The Presidents Club: Inside the World's Most Exclusive Fraternity

by Nancy Gibbs

  Dick Nixon may not have been Jerry Ford’s first friend in Washington, but he came close, and it is easy to see why. They were born just six months apart in 1913, a year that produced the zipper, the Federal Reserve, and Rosa Parks. They shared small-town roots, had struggled to attend nearby colleges, served in the Navy, and both gone on to law school. Nixon was elected to the House right after the war in 1946; Ford followed two years later.

  And if Nixon had heard about Ford, Ford had certainly heard of Nixon, after his triumph over Alger Hiss. Ford liked to hang out on the House floor on most days in his first term, meeting other members and talking shop; he made it a point to be present when Nixon rose to speak. Ford was struck by Nixon’s attention to detail, how carefully he prepared for debates, how deeply he understood the complex cast of characters who mattered on foreign policy both at home and overseas. Nixon had to be impressed by Ford’s ready smile, his easy way with his colleagues, his straightforward Midwestern manner, and his obvious lack of pretense. (Ford had trouble getting into his Capitol Hill office on the first day because he came dressed to clean the place—in overalls.) “Both of us were strongly dedicated to certain domestic policies at home and US leadership abroad. In fact in political philosophy, we were about as close as two people could get,” Ford said, adding, “We understood what it meant to rise on merit, not privilege.”

  Being the same age bonded them; so did their charter memberships in the Chowder and Marching Society. They carpooled from northern Virginia to Capitol Hill together and saw each other socially, and Pat Nixon and Betty Ford became friends as well. Nixon had big plans: by 1950, he’d graduated to the Senate and the next year, when the Republican swells in Grand Rapids pressed him to produce a big name for their annual Lincoln Day Dinner, Ford turned to Nixon for help. Sure enough, Nixon filled the hall in Ford’s hometown for the event. He spent time later that night reassuring a smaller group of locals about his controversial investigation of Hiss; some of the questions were hostile, but Nixon, Ford recalled, kept his cool throughout. Later, Ford took Nixon to his parents’ house to spend the night, where they stayed up late sharing a drink and talking about the coming 1952 campaign. Nixon occupied Ford’s mother’s four-poster bed. “Later,” Ford recalled, “she hung a sign on the bed: ‘The Vice President slept here.’”

  Over time Ford realized that however similar their views on policy might be, their personalities were not. The sunny Ford was struck by Nixon’s moodiness. He recalled one party where Nixon was playing the spirited showman inside the room but turned gloomier when he left. “On my way out I saw him on the curb waiting for a car, mumbling to himself. He seemed sad and detached.” The mood swings, Ford assumed, exacted a price. “One minute he was the outgoing extrovert, the next reflective, even sullen. My impression was that his moodiness drained a lot out of him.”

  But Ford shared that observation with the public only late in his life. At the time, Ford was a solid Nixon man. During the 1952 campaign, he came to Nixon’s defense when the nominee was discovered to have maintained a congressional slush fund for personal expenses. Ford himself had done the same and when a variety of Republicans urged Nixon to take himself off the ticket, Ford urged Nixon to stay put. “I am in your corner 100 percent,” Ford wired. “Fight it to the finish, just as you did the smears by the communists when you were proving your charges against Alger Hiss. All Michigan representatives feel as I do.”

  A pattern emerged: Ford again led the countercharge for Nixon in 1956, when a group of Republican backbenchers, led by Harold Stassen, tried to have the vice president tossed from the ticket. This time around, Ford organized the defense, rallying members of the Chowder and Marching Society at the convention in San Francisco to pressure their state delegations to stick with Nixon. Ford’s maneuvering took place far from any cameras and was engineered to avoid, rather than generate, publicity. But when it was over, Nixon knew whom to thank: he sent Ford four different notes of gratitude for his help over a sixteenday period. “It is difficult to express adequately in a letter how deeply I appreciated your fine gesture of confidence,” Nixon wrote. A few days later, he wrote again, despite a plea by Ford that no thanks were in order. “I know you said ‘don’t answer,’” Nixon wrote, “but I wanted to tell you how very much I appreciate what you did.”

  By 1960, it was hard to tell where friendship stopped and a strategic alliance began—to the point that Nixon arranged to have Ford’s name floated as a possible vice president at the 1960 convention in Chicago. Nixon did this the old-fashioned way: he asked veteran Newsweek writer Raymond Moley to extol Ford’s uncommon grasp of Congress in his column. Moley complied: “Watch this Ford,” he wrote. “A conservative [who combines] the wisdom of age with the drive of youth.”

  With Ford’s permission (and perhaps a little encouragement as well), Michigan Republicans picked up on the idea. About one hundred flag-waving supporters greeted his arrival at Midway Airport in Chicago that summer; the Congress Hotel on Michigan Avenue sported Ford banners and many guests pinned on blue and gold Ford buttons. Some of this hoopla was the kind of ritual courtesy a nominee paid in that era to big state delegations and their titular leaders; governors often arrived at party conventions as favorite son candidates for the top job itself, in part just to keep the delegations unified until the proper deals could be struck with the nominee. Ford later insisted that he hadn’t put much stock in the 1960 vice president boomlet and instead preferred a Republican senator from Kentucky by the name of Thruston Morton for the job. Maybe so, but there is evidence that Ford did not regard his own “candidacy” as another routine Nixon head fake: he sought a lawyer’s advice about whether he could, under Michigan law, run for both the vice presidency and Congress at the same time. And there is a telling aside in his wife’s memoirs that some part of Ford hoped Nixon might be serious in 1960. As Betty Ford recalled the rumors in 1973 (which would, of course, come true) that Nixon was about to tap Ford to be his vice president, she wrote that she saw no reason to take them seriously then given what had happened before. “We’d done our sitting-up-until-four-in-the-morning number in 1960,” she wrote, “and [Nixon] had come up with Henry Cabot Lodge, and since then we’ve been impervious to rumor.”

  As for Ford, he learned a different lesson about Nixon and the vice presidency in 1960. A day before Nixon was to announce his choice, Ford was invited by a Nixon aide to attend an urgent meeting to discuss the options. When Ford replied that he favored Kentucky’s Morton, the aide said that Nixon had already decided on Lodge. So what was the point of the meeting, Ford wondered. “If Nixon had made up his mind,” Ford asked later, “why would he go through the sham of asking for our advice? That wasn’t the way to play the game. . . . Making up his mind and then pretending that his options were still open—that was a Nixon trait that I’d have occasion to witness again.”

  But if Ford was bothered, he went to Nixon’s imaginary bull session at the Blackstone Hotel anyway. Which was lucky, if only because Ford too had a role to play in the psychodrama: to volunteer to stay put. Nixon at one point in that session turned to Ford and said, “I don’t know of anyone whose views on domestic and foreign policy are more consonant with mine than Jerry here, but if I’m elected, I’ll need him in the House.” So there Ford stayed. Adding insult to injury perhaps, Nixon asked Ford to make a speech seconding Lodge’s nomination. And, ever the good soldier, Ford agreed.

  Nixon led Ford through a similar charade in 1968, when he was again the nominee and seeking “advice” from party elders about a running mate. At another Kabuki session, this time in his Miami Beach hotel suite, Nixon again gathered top Republicans to discuss the options. Once more he turned to Ford and said, “I know that in the past, Jerry, you have thought about being Vice President. Would you take it this year?”

  It is hard to imagine that such an offer, made in such a semipublic fashion, was serious. And Ford, playing along with the charade, said that while he appreciated the “compliment,” he favored New York Cit
y mayor John Lindsay instead (a choice about as far from Nixon’s mind as Ford himself). But there were some candidates Ford, whatever his feelings about his own chances, could not abide. And when Nixon gently floated the name of Maryland governor Spiro Agnew later in the session, Ford let out what one man present described as a raucous whinny. Though Ford may have expressed what others in the room were thinking, his reaction was not enough to deter Nixon. When Ford, sitting poolside the next day with Betty at the Fontainebleau Hotel, heard from an aide that Nixon had indeed tapped Agnew, he was again dumbfounded. “I couldn’t believe it,” he said. Agnew, Ford related, “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.”

  It had to sting Ford that his old friend had picked a second-rate player as his understudy. But Nixon got exactly what he wanted with Agnew: someone who would gladly stick a knife in Nixon’s enemies, a role for which the genial Ford was completely unsuited.

  Third Time’s the Charm

  When Nixon finally tapped Ford to be his vice president—not in 1960 or in 1968 but in 1973 after Agnew resigned as part of a plea bargain agreement—it wasn’t really Nixon who chose him at all.

  Ford and his aides maintained in their various memoirs that being vice president was the last thing on his mind. By 1973, the story goes, Ford wanted out of politics. He had served twenty-five years in the House, made many friends, and secured a good federal pension. But he had largely missed his kids while they grew up. His gregarious wife was lonely and sought comfort in alcohol and pills. And after watching Nixon win a forty-nine-state landslide in 1972 only to have the House remain safely under Democratic control, Ford also knew, once and for all, that he’d never be speaker. By the summer of 1973, Ford was asking majority leader Tip O’Neill to consider a congressional pay raise to help boost his pension before he retired. That way, Ford figured, he could go back to Grand Rapids and practice law, as he put it to O’Neill, “three days a week and play golf the other four.” O’Neill demurred, “Let me think about it.”

  As it became clear that Agnew could not survive in office, Ford knew he was once again a contender for the number two job. Ford and a few other lawmakers had been given the task (by Nixon) of rounding up nominations from members of Congress about who should replace Agnew; and the winner of that informal poll was none other than Ford himself. He was well known to Nixon, perfectly aligned with the president on most issues, popular on Capitol Hill, nonthreatening to Democrats, and free of any taint of scandal. Even Pat Nixon was betting on Ford.

  Nixon, however, was not on board. He had long preferred John Connally, chiefly because he believed the LBJ protégé, who had joined the Nixon administration and later the Republican Party itself, could split the Democratic Party in two in the not too distant 1976 elections. Connally, for his part, certainly thought he was going to get it; by October 10, the day Agnew resigned, Connally was already installed at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel, quietly assembling a vice presidential staff.

  But Nixon had failed to anticipate the reaction of House Speaker Carl Albert, the diminutive Oklahoma Democrat who had come to Congress with Nixon in 1946 and who would later say that Dick Nixon had been the first Republican he’d ever met. Along with Senate majority leader Mike Mansfield, Albert told Nixon that only Ford would have an easy time winning confirmation in the midst of the widening Watergate crisis. Albert left no doubt that the other contenders—Ronald Reagan, Nelson Rockefeller, and especially Connally—would face a meat grinder of questions. A Congress controlled by Democrats would never allow a party turncoat like Connally to become the vice president. Nor did they want someone who might prove to be a strong contender for the presidency in 1976. And so, as Nixon would recall, “This left Jerry Ford.”

  A White House official told Richard Reeves, “Nixon hated the idea but he had to go along.”

  Perhaps because he had so little choice, Nixon pretended that he did, and repaired to Camp David for two days to ponder the matter. Then he flew by helicopter back to the White House on the morning of October 12 and informed his staff that he had made up his mind. They in turn laid on an East Room announcement for the evening, a Friday night. On instructions from Nixon, chief of staff Al Haig gave Connally the bad news, before calling Ford with a hint of the good news to come.

  It is difficult to re-create the uncertainty about Nixon’s choice that pervaded Washington in a pre-Internet, pre–cell phone, pre–cable television era. Throughout the afternoon, news organizations, including the Washington Post, had madly chased a rumor that Nixon would tap a relative unknown, Virginia governor Linwood Holton. Nixon phoned Ford just as the Ford family sat down to a dinner of grilled steaks at their northern Virginia home. “I’ve got good news,” Nixon said, “but I want Betty to hear it, too.” The Fords dressed and hurried to the White House, where by 9 P.M. a mix of stifling klieg lights, wild speculation—and, strangest of all, live chamber music—created a scene out of Gilbert and Sullivan. Everyone in politics had been invited; the room was crammed with row upon row of gilt chairs to accommodate the overflow crowd. Television networks went live to the nervous and congested room, their anchormen in the dark about the outcome. As Nixon entered to “Hail to the Chief,” virtually no one in the room knew the identity of the next vice president of the United States.

  Yet everyone knew that whoever it turned out to be might well become the next commander in chief.

  Nixon unveiled his choice slowly, first talking about his agenda and the need for the country to “build a new prosperity . . . without war and without inflation.” Even when he turned to the business at hand, he moved by inches: he spent a few minutes explaining his rationale and the unnamed nominee’s qualifications. Many in the crowd were madly updating their own mental short lists as Nixon ran through his reasons, trying to get there first by process of elimination. When Nixon came to the part in the remarks where he praised the nominee’s twenty-five years in the House, the suspense broke and the silence began to break into whistles, cheers, and scattered applause—“Beautiful, beautiful,” one lawmaker shouted from the rear of the room. By now, Jerry terHorst, who was then covering Ford for the Detroit News, noted in his own account, “those around Ford began pummeling him, clapping him on the back, punching his shoulders”—and he stood to accept the handshakes and congratulations of the two House leaders who were sitting near him, Albert and O’Neill; at the same time, people were nudging—shoving by some accounts—Ford out from the audience and toward the president and the podium. Those in the audience almost seemed to want to take the decision out of Nixon’s hands, validating it as their own.

  But Nixon was still speaking, praising the still unnamed Ford, and he broke from his text to urge the audience not to rush to judgment. “There are several here,” he said, “who have served 25 years in the House of Representatives”—as if he preferred to deprive Ford of the moment. And then, a few sentences later, Nixon revealed his choice and the room exploded in sustained, unalloyed cheering. “I proudly present to you the man whose name I will submit to the Congress of the United States for confirmation as Vice President of the United States, Congressman Gerald R. Ford of Michigan.”

  A live microphone picked up the back-and-forth between the president and his new number two. “They like you,” Nixon said to Ford, who replied, “I have a few friends out there.”

  It was a revealing piece of political theater that offered more than a hint of what was to come. Henry Kissinger, who had spent much of that day wrestling with the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War, spoke to Nixon after the East Room event. His analysis, recorded in his memoirs, was sharp-eyed: “He was in good form, still exuberant over achieving surprise in naming Ford, who (he reasoned) would be a short-term asset with the Congress.” The choice, Nixon imagined, would slow the drive toward impeachment, since Congress would not want to run the risk of placing a supposedly inexperienced man in char
ge of foreign affairs. This just showed how little Nixon understood his adversaries. “He failed to recognize that [the applause] was a tribute above all to Ford,” Kissinger observed. “Nor did he yet understand that his fate could no longer be changed by tactical maneuvers. Indeed, Nixon’s travails had reached the point where even if Ford was as inconsequential as Nixon thought—which he emphatically was not—his designation as Vice President would accelerate Nixon’s collapse rather than delay it. It was more tempting for Democrats to remove Nixon if his successor seemed to be someone they thought they could beat in the Presidential election of 1976.”

  Nixon resigned eight months later.

  “I Haven’t Cried Since Eisenhower Died”

  Gerald Ford held fifty-five press conferences in his eight months as vice president, more than Nixon, as president, had held in six years.

  So when Ford finally got to hold one as president, in mid-August 1974, he tried to do it in a way that proved that he had expunged Nixon’s ghost from the White House.

  Ford conducted the session in the East Room, standing in plain view of the wide-open central corridor rather than before a wall of heavy velvet drapes. Wearing no makeup, he entered from a side door that was pointedly left ajar, as if to signal a new openness. He stood comfortably, almost casually, in front of a sliver of a lectern so minimal that it hid nothing of Ford’s frame and barely left room for the Presidential Seal. The whole event screamed modesty and transparency. And in case anyone missed the point, Ford opened with some lighter news from the residence: in order to hold this first press conference, he said, the commander in chief had been forced to bump his wife’s first meeting with reporters into the following week. “Until then,” he deadpanned, “I will be making my own breakfast, my own lunch and my own dinner.”