Gerald Ford and the Challenges of the 1970s

Yanek Mieczkowski

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9780813138473
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A reappraisal of the brief presidency of Gerald Ford, called to leadership in the midst of scandal, stagflation, and an energy crisis. For many Americans, Gerald Ford evokes an image of either an unelected president who abruptly pardoned his corrupt predecessor or an accident-prone klutz spoofed on Saturday Night Live. In this book, Yanek Mieczkowski reexamines Ford's two and a half years in office, showing that his presidency successfully confronted the most vexing crisis of the postwar era. Viewing the 1970s primarily through the lens of economic events, Mieczkowski argues that Ford's understanding of the national economy was better than any modern president's; that he oversaw a dramatic reduction of inflation; and that he attempted to solve the energy crisis with judicious policies. Throughout his presidency, Ford labored under the legacy of Watergate. Democrats scored landslide victories in the 1974 midterm elections, and within an anemic Republican Party, the right wing challenged Ford's leadership, even as pundits predicted the GOP's death. Yet Ford reinvigorated the party and fashioned a 1976 campaign strategy against Jimmy Carter that brought him from thirty points behind to a dead heat on election day. Drawing on numerous personal interviews with former President Ford, cabinet officials, and members of the Ninety-fourth Congress, Mieczkowski presents the first major work on Ford in more than a decade, combining the best of biography and presidential history to paint an intriguing portrait of a president, his times, and his legacy. "This ambitious work calls for a reexamination of the Ford presidency in light of the formidable challenges he faced upon taking office. A welcome and important addition to the literature on the Ford presidency." ? Library Journal

Part One
The Leadership Challenge

Chapter 1

Hungering for Heroes

In the mid-1970s, feeling betrayed by their president after Watergate, Americans hungered for new national heroes. They found Evel Knievel. The motorcycle stuntman wore a red, white, and blue jumpsuit; spoke openly of his love of country; denounced the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang; and urged his young fans to avoid drugs and wear helmets when motorcycling. Most important, Knievel performed stunts that demanded superhuman courage, leaping over cars, trucks, buses, and even the fountains at Las Vegas’s Caesars Palace. A legend grew around him; awestruck children claimed that he had broken every bone in his body (in reality, his crashes had caused around thirty-five fractures).

On September 8, 1974, the daredevil performed what was supposed to be his greatest stunt. He tried to jump Idaho’s Snake River Canyon on his Sky-Cycle X-3, a rocket-motorcycle hybrid. The steam-powered machine was to shoot off a ramp and fly at 200 miles per hour across the 1,600-foot canyon. On that day, when Knievel pressed the ignition button, the Sky-Cycle roared up the ramp, but as it tried to sail across the enormous chasm, the safety parachute unfurled and the bike and rider floated slowly to the Snake River below. Rescuers plucked Knievel safely from the canyon floor. The daredevil received only scrapes and bruises; no broken bones this time. But he fractured his reputation. These were cynical times, and skeptics denounced the whole affair as a hoax, even accusing Knievel of intentionally deploying the parachute early.¹ The charges were untrue, but Knievel’s hero status was tarnished for good.

On the same day that Knievel made his notorious Snake River Canyon jump, more than 2,000 miles away in Washington, D.C., Gerald Ford took the most controversial action of his presidency by pardoning Richard Nixon. There were some parallels. Knievel crashed and enraged fans and detractors alike, who felt that they had been cheated; Ford’s public support crashed, and he, too, enraged supporters and opponents alike, who said that justice had been cheated, even accusing Ford of conspiratorial behavior. His presidency never fully recovered.

Post-Watergate Cynicism

On the morning of August 8, 1974, Vice President Ford had an appointment with the president. He walked into the Oval Office alone, unsure what Nixon would say. For months, the Nixon presidency had been hanging by a thread. On August 5, the thread snapped. The Supreme Court rejected Nixon’s claim of executive privilege, which he had used in refusing to turn over taped recordings of Oval Office conversations. Nixon was compelled to release transcripts of Oval Office conversations indicating that he had wanted the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to obstruct the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) inquiry into the 1972 break-in at the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate office-apartment-hotel complex. This evidence became the “smoking gun” implicating the president in an attempt to cover up the scandal. The release of the transcripts cost Nixon what little support he had left in Congress and with the public. Impeachment was a certainty.

Yet rumors circulated that the battle-scarred president might hang on and fight for his political life. When Ford entered the room, Nixon was sitting behind his desk. After Ford sat down, the tired president spoke solemnly and slowly. “I have made the decision to resign,” he began. “It’s in the best interests of the country. I won’t go into the details pro and con. I have made my decision.” After a pause, Nixon added, “Jerry, I know you’ll do a good job.”² Ford would become the thirty-eighth president of the United States, at the helm of a country in crisis. His most pressing goal was to reestablish trust in government, which had evaporated during Watergate.

On August 9, 1974, as he assumed the presidency on a wave of goodwill, Ford offered words of reconciliation. Since the development of voice recording, a few presidential inaugural addresses have been powerful enough to be preserved almost as a historical archive that many citizens carry in their heads. Franklin Roosevelt’s and John Kennedy’s stand out, and Ford’s became a classic as well. After taking the oath of office in the White House East Room, the new president spoke earnestly to the nation, his voice occasionally cracking with emotion. He declared, “My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over,” which became the most quoted and best-remembered line of his presidency.³ “Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule,” Ford continued. He reassured the nation, “I believe that truth is the glue that holds government together, not only our government, but civilization itself,” and he pledged, “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 always the best policy in the end.”⁴ These were words that Americans wanted—and needed—to hear.

By 1974, a series of presidential tragedies had brutalized Americans’ political sensibilities, and Watergate was the coup de grâce. Kennedy had been murdered, Johnson had led the country into a painful war in Vietnam, and Nixon had prolonged the war. For Americans, Vietnam was tragic not just in its outcome but in how it was conducted. Johnson, Nixon, and government officials withheld critical information from the public. During the 1964 presidential campaign, Johnson preached restraint in Vietnam yet secretly planned more bombing raids and troop commitments against North Vietnam and misled the public and Congress about attacks on American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. After deploying ground troops, Johnson tried to conceal from public view the enormous cost of the military effort. Taking their cue from the White House, top officials dissembled about the war. One assistant secretary of defense was even candid about government mendacity. In 1966, when a reporter questioned the credibility of “official” information on the war, he bluntly replied, “Look, if you think any American official is going to tell the truth, then you’re stupid. Did you hear that—stupid.” The 1968 Tet Offensive, during which the Viet Cong scored swift victories throughout South Vietnam, destroyed the credibility of American assessments that the enemy was almost vanquished and helped to drive Johnson from office. But Nixon followed Johnson’s pattern of prevarication, continuing wildly optimistic assurances, exaggerating enemy losses and the effects of American bombing, and ordering secret bombing raids into Cambodia.⁵ (Nixon’s diplomatic efforts throughout the world depended on secrecy and deception, sometimes leading to breakthroughs, as with his 1972 visit to China, but always surprising the public.)

Because of the deceptive conduct of the war, Americans increasingly distrusted presidential actions and decried a growing “credibility gap,” which became a euphemism for presidential lies.⁶ In a 1967 speech, Congressman Gerald Ford attacked Johnson’s war leadership, saying that “Vietnam gave rise to the credibility gap. Various Administration statements and actions involving Vietnam initially established the credibility gap and then widened it. This . . . has produced the deep frustration felt by the American people, a crisis of confidence at a time of international crisis for the Nation.”⁷ The trend toward distrusting the president had a corrosive influence on public approval ratings. During much of the post–World War II era, presidents won public approbation almost effortlessly. From 1953 to 1965, presidents usually scored an average of at least 60 percent in public approval, especially as Americans supported the president against the menace of communism. But Vietnam chipped away at this remarkable consensus, and as partisan sniping increased, Americans’ regard for their presidents fell. Beginning in 1966, approval ratings slid, and presidents had a difficult time even cracking the 50 percent mark.⁸

The Nixon presidency dragged the public’s trust in government down to a new low. (Ironically, Nixon had promised to be a healing president. During the turmoil of 1968, one of his campaign themes was “bring us together”; in a further irony, he promised that his administration would represent “law and order.”)⁹ Offenses of many different stripes continually assaulted the nation’s moral sensibilities. The president underpaid and made questionable deductions on his income taxes, and at taxpayers’ expense, he spent millions of dollars on additions to his California and Florida homes. Nixon also used the presidency for politicalcombat. He tarred political opponents as unpatriotic and kept track of them with an “Enemies List.” He ordered freeze-outs of reporters who published unfavorable stories, barring them from communicating with administration officials. Some tactics were squalid. In early 1970, when the Senate debated Nixon’s nomination of the undistinguished G. Harrold Carswell to the Supreme Court, the White House tried to sully the reputation of senators who opposed the nomination, spreading word that Birch Bayh once failed his bar exam and that Hubert Humphrey and George McGovern had restrictive covenants in the deeds to their houses forbidding their sale to blacks. (The Senate ultimately rejected Carswell’s nomination.) When Senators McGovern and Mark Hatfield introduced an amendment to force American withdrawal from Vietnam, the Nixon administration oppugned their patriotism. By fighting so dirtily, the Nixon White House cut political lacerations that would not heal as long as he remained in office.¹⁰

Watergate gouged the deepest wounds. After a long, bitter battle over the Watergate tapes in the spring of 1974, Nixon released edited transcripts. Most Americans recoiled at what they read. The transcripts revealed the president as a man of mean moral character, with private behavior sharply at variance with his public image. Senate minority leader Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania called them “shabby, disgusting, immoral.”¹¹ Small and petty men may commit small and petty crimes, but Nixon’s peccadilloes, like cursing in private conversation, were offensive simply by the nature of his position. He disgraced not only himself but the presidency, an office that Americans revered.¹²

What damages a president damages the nation, and that was true with Watergate. Democratic senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina, who chaired the Senate committee investigating the scandal, hyperbolically called Watergate “the greatest tragedy this country has ever suffered, [worse than] the Civil War.”¹³ Watergate changed how Americans saw their government and their president more radically than any other event since the New Deal. But while the New Deal prompted Americans to view the federal government as a benevolent force and the president as their friend, Watergate convinced most Americans that their president was evil.¹⁴ Heretofore, they thought that some sheriffs or mayors could be corrupt, but their president was somehow above seaminess. Watergate shattered the assumption of presidential decency.¹⁵ At a dinner party in 1973, Newsweek writer Shana Alexander overheard CBS News anchorman Walter Cronkite saying, “I think we ought to take Lysol and scrub out the Oval Office.” Alexander agreed, reflecting that Americans “share [Cronkite’s] disgust and contempt for the soiled presidency; they too want to scrub it clean again.”¹⁶

Public opinion polls reflected the plummeting confidence in government. Whereas trust in government stood at 76 percent in 1964—the highest rate in the world—it had dropped to 36 percent a decade later.¹⁷ A 1975 poll revealed that 68 percent of Americans thought that the government had consistently lied to the American people over the past ten years. Irving Crespi of the Gallup Organization predicted, “If this trend persists, it is within the realm of possibility that the United States will in the near future experience its greatest crisis of confidence since 1933 [a Great Depression year].”¹⁸

One measure of American disgust with politicians and government was the low voter turnout in the 1974 elections, when only 38 percent of eligible voters cast ballots, the worst showing in three decades.¹⁹ Surveys indicated a limited public confidence not just in the executive branch but in Congress. In 1975, one question from Maryland senator J. Glenn Beall’s survey of constituents asked, “Do you have confidence in the ability of Congress to deal with today’s problems?” Marylanders answered “no” by nearly 2 to 1. One Baltimore couple scoffed, “We don’t have enough confidence—or trust—in our congressmen to let them take out the garbage.” In Indiana, a woman wrote to Birch Bayh to tell him that all incumbents should resign from office. A popular bumper sticker simply read: IMPEACH SOMEONE.²⁰ This mood persisted when Ford ran for president in 1976, and in preparing the president for his debates against Jimmy Carter, adviser Doug Bailey suggested that Ford avoid mentioning his congressional experience—normally a political asset.²¹

Their moral fiber rubbed raw after Watergate, Americans had little stomach for shenanigans. In the mid-1970s, political careers lay ruined after revelations of scandal, like wreckage strewn across a field of ethical land mines. In October 1974, Washington Park police found Democratic congressman Wilbur Mills of Arkansas drunk in the Tidal Basin in the company of a spectacularly buxom stripper. The erudite Mills, who served as Ways and Means Committee chairman for more than a decade, was forced to relinquish the chairmanship and declined to run for reelection in 1976. That year the career of veteran Democratic congressman Wayne Hays of Ohio was ruined by scandal. Hays’s twenty-seven-year-old secretary, Elizabeth Ray, made the stunning revelation, “I can’t type, I can’t file, I can’t even answer the phone,” yet she was on the House payroll for two years. Th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One: The Leadership Challenge
• Part Two: The Economic Challenge
• Part Three: The Energy Challenge
• Part Four: Diplomatic and Political Challenges
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index