“I ran for President to resist overweening executive power from a Democratic President,” he said, with a smile on his face. “A foolish consistency may be the hobgoblin of little minds, as Emerson said, but so is a foolish inconsistency. I vote aye.”
ON THE MORNING OF Tuesday, September 22, an overflow crowd of journalists, Senate staffers, and tourists crowded into the hearing room of the Senate Judiciary Committee on the third floor of the Russell Office Building. There was no live TV coverage of the event, but a thicket of cameras ringed the walls of the room. That morning, the Washington Post front page featured a Woodward exclusive: a detailed look into the entire 2,000-page FBI report on Corbin, highlighting his immigration troubles, his links to the Communist Party, his bare-knuckled fund-raising practices, and his labors in the political vineyards. So after the morning session, when Kevin McKiernan described his surreptitious work, the stage was set for an afternoon face-off between the committee and Paul Corbin, in a setting that had provided high political drama for decades. The going assumption was that Corbin would either take the Fifth Amendment, or deny McKiernan’s claims, setting up a “he-said-he-said” clash. What they got was something utterly different.
Corbin strode into the hearing room alone, took his seat at the witness table with no lawyer at his side, and read an opening statement that assailed the committee staff for breaking its own rules by leaking his FBI report to the press.
“I’d like to ask this committee how it can suggest it is looking into ‘unethical or illegal behavior in the political process’ when it can’t control the character assassins in its own ranks. This is McCarthyism, pure and simple.” (“I thought he worked for McCarthy,” said the AP man.) And he volunteered to take a polygraph test to prove his assertion that he had had no contact with the President or any of his staff—an offer that might have been less impressive had the committee known of Kennedy’s response years earlier when Defense Secretary McNamara had proposed one for Corbin. (“A lie-detector?” Kennedy had said. “He’d break the machine!”)
For the next hour, Republicans on the committee demanded to know if Corbin countenanced “political spying.”
“Where you draw the line between dirty tricks and hardball and pranks—I don’t know,” he said. “What about a baseball coach stealing the other team’s signs? I do know, Senator, that I can certainly think of examples where there’d be no question about unethical, immoral, illegal behavior. I mean, imagine a candidate for President who tried to prevent a peace agreement, who wanted to keep a war going that was killing American boys, in order to gain a political advantage. Doesn’t that sound like something pretty close to treason, Senator?”
There was a pregnant silence as Mundt looked to his fellow Republicans for a lifeline, as Democrats took up the theme. Perhaps, Senator Ribicoff suggested, the committee’s focus might be expanded, to examine alleged unethical or illegal conduct by political operatives on both sides. Perhaps, chimed in Senator Fred Harris, the FBI might be asked if they had gathered any intelligence about such behavior, perhaps in the last Presidential campaign. Republican Charles Percy reminded his distinguished Democratic friends that in 1964, the Johnson campaign had planted a spy disguised as a reporter on Barry Goldwater’s campaign train.
It was at this point that the counsel for the Republican minority, a thirty-two-year-old lawyer who had recently moved over from the House Judiciary Committee, entered the committee room and exchanged a few, obviously urgent words with an obviously startled Chairman McClellan and Senator Mundt. McClellan declared a temporary recess, and summoned committee members to a private office.
“Counsel for the minority tells me he’s just learned some information he wants to bring to your attention. Tell the members what you’ve learned,” the Chairman said. “Go ahead, John.”
“Well,” said John Dean, “it appears there may be another way of learning whether the White House is involved . . . it seems that there is a taping system inside the Oval Office.”
THERE IS NO SUCH thing as political science, but there are tendencies so strong that they might as well be called laws of nature. One of them is that a Congress dominated by one party is highly disinclined to embarrass a President of the same party. So it is impossible to know how the “First Street Caper,” as the headlines had it, would have played out had the House and Senate been controlled by Republicans—or, for that matter, had Robert Kennedy and the press had a long history of mutual contempt. Had Republicans held the reins of power in the Senate, they might have demanded a release of all tapes, a standoff between the two branches of government that rose to a Constitutional crisis. So while Chairman McClellan’s disclosure made headlines the next day, his announcement was quickly followed by a parade of Democrats, noting that Presidents going back to FDR had engaged in similar practices, and issuing dire warnings about exposing highly classified conversations or endangering the free flow of conversation and advice that Presidents have historically relied on. The White House, secure in its Congressional support, moved to lower the temperature.
“Legally,” counselor Fred Dutton said, “it is clear that there are serious questions of executive privilege involved. The President’s goal, however, is to cooperate with the legitimate interests of the Congress—and the people—to clear the air and put to rest false rumors and baseless allegations.”
So the White House invited two of the most respected members of the Senate, Democrat Phil Hart and Republican John Sherman Cooper, to come to the White House and review “any relevant records and documents.” The review showed “no evidence of contact between Mr. Corbin and any White House officials.”
(“Of course they didn’t communicate from the White House!” thundered Roger Ailes, now planning the Republican Party’s midterm advertising campaign. “Nobody would be that stupid! Does anyone need any more proof that the networks are all in Bobby’s pocket?”)
For his part, Corbin pled no contest to a misdemeanor charge of aiding and abetting the unauthorized misappropriation of information. He received a six-month suspended jail sentence, then faded from sight. In later years, there were those who wondered how that reclusive figure with no visible means of support had managed to buy a fourteen-room house on Madison’s Lake Mendota.
Bob Woodward stayed on the First Street Caper story, but left the Washington Post for law school after the story lost traction. In later years, he joked that he’d someday write a book about the affair called One of the President’s Men.
HE WAS RESTLESS, energized on this mid-October morning as he flew north on Air Force One. He would spend this noon at a massive rally for the Democratic Senate candidate from New York. No one had thought the party had a chance against Senator John Lindsay, a potential Presidential rival in two years—until Kennedy’s two years of importuning paid off: CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite announced he was stepping down as anchor of the evening news to run for the Senate.
His thoughts, however, were on a broader horizon. He had survived two near-deaths—one personal, one political—but the gap between what Kennedy wished to do and what he had the power to do seemed more like a chasm. Even eight years, should he win a second term, seemed like a very short time for the work that needed to be done.
But if things broke right, by the time his Presidency ended, maybe there would be more men and women at work in the broken neighborhoods of the cities, maybe there would be fewer broken families, maybe there would be work that would keep America’s small towns from hollowing out. Maybe what happened in that kitchen pantry in a Los Angeles hotel two years ago would someday be seen as the start of something.
And that was the most he could promise.
Maybe . . .
Reality Reset
Steve Smith was not in front of Robert Kennedy when he entered the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel; no one was. Kennedy died on June 6, 1968.
The Democratic nomination went to Hubert Humphrey in a Chicago where violent clashes between police and demonstrators almost overwhelmed
the political story. Despite the deep divisions in the party, Humphrey staged a comeback that ended just short of victory. The election may well have turned on the refusal of the South Vietnamese government to agree to peace talks—a refusal encouraged by sub-rosa contacts between the Nixon campaign and the Saigon government.
There were significant movements on the international front—a Presidential visit to China in 1972, a peace agreement in Vietnam in early 1973, but by 1974, the clouds surrounding the 1972 Watergate break-in at Democratic National headquarters had become a firestorm that drove Nixon out of the Presidency. Gerald Ford, appointed as Vice President less than a year earlier, took over, but he faced not just a heavily Democratic Congress but a fight for renomination within his own party from California Governor Ronald Reagan. Ford barely beat back the challenge, and when the fall campaign began, he was seriously—but not hopelessly—behind.
PALACE OF FINE ARTS, SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA
OCTOBER 6, 1976, 7:00 P.M.
He stood at the podium, hands lightly gripping the sides; he wore a three-piece gray suit, a tie with a light red pattern, and a placid, calm, controlled, expression. At six feet, 190 pounds, he retained much of the athlete’s grace of his younger years, and he was remembering now that same feeling he’d had four decades earlier when his team would begin to move up inexorably on the other guys, when their once-commanding lead began to shrink, when that feeling took hold that was visceral, elemental: We’re going to beat those bastards after all.
Less than fifty days ago, he’d left the convention battered, bruised, barely surviving what would have been the first time a sitting President had been denied his party’s nomination since Chester A. Arthur. He was facing a united Democratic Party already measuring the drapes at the White House. But now, Jimmy Carter’s thirty-point lead had shrunk to single digits. Now, it was the Democrats grumbling about their candidate, his inability to connect with the core of his party, the homilies about goodness and honesty beginning to curdle with labor and the liberals, his smile beginning to wear on the undecideds. Now, as it had throughout his life, the same fortune that had taken him into hostile waters seemed to be guiding him to a friendly shore.—His mother had fled her abusive husband when he was sixteen days old, leaving Omaha for her parents’ home in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Two and a half years later, she remarried, and the boy took his stepfather’s name: Gerald Ford, Jr.
—His stepfather was a good man and a good provider, but when it was time for Ford to go to college the Depression was deep, and the father had other children to support. But a small scholarship provided by his high school got him to the University of Michigan, where he washed dishes and sold blood to pay his bills.
—He was a star on two national championship teams, good enough to be courted by the Lions and the Packers, but he chose Yale Law School instead of pro football, and that choice proved to be the key that opened the door to a public life.
—When he served as assistant navigator on the USS Monterey in the Philippines in 1943, a violent typhoon almost washed him overboard; his life was saved by a two-inch-high metal railing.
—When he came home to Grand Rapids after World War II ended, the Republicans were looking for a young, internationalist-minded veteran to challenge the hidebound isolationist incumbent. Ford won, and joined the House where others of his generation had just begun to serve, men like John Kennedy and Richard Nixon.
—In 1965, after the Goldwater debacle, the meager ranks of House Republicans were looking for a younger face as the party’s voice. So Jerry said he’d run, and ousted Charlie Halleck as the GOP leader. He was now closer to his driving ambition: to be Speaker of the House of Representatives.
—Then in October 1973, Vice President Agnew fled the Vice Presidency, one step ahead of federal prosecutors and a bribery indictment. When President Nixon, with the Watergate waters already up to his waist, asked the Congress for replacement names, they gave him one: Jerry Ford. And he became the first Vice President ever chosen by the mechanism of the Twenty-fifth Amendment. When he was sworn in, the Democratic Speaker of the House, Tip O’Neill said, Yes, it was an impressive ceremony and we won’t see another one like it for . . . months.
—O’Neill was right. On August 1, 1974, the White House Chief of Staff, Al Haig, came to Ford and said, there’s a White House tape . . . it’s the smoking gun . . . you need to be prepared. And Ford had come home to Betty, who was packing up for the move into the brand-new Vice Presidential home and said, Betty, I don’t think we’re going to be living there after all.
It was such a warm welcome at first. “Our long national nightmare is over,” he’d said, and that’s how the country behaved. He was a friendly, accessible President, without the palace guard, without the brooding, haunted look of his predecessor. There he was, toasting his own English muffins in the morning! There he was, cleaning up after his dog! Then, a month later, he announced that he would not put the country through a protracted criminal trial of the former President of the United States; he would pardon Richard Nixon. Some day, he knew, his decision would be seen as wise, courageous; but the political cost was enormous. His press secretary quit, and in the Congress and the press, there were dark mutterings about a deal with the devil: You get the Presidency, Jerry, if you get me off the hook. There was nothing to it; he’d even gone up to the Hill, testified before committee—a sitting President, when was the last time that had happened, Jefferson?—but the bloom was off the rose.
Then came the nasty stuff, the ridicule. He was the most accomplished athlete to hold the office since Teddy Roosevelt, maybe ever; but every time he slipped on the slopes, or bumped his head, it was all over the news, the photo splashed across every front page. A new late-night comedy show made a star out of a young man—Chevy Chase—who played Ford as an addled idiot. And New York magazine produced a cover with a clown sitting in the Oval Office, with the title: “Ladies and Gentlemen, the President of the United States.” What made it worse was that the country was going through a bad economic patch, inflation was eating away at savings and some PR genius had come up with the idea of a “Whip Inflation Now!” stunt, with “WIN!” buttons, for God’s sake. Between the economy and the Watergate hangover, the Republicans took a pounding in the ’74 midterms, leaving Ford facing a Congress almost 2-to-1 against him in the House, and not that much better in the Senate.
And that wasn’t the worst of it. Late last year, Ronald Reagan, the former governor of California, had called to tell him, No hard feelings, but I’m going to challenge you for the nomination next year. He’d beaten Reagan like a drum early on, just about driven him out of the race, and then with the help of that wing nut, Senator Jesse Helms, Reagan had won the North Carolina primary, run up a string of victories and come to the convention in a virtual tie. It had taken every ounce of Presidential power to hold on: bringing delegates to White House dinners, showering their states with federal grants, tossing his own Vice President, Rockefeller, over the side to feed the conservatives. The nomination had come down to a three-vote margin in a crucial Mississippi delegation vote, and after he’d won he’d had to grit his teeth and invite Reagan to the podium to make his own speech.
And yet . . . something began to happen that night after he’d (barely) won. In his acceptance speech, he’d gone after Carter hard, the way Truman had picked himself up off the floor in ’48 and gone after the “do-nothing 80th Congress,” when everyone had pronounced him dead. Ford declared himself the tribune of middle America: “You are the people who pay the taxes and obey the laws. You are the people who make our system work. You are the people who make America what it is. It is from your ranks I come, and on your side I stand.”
And then Ford did something no incumbent President had ever done: He’d taken the advice of two young aides who worked for Chief of Staff Dick Cheney and challenged his opponent to debate! And in that first debate, in Philadelphia, he’d gone right after the soft underbelly of the Carter campaign—his vagueness, his lack of
definition—with a response he was prepared to deliver no matter what Carter said.
“I don’t think Governor Carter has been any more specific than he has been in the past” were his very first words. Since then, the polls showed that Carter’s eighteen-point lead was down to eight, and for the first time, he and his team had seen a path to victory.
Not that they’d had any doubt about what they had to do. Two weeks before the Kansas City convention, his top strategist, Stu Spencer, had presented him with a 120-page battle plan, and begun with this assessment: “Mr. President, as a campaigner, you’re no fucking good!” People know you’re a nice guy, the memo said, they admire you for having calmed the country down after Watergate, but they think you’re indecisive. To win, it said, we need to bore in on Carter, and the fact that most voters don’t really know what he stands for.
Nor was there any doubt about which group of voters would decide whether Jerry would pull off the biggest upset since Truman. At the convention, adman Malcolm MacDougall had asked Bob Teeter, “What about the Catholics? And the Jews? Doesn’t the Baptist thing scare them?”
“We’re still not sure,” Bob had said. “Maybe. Of course, the Jews are Democrats. You’ve got to scare the hell out of them to get them to vote Republican. Carter’s too smart to do that. But the Catholics are something else. They could be the key to the election. Carter knows it. We know it.”
And that, as it turned out, was exactly, precisely right.
And it all turned on a single sentence.
THEY WERE a half hour into this second debate, which was focused on foreign policy, and it was going fine, no slips of the tongue, no egregious factual errors, no flop sweat or stuttering, which was pretty much the only damn thing the press ever cared about. He’d begun with the same out-of-the-chute response he’d given in the first debate, answering Carter’s attack on his foreign policy by saying, “Governor Carter is again talking in broad generalities,” then charging that Carter’s ideas on cutting the defense budget would result in “a weaker defense and a poor negotiating position.” He jabbed Carter hard, charging that Carter had said he’d “look with sympathy” on a Communist government in NATO (if Italy voted in a Red government)—it was a stretch, but his campaign knew full well that Italian-Americans, devoutly anti-Communist, had been one of the first Catholic voting blocs to defect from the New Deal coalition.
Then Everything Changed Page 33