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Is anybodyyyyyyyy theeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee Does anybodyyyyyyyy caaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrreeeeeeeeeeeeeee
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Apr 2, 2020 02:02
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Ogle's speech was awesome. That is a masterclass right there in political attack.
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Apr 2, 2020 04:42
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So, uh, I'll leave it up to y'all if you want to see any more of these, I guess. Just call out some names.
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Apr 4, 2020 17:06
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Of course! I don't post much but I always enjoy these long write ups. Has Warren Harding been done yet? I'd be interested in Mr. Teapot Dome if others were up for it. e: If not Harding, I'd still be interested in hearing about one of the relatively "anonymous" 19th century presidents like Van Buren, Fillmore, Buchanan, etc. F_Shit_Fitzgerald fucked around with this message at 17:23 on Apr 4, 2020 |
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Apr 4, 2020 17:17
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F_Shit_Fitzgerald posted:Of course! I don't post much but I always enjoy these long write ups. Harding's been done; check the OP if you want a direct link to the entries I wrote on him. They're pretty good, if I do say so myself. Fillmore and Buchanan were covered by myself and axeil, respectively.
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Apr 4, 2020 17:59
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Fritz Coldcockin posted:Harding's been done; check the OP if you want a direct link to the entries I wrote on him. They're pretty good, if I do say so myself. Fillmore and Buchanan were covered by myself and axeil, respectively. Ah. gotcha. I didn't think to look at the OP. Most of the presidents I would have suggested have already been done, but thanks for your and Axeil's work!
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Apr 4, 2020 18:13
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Fritz Coldcockin posted:Harding's been done; check the OP if you want a direct link to the entries I wrote on him. They're pretty good, if I do say so myself. Fillmore and Buchanan were covered by myself and axeil, respectively. Teddy please!
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Apr 4, 2020 18:18
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Yeah unfortunately I don't have a lot to comment most of the time aside from the always-present "great work". As for the next one, a lot of our early presidents are still not touched-upon so why don't we finally talk about Andrew Jackson
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Apr 4, 2020 18:26
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Looking thru the OP & unless it's behind on its update, I want somebody modern. How 'bout our 38th President
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Apr 4, 2020 18:29
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So is this just the absolute best time to be a James Buchanan fan? Because by the end of the month, I can see him only being the second worst president in US history.
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Apr 4, 2020 21:17
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it's been fascinating to read the bios here and realize how worthless antebellum presidents were in addressing slavery and how they exacerbated the problem at the same time with Manifest Destiny and expansionism then again, this was when the legislature was more powerful than the executive
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Apr 4, 2020 21:23
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Android Apocalypse posted:Looking thru the OP & unless it's behind on its update, I want somebody modern. How 'bout our 38th President gerald ford was a male model, in 1942 he sat for this picture with his girlfriend at the time, it became a cover of Cosmopolitan magazine  Shrecknet posted:So is this just the absolute best time to be a James Buchanan fan? Because by the end of the month, I can see him only being the second worst president in US history. no time is ever a good time for a james buchanan fan
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Apr 5, 2020 00:10
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Android Apocalypse posted:Looking thru the OP & unless it's behind on its update, I want somebody modern. How 'bout our 38th President I'd be down for Gerry Ford!
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Apr 5, 2020 00:45
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I would love to get some of them factoids about that there Gerald Ford
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Apr 5, 2020 15:52
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I'm seeing a fairly strong desire for Gerald Ford, which is perhaps the only time in history that statement has ever been uttered. All in favor?
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Apr 5, 2020 23:40
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Sure, let's talk Ford
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Apr 5, 2020 23:44
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Fo Mo Co. I vote we do Jackson absolutely last, entirely out of spite. Ford's also got some...interesting contextual entailments for the present, all on his own.
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Apr 6, 2020 00:39
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If this thread goes through all presidents, I think  has to be last. I mean, there is a chance he'll still be president before we get through the rest of the ones on the list, and it wouldn't be right to exclude whatever disasters he's got lined up for us next.
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Apr 6, 2020 01:59
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Android Apocalypse posted:If this thread goes through all presidents, I think Nope. Pissboy and Obama are exempt; I would like to do one on Obama but I know how D&D feels about him as a whole and I don't want to drag USPOL/CSPAM bullshit into this thread, and Donald Trump makes me so loving angry when I even THINK about him that I would break things while writing about him.
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Apr 6, 2020 02:01
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Ford is the only president we've had that wasn't elected to office, since he was never on a ticket. Plus he hated Reagan so for how bad he is maybe he won't make me as angry as the Reagan entry.
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Apr 6, 2020 02:14
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Fritz Coldcockin posted:Nope. Pissboy and Obama are exempt; I would like to do one on Obama but I know how D&D feels about him as a whole and I don't want to drag USPOL/CSPAM bullshit into this thread, and Donald Trump makes me so loving angry when I even THINK about him that I would break things while writing about him. id say do trump if he loses in november.
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Apr 6, 2020 02:20
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Fritz Coldcockin posted:Nope. Pissboy and Obama are exempt; I would like to do one on Obama but I know how D&D feels about him as a whole and I don't want to drag USPOL/CSPAM bullshit into this thread, and Donald Trump makes me so loving angry when I even THINK about him that I would break things while writing about him. I think you should do Obama eventually. I mean, pretty sure we all know how D&D feels about W. Bush and Reagen also and yet they've got entries.
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Apr 6, 2020 09:21
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Fritz Coldcockin posted:Nope. Pissboy and Obama are exempt; I would like to do one on Obama but I know how D&D feels about him as a whole and I don't want to drag USPOL/CSPAM bullshit into this thread, a You soft if you don't do one on Obama.
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Apr 6, 2020 12:50
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Orange Devil posted:I think you should do Obama eventually. I mean, pretty sure we all know how D&D feels about W. Bush and Reagen also and yet they've got entries. I like him; D&D hates him. That's a recipe for disaster. W and Ronnie, by contrast, are a) long enough ago that maybe not everyone remembers everything from their time in office and b) universally hated.
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Apr 6, 2020 13:26
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I mean, I simultaneously believe he was one of the better American post WW2 presidents (behind just Carter?) and also a despicable human being. That should give you an idea what I think about the rest of these precious presidents of yours and yet I still greatly appreciate every bio you do.
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Apr 6, 2020 13:33
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Orange Devil posted:I mean, I simultaneously believe he was one of the better American post WW2 presidents (behind just Carter?) and also a despicable human being. That should give you an idea what I think about the rest of these precious presidents of yours and yet I still greatly appreciate every bio you do. Fitting red text.
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Apr 6, 2020 13:59
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i think it's fine if there's no attempt to do any more living presidents because any profile on obama would completely blow up this otherwise historically-focused thread with circular contemporary slapfighting, which is the purpose of the majority of other threads in d&d if anyone else wants to chum those waters they're free to do so obviously without badgering fritz to write one
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Apr 6, 2020 16:44
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Then Gerald "Leslie" Ford it is. I'll get to work.
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Apr 7, 2020 14:24
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Fritz Coldcockin posted:Then Gerald "Leslie" Ford it is. I'll get to work. These have been great, sorry if I haven't mentioned that enough.
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Apr 7, 2020 14:37
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Fritz Coldcockin posted:I like him; D&D hates him. That's a recipe for disaster. W and Ronnie, by contrast, are a) long enough ago that maybe not everyone remembers everything from their time in office and b) universally hated. I personally hold a lot of anger myself for the presidency of Barack Obama, but I still think you should eventually write him up. The worst the goons can do is shout at you. That said, I'm much looking forward to the Ford write-up.
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Apr 13, 2020 20:49
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Is there any part of American history that you guys don't hate? Jeez. Y'all making me not want to read more us history books about antebellum
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Apr 14, 2020 06:26
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I really enjoy history, even though a large chunk of it is a long succession of tales of terrible people doing even more terrible things to other people, many of whom are also terrible. American history is not unique in this, as indeed most things American aren't, and it'd be really, really good if Americans would start to understand that.
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Apr 14, 2020 11:39
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This thread alone is worth like 5 sub fees to SA. Thanks for these awesome posts, they have materially improved my teaching and my own knowledge. BTW since this is a thread about Presidents I feel compelled to say, "gently caress Andrew Johnson."
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Apr 14, 2020 15:21
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I started reading this whole thread about a day ago and got to a few pages back and realized I wrote my own writeup and loving forgot about it. This thread owns
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Apr 22, 2020 14:42
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Saw this thread get bumped back when WHH update was confirmed, and have read through it in the following days. Excellent work, Fritz Coldcokin. I especially appreciated the bit where it turned out Reagan more or less lied about the protests he was involved in. That was just perfect.
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May 6, 2020 21:39
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Gerald Rudolph Ford, 38th President of the United States It was one of the darkest, strangest times in American politics. Americans’ trust in their government was at an all-time low. We had just witnessed the darkest, seamiest underbelly politics had to offer--President Richard Milhous Nixon had ordered and orchestrated a cover-up of unimaginable proportions to hide the fact that his people had attempted to electronically eavesdrop on the opposition. He’d been caught, and to avoid an almost certain impeachment and conviction, he was resigning the Presidency. As if that wasn’t enough, Nixon had gone from a crushing landslide victory in 1972 to presiding over an administration that was in utter chaos. Aides and associates were resigning or being indicted left and right. It was easy for the casual observer to lose count of the number of people who were about to be sent up the river. We, as Americans, were sentenced to the worst fate of all--to watch as horrified observers as these people we trusted to lead us were revealed as liars, cheats, and criminals. It was into this turmoil that our next subject stepped--a peculiar man who had led a fairly ordinary political life until now. Gerald Ford was, in many ways, a man much in the mold of previous subjects William McKinley and Warren Harding, personality-wise. To many Americans, he represented a breath of fresh air after the Nixon years. His sunny disposition and his long tenure in the House of Representatives had earned him many friends on both sides of the aisle. When Nixon’s Vice President, Spiro Agnew, resigned in late 1973, Ford ascended to the Vice Presidency--and then, unbelievably, to the Presidency, without ever earning a single vote in a national election. It’s why, despite his utter unremarkability, Ford makes for a fascinating subject--he served two years as President without ever being elected to the job. How, you might wonder? Well, let’s talk about that. Made In Detroit (Not Really)  Ford’s beginnings are a lot like Bill Clinton’s. For one, he was born into a family with an alcoholic, abusive father, and two, when his mother finally had enough and fled to Michigan to raise him herself, he changed his name. Wait, what? Yes! Gerald Ford was born Leslie Lynch King, Jr. on July 14, 1913, in Omaha, Nebraska. His family was fairly well-to-do--his rich father, Leslie King Sr., had married 19-year-old Dorothy Ayer Gardner the previous year, and the family’s first home was a large, ornate Victorian house. The marriage didn’t last long. Two weeks after young Leslie Jr. was born, his father flew into another drunken rage, brandishing a knife and threatening to kill both Dorothy and the baby. This was just the latest incident in a pattern--Ford’s mother would recount later that her ex-husband would hit her at the slightest provocation. In response, Dorothy packed up her belongings, took her son, and fled Omaha one afternoon. Personally, in an age where spousal battery was viewed as “normal”, I commend her for having the courage to do so. With young Leslie in tow, Dorothy moved back into her parents’ house in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Grand Rapids was an up-and-coming city at the time--it had a burgeoning furniture manufacturing industry, and it was an exceedingly bucolic place to grow up, according to historian and Ford biographer Douglas Brinkley. It had “rows of neat houses tucked amid rolling hills of surrounding farmland,” Brinkley writes. It was fairly immigrant-heavy too--half the local population were first-generation Dutch, another quarter was Polish. Among the residents of Grand Rapids was a paint salesman with a tenth-grade education named Gerald Rudolf Ford. He was twenty-five, and despite his name, he bore no relation to the famous automaker whose name was stamped across all of Michigan at the time. Ford wasn’t educated, and he had very little money, but he had everything that Leslie King didn’t--he was honest, he had a deep-seated work ethic, and he was exceedingly kind to the young divorcee he met at an Episcopalian church social. Indeed, Dorothy Gardner King recognized Ford’s merits immediately, and Ford was not put off by the fact that she was divorced with a son. The couple were married on February 1, 1917, when young Leslie Jr. was three, and they settled into a loving home. Ford never adopted his stepson. Not officially anyway. Dorothy thought it would hurt her chances of procuring child support from Leslie King. What they did do, however, was informally rename him Gerald Rudolf Ford, Jr (Ford would not have it officially changed until 1935--that was when he altered the spelling of his middle name to “Rudolph” to give it a less German look). This kind of fuckery with his name would have driven the birther crowd WILD if Ford was running for office now. Ford’s mother and stepfather waited until Jerry was twelve to tell him he had a different biological father, but Ford was still stunned when Leslie King showed up at the hamburger joint across from Ford’s high school where he worked part-time. King invited his son to lunch and Ford accepted, but the encounter did not cause Ford to warm to his long-lost father. Indeed, it left him bitter at King’s wealth and long absence. King did not seem at all inclined towards taking a more active role in his son’s life--so I am mystified as to why he bothered looking Ford up at all. The revelation of his true parentage didn’t change much. By seventeen, Ford had bonded with Ford Sr., the man he viewed as his “real” father. The elder Ford had gone into business for himself by this point, and his stepson admired the way his adoptive father managed his affairs, always forgoing the quick buck in favor of steady progress towards measured financial success. Ford Sr. and Dorothy spent a great deal of time giving back to their community, too--the couple helped to establish a community center in one of Grand Rapids’ racially mixed, most disadvantaged neighborhoods. Grand Rapids was growing into that very prototypically “American” town. When it celebrated its centennial in 1926, the city had plenty to be proud of--first-rate public education, regular air service to Detroit, four big movie theaters, hundreds of grocery stores, a low tax rate, and a ranking as the number-one tree city in America. Homes displayed the Stars and Stripes year round, and every lawn was manicured. Yes, Gerald Ford grew up in a real-life Pleasantville, America. By the late 1920s, the Ford household had grown. Jerry and his half brothers, like most American kids, divided their time among schoolwork, chores, and family fun. Indeed, Ford Sr. started the Ford Paint & Varnish Company with a partner and moved his family into a big new house in East Grand Rapids--but the prosperity was short-lived. The Depression destroyed his new venture and wiped out the family’s savings. The Fords abandoned their new house for cheaper quarters...but it is a tribute to the luck and work ethic of Dorothy and Gerald Ford Sr. that no one in the family ever went to bed hungry. Honestly, Ford’s upbringing, to me, rings as almost TOO idyllic. SOMETHING had to happen to him, for chrissakes. Footbaw!  Jerry Ford was, in many ways, the same kind of high school student that he was a politician--good, not great. Well-liked by his peers, Ford was charming and agreeable--and arguably more into cars than girls. Indeed, he once told a classmate, “Everybody had more good things about them than bad things. If you accentuate the good things in dealing with a person, you can like him even though he or she had some bad qualities. If you have that attitude, you never hate anybody.” Much of the highs of his teenage life, however, came in one arena: football. Indeed, he played center on offense and linebacker on defense for his South High School team. In 1930, South High would win the state championship, and Jerry was named to both the all-city and all-state squads. Big but deceptively quick, Ford had a nose for the ball, and years later, many of the lessons he learned on the football field he’d use again in politics. As we all know, being a star athlete opens up way more doors than it should. It got Ford invitations to join Harvard, Northwestern, and Michigan State, but it was the University of Michigan that won Jerry’s favor when a team of alumni visited his high school with a scholarship offer in tow. Michigan coach Harry Kipke got Ford a part-time gig at Ann Arbor’s University Hospital to help him scrape through the lean Depression years, and the Michigan Wolverines went unbeaten and took the Big Ten championships in both 1932 and 1933. Ford rode the bench for those two years and didn’t make first-string till he was a senior. Though he was named the team MVP in 1934, the somewhat talent-starved Wolverines lost seven of eight games that year. The one game they did win, however, was in a rather contentious, racially-charged matchup against Georgia Tech. See, Tech had declared that they wouldn’t take the field against the Wolverines because Michigan’s star wide receiver, Willis Ward, was *gasp* black. Yes, I know. In a display of stunning cowardice, Michigan’s administrators agreed to withdraw Ward from the lineup for the game. As for Ford, he grappled with whether to withdraw from the game himself--but decided doing so would hurt the team even more. Besides, he had a much more poignant punishment in mind. When one of the Georgia Tech linemen began to taunt the Michigan offense over their “missing n***er”, Ford and one of his fellow Michigan offensive linemen blocked him so savagely on the next play that he was taken off the field on a stretcher.  . Michigan won the game, 9-2, by the way.The MVP he won in his senior year earned Ford a spot in the annual East-West Shrine Game in San Francisco on New Year’s Day 1935, then an even more coveted spot in the College All-Star Game eight months later, played against the Chicago Bears at Soldier Field. The Bears won, 5-2--but Ford played well enough to win contract offers from two of the Bears’ division rivals, the Green Bay Packers and the Detroit Lions. Both teams offered him $200 a game for the upcoming 14-game season. But Ford had other ambitions in mind. Being an athlete wasn’t a meal ticket in those days, and Ford was a solid enough student to do what he really wanted to do--go to law school. “It was hard to walk away from the NFL,” Ford recalled later. “But my ambition was to go to law school. Sometimes I’d daydream about how my life would have turned out differently if I had said ‘yes’ to the Lions or Packers.” You know what? Good for him. Law School, War, And Congress  Despite having only a B average, Ford had high hopes indeed--he wanted to get into Yale Law. He’d graduated with a degree in economics and political science from Michigan, and he moved east to become boxing coach AND an assistant football coach at Yale, in an attempt to wear down the administration into taking him. They did, as a student, in 1938, and Ford never gave them cause to regret their decision. He never did make for an exceptional student, however, merely a good one. One of his professors, Eugene Rostow, recalled him as “a very solid, straightforward, decent sort of bird of moderate ability.” I can’t tell if this is a backhanded compliment or just a compliment. Maybe that’s the point? Ford did graduate in the top third of his class, however, and he got his highest grade at Yale in the legal ethics course. There’s a joke in here somewhere about the Nixon pardon; I just can’t quite find it. Fun fact about Jerry: he was a model! Yes, while at Yale, he dated an aspiring model named Phyllis Brown--and when she was accepted as a client by a New York modeling agency, Ford posed in ski clothes next to her in seventeen photographs that were splashed across the pages of Look magazine in March 1940. Indeed, the couple kept this up for two years--but Jerry’s modeling career ended when he broke up with Phyllis. His last modeling gig was the cover of Cosmopolitan--he and his soon-to-be-ex were posed on the cover, with Jerry in a sailor’s uniform. Here it is, in fact:  Doesn’t he look slick as hell!  So you might be wondering how on Earth Gerald Ford, this real-life Moose Mason (read an Archie comic sometime), got from Pleasantville High jock to the Oval Office. After all, I’ve barely even mentioned politics. Well, you should know that Jerry grew up a Republican. Hell, for the first half of the 20th century, Michigan was pretty reliably GOP--and in Grand Rapids, being a Republican was practically a birthright. Folks grew up with Republican parents and just sorta became Republicans by default. Long before Jerry Ford was even old enough to understand politics or recognize the leaders of the two main political parties in America, he considered himself a diehard Republican. You know, kinda like now, except diehards take pride in the fact that they’re loving stupid. Michigan’s leading political figures were its Senators when Ford was growing up--namely, Sen. James Couzens and Sen. Arthur Vandenberg. Couzens had made a massive fortune as a founding partner in the Ford Motor Company, but he was irascible and very politically unpredictable. He had, for example, been a stalwart supporter of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, which had made his name mud among much of the GOP. Vandenberg you might recognize from past biographies--he’s famous for being one of the leading GOP voices against Roosevelt’s court-packing plan, mostly because he was the guy who gave the speech with that line “This is more power than a good man should want or a bad man should have.” Ford remained a Republican all through high school and college, and when he heard Republican Presidential candidate Wendell Willkie speak at a New York City rally in 1940, he immediately identified with the stolid, moderate businessman from Indiana. Oddly enough, it was the rather apolitical Willkie who informed much of Ford’s early politics. Indeed, Willkie impressed Ford enough that Ford decided he wanted to go to work in Michigan for him--and the best way to do that was through this man.  Apologies for the watermark. Anyway, Frank McKay ruled over a huge portion of western Michigan politics from a penthouse in a Grand Rapids office building. He’d built his political fiefdom on real estate, banking, and insurance, and he exerted an iron-fisted control over nearly every patronage job in his Congressional district, the Michigan 5th, plus much of the state’s most lucrative public contracts. McKay called himself “a businessman first and a politician second”, but that was crap; he held the keys to the kingdom if you wanted to work for a Republican politician in Michigan. Well, Ford went to see McKay...but after a four-hour wait outside his office, McKay barely spared him three minutes before showing him the door. “Boy, was I mad,” Ford recalled later. Ford took McKay’s rude reception personally, even though it probably was not meant as such--and later, he’d use this slight as the impetus for a personal crusade to topple McKay from his throne. For now, however, he could only watch and learn from the doings at the 1940 Republican National Convention. Willkie and Sen. Robert Taft (R-OH) were the two leading contenders, but Willkie was the underdog until none other than Frank McKay threw his support to Willkie on the seventh ballot. The price? Control of every patronage job in Michigan, not just the 5th District. Yikes. Well, that stuck in Jerry Ford’s craw, to be sure. He became determined to topple McKay’s machine once and for all. He passed the Michigan bar exam and set up a law practice in Grand Rapids with a frat brother from college, Philip Buchen, and he also began meeting with other Republicans that were intent on overturning the status quo in western Michigan politics. They called themselves “the Home Front”. Then World War II happened. Ford was a healthy young man in his late twenties; there was no way he was going to avoid it. He joined the U.S. Naval Reserve in 1942, received a commission as an ensign and went to Annapolis, where he was ordered to join a physical training unit headed by former heavyweight boxing champ Gene Tunney. Being a physical fitness specialist meant that you sat behind a desk and impressed upon other recruits the importance of conditioning, but that wasn’t enough for Jerry. He wanted to see action. He was transferred, finally, to Norfolk, VA, where he was promoted to lieutenant and placed on the newly-commissioned aircraft carrier USS Monterey. Ford received gunnery training at Norfolk, which made him an ideal candidate to oversee the anti-aircraft gunnery crew on the ship’s fantail deck. Ford also saw combat. In October 1943, the Monterey headed out from San Diego to join Admiral William “Bull” Halsey’s Third Fleet. Planes from the Monterey’s deck bombed Japanese troops on Gilbert Island for nearly a month. Ford was gunnery chief when the ship sank a Japanese cruiser and destroyer, too. Worse than the Japanese, though, was the weather. A typhoon hit the fleet just off the Phillippine coast in December 1944, and nearly 800 sailors died--including six from the Monterey. Ford himself nearly died--he was almost washed overboard in the sixty-knot winds. He and the hastily-arranged bucket brigade donned gas masks and worked to put out fires, but the damage was done. The Monterey was dry docked for repairs and eventually mothballed. For his service, Ford was promoted to lieutenant commander before he was discharged--he’d spend the rest of the war on land, though. The war spawned an entire generation of leaders--Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter. Back home, Ford’s friends hadn’t been idle. Remember that little cabal they formed before the war? Well, now they felt they finally had a shot at wresting the Kent County Republican Party out of the hands of Frank McKay’s machine. To do it, though, they’d need someone popular, respected, and squeaky-clean personally to put forward for county chairman. No, the answer’s not what you think. In most of these stories, it ends up being the man himself--but this time, it wasn’t possible. Ford was still on active duty, so his stepfather, Gerald Ford Sr., was the candidate the Home Front thought of. He was supportive of their efforts and he was head of the county’s Office of Civil Defense, so he was already a well-known figure around the region. Unfortunately, Ford Sr. said no. The following Sunday, however, one of the Home Front’s officers got a call from Ford Sr.. He’d just gotten home from church, and in the mail was a letter from his stepson. The old man read parts of it over the phone. “Dad,” Jerry had written, “if the Home Front ever asks you to do something, don’t turn them down. I’m going to get into this thing when I get back from service and I’ll take your place. So don’t turn them down.” That was enough for Ford Sr.. He told the Home Front that he’d stand for county chairman. He won, but it barely dented the McKay machine. And despite being subjected to a barrage of investigations for corruption in the Michigan statehouse, McKay still had firm control over the man who represented the Michigan 5th District in Congress.  Republican Congressman Bartel Jonkman (I know) had started his career, like Ford and Vandenberg, as an isolationist--but unlike them, World War II had not changed him. He advocated, foolishly, for the immediate withdrawal of American troops and money as soon as hostilities had ceased. Jonkman had voted against the Marshall Plan and every other European recovery program, while most other Michigan Republicans had voted for them. He was a target ripe for taking down. Jonkman was no populist, either--he never came back to his district to meet with constituents. He considered his seat safe--after all, he was McKay’s man, and McKay controlled the machine back home. The Home Front, however...they had other ideas, and they had the perfect candidate to push through McKay’s line in young Gerald Ford. For his part, Ford had returned to practicing law when he got home to Grand Rapids--he and his friend, Philip Buchen, had joined a larger and more well-regarded firm. In addition to working on his golf game, Ford became a strident advocate for veterans--forming a housing association devoted to developing affordable lodging for returning servicemen who had come home and found themselves without jobs. Bolstered by his colleagues’ contempt for Jonkman and worried about Jonkman’s aggressive isolationist worldview, Ford announced his candidacy for the Fifth District’s Republican primary on June 17, 1948. Not many observers gave him a chance. McKay’s grip on Michigan politics was still very strong, after all. Ford wasn’t to be deterred, however. He assembled a team of fellow Home Fronters around him, fashioned a campaign platform, and worked up game plans for how to promote himself to the people of the Fifth District. Jerry Ford decided he was gonna campaign more or less how he’d lived his life up until now--by making friends. Indeed, Ford made some very powerful ones, including Senator Vandenberg himself. Vandenberg met with Ford in private to offer his encouragement--after all, Ford’s service in the military had made him an internationalist, and Ford knew that Vandenberg’s popularity stemmed from his ability to read the pulse of Michigan’s voters. For his part, Vandenberg didn’t think Ford would win, so he had to keep his endorsement of the young Navy man secret--after all, given that Michigan Democrats were so weak that a Republican primary victory was essentially a general election victory, Ford’s quixotic efforts would just result in Vandenberg having to deal with Frank McKay’s handpicked mouthpiece once more. But Jerry had one big advantage: he was young, and he acted like it. Ford went anywhere and everywhere to shake hands with Fifth District voters, while Congressman Jonkman made only a couple efforts to meet constituents. Most voters’ impression of Ford was that he did not seem charismatic--but he gave off a very authentic impression. His combination of athlete’s backslapping combined with nice-guy good manners appealed to voters--remember, like I said, the guy was Moose Mason. It worked because it was the truth. Ford spoke well, but he listened even better, and voters in the Fifth picked up on that. He gave his full attention to any voter who took the time to address him. Well, you know how this story goes. Old Jerry Ford whipped his incumbent rival in September’s primary, beating Jonkman by over 10,000 votes in a race that only saw less than 40,000 votes cast. It began a 30-year political career wherein he’d lose only once. Incidentally, that wasn’t the only victory Jerry celebrated in 1948--he’d fallen in love.  Elizabeth Ann Bloomer Warren was a 27-year-old divorcee and a fashion coordinator at a local Grand Rapids department store. Like Jerry, she’d done some modeling in New York City and had spent some time as a professional dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company. “Betty just lit me up,” Ford recalled. “She touched me in a way no other woman ever could. She made me laugh and also feel protective of her.” TMI, Jerry....TMI. Man Of The House  Over the New Year holiday weekend in 1949, Gerald Ford arrived in Washington D.C., eager to set up his new office. He and his administrative aide, John Milanowski, showed up at the House Office Building in overalls--and they were initially barred from entering by the Capitol Police. “It’s all right, Officer,” Milanowski said. “He’s the new Congressman from Grand Rapids.” Indeed, sandy-haired and still built like a linebacker at 35 years of age, with his unhurried Midwestern manner, Gerald Ford seemed a bit unsuited for the nation’s capital. Truthfully, though, he was no less ambitious than any of his peers in the new 81st Congress. Behind the humble, nice-guy demeanor, Ford hid a no-nonsense, businesslike attitude. Milanowski remembered that Ford, from the jump, had designs on a leadership position. “We talked about how nice it would be for Jerry to be Speaker someday,” he recalled. The Speakership was no small thing, as we all know. It’s where all the patronage and power lies in the House. The Congressman who holds the Speakership directs and oversees debates, shepherds through legislations, sways committee appointments, and is second in line to the Presidency itself. Ford’s ambition, if anything, was eclipsed by some of the other people to join him in Congress in 1949--a young Massachusetts Congressman named John Fitzgerald Kennedy was, at 29, already dreaming Presidential dreams. He had the suite across the corridor from Ford’s. “The net result was that Jack Kennedy and I became good friends because we walked back and forth from our offices to the House chamber when the House bell rang,” Ford remembered. “We were pals. I was not familiar with his health problems, but I had many suspicions about his philandering. That was none of my business.” Another ambitious Congressman made a point of introducing himself to Ford right from the off--directly after Ford took his oath of office. “I’m Dick Nixon, from California,” Richard Milhous Nixon said as he shook Ford’s hand. “I heard about your big win in Michigan, and I wanted to say hello and welcome you to the House.” Weird how history intersects with itself, isn’t it? Nixon and Ford, strangely enough, became close. They were both Republicans and Navy veterans, and they naturally became political allies as well. “Incidentally, if I had been a sportswriter during the time you played center for Michigan,” Nixon told Ford in 1994, just months before his death, “you would have been on my All-American football team.” Nixon really had no idea how to relate to people. It was a hell of a time to be a Congressman in the United States. We were coming down off of World War II, the death of Franklin Roosevelt and the ascension of Harry Truman, and the rise of Joe McCarthy and HUAC. Ford remembered sitting in the House chamber and watching General Douglas MacArthur deliver his “Old Soldiers Never Die” speech, and he remembered seeing Richard Nixon vigorously pursue treason charges against Alger Hiss. “Both moments stayed with me in a very real sense for very real reasons,” Ford recalled. quote:General MacArthur, after all, had led our efforts in the Pacific where I served during World War II. And Dick Nixon was my close friend and there he was creating a national ruckus by prosecuting Hiss. In MacArthur’s case I was impressed by the power of oratory. In Dick’s case it was more the power of dogged diligence. One could argue in Nixon’s case it was also the power of obsessive hatred for his target. So what committees would Ford serve on? Well, if he wanted to be Speaker, he noted that three past Speakers--and, indeed, President James Garfield--had all served on the House Appropriations Committee. These guys, for the uninitiated, control federal purse strings--so they are one of the most powerful committees in the House. Ford also knew that finance tended to bore his flashier, more flamboyant colleagues that he knew would be his rivals in the years to come--so he went out of his way to befriend the chairman, Rep. Clarence Cannon (D-NY) and the ranking member, Rep. John Taber (R-NY). Openings on the Appropriations Committee, however, were rare. They still are. Most freshmen didn’t waste their time. To get on the committee, a Congressman would have to be in the right place at the right time--most committee members tended to keep their seats because their constituents understood that a seat on the Appropriations Committee meant lots of government cheese back home. But Jerry Ford wasn’t just anyone, and Fortune decided to smile on him. In 1950, one of the Appropriations Committee’s Republicans--a man from Michigan, incidentally, resigned to run for the United States Senate. John Taber, the ranking member, filled the seat with none other than young Gerald Ford. This, guys, is a HUGE get for a Congressman who hasn’t even completed his first term. Ford took his new gig very seriously--his votes were bloodless. Even if the money would go to help the Navy, Michigan, or even Grand Rapids specifically, he’d vote against it if he felt it was unnecessary. For Ford, the Appropriations Committee gave him an ideal vantage point to learn the inner parliamentary workings of the House, as well as the flow of money and power through the chamber. By the time Ford finished his first full term on the committee--which also happened to be the end of his second term in office--he knew more about how the House was wired than many of his colleagues. Indeed, he had ingratiated himself so much in the Republican caucus that he was asked by the Michigan GOP to mount a campaign for Senate in 1952--Arthur Vandenberg had died the previous year and a Democrat had been appointed to the seat. Ford refused--he felt his career in the House was already on a good track to leadership and he saw no reason to start over in the Senate. We’re well aware, of course, of the events of 1952--I’ve covered them twice, once in my Nixon bio and once in my Eisenhower bio. What I did not mention, however, was that even as Richard Nixon left the House for the Vice Presidency, Republicans squeaked into the majority in both Houses--by one seat in the Senate and by four in the House, and Rep. Joseph Martin (R-MA) became Speaker. Of course, the reason I get to tell you all this is that his reign was short--two years later, Democrats retook both chambers. By the end of the 50s, the junior members of the House felt that the older leadership had failed them--that the Eisenhower Presidency had done nothing to reign in the excesses left by Roosevelt’s New Deal, and they didn’t feel comfortable leaving their future in the hands of people they viewed as weak and feckless. Consequently, the younger House members in the GOP mounted something like a coup against their leaders, led by Rep. Charles Halleck (R-IN). Halleck was relatively young--fifty-seven--but it became clear very quickly that Minority Leader Martin was running out of friends, as was evidenced by a head count that showed Halleck only a few votes short of toppling him. Desperate, Martin appealed to three of the key swing votes--one of which was Gerald Ford himself. Two of them were Halleck allies, but while one elected to stand by Martin in a leadership fight, Ford did not. He and the other holdout encouraged Halleck to go forward with the coup--which succeeded. Martin lost his bid for Minority Leader. That’s some Game of Thrones poo poo right there. In the 1960 election, the favorite for the GOP Presidential nomination was almost certainly Vice President Richard Nixon. Almost immediately, however, Nixon ran into problems. He lacked the inherent trustworthiness Eisenhower enjoyed with voters--which hurt him, badly, even as he tried to run as an “Eisenhower Republican”. The White House’s tepid support of him didn’t help either. Finally, when Nixon cut a deal with New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, his only possible competition for the nomination, that he’d make changes to the platform in exchange for “Rocky’s” support at the convention, conservatives threw a hissy fit. So how to bridge the divide? Well, Nixon had an idea--he floated his old friend from the House, Gerald Ford, as a possible vice presidential candidate. After all, Ford’s voting record showed him to be a reliably firm conservative. He’d voted against what he viewed as overly-costly programs for farming, education, housing, and even the military on some occasions. He had been an enthusiastic backer of Ike’s 1956 Federal Aid Highway Act, what with him being from Michigan and all. He favored progressive civil rights legislation, but he was suspicious of organized labor. This odd mix of politics--some liberal, some conservative--made Gerald Ford the ideal “Eisenhower Republican” for the moment. Alas, it was not to be. Despite arriving at the convention in Chicago that year as the favorite, Nixon calculated that Ford would be more use to him if he remained in House leadership. Plus, Nixon felt that he could in fact take the conservatives for granted--after all, who else were they gonna vote for? Kennedy? Nixon instead selected Boston Brahmin and former Senator Henry Cabot Lodge for the second spot, as we all know. Heh. Anyway, instead of the VP spot, Ford was instead enlisted by the campaign to follow Kennedy around on the trail, acting as one of the Nixon folks’ spin doctors to defend the GOP platform against the Kennedy campaign’s attacks. He was disappointed that Nixon didn’t win in November, but he didn’t stop liking and admiring John Kennedy--indeed, he’d spend much of Kennedy’s term working with him on foreign affairs. “To know Jack Kennedy, as I did, was to understand the true meaning of the word courage,” Ford remembered. “Physical pain was an inseparable part of his life, but he never surrendered to it.” As always, though, Ford’s interest in the Presidential cycle was its effect on the makeup of the House. Through the years, he’d track the chamber’s makeup--the number of seats gained, held, and lost--like a major-league baseball manager monitoring his ace’s pitch count. After the 1958 disaster--in which Republicans lost 15 (!) seats in the Senate and 48 in the House, Ford was pleased that in 1960, despite Kennedy’s victory, they picked up 2 Senate seats and 20 House seats. That was offset, however, by a disappointing 1962--when despite being the party out of power, the GOP lost two Senate seats and only gained one House seat. Younger House Republicans at this point felt that this new regime of leadership was no better than the previous one--too antagonistic and STILL ineffective. In response, another cadre of younger Republicans was formed to challenge the House leadership, and Gerald Ford was one of them, despite the fact that he’d been in the House for nearly a decade and a half by this point. After all, he was not yet 50. One of the others, incidentally?  Don’t recognize him? Well, imagine him talking about “known unknowns”. Yes. This young 30-something man with the Johnny Unitas haircut was a brash, newly-elected Congressman from Illinois named Donald Rumsfeld. Together, Rumsfeld and the other “Young Turks” in the GOP urged Ford to challenge 67-year-old House Republican Conference chairman Charles Hoeven (R-IA) for his post. This job was third in line to the top spot in the caucus, behind the Minority Leader and the Minority Whip, and Ford went for it. He won, and he won big. Indeed, Ford’s ascension to GOP leadership showed a new willingness within the House GOP to stop trying to make friends with Southern Democrats (the “Dixiecrats”, as you all know them), and instead start backing Republican challengers to them. But all this got blown completely out of the water when, on November 22, 1963, President Kennedy was shot to death in Dallas. Two days later, the prime suspect, Lee Harvey Oswald, was himself shot by nightclub owner Jack Ruby. Since there would be no criminal trial, President Lyndon Johnson announced the formation of a commission designed to “satisfy itself that the truth is known as far as it can be discovered, and to report its findings and conclusions to him, to the American people, and to the world.” To lead it, Johnson chose highly-respected Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren--hence its name, the Warren Commission. Its members were a mixture of government officials from other branches--it included Democrat Hale Boggs from Louisiana, Republican Senator John Sherman Cooper from Kentucky, former CIA director Allen Dulles, Democratic Senator Richard Russell from Georgia...and as the Republican representing the House, GOP conference chairman Gerald Ford.  I’ve circled Jerry for you in this photo since if you blink you might miss him. Yes, future President Gerald Ford would, at one point, investigate the death of one of his predecessors. “I wanted to find who killed Jack,” Ford remembered later. “I wanted the murderer put away for eternity.” Jerry, uh...the murderer was already six feet under. If you came here looking for a detailed expose on the workings of the Warren Commission, I’m afraid you’re out of luck. This is about Jerry Ford, and being on the Appropriations Committee meant that he wasn’t really an active participant in the investigation. “It was a full-time job,” Ford recalled. “The Republican Conference chairmanship demanded another hour or two every day and I didn’t see how I could handle new responsibilities without obtaining additional help.” Ford concurred with the committee’s final conclusions, however, and years later, at age 90 in 2003 when he was the only surviving member of the committee left, he didn’t look kindly on people who pushed conspiracy theories for public consumption. “I’d like to tell you I never saw Stone’s ridiculous film,” he told a reporter when asked about the Oliver Stone film JFK, wherein flamboyant Louisiana lawyer Jim Garrison unearths the “real” architect behind John F. Kennedy’s death. “The film is filled with inaccuracies and omissions. It bothered me so much because it was so wrong...at some point, I was so upset with Oliver Stone I was tempted to challenge him to a debate.” That I would have liked to see. The 1964 election was, as we know, a disaster for the Republican Party as Kennedy’s former understudy, Lyndon Johnson, swept to victory over Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-AZ). Ford’s House scorecard showed a similar catastrophic ripple effect--Goldwater’s failure had cost the GOP 36 House seats--and they now trailed Democrats in the chamber by over 150 (!) seats, 295-140. These are ABSURD margins we’re talking about and there’s a reason we haven’t seen anything like them since. Ford was frustrated now--at this rate, he’d never reach the Speaker’s chair. His solution? Conservatism with a smile instead of a sneer and a clenched fist. As Douglas Brinkley writes: quote:“We must stake out our positions independently of any preplanning with the southern Democratic leadership,” he exhorted, “so as to correct the frequently distorted image of a Republican-southern Democratic coalition.” To his colleagues in the House, every line of his attack was aimed straight at Charles Halleck, the right-leaning, Dixiecrat-courting minority leader. “I believe the basic Republican position we must regain is the high middle road of moderation,” Ford continued. “We welcome into the party Republicans of every reasonable viewpoint. But we must firmly resist the takeover of our party by any elements that are not interested in building a party, but only in advancing their own narrow views.” This wasn’t just sour grapes. Ford wasn’t a hard-right ideologue. He was a conservative, yes--but he understood the value of making friends and forging alliances, and he knew that the GOP had to make its way back to the American political mainstream. The Goldwater conservatives were more interested in airing opinions than winning elections, and they’d given the American electorate the impression that the modern GOP was just to the right of Genghis Khan. Heh. With that, Ford knew that his time had come. He announced he was challenging Rep. Halleck for the minority leader’s post. Initially, few gave him a chance--after all, after the 1964 drubbing, disgruntled Rep. John Lindsay (R-NY) had made a few angry noises about his party’s leadership. In response, they’d cornered him and warned him to stop rocking the boat. Dryly, Lindsey retorted, “It is impossible to rock a boat resting at the bottom of the ocean.” But Ford, in a stunner, won a narrow victory in the closed-door House Republican caucus vote in January 1965. By a vote of 73-67, he was elected the newest House Minority Leader, and RNC chairman Dean Burch quipped that it was time for the GOP to “put away the switchblades and take out the Band-Aids”. Well, maybe. To anyone who asked, Ford said, “My aim and ambition is to be Speaker of the House of Representatives.” This would only occur if the GOP recaptured the chamber, though, and right now they trailed the Democrats by over 150 seats. It looked...unlikely. The GOP did make some progress in the 1966 elections, however--they picked up 47 House seats, bringing the chamber total to nearly 190, and Ford also noted that GOP efforts in the South were paying off. “We can’t win 50 percent of the House seats from only 75 percent of the country,” he had said, and in January 1967, the House saw 28 Southern Republicans enter the chamber. But Ford’s party remained in the minority, and they had missed their chance to corner the Democrats and President Johnson on the most important issue of the day.  When it came to the war in Vietnam, neither party was able to capture the center with any effectiveness. Both parties had elements that recognized the massive cost of lives and morale in the United States, but neither was willing to admit that fighting the war wasn’t worth the effort. Ford was no different--Cold War myopia was a real bitch. He was more cautious and reflective than some of his GOP colleagues about the consequences of intervening in Southeast Asia, but that didn’t stop him from voting to continue the war at every opportunity. quote:In a rare display of political tin ear, Ford passed on the GOP’s best chance to co-opt the war issue. A Senate Republican Policy Committee study released in 1967 suggested new ways to look at the political consequences of the Vietnam conflict and the possible strategies to end it. As the Senate committee report pointed out, “Republicans for two decades have believed the United States must not become involved in a land war on the Asian continent; we are so involved today.” Whoops. Sen. William Proxmire (D-WI) had been on the Yale football team Ford had coached many years ago, and of Ford he said “In many ways, Ford is the same kind of man now that he was then...solid and square. He is not a man of imagination.” Again: Moose Mason.
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May 13, 2020 02:20
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The Return Of Tricky Dick Ford began to build a somewhat unusual profile as House Minority Leader. Douglas Brinkley will explain. quote:Although Ford still had the fumbling syntax of a jock, too, his stump speeches were offset by his innate talent for public relations. He also had a knack for making people get along. As Republican conference chairman and later as House minority leader, Ford strove for cohesion and comity within his flock. Rather than strong-arm his cadre into sticking to the party line, Ford accepted differences of opinion within the fold. It made more sense to him to accommodate his members’ views than splintering apart into factions. So he played the good coach, giving his squad wide latitude to speak their minds. In exchange, he wanted no bickering. Ford’s open forum proved smart strategy. Whenever he needed broad cooperation on major votes, he could call on the goodwill his nice-guy approach had accrued to bring his colleagues in line. Ford did not bully or threaten fellow Republicans to get them to fall in line--and he didn’t punish the ones who voted against the party. Incredibly, fewer than a dozen Republicans on average would stray from the party on any major vote. Ford’s ordinary nature, in many ways, worked in his favor--his colleagues let their guard down around him because he wasn’t threatening. “He doesn’t look for clever ways to sneak behind you. He does the obvious, which is usually common sense. He doesn’t try to be gimmicky,” fellow Rep. Edward Derwinski (R-IL) remarked. By 1968 Ford’s efforts were paying dividends. The GOP was finally coming together on a national level, and their ideological rifts had healed to the point where the party’s old standard-bearer was able to make his triumphant return.  AAAAAAAARRRRRROOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!  Yes, after a heartbreaking loss in 1960 and an absolute drubbing in the California gubernatorial race in 1962, Richard Nixon had cashed in all his chits and completed one of the most remarkable political resurrections in American history. 1968 was the Democrats’ year to fall apart, and fall apart they did--President Johnson dropped out of the race in March, and a bruising primary campaign was further marred when Sen. Robert Kennedy was shot to death in early June. Violent riots tore apart the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago as the whole world watched--it made the Republican gathering in Miami a model of decorum as Richard Nixon was nominated overwhelmingly on the first ballot, despite a few rustles of discontent from New York governor Nelson Rockefeller and California governor Ronald Reagan. Once again, Ford’s name was in the discussion for the second spot--but he nipped any discussion of it in the bud this time. He knew that if Republicans won just 31 more House seats in an election against a terribly divided Democratic Party, he’d finally be Speaker. We all know who Nixon eventually settled on, of course.  Before his headless body belonged to Ogden Wernstrom, Spiro Agnew was the Republican governor of Maryland, and by all outward appearances he was considered a moderate. “In talking with Agnew,” Nixon wrote later, “I had been impressed by him as a man who seemed to have a great deal of inner strength...he expressed deep concern about the plight of the nation’s urban areas. His instincts seemed to parallel mine.” If you only knew. Jerry and Betty Ford were sitting by the pool at their Miami hotel when they heard Agnew was the choice. Ford was...underwhelmed. He recalled thinking that Agnew “seemed like a nice enough person, but he lacked national experience or recognition. And now, after just two years as governor, he was going to run for Vice President. I shook my head in disbelief.” As for Agnew himself, he expressed some mild surprise at being chosen, proclaiming in his acceptance speech, “I stand here with a deep sense of improbability of this moment.” We know, of course, how this story ends. The 1968 election ended with a slim Nixon victory--he beat Vice President Hubert Humphrey by less than one percent of the popular vote, but more important to Ford, his coattails were short. He netted only five House seats--far short of the 31 Ford needed to become Speaker. Frustrated by what he viewed as the clumsy, mismanaged Nixon campaign, Ford thought at least he’d have the chance to work with the Nixon White House as Minority Leader. That too turned out to be a major disappointment--after all, despite Nixon’s tenure in both the House and the Senate, his White House never made much of an effort to cultivate a relationship with Congress. Indeed, by the time Nixon reached the White House he’d soured on Congress’s wrangling to the point where he came to rely on the much quicker executive order process. Even as Ford was happily anticipating a new era of cooperation with the White House, Nixon was brooding about being the first President in over a century to begin a term with both houses of Congress being controlled by the opposition. With Democrats running the legislative branch, Nixon set about consolidating executive power in a manner that Washington had never seen. It was concentrated in a tiny handful of hand-picked White House aides. Among them were chief of staff H.R. “Bob” Haldeman legislative liaison and senior counselor John Ehrlichman. Together, they became known as the “Berlin Wall”, but it was Ehrlichman who rankled Ford the most. Ehrlichman called the House Republicans a “Congressional herd of mediocrities”, and for him, Ford was the most mediocre of mediocres. “At my first meeting with our Republican leader in the House of Representatives, Gerald Ford, I was not impressed,” Ehrlichman wrote later. “It was clear in our first conversation in 1969 that Ford was not thrilled to be harnessed to the Nixon Administration. Furthermore, he seemed slow to grasp the substantive information we were trying to give him. I came away from his office with the impression that Jerry Ford might have become a pretty good Grand Rapids insurance agent; he played a good game of golf, but he wasn’t excessively bright.” Ouch. Like many others, though, Ehrlichman underestimated Ford’s ability. Ford was smart enough to keep the White House from forcing its programs through--he didn’t have a lot of imagination, but he knew how to hold the line, and his innate caution and a strong bullshit detector worked to his advantage when dealing with people like Ehrlichman. However, Ford’s tenure as Minority Leader was not without boneheaded political decisions, and this one? This one was a real head-scratcher. It begins with this man:  Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas had served on the court since Franklin Roosevelt had appointed him in 1939. A staunch supporter of civil rights and environmental conservation measures, he annoyed conservatives--and his bon-vivant lifestyle didn’t endear him to them any more. Douglas drank, he was a womanizer, and he spent lavishly--he made up for it by writing books about his travels to exotic spots around the globe. His 1969 book Points of Rebellion analyzed and, for the most part, defended the rising protest movement against the Vietnam War. Apparently this was a real trigger for Jerry Ford. He’d been absolutely incensed by the protest movement for years--calling them the “seeds of Communist atrocity”. You know, just in case you needed a reason to think he was a moron. In 1968 Ford had strongly supported the Campus Disorders Act, which aimed to withhold federal subsidies from any student who had taken part in a campus protest. In addition to being a GROSS violation of the First Amendment, how Ford thought something like this would be enforced is as yet unknown to me. When Douglas published Points of Rebellion, Ford was so outraged by it that he announced he was launching an investigation into its author--and indeed, in November 1969, he announced that he was drawing up plans to introduce impeachment articles against Douglas. Jesus loving Christ, Jerry, simmer the gently caress down. Ford thought he scented vulnerability among the court’s members--earlier that year, another justice, Abe Fortas, had been forced to resign amid charges of financial improprieties. To replace him, Nixon nominated Appeals Court judge Clement F. Haynsworth, a Southern conservative...but the Senate put the kibosh on it when they discovered Haynsworth’s record was nearly as checkered as Fortas’. Sen. Birch Bayh (D-IN) pointed out that Haynsworth had “sat on cases involving litigees in which he had financial interest”. Heh. Amateurs. That’s like the entire Republican wing of the Court these days. To Ford, this meant that the Court was no longer untouchable, and just as the Haynsworth nomination faltered, he announced his crusade against Douglas. “If the United States Senate does establish new ethical standards for Supreme Court nominees,” Ford proclaimed, “then those same standards ought to be applicable to sitting members.” Oh, Jerry, you poor, naive honky. His real motives are a bit more...murky. I’ll let Douglas Brinkley explain. quote:The tangled reasons for Ford’s bold crusade against Douglas grew out of the political complexities Richard Nixon had brought to town. It is telling that when Ford felt pressured by the Nixon administration to do something to bring Congress into line, he could not force himself to “get up and denounce [Sen.] Teddy [Kennedy],” as Robert Hartmann had put it. Congress remained sacrosanct as a place for conciliation in Ford’s eyes. But if he couldn’t bring himself to do Nixon’s bidding within the legislature, his own ambition demanded he find another way to satisfy the president. I personally do not buy this line of reasoning. Ford’s efforts failed, miserably and publicly, and it scarred his reputation as a sensible politician. Perhaps this is what Nixon had wanted--to weaken the popular GOP House leader by getting him to paint himself as a White House lackey. Ford had a mind of his own, as far as I’m concerned, and if he wanted to avoid this, he could have avoided it. Later, Ford would insist that he had been neither asked nor ordered to mount the attack on Douglas--but notes that John Ehrlichman took at a 1969 White House meeting show that Nixon did indeed instruct Ehrlichman to tell Ford to move against the Supreme Court Justice. Makes you wonder just how much of the pardon was Ford’s idea and how much of it was the Nixon people executing a quid pro quo. Anyway, the 1970 midterms did nothing for Ford’s relationship with the White House--the GOP lost 12 seats in the House, further driving Ford’s GOP into the wilderness. The Nixon White House had shown, clearly, that it had no interest in strengthening or growing the party. Ford found this rather depressing--and with good reason. Around then, Nixon called the first meeting to plan for his reelection. Those invited included his assistants John Ehrlichman and Bob Haldeman, Attorney General John Mitchell, who would eventually be placed in charge of the campaign, White House Senior Counsel Charles “Chuck” Colson, Congressional liaison Bryce Harlow, and newly-minted Nixon staffer Donald Rumsfeld, who’d resigned to join the White House. This meeting was more notable for who was not present--for instance, there was not a single representative of the national Republican Party at at. Indeed, Sen. Bob Dole (R-KS), the chairman of the RNC, couldn’t even get an appointment with the President. Dole joked later that long after he put in a request for a meeting, an aide called him and asked if he still wanted to see Nixon. When Dole answered yes, the aide replied “Tune in on Channel 9, he’s coming up on the tube.” Ford, from his place in Congress, didn’t grasp just how insular Nixon’s paranoia had made him until he heard the news of the Watergate break-in on the morning of June 17, 1972. We know the details of this, of course. I wrote a 70+ page entry on the entirety of the Watergate break-in when I penned my Nixon biography, so I will not be going over the finer points of it this time out. For those of you who are too lazy to read it (  ), the short version goes like this: Nixon’s campaign hires a bunch of bumbling, incompetent Cubans and ex-intelligence operatives to break into the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at D.C.’s Watergate Hotel. They got caught. poo poo snowballed from there.Ford was spending that weekend in Central Michigan, meeting with constituents. His first reaction to the break-in news was that it had to be the work of some sort of freelance group. After all, no real political professional would do something so stupid, right? <extremely Ron Howard voice> Wrong. Ford, like many of his countrymen at that time, held a very mythologized view of government. Despite his reservations about the Nixon White House’s relationship with Congress, he knew Nixon personally and couldn’t conceive of the idea that he would have had anything to do with the crimes at the Watergate. After all, he was on the outside--he couldn’t have had any knowledge of the depths that the Committee to Re-Elect The President (or CREEP, as we’ve come to fondly know it) would sink to. When Ford returned to Washington the following Monday he realized that things had gotten more serious. The DC Police had scoured the burglars’ hotel room at the Howard Johnson’s across the street, and they’d found a number of rather incriminating items, including an address book containing the White House number of E. Howard Hunt, a known associate of Chuck Colson’s. Immediately, Washington was abuzz with rumors. Did Nixon know about this? Ford and other Congressional leaders happened to have a meeting with John Mitchell later that day. After, Ford took Mitchell aside and asked him, point-blank: did the White House have anything to do with the Watergate burglary? Mitchell adamantly denied any connection. “He looked me right in the eye,” Ford remembered, “and said he had nothing to do with it--had no knowledge of it.” And Ford continued to watch as the months passed and the evidence mounted, continuing to believe that the upper echelons of the White House had no connection to the burglary. When the men who’d been arrested that night were indicted, Ford had no trouble hewing to the Republican line, stated succinctly by Press Secretary Ron Ziegler, that it was a “third-rate burglary”. His attentions were, as always, fixated on the Republican Party’s congressional candidates in 1972. CREEP was out to reelect Nixon, not help the GOP as a whole, and Ford felt that the Watergate affair was simply not in Congress’ demesne. This was evident in his role in what would be Congress’ first effort to investigate the scandal, through what would be known as the Patman Committee.  Rep. Wright Patman (D-TX) was a 79-year-old Texan whose silver tongue and abundance of energy made him a dangerous foe for the White House. He was the chairman of the House Banking and Currency Committee, and he wanted to investigate the money trail from the Watergate burglars to high-ranking officials at CREEP. During the summer of 1972, Patman and his committee compiled an 80-page report that detailed the flow of some $10 milllion in otherwise undocumented cash into various CREEP safes and accounts. Naturally, Patman wanted to hold hearings, and he wanted to subpoena a number of high-ranking CREEP officials. In his diary on September 15, 1972, H.R. Haldeman noted that Nixon “wants to be sure we put the screws on Congress to turn off the Patman hearings.” Patman needed a majority vote from the members of his full committee to authorize public hearings. In terms of House procedure, he was well within his rights--the irregularities being investigated were only a few months old, and all the relevant witnesses were available for questioning. Patman’s timing was explosive--the hearings would have started in October 1972, a month before people went to the polls. Who did Nixon’s people turn to, you ask? Why yes, that’s right--their ally in Congress, Jerry Ford. He lobbied all 16 GOP members of the committee to vote against Patman--and four Southern Democrats joined them. Patman lost the full vote, 20-15--and the Patman hearings died. quote:According to Republican representative Garry Brown, who also played an active role in the effort, Ford cooperated with the Justice Department to block the Patman Committee hearings. The tape recording of the September 15 Oval Office meeting supports John Dean’s charge, which Ford refuted, that the minority leader also acted in conjunction with the White House. It also seems telling that Ford evinced no interest in the matter until right after that White House meeting to plan the Watergate cover-up effort. But he had received a September 6 letter from the president slyly noting that, “You looked so good on television while presiding [at the GOP convention] that I became more convinced than ever that you would make a great Speaker [emphasis in original].” Ugh. I’m sucking the vomit back into my mouth. Goddamnit, Jerry, you suck. We know, of course, how the 1972 election went. It was a crushing landslide victory for Nixon, mostly due to the fact that Watergate had not yet stirred up much interest outside the most partisan of Democratic circles. Nixon captured 520 electoral votes--indeed, besides the District of Columbia, the only state that voted for his opponent, Sen. George McGovern (D-SD), was Massachusetts. Yikes. One of the Democrats’ most humiliating losses in history. It was Nixon’s alone, however. Despite sweeping the entire country, the GOP lost two seats in the Senate and picked up a scant 12 in the House, leaving a bad taste in Congressional Republicans’ mouths. They were still in the minority in both chambers--indeed, they trailed Democrats in the House by 50 seats. For all Nixon’s flattery about Ford potentially being great at the job, he would still not be Speaker of the House. Well, that was it for ol’ Jerry. He’d plumb had it. In fact, he was already beginning to think about retirement. After discussing it with Betty, he decided he’d leave Washington in January 1977--after spending a final term out of House leadership between 1974-1976. CREEP’s no-holds-barred efforts during the campaign had left a bad taste in many Republicans’ mouths, and it further soured relations between the White House and Congress to the point that, in early 1973 when the Senate was considering holding hearings on Watergate, 18 Republicans cast their lot with Democrats. Despite ALL of this, throughout the early months of 1973 Ford continued to stand by Nixon, believing--despite the mounting evidence--that Nixon himself had done nothing wrong, even going so far as to encourage his top aides to clear their names by testifying before the Senate Select Committee on Watergate. I don’t get it, I really don’t. Eventually a man can only take so much piss down his throat. You know, unless you’re Donald Trump. Ford would later claim his unshakable faith in the administration stemmed from the personal assurances he’d gotten from John Mitchell a year prior. By the summer of 1973, though, it was starting to look like folly. The term “Watergate” was now swelling to encompass an entire litany of dirty tricks and illegal acts the White House had sanctioned. Ford began to have doubts--but he still did not express them in public, even as his colleagues questioned Nixon’s role in the scandal. Well, his fealty to the administration would pay off. See, Nixon wasn’t the only crook on the 1972 ticket. Turns out Spiro Agnew had his own skeletons. On August 6, 1973, the news broke that Vice President Agnew was under investigation for bribery, conspiracy, and tax evasion. Apparently, he’d taken kickbacks from Baltimore County contractors for years--including during his vice presidency. Jesus loving Christ. I went over this in a bit more detail during my Nixon biography as well; I would invite you to check all of that out if you have the time. Anyway, Agnew had taken kickbacks--and then failed to pay income tax on the money. The investigation of Agnew’s misdeeds had been underway since February, but when it became public, Agnew found himself in a fight for both his political future AND his actual freedom--a conviction would, after all, carry with it substantial jail time. The administration did try to save Agnew, but such efforts were half-hearted at best. After all, Nixon had his own problems. In September, Nixon turned over the Agnew matter to Attorney General Elliot Richardson, who negotiated a plea bargain that would have included Agnew’s resignation as part of the deal. Well, if you know anything about Agnew, you know that he fought it. Bitterly. Seriously, Spiro Agnew would have been right at home in today’s modern GOP. However, Agnew also knew he was caught in a net he wasn’t escaping from--his White House allies were reluctant at best, and federal prosecutors had MOUNTAINS of evidence with which to convict him. As one lawyer familiar with the details put it, he’d “never seen a stronger extortion case”. That was it. Agnew was fined $10,000 for the income tax evasion, and he worked out a deal with the Nixon administration and federal prosecutors--he would resign in lieu of going to jail. An irredeemable scumbag to the end. Anyway, Agnew resigned on October 10, 1973, and Nixon knew that he could not make another mistake with Agnew’s replacement. The 25th Amendment was now firmly ensconced--and it gave Congress the power to confirm the President’s choice. No one who was even remotely perceived as unqualified would be allowed to slip into the VP’s office this time, especially not past an exceedingly hostile Congress that was quickly growing sick of Nixon’s bullshit. Immediately, Nixon began soliciting recommendations for Agnew’s replacement. He invited every GOP member of Congress, governor, and national committee member for their input on a name--they were to list three potential candidates and send them in a sealed letter to the White House. Nixon knew it was important to fill the second slot fast--if something happened to him, Speaker of the House Carl Albert (D-OK) stood to inherit the Presidency. The suggestions reflected the post-Eisenhower split in the GOP pretty accurately. The guys tied in first place? Governor Nelson Rockefeller and Governor Ronald Reagan, representing the party’s liberal and conservative (respectively) wings. Former Texas governor and Treasury Secretary John Connally came in third, but he was thought of as too controversial a choice, seeing as how he was a fairly recent Republican convert (Connally had been a close ally and friend of Lyndon Johnson’s). In fourth place? House Minority Leader Gerald Ford. So how did Jerry win this bizarre sweepstakes despite not even getting onto the medal stand, you might ask? Well, it helped that he received the most important recommendations--that of Nixon himself, and from Speaker Albert, who told Nixon in no uncertain terms that Ford would breeze through a Congressional confirmation. Ford was an internationalist, like Nixon, which made him a practical and acceptable choice. Plus, his continued public loyalty to the White House as the scandal had mounted satisfied the ever-more-paranoid Nixon’s need to find allies. And thus it was. On October 12, Nixon summoned Ford to the White House and after a short discussion accepted Nixon’s offer to be the new Vice President. It seemed fitting to Ford that this would be how he’d end his time in Washington, and it strangely didn’t bother him that he was abandoning Congress at a time when it was about to enter its finest hour. I guess some men have less ambition than others. Mr. Vice President  “The person with the best job in the country is the vice president,” humorist Will Rogers once said. “All he has to do is get up in the morning and ask, ‘How is the President?’” While true, this took on a much darker double meaning when Gerald Ford took the oath of office on December 6, 1973, shortly after his confirmation. Never before had the office been so important. “I am a Ford, not a Lincoln...I am proud--very proud--to be one of the two hundred million Americans. I promise my fellow citizens only this: to uphold the Constitution, to do what is right as God gives me to see the right, and, within the limited powers and duties of the vice presidency, to do the very best that I can for America.” He’s just so....ordinary. Indeed, he had gotten the job precisely because of his machinations over the last 25 years. quote:As liberal senator Alan Cranston of California said for many at Ford’s confirmation vote on November 27: “Frankly, I am astonished to hear myself, a life-long Democrat, support a Republican for Vice President … [but Gerald Ford] has come into focus as someone who appears to offer the nation a steadiness and a dependability for which it yearns. I doubt if there has ever before been a time when integrity has so surpassed ideology in the judging of a man for so high an office.” Eh. Ford had been led to expect that his job as Vice President would be Nixon’s voice on Capitol Hill--a sort of uber-lobbyist for the administration’s positions on pending legislation. In a way, it was the Nixon White House’s attempt to connect with Congress in a way that it never had. In practice, however, Ford found that he was spending most of his time stumping across the country for the Republican cause. He didn’t mind though--he liked campaigning. Problem was, the Republican cause right now meant “saving Richard Nixon’s Presidency”. In the eight months he spent as Vice President, Ford flew to 40 different states and traveled over 118,000 miles. He even took on Agnew’s old role as the administration’s fire-breather...though that didn’t serve him as well. He gave a speech in January 1974 to the American Farm Bureau Federation in New Jersey, one that sounded nothing like the Gerald Ford his colleagues had known for years. It was, of course, because he hadn’t written it. Conservative ideologue and speechwriter Patrick Buchanan did, making no adjustments for the tone and stridency he had defined for Spiro Agnew, and it placed Ford firmly in the camp of Nixon’s apologists. Referring to “pressure organizations” like the AFL-CIO and Americans for Democratic Action, Ford said, “If they can crush the President and his philosophy, they are convinced that they can then dominate the Congress, and through it, the nation.” It was extremely eyebrow-raising to see Ford, of all people, give this speech--especially considering its timing. The next day Americans found themselves facing the most damning evidence of a White House cover-up. quote:Over the previous two months, investigators had been homing in on an eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap in the Oval Office recording of a June 20, 1972, meeting between President Nixon and Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman. The blank portion came in the middle of what might have been a telling conversation about the break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters. On the day of Ford’s pro-Nixon rant in Atlantic City, a team of audio experts released their conclusion that the gap in the tape had been created by at least five separate acts of erasure, all of which almost certainly could not have been accidental—Haldeman’s successor, Alexander M. Haig Jr., attributed it to “some sinister force.” It now looked like the White House had destroyed evidence. As Michigan’s own Detroit News observed, “The new evidence pulls the rug from under the President’s loyal apologists.” Whoops! Sorry, Jerry. Ford hadn’t known about this story when he read Buchanan’s harsh speech on January 15--but even after the findings became public, Ford wouldn’t back away from what he’d said. Even after the audio experts’ report was released, Ford would not stop protesting that Nixon himself was innocent, even as his friends and aides quietly advised him to tone down his insistence to that effect, warning him that it was damaging his own credibility. He did not abandon his defense of the President, but he didn’t read another Buchanan speech. As the months passed, Ford found himself in more of a bind. He was Vice President--he couldn’t say a word against Nixon without looking like he was out for Nixon’s job. While staying loyal served his interests, Ford could easily have opted to say less than he did. He could have cut back his public appearances on behalf of the administration, and he could have made his answers on Watergate intentionally bland and vague. “Someone ought to do Jerry Ford a favor and take his airplane away from him,” quipped the Wall Street Journal’s Norman Miller. Even now, Ford cited Mitchell’s assurances to him in 1972 as the bedrock for his continuing faith in Nixon’s innocence. Unbelievably, even after Mitchell was indicted in March 1974 on charges of obstruction of justice, conspiracy, and making false statements to the FBI, Ford clung to that one moment as the reason for his continued defense of Nixon. Unfuckingbelievable. Did someone need to hit you over the head and SHOW YOU, Jerry?! At the same time Ford was publicly defending Nixon, however, he was also suggesting that Nixon should turn over the tapes and other materials to the Watergate investigators. He had told the Judiciary Committee during his Vice Presidential confirmation hearing, in fact, that impeachment proceedings should begin “if for no other reason than to clear the air”. It seems to validate my suspicions that Jerry Ford was really a simp who actually believed Nixon was innocent. “The preponderance of the evidence,” Ford said, “is in favor of the President and exonerates him of any impeachable offense.” This was untrue, of course, as Ford didn’t know this for sure--and he scrupulously avoided any opportunity to hear what was on the tapes in Nixon’s possession. If he did, he wouldn’t be able to maintain the staunch veneer of deniability he’d constructed. Still, to most outside observers, Ford looked like a fool, continuing to vehemently assert Nixon’s innocence even as the dominoes continued to fall. Douglas Brinkley wrote something interesting that I think you guys will agree with. quote:If Ford was a fool, he was the same ploddingly loyal GOP fool he had remained throughout his entire political career, and what a career it had turned out. Calling him “the very model of a modern American politician,” Richard Reeves wrote, “His success was a triumph of lowest-common-denominator politics, the survival of the man without enemies, the least objectionable alternative. The remarkable thing about Ford and others like him is that they have won leadership by carefully avoiding it. The act and art of leading inevitably offends and alienates some of the people some of the time in a democratic universe,” but Ford “built his career and life on avoiding offending anyone.”...It’s little wonder that H. R. Haldeman’s diary entry for May 18, 1971, had noted that Nixon “got into quite a long thing on the lack of leadership in the Congress … making the point that Gerry Ford really is the only leader we’ve got on either side in either house.” Ford’s success mirrored that of Warren Harding, William McKinley, and many other Republicans many years prior. His was the triumph of the man who made no enemies--to be so scrupulously unobjectionable that no one can muster a strong enough reason to stop your political rise. Some call this masterful politicking. I just call it cowardice and foolishness. The greatest men in this country’s history did not get where they got to because they didn’t offend anyone. Ford’s “campaign” in the spring of 1974 was seemingly aimed at an audience of one: Richard Nixon. Even as the final bricks in the wall came tumbling down, Ford still publicly defended his boss, and Nixon wrote him in June to thank him. “This is just a note to tell you how much I have appreciated your superb and courageous support over these past difficult months,” Nixon said in his letter. “How much easier it would be for you to pander to the press and others who desperately are trying to drive a wedge between the President and Vice President.” But time was Nixon’s enemy now. On July 24, the Supreme Court dealt the final blow to his faltering defenses. By an 8-0 ruling they told Nixon he had to surrender an additional 64 tapes and documents to special prosecutor Leon Jaworski’s office. Even Nixon’s own lead attorney, James St. Clair, wasn’t sure what was on them--to the great annoyance of Judge John Sirica, who was flabbergasted that a lawyer would go to such great lengths to protect recorded conversations he’d never even heard. On the 26th, Sirica ordered St. Clair to remedy that, but it hardly mattered. A day later, the House Judiciary Committee voted in favor of its first article of impeachment by a count of 27-11. Nixon was past the point of no return. He was headed for an impeachment trial. Even as he continued to protest his innocence, Nixon had already come to his decision by the 30th of the month. Chief of Staff Alexander Haig met with Ford and his chief of staff to discuss the contents of the infamous “smoking gun” tape, and the fact that Nixon no longer had the numbers to withstand a trial in Congress. While Ford was not told explicitly that Nixon would resign, a number of scenarios were discussed that involved Nixon’s exit...some of which included his pardon. Yup. Haig claimed that according to his legal research, Nixon was perfectly within his rights to pardon himself before leaving office, but it would look better if his successor pardoned him at some later point. Ford replied that he’d think on the possibilities. Until the day he died, Ford swore that no deal for a pardon was struck at any meeting with Nixon’s people. Even if there wasn’t, it didn’t matter. Haig knew he had Ford on the hook by dint of the fact that Ford did not immediately balk at the notion. Ford knew then that Nixon’s days were numbered--and he began to get himself in a mental place where he would be able to take over the top job. And unbelievably, EVEN THEN, the following Saturday found Gerald Ford in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, telling reporters that he still felt Nixon was innocent. He was still, incredibly, using that thin veneer of deniability he’d maintained by not listening to the tapes himself. quote:As he had yet to hear the incriminating tape firsthand, Ford thus stayed within the bounds of his own ethics, where the line was drawn between what he knew for certain and what he had learned only by hearsay. But his remarks in Hattiesburg constituted an unsavory exercise in technically telling the truth while at the same time perpetuating a lie. By August 3, Ford knew perfectly well that Nixon was not innocent. Still, and perhaps more so than even he realized, he fell prey to Richard Nixon’s inordinate demand for loyalty at all costs. This tells you all you need to know about Gerald Ford--that he was, in the end, nothing more than a willing dupe in a charade that devastated Americans’ faith in their government. And yet somehow, it did not ruin his reputation as it had so many others who’d obeyed Nixon’s crazed demands of loyalty uber alles. Indeed, RNC Chairman George H.W. Bush wrote in his diary on August 6, “this era of tawdry, shabby, lack of morality has got to end…I will take Ford’s decency over Nixon’s toughness because what we need at this juncture in our history is a certain sense of morality and a certain sense of decency.”  Whatever, Georgie Boy.Two days later on August 5, Nixon released a transcript of the “smoking gun” tape, and Ford knew he couldn’t credibly defend Nixon any longer. “The public interest is no longer served by repetition of my previously expressed belief that on the basis of all the evidence known to me and the American people, the President is not guilty of an impeachable offense.” For those of you who don’t speak weasel-rear end fuckface, that means “I can’t ignore the goddamn evidence anymore, I have to jump ship.” Even as the nation pored over the transcripts published in the newspapers, Ford avoided reading any of the material, despite the fact that he could have gotten an advance copy. He chose, bizarrely, to keep seeing no evil, even in the face of unspeakable evil. On Thursday, August 8, Ford was summoned to the White House to meet with Nixon. “The President’s face was ashen, but his voice was controlled and measured,” wrote Ford aide Jerald terHorst. “The two men shook hands, and Nixon motioned Ford to the chair beside him. There was an awkward moment. Then Nixon broke the silence: ‘I know you’ll do well,’ he said. Ford nodded silently. The Presidency had passed from one man to the other.” The pair chatted then for an hour about their shared history in politics and as friends. Ford said later that he felt no joy for himself, only sadness for Nixon’s plight that evening. Ugh.  On Friday morning, as Richard Nixon boarded Marine One for his final flight to San Clemente, California, Gerald Rudolph Ford was sworn in by Chief Justice Warren Burger as the 38th President of the United States. His inaugural address was short, but it is memorable for one line at the end. quote:“I assume the presidency under extraordinary circumstances never before experienced by Americans … . I am acutely aware that you have not elected me as your president by your ballots and so I ask you to confirm me as your president in your prayers … . I have not sought this enormous responsibility, but I will not shirk it. I believe that truth is the glue that holds government together, not only our government but civilization itself. That bond, though strained, is unbroken at home and abroad. In all my public and private acts as your president, I expect to follow my instincts of openness and candor with full confidence that honesty is the best policy in the end. Was it though? End of Part 1. In Part 2, we will discuss the major events of Ford’s Presidency. Stay tuned! Fritz Coldcockin fucked around with this message at 03:08 on May 13, 2020 |
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May 13, 2020 02:20
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I'd always wondered about the "Ford is an idiot" trope. I had no idea that was the more generous of assumptions regarding his actions.
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May 13, 2020 03:15
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Fritz Coldcockin posted:This kind of fuckery with his name would have driven the birther crowd WILD if Ford was running for office now. Nah, they'd be fine with it. He's white.
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May 13, 2020 06:47
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I keep bumping this at the worst times.
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May 14, 2020 03:02
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