by Nancy Gibbs
Both camps would try in later years to dispel any notion that a co-presidency was ever on the table or, if it was, to play down the idea that either man ever took it seriously. And each side did its share of blaming the entire episode on the other. The Ford folks, Lyn Nofziger charged later, “would be nice and let Reagan go to funerals and he—Ford—would pick the Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense. Anybody who wanted to see the president would have to go through him.”
Ford, for his part, made it sound like he merely wanted to be the First Gatekeeper. “I firmly believe, and this is, in effect, what I told my people they had to put on paper, that as Vice President I would be chief of staff. I didn’t want to make the decisions. But I had to know what was going on and would pass on recommendations. But, the president would have to be the decision maker. . . . I think I would have been a very good chief of staff. That’s what . . . I was aiming at.”
Just as he did with his 1968 run, Reagan wrote almost fancifully of the whole episode as if it had been someone else’s idea. And a small army of Reagan historians, interpreters, and expungers rushed in to say that there was far less to the whole episode than it appeared at the time. “There was never any love lost between these two guys,” Stu Spencer would later say. “If 50 people had come and said he had to do it, [Reagan] wouldn’t have done it. He wouldn’t have put Ford on the ticket.” Spencer believed Ford’s advisors were just playing games. “They were talking about power sharing. You get this acre and I get these two acres and you get this acre. It was ludicrous.”
And yet it very nearly happened.
NIXON, FORD, AND CARTER:
Three Men and a Funeral
Jerry Ford and Jimmy Carter disliked each other for five years until they realized they both disliked Ronald Reagan even more.
And then they became friends.
They discovered that more united than divided them while flying back from the funeral of Anwar Sadat in Cairo in 1981. Stuck on a 707 for sixteen hours, Ford and Carter put aside what were largely petty disagreements and decided, in the space of a few hours, to become partners and friends. This reconciliation required no intermediaries, as it had with Nixon and Kennedy, or weeks of behind-the-scenes negotiations, as it had with Hoover and Truman. They did it themselves, in the cramped forward cabin of the plane that had functioned as Air Force One during each man’s presidency. Though one was an exacting and difficult engineer and the other an easygoing former jock, they had just enough in common to see the advantages of getting over it: each had been an unexpected president; each had been tossed out of office by voters; each had at least twenty years to live—and each blamed Reagan for his defeat.
It helped that both men were confident in their faith—Ford an Episcopalian and Carter a Baptist—and each bent toward forgiveness. It surely helped too that both men had just gotten a big dose of Nixon, who was back onstage and acting like he was still the commander in chief. The club can be a competitive place. Both Carter and Ford sensed that they might need each other just to keep up with Nixon’s never-ending quest for redemption. In time, Ford and Carter would create a place all their own, a powerful, productive club inside the club, which would go a few rounds with Reagan, and later with Bush and Clinton as they all tried to square their places in history.
16
“Why Don’t We Make It Just Dick, Jimmy and Jerry?”
—GERALD FORD
Even by Air Force One standards, it was a mission for the ages.
Air Force corpsmen cleaned, fueled, watered, and then checked over the Boeing 707, the one that had brought JFK’s body home from Dallas and carried Richard Nixon on his first trip to China. Special provisions were brought aboard for this trip: lead steward Terry Yamada ordered up some Don Diego cigars, a guilty pleasure of Nixon’s. He stuck a quart of butter brickle ice cream in the freezer for Ford. Grits for Carter were stowed somewhere in the cramped, starboard aft galley along with an electric frying pan, extra eggs, beef tenderloins, and crab claws. White House advance man Joe Canzeri somehow got his hands on some vintage blue and white Air Force One matchbooks bearing the names of Nixon, Ford, and Carter and left them strewn around the cabin for old times’ sake.
And somewhere, just in case, airmen stashed a trio of bulletproof vests.
Three former presidents were about to fly fifteen thousand miles from Washington to Cairo to attend the funeral of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and it was going to take all the ingenuity White House aides could muster to make this strange trip a success. Gerald Ford cared little for Jimmy Carter. Carter had even less use for Richard Nixon. And Nixon was, unbeknownst to the other two, about to peel off for a secret mission of his own. And all three had a complex relationship with Ronald Reagan, the man who summoned them all to duty and was about to send them halfway around the world. What unfolded in October 1981 would herald the rebirth of the Presidents Club. And it happened at 35,000 feet, more or less in full view of nearly twenty-five other people. After years of lying dormant, the club was about to wake up.
Only hours after Islamic extremists had assassinated Sadat and eleven others during a military parade in Cairo, White House officials decided that security concerns made it impossible for Reagan to attend. Reagan had survived an assassination attempt six months earlier—and it had come much closer to claiming his life than the public, as yet, knew. Nor was the Secret Service keen to permit Vice President George Bush to go in Reagan’s place. “Our friends in Egypt understand that,” Bush said the next day. But who should attend?
Secretary of State Alexander Haig proposed an unexpected alternative: a delegation of three former presidents, led by Haig himself, to pay respects to a man who had done so much to advance the cause of peace. Nixon volunteered for duty; Carter had balked at first, briefly peeved that Reagan was unwilling to make the journey himself. When Carter relented, after a number of phone calls from former aides urging him to make the journey, Carter’s lone condition was that his wife, Rosalynn, be allowed to accompany him. White House aides eventually won the participation of Ford, whose family was wary of the trip, and Air Force jets were scrambled to collect all three parties. They arrived at Andrews Air Force Base on the same afternoon, each within one minute of the others.
This mission had uncommon possibilities—the power to redeem, the potential to explode. Each man had left Washington disgraced, disappointed, or rejected in some way. Carter had not been back to the White House at all; Nixon only once before at Carter’s invitation. Now they were returning together, taking up their old places on a world stage for a few brief hours. The mere fact that there were three of them was confusing even to them: which man, they wondered, should be first to board the Marine helicopter for the ride downtown? It was Nixon, Carter recalled, who suggested the most recent president should lead the way because he was technically the senior member of the delegation. Even after this vital matter of protocol had been cleared up, there was considerable tension on board the brief chopper flight and so the ever amiable Ford suggested a way to adjust the mood as they flew from Andrews to the White House. “Look,” he said, “for the trip, why don’t we make it just Dick, Jimmy and Jerry?” The other two men quickly agreed.
Old White House hands sensed that this was an unusual, even an unprecedented, moment. Several hundred White House staffers met the trio on the South Lawn and applauded as they stepped, one by one, off the helicopter, again in order of service. The applause mounted with each successive president. The men walked three abreast (four, counting Rosalynn) across the South Lawn, where they were greeted by the Reagans. Watching the arrival with her husband from a window upstairs, Barbara Bush marveled at the sight of four presidents standing together: “It all rather amused me. I don’t really think they liked each other very much,” she recalled. “Rosalynn came also, and I don’t believe that she and Nancy liked each other very much.”
Everyone was ushered inside the White House and up to the Blue Room, where coffee and canapés were served. The Bushes joined the g
roup as well. It was, Reagan noted in his diary, the first time four presidents had been together at the White House—ever. (Though, with Bush there, it could be argued that there were five.) Reagan thanked his guests for standing in his place and the group exchanged brief memories of Sadat. “Ordinarily, I would wish you happy landing,” Reagan told them, “but you’re all Navy men, so I wish you bon voyage.”
Then, almost as quickly, they were all outside again. A quick South Lawn ceremony, redolent with unity, unfolded as dusk fell. Then the three former presidents headed to the chopper. Carter annoyed Reagan aides when he stepped away from their carefully organized tableau to speak briefly to reporters. “I’m glad to be going,” he said, “but it’s a sad occasion.” Then protocol took over again: Carter reboarded first, followed by Ford and then Nixon. The Marine chopper lifted into the night. Total elapsed time at the old stomping grounds: about thirty-six minutes. The club might be reforming, but that did not mean its members were ready to spend time communing with each other. Peering out the window of the helicopter, a vantage point he had experienced seven years earlier on the August afternoon when he had resigned, Nixon said to his brethren, “I kind of like that house down there, don’t you?”
The First Leg
Special Air Mission 26000 would have been a memorable flight even without the extra cargo of former presidents. Led by Haig, the U.S. delegation included Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, singer Stevie Wonder, U.N. representative Jeane Kirkpatrick, and a sampling of lawmakers that included Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, Chuck Percy of Illinois, and majority leader Jim Wright of Texas. Rounding out the delegation were Army Chief of Staff Edward C. Meyer, former Carter aide Jody Powell, and Middle East envoy Sol Linowitz, as well as a fourteen-year-old boy from Liberty, South Carolina, named Sam Brown who had been pen pals with Sadat. Fold in Nixon, Ford, and Carter and the mood, those on board noticed, was electric.
“This is,” said Haig dryly, “quite a planeload.”
The historical baggage alone would have been enough to ground any normal aircraft. It is easy to forget that Nixon submitted his resignation to Kissinger in 1974 in a deal that was largely engineered by Haig—or that Ford pardoned Nixon a month or so later in a decision that was regarded by many as a payback. Or that Carter would come along out of nowhere two years later to toss Ford out of office; and that Reagan, whose picture lined the fuselage’s interior now, had just as abruptly unseated Carter in 1980.
There was nowhere to hide on this flight: the aging 707 was a thin, noisy, single-aisle plane with only a few not very private rooms. Haig took the tiny presidential cabin up front, leaving Nixon and Ford to share a cramped four-person compartment with Kissinger and Weinberger. Nearby, Carter and his wife shared another two-person row. Rosalynn Carter got things going, walking through the plane and greeting everyone, particularly Nixon, whom she found polite and unexpectedly talkative. Nixon urged Haig, in front of his peers, to allow Mrs. Carter to have the president’s stateroom, which came with a bed. Haig declined, citing protocol. (It was not the first time Nixon had come to Rosalynn’s defense: after Carter had left office just months before, he sent an aide to see Nixon for advice about setting up a post-presidential operation. Nixon offered the Carter emissary one particularly pointed piece of advice: “Make sure Mrs. Carter has her own office,” he said.)
By contrast, Ford and Carter seemed determined to not get along. Their wounds were deeper, their anger fresher. “Oil and water,” Carter himself explained early in the flight, smiling slightly for reporters. “They had no use for each other,” said a Ford aide later. At one point, when an Air Force steward asked all three men for a photograph, Carter seemed uncertain. “How long will it take,” he asked, before agreeing to smile for the cameras. Later, Ford murmured to a fellow member of the delegation, “You know, that just goes to show you can’t make chicken salad out of chicken shit.”
Carter later said he found Nixon fascinating, perhaps because Nixon worked so hard to lighten the mood, walking stiffly through the plane in his blue serge suit, greeting people, moving away from Ford and Carter when others on board approached the group for photographs. “They don’t want pictures with me,” Nixon demurred, making sport of his own misfortunes. “Nixon was being very gregarious,” said Barrie Dunsmore, diplomatic correspondent for ABC News and one of three reporters on the first leg of the flight. “He was walking up and down the aisle and really trying to be gracious.” But the old awkwardness was there too: Nixon at one point wandered back to the small section in the rear where the reporters were sequestered, looked around, uttered an enigmatic few words—“This is all,” he observed—and then headed back up front.
From the very start of the trip, security was an obsession. Sadat’s assassination had been sudden, brazen—and caught on videotape. At this time, very few people, even in government, understood the seismic forces at work in the Muslim world. “There was a real fear, everyone was uneasy,” recalled Haynes Johnson of the Washington Post, also on the trip. “You didn’t know what was going to happen.” And even if there was a bulletproof vest for every president, there were not enough for all the other VIPs along for the ride. There were some morbid jokes about the plane flying close to the Gulf of Sidra, which Libyan leader Colonel Muamar Gaddafi had threatened to defend with his life—or that of his air force pilots.
Things seemed to ease a bit once the plane was airborne. The sweaters came out: Carter wore a beige cardigan; Ford put on a red one, while Nixon, martini in hand, wore blue. It may have been the nostalgic fact that they were now all aboard a plane that had once been, in a way, their own. Or it may have been the symbolism and sheer power of the 707 itself: to walk through Air Force One, even in its older, narrower, louder, cramped incarnation, was a heady experience; to do so when it was fully loaded, thick with Air Force personnel, on a high-stakes mission overseas under full power could be intoxicating. “Every time you got on that airplane, you were flying into history,” Haynes Johnson recalled. “Everybody feels that. You know you are on history itself.”
The former presidents quickly found something to talk about: Anwar Sadat, what he meant to each man, each man’s presidency, and the world. All three commanders in chief had tried to prevent this day: Nixon sold Sadat Sikorsky helicopters; under Ford, the CIA had given Egyptian security agents special encryption devices so they could communicate about Sadat’s movements in secret. Carter even sent a radar plane to patrol the skies over Cairo in the event Gaddafi sent fighters in Sadat’s direction. Carter recalled that Begin, Sadat, and Carter jointly phoned Ford in 1978 to inform him that they had completed the Camp David Accords. Carter told the small group of traveling reporters that he could not believe his ears when he learned that Sadat was dead. “The only time I had that bad a day,” he said, “was when my own Daddy died.”
Sadat, Kissinger would observe, “handled four American presidents with consummate psychological skill. He treated Nixon as a great statesman, Ford as a living manifestation of good will, Carter as a missionary almost too decent for the world and Reagan as the benevolent leader of a popular revolution, subtly appealing to each man’s conception of himself and gaining the confidence of each.” They then discussed the broader situation in the Middle East—and agreed that Reagan was right to push the Senate to approve early-warning aircraft, known as AWACS, for Saudi Arabia; it was Carter, after all, who had proposed that sale in the final year of his term and had pressed Reagan during the transition in 1980 to see it through.
But just when things seemed to be settling down, Nixon steered the ship into turbulence. A few hours into the flight, Haig came out of his cabin to speak to Kissinger about some cables he had received just before boarding in Washington. The cables, Haig explained, were from officials at the State Department seeking guidance now that Nixon was apparently expected in a few days at a private dinner in Jidda, Saudi Arabia. Haig was taken aback by this news—landing as it did amid the uphill figh
t for AWACS in Congress and the very real regional confusion in the wake of Sadat’s assassination. Haig asked Kissinger to find out what Nixon was up to. About the same time, White House signal operators called to say that Reagan aide Mike Deaver was on the line, also asking about Nixon’s mystery dinner in Jidda: was Nixon running his own secret mission inside the public one?
Kissinger pressed Nixon for an explanation. “Ever the conspirator,” Hugh Sidey reported, “Nixon threw his hands in the air. He was not sure, he claimed. He had invitations to visit several nations in the Middle East. Whether the Saudis would let him come had not yet been resolved.” Nixon was once more up to his old tricks, keeping his host, the U.S. government, in the dark about his next move. By the time the plane bounced into Spain’s Torrejón Airbase near Madrid to refuel, even Kissinger’s head was spinning. Asked by Haynes Johnson how everyone was getting along up front, Kissinger set the stage as the reporter and the diplomat strolled around the Spanish tarmac. “They are all being themselves. Ford is being Ford. Carter is being Carter and Nixon? Nixon is all over the place!”
When the party arrived in Cairo that night, the trio boarded armor-plated limos flown in from Washington and sped to their hotel downtown. Robert Barrett, a Ford aide who was assisting with advance work on the journey, approached all three men before each event, his arms outstretched, and recalled later how awkward it was to keep saying “Mr. President” as he guided them from place to place. They paid courtesy calls on Sadat’s handpicked successor, Hosni Mubarak, and then spent thirty minutes with Sadat’s widow, Jehan, at her home in Giza. They visited the Egyptian parliament and met with the parliamentary speaker. They even made a visit to a group of U.S. government officials living in Cairo, each man speaking extemporaneously. In his remarks, Nixon self-consciously noted that the sad occasion had attracted people from around the world, both famous “and infamous.”