined Ford’s support. To top it all off, there were two attempts on Ford’s life in three weeks. Yes, you read that correctly: in one month, two people tried to kill him. On September 5, 1975, Ford was shaking hands in a crowd that had turned out to see him in Sacramento, CA when a rather odd-looking woman standing two feet from Ford pulled a gun and aimed it at him.  Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme was a member of cult leader and serial murderer Charles Manson’s “family”. Fromme was no stranger to committing crimes for her “Charlie”--she’d tried to feed a hamburger laced with LSD to one of the witnesses in the Sharon Tate murder to keep her from testifying in the murder trial. Anyway, Fromme was angry because she believed that the giant coastal redwoods in California were in danger of falling due to automobile smog poisoning them. She decided she’d bring attention to the cause by putting fear into the federal government. What better way to do that than by killing the President? Fast forward to the moment of the assassination attempt. When Fromme aimed the gun at Ford, many witnesses heard an audible “click” right before the Secret Service agents swarmed her and pinned her to the ground. While she was on the ground, Fromme kept saying, “It didn’t go off. Can you believe it? It didn’t go off.” Incidentally, the .45 pistol Fromme tried to kill him with? It’s now in the Ford Presidential Library. Soon after the news of the attack, a proud California GOP committeeman took the floor in the state house and said “Mr. Chairman, I think the record should show that for the first time since McKinley, we have a Republican President worth shooting.” Yyyyyyyyeaaaaahhhh. Especially tone deaf, considering what happened less than three weeks later. On September 22, 1975, Ford was in San Francisco, doing a local television interview at the St. Francis Hotel. After the taping, Ford walked out of the lobby and was headed to the limousine when a shot rang out.  Sara Jane Moore, incredibly, had been evaluated as a possible threat by the Secret Service earlier in 1975--and they’d turned her loose, determining that she posed no threat to the President. She had even been picked up by the cops THE DAY BEFORE THE ATTEMPT on an illegal handgun charge. The police released her, though they did at least confiscate her .44 caliber revolver and 113 rounds of ammunition. Moore was a pseudo-revolutionary--she belonged to a group called Tribal Thumb, led by an ex-con named Earl Satcher. Satcher had served nearly two decades in prison for armed robbery, assault, and illegal gun possession--he was a big believer in revolution to bring down oppression. Satcher’s group groomed Moore as their representative to spark a revolution. Best way to do that? Kill the President, of course. It was the loss of her gun, ironically, that may have saved Ford’s life--she had hastily purchased a .38 revolver in lieu of her .44, and she didn’t know that the sights were badly calibrated. The first shot had only missed Ford’s head by five inches from 40 feet--over twice the effective distance, if I recall correctly, of a .38 Special. After the first shot, Moore paused to take better aim--but ex-Marine Oliver Sipple, who was in the crowd and right near her, dove at Moore and forced her arm up and away before she pulled the trigger a second time. In seconds, the San Francisco Police had swarmed Moore and taken her gun, while the Secret Service hustled Ford into his limo and used their bodies (and, incidentally, the body of Donald Rumsfeld) to shield him. You can see how a man might get the impression that people disliked him, but Ford appeared unfazed. “Under no circumstances will, and I hope others, capitulate to those that want to undercut what’s good in America.” That said, at the Secret Service’s insistence, Ford began wearing Kevlar under his suit jacket when he went out in public, and when asked in 2003 if he’d had any nightmares after the two attempts on his life, Ford said he’d joked to Betty, “I’m gonna have to review my support for the Equal Rights Amendment. These women are trying to kill me.” Buh huh huh. Meanwhile, Reagan kept up his cross-country noncampaign, making the White House sweat as the California governor refused to declare himself in or out of the race. Ford, personally, detested Reagan. He thought of Reagan as an opportunist. Here’s Ford himself on Reagan’s chances. quote:Several of his characteristics seemed to rule him out as a serious challenger. One was his penchant for offering simplistic solutions to hideously complex problems. A second was his conviction that he was always right in every argument; he seemed unable to acknowledge that he might have made a mistake. Finally, I’d heard from people who knew him well that he liked to conserve his energy. From every campaign I’d witnessed, I knew that you can’t run for President and expect to work only from nine to five. Reagan was no less uncomplimentary. He viewed Ford as weak, as a caretaker who had spent too long in Congress. Additionally, he blamed Ford for the federal budget deficit, which was near $52 billion at that point--ignoring Ford’s repeated efforts to curb spending by vetoing Congressional spending bills. Reagan’s portrayal of Ford as the sole steward of the government’s debt was rather disingenuous to say the least. Indeed, Ford had already shown himself to be a crusader against what he viewed as profligate government spending in response to New York City’s financial crisis. See, since 1965, NYC’s budget had tripled as its expenses had risen by nearly 12% a year but revenues grew by less than half that. After a decade of spending on social programs, employees, and raises, the city was $14 billion in debt--most of which was secured on loans with wildly unfavorable terms, wherein the city managers mortgaged future revenues for more loans. Throughout the year, Mayor Abraham Beane and Governor Hugh Carey had repeatedly gone to Washington, hat in hand, to ask for a federal bailout in the form of 90-day guarantees for $1 billion in new city bonds. In essence, Ford told them to pound sand. It was their fault they were in the financial fix they were in, perhaps they shouldn’t have spent like drunken sailors. Stung by the administration’s rejection, Governor Carey declared it the product of a “level of arrogance and disregard for New York that rivals the worst days of Richard Nixon and his gang of cutthroats.” New York flirted with insolvency for the entirety of 1975 as they laid off thousands of police, firefighters, sanitation workers and other city employees. Americans outside the city were lauding Ford’s efforts, ironically. “The country has long seen New York as arrogant,” remarked one observant bond broker. “The attitude is ‘So now you’re in trouble, then help yourself, Big Mouth!’” It was at this point that Vice President Rockefeller stepped in. He thought maybe the upstate politicians might be able to help, so he sat with New York Republicans that October and listened as they laid out their concerns. They understood, of course, that the administration’s skinflint nature came from Ford’s need to protect his right flank, and that the right as a whole sneered at the idea of a bailout for New York City. That said, they warned Rockefeller that unless the White House started treating the Big Apple with a bit more kindness, Ford could forget about New York’s electoral votes in November. Rocky dutifully reported all of this to the White House, but it only stiffened Ford’s resolve to give no help to NYC until he saw proof of real belt-tightening in the city’s budget. The memory of his meeting with Beame and Carey in May where they had come begging without so much as a pie chart to show what they would do with the federal aid they were asking for still rankled. Ford still wasn’t buying it by October of 1975, but he did give Rockefeller permission to speak out on the crisis on the ground in New York. After all, it couldn’t hurt, and it might even help both the city and the Vice President’s standing. On October 12, Rockefeller spoke in Manhattan that appeared to extend the city some sympathy, but it deflected the blame onto Congress instead of the White House. Whoops. New York Republicans weren’t happy, and neither was the White House. “There is no more continuous thread in the history of our Republican than White House wrath when Vice Presidents speak out of turn,” explained Robert Hartmann, one of Rocky’s few admirers in Ford’s inner circle. Other advisors said Rocky was sabotaging Ford’s careful strategy, feathering his own New York nest, furthering his family’s banking interests, and fueling conservative rebellion in the South, West, and Midwest. They were unanimous in their diagnosis, especially after a series of polls told them the same thing: Rocky had to go. Rockefeller was a team player, and his unswerving loyalty to Ford led him to immediately offer to withdraw from the 1976 ticket. Both Ford and Rockefeller could then maintain that it was a mutual decision. The fact remained, though, that he’d been pushed off the ticket, and Ford himself had done the pushing. He told Rocky, “To be brutally frank, some of these difficulties might be eliminated if you were to indicate that you didn’t want to be on the ticket in 1976. I’m not asking you to do that, I’m just stating the facts.” Yeah, that’s about as subtle as a baseball bat to the face. In any event, it didn’t fix a drat thing. Ford’s public about-face on something as crucial as his VP choice--less than a year after having called it his proudest achievement--made him look weak and craven, exactly what Ronald Reagan was telling voters currently. Plus, now New York was furious--he’d kicked their favorite son off the ticket, AND he was hardening his stance against federal aid for NYC. Long story short? Ford got what he wanted. NYC ended up operating with austerity budgets imposed by Washington--and in return, Ford granted them access to $2.3 billion in federal loans for the next three years. He thought it all sounded good--but the idea of a bunch of laid-off cops and firefighters penetrated the schadenfreude-heavy facade that the country’s heartland had towards New York. Between his harsh treatment of the Big Apple and his cold dismissal of Nelson Rockefeller, Jerry Ford was starting to look like a jerk--a disloyal, waffling, cynical jerk. Nevertheless, in November of 1975, Ford had reason to give thanks--perhaps more than many Americans. A Gallup poll of Republican voters showed him leading Reagan 58-36%, while a general survey of the electorate put him ahead of all the likely Democratic nominees by 50-42%. Even DNC chairman Robert Strauss had been forced to admit, “You’re not going to beat him with a more honest, honorable man...you’re going to beat him on the issues.” This was, of course, a year before Jimmy Carter became the Democrats’ standard-bearer. But it wasn’t just Carter. As Kevin Phillips had pointed out in his book The Emerging Republican Majority, “a populist revolt of the American masses who have been elevated by prosperity to middle-class status and conservatism” was afoot “against the caste, policies and taxation of the mandarins of Establishment liberalism.” And these people? They followed Ronald Reagan, who declared his candidacy for the Republican nomination on November 20, 1975. Reagan proved a surprisingly adept campaigner. Every strength of Ford’s was recast as a weakness--every attempt to reach across the aisle cast as heresy and apostasy. Ford had no choice--with Congress firmly in the hands of the Democrats, getting anything passed meant working with them, but that didn’t stop Reagan’s supporters from claiming that Ford was betraying the cause. Reagan’s remarkable ability to smash complex topics that were full of nuance into tiny, bullshit aphorisms that were simultaneously both irrefutable and specious. It was infuriating for Ford to watch Reagan apply kindergarten logic to complex world issues. Not to mention that many of Reagan’s gibes weren’t true. Ford wasn’t a flip-flopper; he was as staunch in his beliefs as any conservative. But the contrast on television was very apparent and very stark: Reagan’s hard-nosed, in-your-face charm played off well, but Ford showed clear difficulty. He spoke in halting fashion before making policy points, often emphasizing the wrong word in sentences. “The President had a habit of pausing for several beats before he spoke,” remembered James A. Baker, Ford’s newly-minted campaign manager and the man who would eventually run Reagan and Bush 41’s White Houses. “When the red light on a television camera would come on--his cue to talk--he would not start speaking right away. This sometimes gave the mistaken impression that he was struggling to find the right words.” Ford’s image needed rehabilitation, that was for sure. In December of 1975, Newsweek ran a cover headline that said “Ford In Trouble”. It cited Reagan’s surging popularity among Republicans, juxtaposed with Ford’s inability to sway Congress to his will, and it dubbed him, jokingly, “Bozo the President.” This jokey take on Ford would stick...and it would hurt him far more than anything Reagan ever said or did. Douglas Brinkley elaborates. quote:Quips at the expense of Ford’s intellect went back as far as Lyndon Johnson, who was credited with two of the best known: that “Jerry Ford is a nice guy, but he played too much football with his helmet off,” and that Ford “is so dumb he can’t fart and chew gum at the same time.” As the 1976 presidential campaign got going the gibes turned more topical, as Time noted in January, citing current jokes such as, “The president was loath to help New York during its fiscal crisis because he has bad memories of the city’s great blackout; he was trapped for six hours on an escalator.” Of course, Ford didn’t help matters by introducing California’s GOP Senate candidate S. I. Hayakawa as “Dr. Haya-kama,” prompting an aide to confess, “It was better than what he called Hayakawa in a private meeting. He called him ‘Hiawatha’ the first time.” And for all the time Ford spent as an athlete back at Michigan, the media had started to depict him as a clumsy oaf as well. The sort of everyday embarrassing missteps that the media used to ignore became big news when Gerald Ford did them, whether it was stumbling on a ski slope, tripping on a church stairway, or bumping his head on the door to Air Force One. We are all familiar, of course, with Chevy Chase’s portrayal of Ford on Saturday Night Live, but in case you’re not, here’s a sample. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEIpAIqzbTg Ford appeared to bear the jokes well, but in a book he wrote ten years after leaving the Presidency, he describes the jokes at his expense as “an indignity”. quote:“Some people have suggested that I handled the jokes at my expense very well, and that I thought such things ‘came with the turf’ of being president. Let me put it this way: I developed a good exterior posture. The truth of the matter is that some of my favorite pipes have teeth marks in their stems that you wouldn’t believe. This is a fact. You cannot cry out dramatically about your outrage or your indignity. That, as sure as tomorrow’s sunrise, will open a floodgate that you’ll never be able to close.” Lighten up, Jerry. As the spring of 1976 approached, the incumbent President should have gained momentum. After all, the country was at peace and the economy was finally picking up. Instead, Ford continued to take blow after blow as he continued to exchange barbs with Reagan on relatively minor issues. For example, in answer to Reagan’s position on ownership of the Panama Canal (“We built it, we paid for it, it’s ours and we are going to keep it”), Ford felt it necessary to detail all the dull nuance behind the the complex negotiations involved in the eventual transfer of ownership of the Canal to Panama. However, in the early going, Ford did very well. Despite Reagan’s people’s efforts, Ford won the first three big primaries in New Hampshire, Florida, and Reagan’s home state of Illinois. That last victory was especially impressive because it came on the heels of Ford’s campaign chair, Bo Callaway, being accused of misusing his office of Secretary of the Army to secure a sweetheart land deal from the federal government. Fortunately, Ford’s newly-minted Chief of Staff, Dick Cheney, was able to quickly excise the problem and was able hand Illinois to Ford, but since the Calloway affair tied up the White House for a crucial few days, Reagan pulled off an upset victory in North Carolina on March 23. This, writes Reagan biographer Lou Cannon, was key. “Without his performance in North Carolina, Reagan would have faded from contention...and it is unlikely that he would have won the presidential nomination four years later.” The victory was helped in large part by an endorsement from North Carolina’s senior senator and all-around scumbag Jesse Helms--I believe I covered this in some detail in my Reagan biography. The North Carolina victory spurred Reagan to greater heights, as he rattled off a string of impressive victories that included California, Georgia, Indiana, South Carolina, and Texas. Alas for Ronnie, he lacked certain built-in advantages that Ford had. Given that he was President already, Ford could win the hearts and minds of uncommitted delegates in ways Reagan could not. They were brought to Washington, wined and dined, and included in briefings. Some were even invited to the social high point of 1976--the state dinner for Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II, who came to the capital in July to recognize the 200th year of American independence. Ford made full use of the bicentennial to bolster his campaign--on Independence day, buildings all over the capital were festooned with red, white, and blue bunting. The effort was long, slow, and torturous--but Ford’s incumbency advantage forced Reagan back, inch by inch, all the way to the convention, and it was there that Reagan made a tactical error. He decided it was then that he’d appeal to moderates by promising to choose Pennsylvania senator Richard Schweiker as his running mate--a move that sent conservatives into an uproar. The wind went out of his sails. Additionally, Ford gave into one of the Reagan people’s demands--that the party platform include calls for “morality” in crafting foreign policy, a direct swipe at Henry Kissinger. Dick Cheney indicated that he didn’t give much of a gently caress-- he told Brent Scowcroft, “Platforms don’t mean anything, they are forgotten the day after the nomination.” Reminiscent of “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.” Ultimately, Ford would hang on to the conservatives’ support, even if he didn’t inspire their ardor like Reagan did. Now all he had to do was peel off enough moderates and liberals to catch Jimmy Carter. This wouldn’t be easy. The battle with Reagan had wounded him. Badly. Ford was still reeling from Reagan’s misrepresentations of his record, and since he’d had to spend months touting his conservative credentials, Ford could not use his broader-minded brand of Republicanism. Polls out of the convention showed him trailing Carter by 30 (!) points. The challenge from Reagan hadn’t just hurt him politically, though, it had pissed him off personally. quote:Decades later, Ford still bristled about Reagan’s decision to challenge him in 1976. To Ford, that action made a hypocrisy out of Reagan’s famous Eleventh Commandment: “A Republican should never criticize another Republican.” Even though Ford insisted he didn’t hold a grudge against Reagan, he clearly did. “I have never publicly criticized Reagan for what he did,” Ford recalled. “I can tell you I was shocked when he called me in November of ’75 and said he was going to run. I thought, ‘What a low-down stunt.’ Really burned the hell out of me.” Who would be Vice President? Well, after soliciting a series of suggestions from the GOP’s leading lights, Ford settled on this guy.  Apologies for the watermark. He was young once! Before he was the spokesman for erectile dysfunction and a walking joke, Sen. Robert “Bob” Dole (R-KS) was the former chairman of the Republican Party and a young man known for a quick wit and strong party loyalty. Moreover, pollsters found that Dole fit the best in the spot. “He was a true conservative, acceptable to the Reaganites, a hard-hitting campaigner, a friend and supporter of Ford, and a Midwesterner who could appeal to farmers who were angry at the President for imposing a two-month embargo on grain sales to the Soviet Union," said Press Secretary Ron Nessen. The contest against Carter developed into a political slugfest, but a surprising (and unlikely) ally emerged on Ford’s side. Still in exile at his home in San Clemente, Richard Nixon was hoping to repay his friend who had campaigned for him in 1960, 1968, and 1972. For obvious reasons, he couldn’t campaign for Ford--but behind the scenes he was offering strategic advice and morale boosts throughout the general election. He presented himself to Ford as a bruised veteran of political fistfights. For example, he urged Ford to attack the Humphrey-Hawkins social services bill, co-authored by Sen. Hubert Humphrey (D-MN) and Rep. Augustus Hawkins (D-CA). Nixon detested the bill--he called it “a monstrosity” and “socialism”. He also told Ford to accuse Carter and the Democratic Congress as soft on Communism. It’s unclear how much of this advice Ford and his people actually took. For a while, Ford did well by stressing his White House record and accomplishments, especially his efforts to perk up the economy. That turned South quick. On September 13, 1976, the Labor Department reported that unemployment had risen each of the previous three months, hitting a new high for the year in August. September also featured Ford’s disastrous effort to inoculate Americans against a supposedly imminent swine flu epidemic--turned out the vaccine caused temporary paralysis in some recipients and killed others. Whoops. But the watershed moment of the 1976 campaign, for many historians, came in the second of what would eventually be three prime-time debates between Ford and Jimmy Carter. Ford had acquitted himself well in the first debate, which was limited to economic and domestic issues. The second debate dealt with foreign policy, and it was going well...until moderator Max Frankel asked Ford whether detente, as exemplified by the Helsinki Accords, benefited the Soviet Union more than America. This was Ford’s response. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfyL4uQVJLw You, uh...you can see why it is called a watershed moment. It’s clear to us what Ford meant, certainly--that the Soviets’ control was entirely through military might and that they did not have the hearts and minds of Eastern Europe won--but the damage was done. All the campaign’s efforts to make Ford look smart and Presidential over the past few months faded to nothing in that one moment. Ford and his campaign spent the next few days clumsily trying to clarify his comment--but the horse was out of the barn. It made the GOP look out-of-touch and utterly disengaged with world events. On the eve of the election, the final polls showed a statistically tied race. Carter led by a point in the last Harris poll; Gallup had Ford leading by a point in theirs. Ironically, it was the first time in their polling this cycle that Ford had led the race. For all the difficulties Ford had suffered, he’d erased a 30-point deficit in just two months. But it wasn’t enough.  Carter did not capture a single state west of Texas--but he snagged just enough big electoral prizes to win a narrow electoral college victory. His popular vote victory was a bit larger--he took 40.8 million votes to Ford’s 39.1 million--but either way, he had won, and Ford had lost. There’s also the one dumb schmuck elector who voted for Reagan, but that’s neither here nor there. Jimmy Carter was President, and Gerald Ford was going home. Fritz Coldcockin fucked around with this message at 13:43 on Jun 10, 2020 |
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Jun 9, 2020 04:40
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Retirement To say that Ford was not disappointed would be untrue. He had enjoyed his time as President, and to lose by such a close margin led him to second-guess every move he’d made during the campaign. He pored over a litany of what-ifs: what if he hadn’t pardoned Nixon? What if he’d gone to bat for Rockefeller? What if he hadn’t muffed the Eastern Europe question during the debate? And, most importantly, what if that bastard Ronald Reagan had been able to let bygones be bygones and actually campaigned for him? Alas, hindsight is always 20/20. In an emotional goodbye, Ford told Congress and the American people on June 12, 1977, during his final State of the Union address, “I can report that the State of the Union is good. There is room for improvement, as always, but today we have a more perfect Union than when my stewardship began.” He was surprised and gratified when, eight days later, as Jimmy Carter took the oath of office and became the nation’s 39th President, he paid tribute to the man he’d beaten. “For myself and for our nation, I want to thank my predecessor for all he has done to heal our land,” Carter said. This is a bit much for me, considering that the Nixon pardon did more to divide and hurt the nation than anything Ford did to help in his two years. Nevertheless, it gave rise to a genuine friendship between the two men as the years passed. The most pressing concern that faced Ford and his wife as they settled into retirement in their home at Rancho Mirage, California, was financial solvency. Ford’s years in public service had left them cash-strapped--remember, Jerry had been in Washington since the 1940s. Both of them signed publishing contracts for their memoirs in March of 1977, and Ford would often return to Washington to discuss foreign policy issues with President Carter, including the Middle East, the Panama Canal, and the Soviet Union. These visits sparked an old flame in Ford--he even flirted briefly with the idea of running for President again in 1978. “Carter wasn’t doing well, and I’d already proven that I could beat Reagan,” Ford recalled. Ultimately, he passed, however, shutting the door permanently in March of 1980. Still, as the days of the Carter administration wore on and people grew weary of inflation, the long gas lines, and the terminal Iranian hostage crisis, nostalgia for Ford grew in Republicans’ minds. There was even an attempt during the convention in 1980 to make Ford the Vice President on a ticket with Reagan; however, I detailed in my Reagan bio why this didn’t happen. Deep down, Ford knew he couldn’t play second banana to a man like Reagan, and Reagan knew he couldn’t legally surrender the authority to Ford in the White House day-to-day operations that he wanted to. So, former CIA Director and Texas Congressman George H.W. Bush took the spot, and Ford contented himself with stumping for Reagan around the country. It was at the funeral for Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat, killed in a hail of gunfire at a military parade, that Ford and now-former President himself Jimmy Carter bonded even more closely. Their wives, Betty and Rosalynn, became friends as well--sponsoring several causes together such as alcohol and drug prevention, the ERA, and health care for the mentally ill. Ford would co-chair several Carter Center projects, and Carter would co-host a two-day conference at Ford’s Presidential library at Ann Arbor. Throughout the 1980s, Ford’s name appeared in the paper numerous times, in part due to the number of corporate boards he sat on. The list included American Express, Texas Commerce Bank, Tiger International, Inc, and 20th Century Fox Film Corporation. He caught a lot of flack for “selling out” to corporate America. Indeed, the money was good--in addition to his $100,000/yr government pension, Ford netted more than a million dollars in supplemental income from these corporate boards. “I’m a private citizen now,” Ford said in response to all the carping. “It’s no one’s business.” Well, I guess it wasn’t, but still, Jerry...bad look. Ironically, Ford became good friends with Chevy Chase, the comedian who had so effectively lampooned him during the mid-70s--and that was just the opening salvo of his image rehabilitation. Slowly, the tarnish began to fade. Veteran journalist and historian Richard Reeves wrote an article for American Heritage in 1996 titled, “I’m Sorry, Mr. President”, in which he apologized to Ford for a highly critical book he’d written in 1975 called A Ford, Not A Lincoln wherein he’d called Ford “slow”, “unimaginative”, and “not very articulate”. I say “if the shoe fits”... Reeves still held fast to his thesis that Alexander Haig had brokered the infamous Nixon pardon--but he now believed that it had been the right move. “Whatever his failings as a leader, and there were many, he was right about the big one,” Reeves wrote of Ford. Ford accepted the apology gracefully. “I was grateful that Reeves had the guts to apologize. Most journalists don’t do that. His article confirmed my belief that history would judge the pardon favorably. It just took time for people to get to that conclusion...a couple of decades.” Jerry, buddy, I have some bad news. It was Ford’s defense of Bill Clinton in 1998, as the President was mired in the Lewinsky affair, that endeared him to the left. While Clinton’s lie offended Ford’s sensibilities, he thought impeachment was totally uncalled for and a political mistake. The now-eighty-five-year-old Ford published an op-ed for the New York Times recommended that Clinton be “rebuked” by Congress, but not impeached. As for Clinton’s allies, they disagreed with Ford’s recommendation, but they fully agreed that the impeachment inquiry was a witch hunt designed to air Clinton’s boxer shorts out of a need for revenge. “Gerald Ford is a man who has been there, who understands a situation like this and understands the importance of deferring to Constitutional standards under all circumstances,” White House counsel Greg Craig told the Times. “President Ford is absolutely right: this kind of conduct simply doesn’t rise to the level of impeachable offense.” Republicans denounced Ford, calling him a turncoat. Republican leader Tom DeLay, then the House Majority Leader, was particularly vicious. “DeLay wrote me the nastiest letter imaginable. He was downright rude,” Ford recalled. “But I didn’t care. I thought the House impeachment was enough. If I could pardon Nixon then we could certainly censure--not impeach--Clinton in the Senate. It was the centrist position. And it’s what was right for the country.” This animosity between Ford and the radical right only grew when, in March of 1999, President Clinton awarded Ford the Presidential Medal of Freedom. When the fracas over the 2000 Presidential election was going on, Ford publicly worried about the state of American democracy--it hurt him deeply that the GOP might have won due to voter disenfranchisement. He took direct action, joining his friend and former President Jimmy Carter as co-chairs of the National Commission on Federal Election Reform. Over the years, Ford transcended the label of “accidental President”. He became a healer and an elder statesman. Honors poured in from all sides--the NCAA created an annual leadership award in his name, and the National Archives hosted a symposium to honor his public service achievements. Ford had finally achieved what he could not as President--he’d become beloved. But at age 93, time was running out. By 2006, Ford was the oldest President in history--he’d surpassed Ronald Reagan by four years. Time brings with it infirmity, however. Ford had been hospitalized twice in 2006 for heart issues, and on the day after Christmas, his time ran out. Gerald Ford died at his home in Rancho Mirage, California, on December 26, 2006. The cause was arteriosclerotic cerebrovascular disease--a thinning of the walls of the arteries that eventually leads to strokes. His funeral was no grand event--he would not have a horse-drawn procession through the Washington streets. There were simple ceremonies at St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church in Palm Desert, California, and at the National Cathedral, followed by a service in his hometown of Grand Rapids. His body was interred on the grounds of the Ford Presidential Library in Ann Arbor, and his wife, Betty, would join him there five years later in 2011. What to say about Gerald Ford, the accidental President? His time in office was 896 days--shorter than John F. Kennedy’s, even. History has spent decades whitewashing the force and impact of the Nixon pardon on the nation’s fabric. To this day, many respectable historians will tell you they believe it was the right thing to do. As I explained earlier, however, I don’t agree. I think the pardon did a great deal of harm to our institutions that has yet to be repaired. Still, I think the nation needed a personality like Ford’s after the inky darkness that was the Nixon era. The secrets and lies that pervaded the Nixon years were toxic--they spread throughout the Washington mood like a poison. Despite Ford’s record, despite his conservatism, and despite his at-best-above-average intellect, Ford was a balm for many Americans at a time when it was desperately needed. It makes me wonder what Ford could have been had he divested more of Nixon from his White House. --- I hope you guys have enjoyed reading this! Not my longest entry, but surprisingly one of the toughest to write. Fritz Coldcockin fucked around with this message at 05:24 on Jun 9, 2020 |
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Jun 9, 2020 04:42
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I've only gotten as far as the pardon debacle, but I just wanted to comment on thisFritz Coldcockin posted:I believe Ford was wrong. I do not know if there was a deal--my inclination is to say yes--but I believe Ford misunderstood the potential impact of a criminal trial on the nation. Seeing that no one, not even the President, is above the law would have done a great deal more to heal and unify the nation than giving Richard Nixon a free pass for the crimes he committed. The Nixon pardon is a watershed moment in American history. Had it gone the other way--indeed, if Ford had allowed Nixon to stand trial and not gotten involved--I think that instead of a slow slide into the Reagan and Bush years where Americans stopped trusting their government, the wounds of Vietnam and Watergate are instead healed. I do not know, for example, if Ronald Reagan is as effective in convincing Americans “government is the problem” if there is not already an endemic mistrust of government due to the events of the 60s and 70s, for example. I completely agree. My Dad and Granddad - both of whom were actually alive during the Ford years - seem to come out on the "Ford's pardon was wrong but probably helped heal the nation" side of the equation. Reading this now, I agree with your position. This is the first of many times in fairly recent memory that bastards got away with poo poo because power doesn't like holding power accountable (cough...Iran-Contra...cough). It not only set a bad precedent but it ripped the bandage off of an open wound, which probably isn't what Gerry intended, but that's the effect it seems to have had. Your posts on presidents are among the best on this forum, Fritz. Thanks for posting!
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Jun 9, 2020 16:11
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And of course there's Ford's greatest post presidency contribution (I know it was Dan Castellaneta doing Ford's voice) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0-AD3bFjF8 That whole exchange just kills me every time I see it. "Do you like football?"
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Jun 9, 2020 16:36
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F_Shit_Fitzgerald posted:I completely agree. My Dad and Granddad - both of whom were actually alive during the Ford years - seem to come out on the "Ford's pardon was wrong but probably helped heal the nation" side of the equation. Reading this now, I agree with your position. This is the first of many times in fairly recent memory that bastards got away with poo poo because power doesn't like holding power accountable (cough...Iran-Contra...cough). It not only set a bad precedent but it ripped the bandage off of an open wound, which probably isn't what Gerry intended, but that's the effect it seems to have had. Yeah, my folks were definitely among the "this is BS" school of thought then and now and I've always agreed with them. Even not counting just the lack of punishment for Nixon, given how many of the worst players from the era have come back to cause more damage and how much similar outright illegal crap we've seen from following Republican administrations it's obvious the takeaway lesson was "we're above consequences" to everybody inclined to follow Nixon's example. Reading your discussion does make me think it was less Ford being a bent bastard himself and more him being, in the current parlance, too concerned about  and adverse to the confrontation required to get the rot actually addressed. Which only got Democrats mad at him and Republicans turning on him anyway, so we see what trying to be "nice" over dealing with the problem gets you in politics.quote:Your posts on presidents are among the best on this forum, Fritz. Thanks for posting! Yeah, this is doing amazing things for my understanding of American history, particularly all the context you add for why certain things were done at the time. Always much appreciated! MadDogMike fucked around with this message at 20:00 on Jun 9, 2020 |
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Jun 9, 2020 19:53
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No one commented yet on Ford getting shot at twice in SEVENTEEN DAYS, very low energy, goons 
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Jun 9, 2020 23:49
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Not so much about Ford himself, but in the "everything intersects" category, Sarah Jane Moore was also on the edges of the Patty Hearst kidnapping. When Hearst was kidnapped, one of the demands of the kidnappers was that her father set up food banks to give away free food, to help pay for his "crimes against the people". He set up an organization called People in Need that did that, and she volunteered as a bookkeeper for it.
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Jun 10, 2020 00:20
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reading the whole ford thing. its interesting seeing the last shot of the GOP being socialy progressive or at least somewhat socially liberal. i always forget a sorta progressive wing of the GOP did exist after nixon and battle for the future of the party was happening for a bit before they were cast out by the evangelicals and reagan.
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Jun 10, 2020 00:26
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Dapper_Swindler posted:reading the whole ford thing. its interesting seeing the last shot of the GOP being socialy progressive or at least somewhat socially liberal. i always forget a sorta progressive wing of the GOP did exist after nixon and battle for the future of the party was happening for a bit before they were cast out by the evangelicals and reagan. Thanks to St. Ronnie. It feels like a lot of this country's current problems can be traced back to him.
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Jun 10, 2020 00:28
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Guys, uh, who would you like to hear about next? Toss out some names. I'm throwing open the floor.
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Jun 10, 2020 02:12
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F_Shit_Fitzgerald posted:Thanks to St. Ronnie. It feels like a lot of this country's current problems can be traced back to him. I'm sure it's been recommended before, but I'd like to recommend Rick Perlstein's trilogy, "Before the Storm", "Nixonland", and "The Invisible Bridge", which traces the birth and development of modern conservativism in America. (Although Perlstein admits that Trump doesn't fit in his theory at all).
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Jun 10, 2020 02:33
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Fritz Coldcockin posted:Guys, uh, who would you like to hear about next? Toss out some names. I'm throwing open the floor. We haven't done Teddy Roosevelt yet, have we? He's interesting, if sometimes exhausting.
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Jun 10, 2020 02:36
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Epicurius posted:I'm sure it's been recommended before, but I'd like to recommend Rick Perlstein's trilogy, "Before the Storm", "Nixonland", and "The Invisible Bridge", which traces the birth and development of modern conservativism in America. (Although Perlstein admits that Trump doesn't fit in his theory at all). I'm pretty sure someone has mentioned this series to me before - maybe it was you. In any case, I will definitely check it out! This thread has renewed my interest in presidential/political history. Fritz Coldcockin posted:Guys, uh, who would you like to hear about next? Toss out some names. I'm throwing open the floor. I'd be interested in one of the more "faceless" 19th century presidents, like Van Buren or maybe Garfield (if they haven't already been done).
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Jun 10, 2020 02:39
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F_Shit_Fitzgerald posted:I'm pretty sure someone has mentioned this series to me before - maybe it was you. In any case, I will definitely check it out! This thread has renewed my interest in presidential/political history. Haven't done either of those yet, now i'm wondering who the most "faceless" president that hasn't been done yet is. Possibly Benjamin Harrison because I'm pretty sure his only claim to fame is being the grandson of William Henry Harrison and his term being in between the two terms of Grover Cleveland. Hell, I can at least remember Rutherford B. Hayes because of the electoral shenanigans that got him into power. So yeah, my vote is for Harrision or one of the other less-noteworthy so we can have a bit of a cooldown. howe_sam posted:And of course there's Ford's greatest post presidency contribution (I know it was Dan Castellaneta doing Ford's voice) I also like how this gets a callback in the Frank Grimes episode. Angry_Ed fucked around with this message at 02:52 on Jun 10, 2020 |
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Jun 10, 2020 02:49
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Angry_Ed posted:Haven't done either of those yet, now i'm wondering who the most "faceless" president that hasn't been done yet is. Appropriately, I had forgotten Ben Harrison existed. His presidency, as far as I can remember, was pretty inconsequential (though maybe not as much as someone like Buchanan).
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Jun 10, 2020 02:56
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F_Shit_Fitzgerald posted:Appropriately, I had forgotten Ben Harrison existed. His presidency, as far as I can remember, was pretty inconsequential (though maybe not as much as someone like Buchanan). Buchanan's presidency was anything but inconsequential as we found out
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Jun 10, 2020 03:01
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Fritz Coldcockin posted:Guys, uh, who would you like to hear about next? Toss out some names. I'm throwing open the floor. I vote for something different: John Hanson. Alternately, if that's no good, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKDjis1fg8E Fritz Coldcockin posted:No one commented yet on Ford getting shot at twice in SEVENTEEN DAYS, very low energy, goons You've done an excellent job laying out why so many people would want to do it! Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 05:29 on Jun 10, 2020 |
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Jun 10, 2020 03:03
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Voting for Jackson.
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Jun 10, 2020 08:26
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Gonna go with Cleveland this time.
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Jun 10, 2020 09:15
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