Most obituarists portrayed President Gerald Ford as a humble man
with few ambitions, a great conciliator, a political moderate, an
all around nice guy. They may have the “nice guy” part right but
the rest is pure hokum.
Ford’s genius was in knowing that Americans will take people at
their own self-description. In his vice presidential confirmation
hearings, the Michigan congressman promised to be “a ready
conciliator between the White House and Capitol Hill.” He described
himself alternately as a moderate, a fiscal conservative, and an
internationalist to anybody who would listen. He was also for ice
cream and against needless human suffering.
But beneath the soft talk, goofy grin, and crazy tie beat the
heart of a relentless partisan with ambition to burn. That many of
his decisions have been used to argue for a Picasso-like portrait
of the man simply goes to prove that the past is a different
country — the Seventies doubly so.
Ford is said to have been humble and lacking in ambition because
he had the presidency thrust on him. His wife has let it be known
that she didn’t want him to accept it. She wanted him to run for
one more term in his district, his thirteenth, then retire. Ford’s
self-effacing humor is thrown in as the clincher: Didn’t he claim
to be “a Ford, not a Lincoln” in his acceptance speech?
So what? Self-effacing humor is the least risky kind as long as
it’s used in moderation. Speechwriters routinely put a few light
barbs into politicians’ mouths in order to take the sting out of
more serious criticisms. If Ford was humble, he was humble like a
fox.
As for ambition, it’s possible that Mrs. Ford would
have prevailed on her husband to retire, but (a) that’s not what
happened, and (b) one does not rise to the post of Minority Leader
through self-renunciation. Moreover, here is one huge problem with
portrayals of Ford as reluctant president: He ran for reelection in
1976.
Movement conservatives tend to view that campaign through the
lens of Ronald Reagan’s primary challenge and Ford’s disastrous
foreign policy answers during the presidential debates. They see
Ford as the last gasp of the old Republican establishment — a man
so clueless that he picked Nelson Rockefeller as vice president, so
inarticulate that he lost a debate to Jimmy Carter, so stubborn
that he wouldn’t bow out of the race in favor of a superior
candidate.
There is another way to look at it that doesn’t read nearly so
much of the present into the past. During his legislative career,
Ford was a dealmaker but he was also a partisan. He led the doomed
fight against LBJ’s Great Society programs and he was involved in
the effort to impeach Supreme Court Justice William Douglas. He may
have been a nice guy but he was also a fighter.
Ford accepted the vice presidency after Spiro Agnew resigned in
disgrace and then gave speech after speech in defense of President
Nixon. His rationale for the blanket pardon of Nixon was dressed up
in the language of national healing — and I’ve no reason to doubt
that Ford believed this — but it was also meant to stop the slow
bleed of support for the Republican Party.
It didn’t work. In the ‘74 midterm elections, Republicans lost
49 seats in the House — one for each state Nixon had carried two
years earlier — and several in the Senate. It ushered in arguably
the most radical Congress since the Republican Congresses of the
Civil War period.
Ford did what he could to limit the damage, starting with a
vigorous use of the veto power. In eight years, President Reagan
would rack up 78 vetoes; Ford managed to send 66 bills back to
Congress in just two-and-a-half years, and cobbled together a large
enough coalition to uphold most of those vetoes. His initial
refusal to bail New York City out of its financial mess led to the
famous New York Times headline “Ford, Castigating City, Asserts He’d Veto
Fund Guarantee; Offers Bankruptcy Bill.”
Then Ford won a hard fight for his party’s nomination and ran a
bruising laryngitis-wracked campaign for the presidency. He closed
a huge gap to put him within a few thousand votes of being returned
to the White House. It was the only election he ever lost.
