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

by Nancy Gibbs

  Nixon would never stop trying to rehabilitate his image in the years that followed and he often used the club as a lever to get it done. Ford’s challenge after his defeat in 1976 was more basic: to get legitimately elected in the first place. In June 1978, Ford’s old friend Jack Marsh wrote a long memo laying out the rationale, the timelines, and the various steps Ford would have to take to win the 1980 nomination. It was an utterly serious look at the challenges and Marsh’s memo did not understate the difficulty. Reagan started the race as the clear favorite but other hopefuls, including George Bush, John Connally, and Howard Baker all had their own claim on the party. Robert Teeter, Ford’s longtime pollster, worried that Ford might not have the stomach for the fight. Ford had his doubts as well. “It nauseated me that I would have to go out and raise four or five million dollars to put on a campaign, to beat Reagan, even though I thought I could.”

  But as the primaries approached, Ford kept putting the idea on the table. In October 1979, Ford turned up in Washington to confuse everyone about his plans. At a breakfast with reporters, many of whom he had known for years, Ford sounded like a coy teenager. “If I came here as a candidate, I’d have to be answering tough questions,” he teased. “Now I don’t come here having to make some point, having to seduce you. I’m seeing good friends, old acquaintances. Isn’t that a nice way to spend the morning?” Pressed a second time, then a third, and then over and over about his plans, Ford said he wasn’t running, but made it clear he would welcome a draft. “I will speak out on SALT [strategic arms talks], other issues. That doesn’t indicate I’m sitting in a smoke filled room with charts and experts, scheming. If something happens, it happens. I’m a fatalist. . . . I never say ‘never’ in politics.”

  And then, sensing perhaps that those comments hadn’t fully clarified things, he proceeded to muddle them further. “I’m not a candidate, I’m not. Somehow you all don’t believe it. On the other hand, if a scenario developed, I’d have to take another look at it.”

  If Ford had a strategy, it amounted to praying the party would turn to him in desperation. As Reagan began to roll through the primaries in early 1980, some of the more moderate members of the Republican Party began to privately express doubts about Reagan’s ability to beat Carter, which fueled speculation about a Ford return. In truth, some of those moderates weren’t worried that Reagan couldn’t win; they were worried that he could. On February 1, Ford told Adam Clymer of the New York Times that Reagan could not win and volunteered to get in if he was “asked.” As if there were a Standing Committee on Invitations.

  This comment provoked another round of emergency planning inside the Ford camp. It was now very late to be jump-starting a campaign: the Iowa caucuses (which Reagan had lost to George Bush) were already past; New Hampshire was only three weeks away. On February 12, longtime Ford aides Doug Bailey and John Deardourff prepared a long memo to Ford outlining the pros and cons of a last-minute bid. The memo was mostly con: key deadlines for some of the primaries had passed; there was little time left for fund-raising; at age fifty-five, Bush seemed to have a good shot of winning moderate Republicans who did not care for Reagan. That day, three years after leaving the Oval Office, Ford finally (but privately) put the idea of a second run to bed for good. A few weeks would pass before he told reporters on a sunny afternoon in mid-March that he would not be a candidate. “America needs a new president,” Ford said. “I will support the nominee of my party with all the energy I have.” As Ford turned to go back into his house, he said to Betty, “If I were a drinking man I’d have myself a drink.” He later called it the hardest decision of his life.

  Twelve days later, pollster Richard Wirthlin sent Reagan a memo urging the candidate to direct his campaign manager, Bill Casey, to “develop ties” to Ford. It was time to schmooze and court the former president. Wirthlin predicted that nothing would really shake Ford loose until Reagan himself took control of the courtship. But he had to be won over before the convention in July.

  Of all Republicans, Gerald R. Ford potentially can hurt us or help us more than any other. He is respected a great deal by the electorate at large, and even more so in the Republican ranks. Because he considered his own presidential candidacy . . . his whole-hearted and active conversion to our cause will carry a significant political impact. The clincher will come only when Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan sit down amicably one on one, and resolve for the near, and hopefully long term, the major difficulties that arose out of the 1976 election.

  And so on June 5, 1980, two days after he had won the California primary with 80 percent of the vote, Reagan paid a ninety-minute call on the former president in Rancho Mirage. They quickly worked through the old grudges: Reagan asked Ford for his help in the fall against Carter and made the case to Ford that he had not, as Ford had long assumed, slacked off after the 1976 convention. Lou Cannon reported that the two men, both inclined toward forgiveness and common purpose, seemed to patch things up. “Ford found himself strangely drawn to this old foe who shared with him a midwestern upbringing and a natural friendliness,” Cannon wrote. “Ford also thought that Carter had been a terrible president and wanted to help defeat him.”

  At some point during the Rancho Mirage peace talks, Reagan made Ford an unexpected and secret offer. He proposed that Ford join him on the ticket. Ford declined.

  But the courtship was just getting under way. Several factors put Ford into play. First, Reagan didn’t love his other choices. A Wirthlin poll in early summer showed that only three men could help Reagan against Carter: Bush, who had finished second in the primaries, Ford, and Howard Baker. Though Baker had withdrawn months before, Bush had stayed in the primary race until late May, upsetting some Reagan insiders who had waited since 1968 for the boss to win the nomination. Reagan, furthermore, had some doubts about Bush’s judgment. “He thought George Bush was a wimp,” Lyn Nofziger said later, “and he was still mad at Howard Baker for opposing him on the Panama Canal.” Finally, Ford was a former president; his experience and credentials could go a long way toward mollifying voters who worried about Reagan’s inexperience in Washington. While Carter was floundering at home and overseas, deep doubts about Reagan’s suitability as commander in chief remained; Ford’s presence at his side would be reassuring. Still, for much of June and early July, various emissaries to and from the Ford camp reported to the Reagan high command that the former president did not want to be considered.

  Then, on the first night of the Detroit convention in August, Ford delivered a blistering attack on Carter. “You’ve all heard Carter’s alibis,” Ford said, sounding like the prosecutor in chief. “Inflation cannot be controlled. The world has changed. We can no longer protect our diplomats in foreign capitals, nor our workingmen on Detroit’s assembly lines. We must lower our expectations. We must be realistic. We must prudently retreat. Baloney!” And then came a tantalizing passage: “Elder statesmen are supposed to sit quietly and smile wisely from the sidelines,” Ford said. “I’ve never been much for sitting. I’ve never spent much time on the sidelines. This country means too much to me to comfortably park on the bench. So when this convention fields the team for Governor Reagan, count me in.”

  The line played to thunderous applause and got Reagan, watching from his hotel suite, thinking that Ford might be warming to the idea of joining forces after all. When a delegation of six party leaders stopped by Reagan’s suite on the sixty-ninth floor of the Detroit Renaissance Center Hotel the next morning to discuss various vice president options, Reagan asked: “What about Ford?”

  Reagan’s guests were hesitant. “Of course,” said Delaware governor Pete du Pont, “Jerry Ford would be the very best choice.” But few if any of Reagan’s visitors believed that Ford could be induced to take the job—and most doubted whether it would be wise to try. Former presidents don’t stoop to being vice president and even if Ford might be convinced to do so, melding the two staffs would get messy very quickly. But in the hothouse atmosphere of a national convention, l
ogic sometimes evaporates. House minority leader Bob Michel urged Reagan to make a personal appeal to Ford: “It ought to be on a one to one basis and not handled by staff, so there’s no mistake. You bare your breast to him and tell him how it is. He appreciates forthrightness.”

  Ford, who somewhat improbably was staying just one flight above Reagan at the Renaissance Center, stepped downstairs later that afternoon to huddle once more. In the sixty-five-minute session, Reagan again—and more directly—asked Ford to join him on the ticket. He had been watching Ford closely over the last several weeks, he said, and this was not a spur-of-the-moment impulse. But then Reagan went further, proposing as a sweetener that Ford might want to add a second job to his portfolio, such as secretary of defense. In their accounts of this session, Ford’s aides said that he replied, essentially, by saying, “I don’t think it will work” and “I don’t want to encourage you.”

  These vaguely discouraging comments were all that Reagan needed to keep the talks going.

  The ironic replay of 1976 was unmistakable: Reagan had shut the door in 1976 before Ford could offer him the vice president’s job; in 1980, Reagan was unquestionably offering it and Ford couldn’t bring himself to say no. Being vice president after being president was unimaginable—unless you had not been elected president in the first place.

  The Reagan lobbying team then swung into action. Paul Laxalt, who regarded a Reagan-Ford ticket as “a political marriage made in heaven,” called Henry Kissinger, Ford’s secretary of state and now foreign policy advisor, and recruited him to the matchmaking mission. Kissinger met early Tuesday evening with Reagan aides Bill Casey, Ed Meese, and Mike Deaver and agreed to push Ford on the idea. Around midnight, Ford gathered members of his family, along with aides Alan Greenspan, John Marsh, and Kissinger, to discuss the idea in his suite. Even later, Ford and Kissinger talked alone for forty-five minutes. During that session, Kissinger pressed Ford to take the offer seriously. One of those in the Ford suite later reported that Kissinger alternated that night between cajoling Ford into yes one minute and then warning him the next of the perils of saying no. “The country needs you,” Kissinger told Ford at one point. “But, Henry,” Ford replied, “it won’t work.” The two men did not finish until nearly 2 A.M.

  On Wednesday morning, Ford was a riot of ambivalence and ambition, unable to move forward, unable to let go. Robert Teeter circulated a private poll that morning showing that Ford would move a Reagan ticket by eleven points nationwide, more than any other vice presidential candidate. On the Today show, Ford was no better than Delphic when asked if pride was an obstacle to him taking the number two spot. “Jerry left a crack in the door,” Bob Michel said, watching from a Republican breakfast in party chairman Bill Brock’s Plaza suite. At a breakfast with Time editors at the Detroit Athletic Club a few minutes later, Ford said he’d had a good meeting with Reagan the day before and that he continued to think the idea was unworkable. But he hedged on the question of whether he or his aides had sent a definitive answer to the Reagan camp. At 10:30 A.M., Ford told aides Robert Barrett, Marsh, Kissinger, and Greenspan that he wanted to break off talks. But then Casey, Reagan’s campaign manager, called at 11:15 and asked to meet with Ford’s advisors. Ford agreed, as long as everyone understood that he was still against it. And still Ford just couldn’t say no. At a lunch with Newsweek’s editors, he imagined a possible relationship between himself and Reagan not unlike that used in some European capitals “where you have a head of state and a head of government.” An eleven-hour marathon of intense negotiations began around noon. Greenspan, Kissinger, and Marsh huddled with counterparts from the Reagan camp: Casey, Ed Meese, Wirthlin, Deaver. By mid-afternoon, Reagan’s group presented a ten-point, double-spaced, page-and-a-half talking paper that gave Ford an outsized role as chief of staff and authority over the National Security Council, the budget office, and the Council of Economic Advisors, while Reagan would maintain final decisions on everything. It was not a formal proposal, more like a basis for future discussion. But it was in any form an extraordinary offer: Reagan, in effect, proposed to give Ford day-to-day control over most if not all of the important White House offices and agencies and control over all the documents that would reach the president. Ford and his aides understood just how dramatic a devolution of power Reagan’s aides were proposing. They weren’t even sure it was constitutional. Ford’s team also realized that their counterparts had little or no idea how the White House really worked, that you couldn’t have one man run the senior staff who was not in every way loyal to—and fireable by—the president. But that was what the Reagan team was proposing. By now—it was Wednesday afternoon, July 16—Ford was tired and feeling pressured. The roll call vote on Reagan’s nomination was just hours away. A parade of governors and lawmakers trooped through Ford’s suite throughout the day, urging him to join the ticket. “Maybe there’s a way,” he said around 5 P.M., “but I don’t think there is.”

  By dinnertime, the plot was not merely thickening, it was congealing. The notion that an incoming president would share anything like this kind of clout with a former president was awkward at best and dangerous at worst. Reagan would say later that troubled times called for abnormal approaches and yet this was too clever by half. Foreign policy hard-liners were horrified by any partnership with Ford that meant a return of Kissinger. Traditionalists just thought the whole thing was a risky experiment with the presidency itself. “It can’t happen,” Arizona congressman John Rhodes said of any co-presidency. “If it does, a lot of people have taken leave of their senses.” Rhodes believed in the end the plan would never get off the ground and, if it somehow did, would tear the White House apart. “Would it be good for the country to bifurcate the presidency?” he asked. Later, he told a reporter from Time, “I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.”

  When Reagan and Ford met again early that evening, for fifteen minutes in Reagan’s suite, Ford had become insistent that Reagan name Kissinger as secretary of state. Ford felt like he was making a huge concession to leave private life and asked for Reagan to make a concession in return. “Ron, I’m making a sacrifice here. And now I’m asking you to make a sacrifice.” It was an astonishing request, given the way Reagan had made Kissinger an issue in the 1976 primary. And this time, it would be Reagan’s turn to politely but firmly decline. “Jerry, I know all of Kissinger’s strong points and there’s no question that he should play a role. I would use him a lot but not as Secretary of State. I’ve been all over the country the last several years and Kissinger carries a lot of baggage. I couldn’t accept that. My own people, in fact, wouldn’t accept it.”

  Over the next three hours, the talks fell apart. But not before Ford did an awkward interview with Walter Cronkite of CBS News in which he floated the notion of some kind of power sharing. Repeating versions of this idea as he made the rounds to the network TV booths Wednesday night, Ford did not fully realize that the idea of a joint ticket came as news to most of the delegates and reporters attending the convention. His remarks sent a wave of celebration—pandemonium might be a better word—through the ranks of delegates on the floor and unleashed every reporter at the convention into a citywide hunt for confirmation. The wave had a name: the dream ticket.

  But up in Reagan’s suite, Ford’s media tour had fallen flat. Negotiations were still under way, aides marveled, and here was Ford giving the public an update. Reagan, watching Ford on TV, could hardly believe it. Years later, in his autobiography, Reagan claimed this was his breaking point. “Wait a minute,” Reagan thought to himself, “this is really two presidents he is talking about.” Reagan and his aides felt pressured all of a sudden, even though they were the ones who had put the powersharing idea on the table. Meanwhile, in the rooms upstairs where the details were being worked out, Ford’s aides were weary of the murkiness of the Reagan proposals; Reagan’s aides were growing tired of the scope of the Ford demands. There was a nagging feeling among some of the more hard-line Reagan aides that Ford was not as i
nterested in returning to power as some of his more ambitious wingmen. Moreover, it didn’t much help that Kissinger, a bone of contention in the talks, was a key part of Ford’s negotiating team, practically reprising his storied shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East as he moved between the Reagan and Ford suites in pursuit of a deal.

  Reagan called Ford at 9:15 saying they needed to close on the deal that night. By 10 P.M., the pieces had yet to fall into place. Ford’s team asked for an extension until Thursday; Meese, after checking with Reagan, declined the request. The media frenzy to get the scoop on the dream ticket was by now reaching a peak and sometime after ten CBS announced, as flat-out fact, that Ford would be Reagan’s running mate; moreover, the network added, the two men would be coming to the hall later in the evening. Other networks ordered their floor reporters to confirm the story; but in fact the whole idea was dead. At 10:30, Ford told his wife he was pulling the plug. He changed into a business suit and walked downstairs thirty minutes later to tell Reagan himself. “This isn’t gonna work,” Ford said. Lou Cannon reported that Ford, over the course of a brief but emotional meeting, thanked Reagan, hugged him, vowed to campaign in the fall. The two men parted on amicable terms and Reagan proceeded to place a call to a long-suffering Bush, asking him to be the vice president. “He was a gentleman,” Reagan said of Ford later. “I feel we are friends now.”

  In its review of the convention a few days later, Time ruled that the whole gambit was “ill-considered,” “unseemly,” and “a stunning spectacle” that raised questions “about the nominee’s judgment and how far he was willing to go to win election in November.” In fact, the Detroit episode was a prologue to the presidency: Reagan would exhibit a tendency to reach for the ideal and then settle for something short of it, an instinct that would become a key component of his success in the White House. At the same time, he displayed a tendency to let others perform duties vested in the presidency if it suited his needs—and that would very nearly tip his presidency over in its second term.