by Curt Smith
Most of the national media—if the reader doubts, simply Google— ignored all of the above, dubbing Mrs. Nixon pliant, Plastic Pat. America knew better, seeing a woman who thought of others, not herself. When she had a stroke in 1976, more than a quarter of a million letters flooded the Nixons’ San Clemente, California, home. Her Secret Service code name was “Starlight.” It is easy to see why.
FOUR
Looking for Mr. Right
George Bush attended Gerald Ford’s swearing-in as president at noon on the day and in the room where Richard Nixon said, “Always remember, others may hate you, but they don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.” That night Bush wrote in his diary of “indeed a new spirit, a new lift.” The sole U.S. chief executive not elected president or vice president would tie autobiography (Ford’s A Time to Heal) and biography (Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life). Frank Merriwell or Chip Hilton? Both lived in the thirty-eighth president.
Ford is said to have calmed America. In truth, he taught it. He was impressed with policy, not himself, his hat size the same leaving as entering office. He was also comfortable with the presidency, treating pomp like Billy Graham did sin. James Fenimore Cooper wrote, “Truth was the Deerslayer’s polar star.” It lit Ford’s first speech as president: “Truth is the glue that holds government together. . . . Honesty is always the best policy. . . . Our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule.” Who would not say he stilled our quiet desperation—right man, right time?
Born in 1913, Leslie Lynch King Jr. left Omaha for Grand Rapids when his parents divorced. Mom married Gerald Rudolph Ford; adopted, the boy took Ford’s name. He worked odd jobs, was an Eagle Scout, and hoped to emulate legendary running back Red Grange. As president, the two-time All-American relived 1930s Michigan football by reading the sports section first. He liked its lesson: “the value of team play.”
After Michigan, Ford spurned pro football’s Lions and Packers to attend Yale, go to war, practice law in Grand Rapids, and begin a fifty-eight-year marriage whose longevity contended with the Bushes’. Another lesson is one that politicians who should know better violate at their peril: If a person is open and reliable, voters sense he is happy with their company. First elected in 1948, Ford began a twenty-five-year stint as Michigan’s Fifth District’s “Congressman for Life”— all he wanted till fate beckoned, garbed in the scandal of our time.
In 1965 Ford became House minority leader, “topping my all-time goal. I could have stayed there forever.” Then, in 1973 Spiro Agnew resigned as vice president. Nixon wanted John Connally, by now a recently converted Republican, ex–treasury secretary, and as we shall see, Bush’s bête noir. Instead, charred by Watergate, he tapped the tortoise, not the hare—loyal, familiar, and sure to be confirmed.
“They like you,” Nixon stage-whispered after naming Ford Agnew’s successor in October 1973. One reason is that few Democrats feared him. “I’m a Ford, not a Lincoln,” he correctly told Congress. That month Newsweek assigned Tom DeFrank, twenty-nine, to cover the future accidental vice president. For nine months both crossed the country in tiny Air Force Two, fencing warily, then bonding, like two veins from a common mine.
DeFrank was younger, Ford more conservative. Jerry became president, Tom a superb president watcher—by turn Newsweek White House correspondent, New York Daily News Washington Bureau chief, and National Journal contributing editor. In 1991 he suggested recording Ford’s views on policy, politics, and presidents—also, as it happened, life and love and faith and aging. Ford agreed, stipulating publication “only when I’m dead.” He died December 26, 2006. The book, published in 2007, became Write It When I’m Gone: Remarkable Off-the-Record Conversations with Gerald R. Ford.
In April 1974 Ford prophesied Nixon’s resignation four months before it happened, then, grabbing DeFrank’s tie, swore him to secrecy. To Ford, the president had “not acted forthrightly” yet “had a terrific loyalty to people.” He was a foreign policy savant yet “had a character where the bad part could take over.” Upon Nixon’s exit, his successor told the East Room audience, “Our long national nightmare is over.” Ford then added, “May Richard Nixon, who brought peace to millions, find it for himself.”
The new president found crisis. Unemployment hit 7.1 percent. Many wanted Nixon tried or hanged. Instead, Ford issued a “full, free, and absolute pardon” a month after taking office, creating a fire-storm but freeing himself “to get on with the country’s business.” Improbably, the athlete took to falling down stairs. Two crazies tried to kill him. U.S. civilians left Saigon as Communists took South Vietnam. “To sit in the Oval Office and see Americans beaten,” said Ford, “was not a happy experience for the President of the United States.”
Unfazed, Ford forced Rhodesia to abandon white minority rule, met with Brezhnev in Vladivostok, and signed the Helsinki Pact, ensuring the sanctity of national boundaries. He ordered an attack on Khmer Rouge (Cambodian) forces that had seized a U.S. merchant ship, the Mayaguez, and refused to release it. Many Americans yawned. Increasingly, our ex-savior seemed Bill Mauldin’s Sad-Sack Kid.
In January 1975 the incumbent said, “The State of the Union is not good.” It was better by 1976: inflation down, America at peace. Still, not enough recalled 1974’s breath of fresh air who rose at 5:15 a.m., worked eighteen hours daily, vowed “openness and candor,” and seemed constitutionally unable to utter a nasty word. Ford trailed Democratic candidate Jimmy Carter by thirty-three points at August’s GOP Convention. Then, like a timer clicking, America remembered Jerry College. He nearly won despite Watergate, the pardon, and claiming in the second presidential debate that Eastern Europe was not under Soviet domination. By election night Ford’s voice was spent. Wife Betty read his concession.
Today many deem Ford just what the doctor ordered: substance over style. My first vote was for Nixon in 1972 over his opponent, George McGovern, whom in a spasm of arrogance I called Caligula’s horse in a college newspaper column. Years later, at Washington’s National Airport, I looked up to see McGovern sit next to me on a plane. To my surprise, I found him eminently decent, like Ford.
In 2012 Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy wrote a book, The Presidents Club, about the fraternity of former presidents, noting that Bush and Gerald Ford admired one another. I was not surprised. In 1999 Bush asked me to ghostwrite a remembrance for American Enterprise magazine of Ford’s succession a quarter century earlier. Typically, Bush mentioned that I had helped, and Ford wrote a thoughtful note.
Politics, I would learn, need not differ from life. You could fault the other side and still allow for friendship. But I should have known this from 1974–77. Jerry Ford taught us that.
Unlike Nixon, Agnew, and later Ronald Reagan, Ford largely ignored targets of the counterculture. Their mid- to late 1970s voice was now inchoate—not for nothing were they still called the Silent Majority— robbed of the person who had demanded for them a decent measure of respect. Before Watergate burst in early 1973, Newsweek had termed Nixon “a stern, sure, and uncompromising man who disdained to conciliate his critics.” To Ford, conciliation was means and end; he enjoyed advising a businessman, local banker, the Democratic whip on the Hill. With Nixon gone, the 1970s’ frame of reference vanished. Liberals yearned for someone to attack. (They later found him in Reagan.) Others yearned for leadership, anywhere.
My time in college had split America into hawk vs. dove, religion vs. hedonism, Saukville vs. Woodstock, combatants trenched in belligerence—an age one might not want to relive but would not have missed living for the world. Washington Star reporter James Dickenson thought Ford unlikely to champion “traditional middle-class family values [like] busing, school prayer, abortion, and individual freedom,” changing the last half of the 1970s landscape for almost everyone—including Bush. Poppy had been unable to advance electorally toward the presidency: witness 1964 and 1970. Building a curriculum vitae, he now tried appointively.
Since childhoo
d I had read the Rochester, New York, Democrat and Chronicle (D&C). It was not a writer’s paper like, say, the Boston Globe, but the then-money-in-the-bank flagship of America’s largest chain, the Gannett Co. I wrote my first story for it the summer before my college freshman year. On a lark I called former Yankees manager Joe McCarthy. For two hours we spoke on his farm outside Buffalo of Babe Ruth and Connie Mack and Lou Gehrig—to McCarthy, a surrogate son. Next week I took the article to the D&C, dropped it on an editor’s desk, and heard nothing till I woke one Sunday to see my byline and a headline, “Down on the Farm, Marse Joe Doesn’t Seem So Bad.” Nine days after college graduation, for $158 a week, Blue Cross coverage, and no expense account, I joined as a full-time reporter the newspaper of my youth.
By 1973 the D&C had waned, though memory of its 1930s through mid-’60s high meridian masked decline. The late publisher, Frank Gannett, considered people like Prescott Bush hopelessly left-wing. Al Neuharth, named chief executive officer (CEO) my first year there, was expected to restore balance (today’s chain is as liberal as the late Gannett’s was conservative) and profit (to get it, Gannett launched a new flagship, DC-based USA Today, in 1982). Working at night—the D&C was a morning paper—fused coffee and conjecture. Who was a better shortstop—Luis Aparicio or Maury Wills? (Little Looie.) Which was superior in its heyday, Life or the Saturday Evening Post? (Pick ’em.) Was “You’re So Vain” about Carly Simon trashing Warren Beatty? (Only they knew.) Who would regret their choice in 1972—a Nixon or McGovern voter? (Depends on whom you asked.)
Sports intoxicated. They also were insufficient. A morning person, I disliked the bell curve of an a.m. paper. Moreover, politics gnawed, and I would not get there from here. In 1975 the Chronicle of Higher Education advertised for a communications official at Hamilton College, chartered in 1793 by a Presbyterian missionary, Samuel Kirk-land, in Clinton, New York, overlooking the Oriskany and Mohawk Valley. In 1812 the school became known as Hamilton College, for Kirkland’s friend Alexander Hamilton, whose Treasury Department statue stands next to the White House. What stunned—as anyone watching the 1969 film The Sterile Cuckoo, shot at and around Hamilton, can attest—was the area’s cathedral of the outdoors.
After a year of campaigning across the country, John F. Kennedy was asked by Theodore White in 1960 what part he felt most scenic. “He thought for a moment, and then, like most Americans, chose home”—New England. Many might choose east-central Upstate New York, including Hamilton, with its changing seasons and wooded glens of oak and pine and maple and quadrangles, broad lawns, and redbrick buildings. Its 1827 chapel, designed by Philip Hooker, is America’s last example of an early three-story church. Hamilton College extolled its faculty—most tying research and intellect—and students—many from private schools—and alumni—like diplomat Sol Linowitz, playwright Thomas Meehan, and psychologist B. F. Skinner. Bush knew a number of Hamilton men (till 1978 theirs was a single-sex college). Graduates anchored the wise men of the Boston– New York–Washington axis. Hamilton was “Little Ivy,” tying privilege, discipline, courtesy, and expectation.
As profited Saul on the Damascus Road, scales fell from a newcomer’s eyes on my arrival at Hamilton. I knew little of students’ boarding school, a vacation in Belize, or alumni opening doors shut to state university graduates. Personally, many treated me with kindness—in particular, former New York Times book critic John Hutchens, then member of the Board of Trustees, became a friend. Meantime, I debated faculty over Ford vs. Reagan, the Mayaguez, and the fall of Southeast Asia. Some were thoughtful liberals. Some resided on what Reagan called the Loony Left. Others were content to live permanently in a state of compromise—what Margaret Thatcher termed the “wets,” missing in action when the gloves came off.
Hamilton’s student body was largely white, upper class, and Protestant—a bay window of Bush’s 1940s education. A mile down the hill, the town of Clinton was middle-income WASP (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant) to the bone. The region’s hub, Utica—working class, largely immigrant, and solidly Catholic—lay ten miles away. What a triangle! Like a candidate, I had to connect their points, somehow finding a denominator. “Easy,” a friend proposed. “Just drink, swear, and talk sports.” Truth was more complex. I could be myself and at home in Clinton—old style in a familiar style, polite and reticent, Time columnist Lance Morrow’s “simple and virtuous small-town America.” I could imbibe more, be more profane, and commune with Utica. As Bush found in 1988, to become president, a Republican, quoting Glendower, had to call both of their “spirits from the vasty deep.”
In time Poppy found that Ivy and other academe had become prisoners of political correctness, changing mightily since he graduated Yale Class of ’48. By contrast, Clinton’s and Utica’s differences were more superficial than substantive. Nixon, then Reagan, perceived, as the Gipper said, how “what unites us far outweighs what little divides us”—contempt for welfare, a need for work, and belief in faith, family, national security, and American exceptionalism. At heart, unlike Thatcher’s “wets,” each flaunted honest emotion.
Later, I often thought of this in a Washington of pretense and posturing vs. Upstate’s love of home and people’s feelings and how you grew up. If, as a newspaper wrote in 1991, I knew “as well as anyone at the White House the values of two groups central to a GOP majority— small-town Protestants and urban Catholics,” the 1970s helped.
Asked about John F. Kennedy’s view that “life is unfair,” Bush said, “It’s unfair to some people, yes. There are inequities, yes. Nobody is going to design a system that is totally, totally fair.” His daughter’s death of leukemia at three was unfair. Barbara Bush said simply, “We loved her more than life.” Losing two crew members and almost Poppy’s life at twenty was unfair. “These were,” Bush said, “the molding events that most shaped my life.” In 1974 his life was, above all, askew.
The last two years had made Bush a two-headed Janus—“serving without combat pay during Watergate.” One head thought his benefactor “was entitled to a fair hearing. I thought he [Nixon] was entitled to it without a lot of fine-tuning out of the party apparatus.” The second felt “the party was separate and apart from Watergate. The party was ongoing. The party had to be strong when all the Watergate mess was over.” Two stacks of mail rose daily in his office. One attacked Bush for betraying Nixon: “The chairman of the party,” he recalled, “he’s head of the party. Why aren’t you helping more?” The other stack ripped him for not attacking Nixon. “Hey, why are you keeping the party so close to the president?” Bush treasured fealty— but to whom?
After Ford’s swearing-in, the president had to nominate a successor as vice president—the first simultaneous U.S. president and vice president not chosen by the people. Bush told Ford that if nominated, he would serve. In turn Ford cut the veep list to Bush and New York governor Nelson Rockefeller. Bush led a poll of GOP officeholders, but Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld reportedly wanted Rocky. Ford agreed. Rockefeller was thought to have more heft, gravitas not then stature’s word of choice. He was also too liberal for party regulars, as the next year showed.
On August 24, 1974, Bush waited at Kennebunkport for Ford’s call. “Mr. Bush, you don’t seem to be too upset about this,” a reporter said, moments later.
“Yes, but you can’t see what’s on the inside,” said Bush, a profile in poise.
Rockefeller took his oath of office December 19. By then Bush had begun a campaign to gild his curriculum vitae in two places, eleven thousand miles apart. The first followed Ford’s fall 1974 offer to become ambassador to France or the Court of St. James. Bush gently countered, asking to be sent to China. It was a shrewd, even career-making, move. Nixon’s 1972 pilgrimage had given buzz to all things Oriental, Beijing née Peking now a dateline to rival London or Moscow. China would become a favorite congressional and executive travel destination. Bush’s nonpolitical post could be a political boon. America then maintained official relations only with the Republic of China on Taiwan. T
hus, the Beijing office lacked an embassy’s official status and Bush the title of “ambassador,” though he brought to the position everything but the name.
Ford made Bush chief of the U.S. liaison office in the People’s Republic of China, telling him to expect to stay there two years. Photos show Poppy and Mrs. Bush shopping with the natives, bicycling by the China World Trade Center, standing near a giant picture of Mao Tse-tung, and seeing the Great Wall, Ming Tombs, and Temple of the Sun Park—all the trappings of a pol. In October 1975 Bush’s favorite baseball team, the Boston Red Sox, played Cincinnati in a World Series that next spring the New Yorker wrote “was replayed everywhere in memory and conversation through the ensuing winter, and even now its colors still light up the sky.” Bush and the staff followed this keeper of an event. On October 22, at 12:34 a.m. eastern time, Carlton Fisk’s twelfth-inning home run that hit the left-field foul pole won Game Six, 7–6, tying the Series, three all. It was noon at the office. Bush recalls “cheering almost as soon as Fisk’s homer cleared the wall. Almost all of the people in our office were pulling for the Red Sox.”
Missing America, the Bushes loved the Chinese, mannered and hardworking; Dorothy Bush could have mothered them all. “Mysterious, loving tradition, so much to discover in their people,” said Bush. “China had been isolated by choice” until Nixon’s trip—and inaccessible to the world. After a year in China, Bush wrote Ford that he wished to return to America, later saying, “I’d done all I could.” Plus, he sensed opportunity. Republican politics rivaled a circular firing squad. On November 20, 1975, Ronald Reagan announced his candidacy for president, the Right already in revolt against Jerry B. Good: too dull, too inarticulate, too quick to capitulate. That month Rocky withdrew as Ford’s 1976 vice president, a sacrifice to conservatives, saying, “I didn’t come down [to DC] to get caught up in party squabbles which only make it more difficult for the president in a very difficult time.”