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

by Nancy Gibbs

  That last part, Ford told Woodward, “was always very reassuring to me.”

  Intensive Care

  And yet for all the trouble that Nixon caused him, for all the risks he posed to a young presidency, Ford would not abandon his old friend.

  Less than two weeks after his appearance before Congress—and just four days before the congressional elections of 1974—Ford went on a ten-thousand-mile, seven-state late-October swing to campaign for Republican candidates, mostly in the West and Midwest. Ford departed just after Nixon had come out of surgery at a Long Beach, California, hospital to remove blood clots from his leg. The procedure had been touch and go; recovery was iffy. Nixon went into shock and, according to some accounts, had come close to dying.

  As Ford was scheduled to headline a $500-a-plate fund-raising dinner at Los Angeles’s Century Plaza Hotel on October 31, it was inevitable that his aides would be asked about whether the president was planning to visit his ailing predecessor, who was about thirty miles to the south. Ron Nessen, the new White House press secretary, urged Ford to skip the courtesy call lest he raise “new suspicions about the Ford-Nixon relationship.” Coming so close to the election—and just two weeks after Ford made his unprecedented appearance on Capitol Hill—any visit with Nixon was bound to raise questions again if not resentments. But Ford dismissed Nessen’s fears out of hand. “If compassion and mercy are not compatible with politics,” Ford said, “then something is the matter with politics.”

  Ford handled the arrangements himself. After arriving in Los Angeles, he called Pat Nixon and asked whether a visit would help her husband recover. “Oh, there’s nothing he’d like more,” she replied. And even though there had always been a mysterious hole in the schedule for the morning of November 1, the visit was only then officially laid on, with Ford flying by helicopter down to Long Beach from his hotel in Beverly Hills. While reporters waited outside, Ford, Nessen, and a handful of other aides went in, taking the elevator to the seventh floor. There Ford greeted Pat, Julie, and Tricia Nixon with hugs and spent a few moments consoling them.

  Nixon had the entire intensive care wing to himself, and Ford’s delegation had only been there a few moments when it became clear that there was a problem: Nixon’s room was somehow locked from the inside. The now pardoned president was bedridden behind a jammed door and therefore, somewhat improbably, imprisoned. “Nixon was in the room all alone,” Nessen recalled, “too sick to get out of bed to unlock the door.” After about ten minutes, a maintenance man appeared and proceeded to cut the lock with a hacksaw.

  Only then was Ford able to enter the room, walk to the bedside, and greet his predecessor. Nixon was flat on his back. “There were tubes in his nose and mouth and wires led from his arms, chest and legs to machines with orange lights that blinked on and off,” Ford remembered. “His face was ashen and I thought I had never seen anyone closer to death.” Conversation turned out to be difficult if not impossible: the two men talked briefly about the campaign but Nixon kept nodding off. Ford at one point asked how the previous night had gone. Nixon’s raspy reply: “None of the nights are good.” Ford realized that it was best to hurry the engagement and let Nixon rest. As he departed, Nixon thanked him for coming. “Mr. President, this has meant a lot to me. I’m deeply grateful.”

  Nessen told reporters afterward that the two presidents had chatted for eight minutes although the real elapsed time was closer to four. (This exaggeration led Nessen to quip in his memoirs: “Ironically, my first lie was to cover up for Nixon.”) Chatting with reporters a few minutes later, Ford insisted that the two men had shared concerns about a variety of foreign policy matters. “Obviously, he is a very, very sick man, but I think he is coming along very, very well,” Ford explained. “The President was very alert.” In fact, Ford left the hospital thinking Nixon might not survive and calculated that, given the odds, it was better to have visited than not. “If he had died and I had passed up the chance to visit him,” Ford wrote later, “I wouldn’t have been able to forgive myself.”

  Nixon and Ford, bound by time and chance, both lived long after their presidencies ended. Nixon left office in 1974 and lived for another twenty years; Ford left the White House in early 1977 and survived for nearly thirty.

  Ford granted many interviews over those three decades, patiently and repeatedly explaining that he had pardoned Nixon to put the Watergate nightmare behind the nation and restart his own unlikely presidency. Over time, most of the people who had criticized the decision or its timing in 1974 came to believe that Ford had done the right thing—and selflessly so.

  And in the end, the club recognized Ford for his decision—and perhaps for recognizing that the power of the presidency had to be preserved at all costs. In 2001, Ford was honored by another president’s family—he received the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award. The decision had been controversial in liberal circles: the Kennedy clan, more than twenty-five years after Watergate, was not yet in the habit of forgiving Republicans who had forgiven Richard Nixon. “Unlike many of us at the time,” Senator Ted Kennedy remarked, before presenting the award to the eighty-eight-year-old former president, “President Ford recognized that the nation had to move forward, and could not do so if there was a continuing effort to prosecute former President Nixon. So President Ford made a courageous decision, one that historians now say cost him his office.”

  It was almost as if the Kennedys had issued Ford a pardon for pardoning Nixon.

  FORD AND REAGAN:

  The Family Feud

  It would be wrong to call the relationship between Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan a rivalry; it was more like a blood feud, a fight that broke out in the mid-1970s between the Republican Party’s moderate and conservative clans, between its realist and idealist foreign policy camps, and between its old base in the East and Midwest and its fast-growing new home in the West. But the fight was also a very personal one: neither man had a terribly high opinion of the other’s intelligence; each believed the other to be in over his head. Reagan viewed Ford as too contented and conciliatory to lead the nation or manage its interests. Ford saw Reagan as a phony and an upstart, in no way ready for the job of commander in chief. Reagan believed Ford and his band of leftover Nixonites, led by Henry Kissinger, had turned détente into a “one-way street” that helped the Soviet Union survive. Ford regarded Reagan as a come-lately opportunist who had been staked in politics by rich oilmen after his Hollywood career cratered. Ford, Reagan believed, was a reliable party understudy but not its true star.

  They would never be close, but the lure of the club would very nearly bind them together. In 1976, both men wanted so desperately to be president that they fought nonstop from New Hampshire all the way to the penultimate night of the convention. So raw was their rivalry that neither man could imagine joining forces with the other on the Republican ticket, whatever the delegates might have wanted. But four years later, they came close to hatching a curious and ill-considered power-sharing scheme designed to ensure that each man would finally get what he had long sought: Reagan would become president and Ford would finally be elected to national office.

  15

  “It Burned the Hell out of Me”

  —GERALD FORD

  Early in January 1976, Gerald Ford explained how he expected his very first campaign for president of the United States to unfold.

  After a quick sweep of the early primaries against Ronald Reagan, Ford predicted he would face his old friend Hubert Humphrey in the general election. “Hubert is a gentleman,” Ford said, “and neither he nor I is going to get into any sordid political accusations. . . . That kind of contest might be very wholesome for the country.”

  Ford’s words were sweetly naive, a reminder that even after sixteen months as president, he was still a novice. Not only had he never been elected to the presidency or the vice presidency—he had never even run for the office. And now he had to mount a campaign to woo tens of millions of voters who had never seen his name on a
ballot. Nothing in Ford’s twenty-eight years in politics prepared him for the scale of what he was about to try and very little in his prediction would come true. Many years later, he acknowledged his miscalculation: “I had always run pretty much a one man campaign for Congress,” he said in 1990. “Pretty straight forward, limited money, almost certain victory. Where you just did hard work, saw everybody, campaigned as hard on a one to one basis as you could. And all of a sudden I had a different ballpark. And I must admit I didn’t comprehend the vast difference.”

  In 1976, Ford imagined that American politics had somehow reverted to a calmer time when good men made good arguments and voters were able to make a wise choice between the two. It was a quaint notion—and a misleading one. Apart from the change in scale in running a presidential race, Ford faced a much more complex landscape than he imagined. It was easy to assume, and many did, that Democrats had gained the upper hand in the aftermath of Watergate and Nixon and the Vietnam War, now that eighteen-year-olds had been given the right to vote, now that the draft had ended, now that a sexual and gender revolution was rumbling across the United States. The culture’s rapid social liberalization, went the thinking, would surely transform the nation’s politics. And in a few places, that was true. But in the main, a forty-year Democratic era was already over—not in spite of, but because of, all the changes that had knocked the country back on its heels. A broad religious reawakening was under way with evangelical Christians at its forefront. An oil embargo and the gas lines it fostered, a recession and the rising deficits it created, and the cracks in the once-reliable industrial base were shifting the nation steadily to the right. A long period of productive bipartisanship was ending; Watergate and the war would turn American politics into something closer to a blood sport. The gentlemanly era that Ford imagined was already gone.

  The Cat Who Came Back

  When the 1976 campaign began, it wasn’t only Ronald Reagan who was driving Gerald Ford nuts. It was Richard Nixon.

  The president who had resigned just eighteen months earlier and whom Ford had pardoned at considerable political risk, decided that February 1976 would make an ideal time to come out of hiding and take a high-profile trip to, of all places, the People’s Republic of China.

  Nixon had promised Ford months earlier through intermediaries to postpone any international travel until after the 1976 election, but sometime in late 1975 Nixon changed his mind. The reasons remain murky: Nixon may have believed that Ford, under pressure from Reagan, was slowing normalization between the two countries, something Nixon as the architect of the Chinese opening could not abide. A trip to China by Ford and Kissinger a few months earlier had produced little in the way of bilateral progress and one Chinese diplomat described Nixon’s visit as “a slap in the belly of Kissinger with a big wet fish.” Whatever China’s game, political minds in Washington thought they spied a more diabolical plot in Nixon’s sudden urge to travel: to undercut Ford at the start of the primary season and somehow boost the odds that Nixon’s eternal protégé, John Connally, could ride to the rescue of a divided party at the 1976 convention. More likely, Nixon was just being his usual difficult, self-centered self. In any case, even Ford had to admit that the timing was damaging. Just as he was facing a challenge from Reagan for being soft on communism, what could be worse than videotape of the disgraced president enjoying a festive homecoming in Beijing?

  Ford aides discussed denying the landing rights to the Boeing 707 the Chinese sent to collect Nixon; they even discussed holding the plane hostage as a show of toughness. In the end, Ford was left to say the only thing he really could say about a man he had pardoned: “President Nixon is going there as a private citizen.” Out of sight, however, Ford was seething: “If he keeps this up, we are going to crack him.” National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft put it more plainly: “Nixon is a shit.”

  And so after months in seclusion, Nixon and his wife turned up in Beijing three days before the New Hampshire primary.

  His trip had all the trappings of a presidential visit: Nixon was attended by fifteen Secret Service agents and twenty traveling reporters; he took in the latest performance of Chinese acrobats and met for forty minutes with Chairman Mao. Time’s editors published two pages of color photographs of the visit at a time when such vivid art direction was still a novelty. When it was over, little had been accomplished by either side and the reaction at home was savage. “There is nothing, absolutely nothing, he will not do in order to salvage for himself whatever scrap of significance he can find in the shambles of his life,” wrote David Broder. Senator Barry Goldwater went further, charging Nixon with breaking the Logan Act, the 1799 law that bars private citizens from conducting unauthorized foreign policy. “If he wants to do this country a favor,” he added, “he might stay over there.”

  There wasn’t much for Ford to do but bear it stoically. Even after he returned home, Nixon showed little deference to the White House. Nixon declined a Ford request to have deputy CIA director Vernon Walters debrief him in San Clemente and insisted instead on sending a sixty-page report to the White House about his trip. Ford read it, circulated it to Scowcroft, CIA director George Bush, and a few others who found that it contained “little of value,” and then returned it without comment. With Nixon’s reappearance overseas, Ford only narrowly averted a disaster in the New Hampshire primary; a switch of about seven hundred votes out of 100,000 cast would have given Reagan a first-state-in-the-nation victory over the incumbent president. It was a harbinger of the year to come.

  The Fight for the Party

  Ford had never been part of Reagan’s plans; he was an inconvenience at best and a usurper at worst. “We had figured that Nixon would serve out two terms and then Reagan would run for President,” said Reagan advisor Lyn Nofziger. “Then Nixon of course screwed up and so Ford became president. That became a problem because a lot of our people who ordinarily would have been enthused about Reagan running for president didn’t want anyone to run in the primary against a sitting Republican President.”

  It’s something of a club irony that Ford forgave Nixon all sorts of appalling personal injuries and insults during the course of their forty years in politics together chiefly because they were old friends. But because Ford and Reagan were largely strangers, the little slights and injuries common in politics alienated both men deeply. When Reagan flew to Washington in August 1974 for a meeting with some conservative activists, Ford was dismayed that Reagan had not asked to come by for a visit. Ford felt slighted when Reagan failed to meet him—or Vice President Nelson Rockefeller—at various California airports during visits to the Golden State. And Ford, the longtime party man, could not abide the fact that Reagan sometimes charged his hosts to appear at Republican fund-raisers.

  Meanwhile, Reagan and his advisors saw in nearly every action taken by the Ford White House a hidden assault on the Reagan operation in Sacramento. They believed Ford’s choice of Rockefeller to be vice president was designed to diminish Reagan’s status in the party. And they claimed that Ford had double-crossed voters (and Reagan in particular) by breaking a promise that he would not run in 1976. Never mind that the Newsweek story on which this notion was based was widely discredited almost as soon as it was published.

  Advisors in both camps marveled that Ford was somehow unable to buy Reagan off in 1976, as others had done before. Nixon had mollified Reagan by sending him on confected foreign trips—“it’s time to stroke Ronnie,” he’d tell Scowcroft, then his military aide. Nixon sent Reagan overseas four times, complete with an Air Force jet and Secret Service protection. Reagan met eighteen heads of state this way while he was still governor. Best of all, Washington paid for everything (and Reagan liked to tell the story of how he had once made a swing through European capitals with only a few dollars in his pocket).

  A little of that went a long way with Reagan, but Ford never seemed to master such small strokes. By the time Ford got around to offering Reagan a spot in the cabinet, he made a hash of i
t. Instead of setting Reagan up somewhere in the foreign policy area that was so dear to his heart, Ford dangled the drearier job of commerce secretary. And then, rather than pick up the phone to chew the fat, seek his advice, and then ask for Reagan’s help, Ford had his chief of staff Don Rumsfeld, who had his own ambitions for higher office, offer the job instead. Not surprisingly, Reagan turned it down. Reagan felt “particularly insulted” by that episode, Lou Cannon reported.

  What stopped Ford from sprinkling the normal presidential holy water in Reagan’s path? Jealousy, for starters. By 1974, Reagan was, at least in conservative circles, the more famous—and certainly the more favored—of the two. He was a lot of things Ford wasn’t: graceful and even bold in speech, strong in conviction; and he knew how to make an entrance. Ford’s pollster Robert Teeter described him in internal memos as a “conservative idol. When you think about who it is that goes to vote in a Republican primary in New Hampshire and Florida,” Teeter wrote, “[Reagan] is almost perfectly attuned to them.”

  And where envy stopped, denial took over. Many of Ford’s aides admitted later that they did not fully grasp the scale of the Reagan challenge until it was too late. They had been too busy getting their bearings in the White House to notice that many Republicans felt Ford was the wrong man for the job. Only about 21 percent of voters by 1976 identified themselves as Republicans and a growing percentage of that group was several turns more conservative than Ford. And yet Ford could not believe that Reagan would upset the already perilous unity of the Republican Party and mount a challenge to a sitting president. “It burned the hell out of me,” Ford said later, “that I got the diversion from Reagan that caused me to spend an abnormal part of my time trying to round up individual delegates and to raise money.”