Then Everything Changed

by Jeff Greenfield

  “He was forced to live fifteen years without breathing fresh air, or walking under blue skies,” Ford said. “But one day, with God’s help, his descendants will be breathing the fresh air and living under the blue skies of a free Hungary.” (A few nitpickers noted that, given the Church’s celibacy rules, the Cardinal was unlikely to have produced any descendants.)

  “FORD’S ADDING days and money in New York?” a bewildered Hamilton Jordan said at a pre-debate prep the next morning. “This is a diversion, right?”

  Pollster Pat Caddell shook his head, and showed Jordan the latest survey from the New York Daily News poll: Carter’s lead in New York was dwindling, down to mid-single digits. Moreover, under the financial rules of this first post-Watergate campaign, the only way to deal with a threat to a campaign’s political base was . . . triage. Each campaign was fueled by $21.8 million worth of public funds. That was it. Period. The lawyers and strategists who lived on campaign mechanics had not yet begun to fashion the loopholes, more like the size of the Lincoln Tunnel, that would permit millions, then hundreds of millions, of dollars to flood the political landscape. If Carter’s campaign was in trouble in New York, if resources had to be found for more ads or get-out-the-vote operations, they would have to come from somewhere else. So a total of $50,000 was shifted out of Texas, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Ohio, and the Carter campaign hoped the relatively small sums diverted from those states would not prove to be critical.

  THE EARTH didn’t move on Election Day; there were no violent tremors burying a candidate under an avalanche of votes, no stampede of voters leaving the habits of a lifetime to form a new coalition. New York held for Carter, though his two-point win demonstrated that the campaign’s decision to move resources into that once-certain state had been a matter of urgent necessity. Wisconsin wound up a virtual dead heat; while a number of Democrats with ties to Eastern Europe had defected, Carter still pulled off a 15,000-vote victory. He swept virtually all of the South, where his appeal to the evangelical community bore fruit; he lost white evangelicals by three million votes, a far better showing than the seven-million-vote loss suffered by Humphrey in the region, and the twelve-million-vote gap that helped bury George McGovern.

  What movement there was, in fact, was so slight that no political seismograph could have measured it. It was a series of minor, undetectable shifts that, in most cases, wouldn’t have mattered at all . . . but they did this time.

  In Ohio, more than four million voters went to the polls. Perhaps three in a thousand voters felt deeply enough about what the Russians were doing to their homelands to have cast their votes for President Ford because he had not stumbled on that issue. Or maybe if that Carter ad buy hadn’t been trimmed, those missing ads would have changed that handful of votes. You couldn’t even measure so slight a movement . . . except that it was enough to give Ohio to Ford by 12,000 votes and, by that whisper of a margin, 25 electoral votes fell into Ford’s column. In Mississippi, 769,000 votes were cast. Maybe 10,000 of them would have gone with Carter instead of Ford had they watched the President spend a week trying to untangle himself from a rhetorical thicket. No such survey could have measured so insignificant a movement . . . except that those 10,000 voters were enough to push Mississippi’s seven electoral votes over to Ford.

  And with those statistically insignificant shifts in Ohio and Mississippi—22,000 out of more than eighty million voters—Gerald Ford wound up with 272 electoral votes. Jimmy Carter, who had won the popular vote by one and a half million votes, had 266.

  Incredibly, impossibly, Gerald Ford had won.

  IN A SUITE on the twentieth floor of Boston’s Copley Plaza Hotel, as he waited to celebrate his landslide reelection to the Senate, Edward Moore Kennedy nodded, smiled, and mouthed to an old ally across the room, Off and running . . .

  In the living room of his ranch in the Santa Ynez Mountains, thirty miles north of Santa Barbara, California, former governor Ronald Wilson Reagan shook his head, and, ensuring that there were no women within range, muttered: Shit . . .

  And in an office in the catacombs of the Capitol, a freshman senator saw the bulletin, and the first faint wisps of a ludicrous idea drifted into his mind . . .

  THE FIRST MEDIA CONSENSUS notes were sounded as soon as Ohio fell into the Ford column, and the networks, one by one, trumpeted the news.

  “Not since Harry Truman . . .”

  “In the most astounding comeback since Harry Truman . . .”

  “Twenty-eight years after an unelected Midwestern President, given up for dead, pulled off the most surprising upset in American history, another unelected Midwestern . . .”

  It was a perfectly understandable comparison. But after the first flush of Trumania, a few unsettling facts began to emerge.

  In 1948, Truman had won a clear popular-vote plurality, defeating Dewey by more than two million votes. Ford had lost the popular vote, becoming the first President-elect since Benjamin Harrison in 1888 to achieve such a dubious distinction. Within twenty-four hours, the media had begun to throw cold water on Ford’s victory.

  “Ford Stumbles Again—Back to the White House,” read a Washington Post headline. More than a few Democrats argued that Ford had no moral right to the Presidency, suggesting that Ford electors be persuaded to vote for Carter, “the real winner.” A newly elected twenty-eight-year-old congressman from Tennessee, Al Gore, Jr., announced that his first act would be to introduce a Constitutional amendment to award the Presidency to the popular-vote winner.

  “It is indefensible,” Gore said, “that a candidate who received the most votes would be denied the Presidency by an archaic, outmoded mechanism, and we must ensure that no future candidate will ever suffer this outrageous injustice.”

  In 1948, Truman had brought with him solid Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. Ford, by contrast, would face a heavily Democratic Congress virtually identical to the one that had so frustrated him during the past two and a half years. Without an ability to claim any mandate—a million more voters wanted the other guy!—he had neither arithmetic nor political clout, and the Democrats, seething over losing an all-but-certain victory, would be in no mood for amicable, bipartisan cooperation.

  Finally, none of the post-election analysis bothered to point out what had happened to Truman in the years following his astonishing comeback. However elevated his stature became in the decades after his Presidency, the four years of Truman’s elected term were brutal: an unpopular war, postwar inflation and industrial strife, and an ugly political climate in which the President and his allies found not just their judgment but their loyalty questioned, all conspired to drive his popularity down to historically low levels.

  On Election Night, Stu Spencer, one of the architects of Ford’s comeback strategy, was standing against a wall in the White House, watching the jubilation.

  “You don’t seem all that happy,” a celebrant said to him. “This is as good as it gets!”

  “That,” Spencer said, “is exactly what I’m afraid of.”

  AT NOON ON WEDNESDAY, Ford assembled his White House team in the Cabinet Room, and formally requested that every one of them remain. It was designed to draw a sharp contrast with Richard Nixon, who on the day after his 1972 historic landslide, had asked for the written resignations of his entire team. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Treasury Secretary William Simon readily agreed. Secretary of State Kissinger, who in the preceding two and a half years had threatened to resign somewhere between twenty-seven and forty-two times, asked for time to consider the offer; he agreed a few days later, after Ford politely but firmly informed Kissinger that he would not agree to appointing him as both Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense. With Brent Scowcroft staying on as National Security Advisor, the Ford foreign- and defense-policy team represented a dramatic contrast in ideology and instincts from the one President Carter would have brought into the White House. Nowhere was that more evident than in their response to what happened in one of the most
dangerous regions of the world.

  FOR MOHAMMAD REZ A Shah Pahlavi, His Imperial Majesty, Shahanshah, King of Kings, Light of the Aryans, Head of the Warriors, the surprise victory of President Ford was a blessing . . . and a curse. It meant that the American President would be surrounded by officials and advisors who saw in the Shah an invaluable ally, presiding over an Iran that shipped oceans of oil to an energy-hungry United States, and that protected the sea-lanes in and around the Persian Gulf from potential threats from the Soviet Union and anti-American regimes in the region. It also meant that the American President would be pressed by other high-ranking officials who saw in the Shah’s hunger for higher oil revenues a mortal threat to the economic fortunes of the West, even though that income from oil was crucial to the Shah’s fragile hold on an increasingly unstable Iran. It was, the Shah understood, just another chapter in a permanent story of friendship and hostility.

  It was the West that had put Reza Pahlavi in power at the start of World War II, and it was the Central Intelligence Agency that had restored him to power in a coup in 1953. U.S. Presidents from FDR to Nixon had embraced him, but under Nixon and Ford the embrace turned almost conjugal. Nixon called the Shah “our best friend.” Ford’s Vice President, Nelson Rockefeller, whose familial and financial ties with the Shah went back decades, said of him that “he’d soon teach us how to govern America.” Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, a close Shah confidant, had said “how much he wished President Ford could emulate his example.” This flattery flowed from strategic necessity. The Shah’s forces guarded the Straits of Hormuz; his diplomacy made Iran Israel’s only ally in the region. (Indeed, Israel’s feared intelligence arm, Mossad, helped create the Shah’s own secret police force, Savak.)

  There was, however, another side to the Shah: a hunger for the huge sums of cash he would need to push, to drag, his country into the twentieth century. He thought his nation hopelessly backward, mired in religious and cultural mores that kept it from its destiny as a great nation. But modernization in Iran had fierce enemies. When, in 1963, the Shah had proclaimed the “White Revolution,” promising land reform, votes for women, political rights for non-Muslims, and a literacy campaign in the nation’s schools, a sixty-one-year-old cleric named Ayatollah Khomeini had led huge uprisings against the reforms. While the insurrection had been crushed and Khomeini driven into exile in Iraq, the discontent was never far below the surface.

  Ironically, one of the Shah’s efforts to deal with the discontents only made matters worse. In 1973, when the OPEC cartel launched an embargo against the West because of its support for Israel, the Shah, while refusing to join the embargo, enthusiastically quadrupled oil prices, and poured the money into massive construction projects and an immense arms buildup. The unintended consequences—a huge population shift to the cities, an influx of foreign workers, the weakening of traditional family life in rural Iran, crushing inflation—combined with growing tension between a more visible Western culture and traditional Iranian customs, meant that by the end of 1976, Iran was on the boil . . . and for the Shah, the most urgent need in order to lance this boil was . . . more money from oil. That determination, in turn, opened up a civil war within the Ford administration.

  For more than two years, Treasury Secretary Bill Simon and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had been at odds with Kissinger over dealings with Iran. For Simon, the huge oil price jump had been the key to the inflation and recession that had helped doom Nixon and that had been one of the biggest obstacles to Ford’s reelection. For Rumsfeld, Iran was simply not to be trusted; its military procurement was infested with corruption and was also fueling Iran’s dangerous inflation. Kissinger, as he so often did, waged an intense turf war for the heart and mind of President Ford, warning him on August 3, 1976, that “Treasury and Defense are going after the Shah . . . [they] are on a vicious campaign. . . . If we get rid of the Shah, we will have a radical regime on our hands.” In this case, however, Kissinger was unsuccessful. The growing tensions between Ford and the Shah over oil prices reached a peak of sorts when the Shah wrote a confidential letter to the President on November 1. It was written with the expectation that Ford would lose to Jimmy Carter; in fact, the Iranian Ambassador was instructed not to deliver the letter until it was clear that Ford had lost.

  The Shah’s letter, in no uncertain terms, warned that the longstanding bilateral alliance could be ended at a moment’s notice.

  “If there is opposition in the Congress and in other circles to see Iran prosperous and militarily strong,” he wrote, “there are many sources of supply to which we can turn, for our life is not in their hands. . . . Nothing could prove more reaction from us than this threatening tone from certain circles and their paternalistic image.”

  With Ford’s upset win, this highly unsubtle threat to turn elsewhere—perhaps to Moscow?—was never delivered to the President. It did, however, wind up in the hands of the one individual most determined, and most able, to use it to shape the future of the nation . . . and the region.

  IT WAS NEW YEAR’S EVE, but Henry Kissinger was in no mood to celebrate. Yes, he would continue as Secretary of State, but it was clear that Defense Secretary Rumsfeld would be a formidable adversary for the ear of the President. Beyond the battle for turf—always one of Kissinger’s obsessions—was the perilous situation into which Iran was about to be plunged. Two weeks earlier, in Doha, Saudi Arabia’s Sheik Yamani had shocked the delegates to the OPEC meeting by announcing a three-million-barrel-a-day increase in oil production, a jump that undermined OPEC’s plan for big price increases. It was clear who the Saudi’s real target was.

  “Yamani went into the OPEC meting intending to stick it to Iran,” said one U.S. observer. “We’ll show the Shah who is boss of OPEC.” Yamani made the motive even more clear when he said, “We expect the West, especially the United States, to appreciate what we did.”

  Officially Kissinger celebrated the Saudi move, but he worried about what the Saudi gambit would do to Iran’s economy and to the prospects of unrest. The Shah had often shown clear signs of uncertainty in how to deal with such unrest: cracking down on dissidents with imprisonment and torture, then loosening restrictions on assemblies and demonstrations. It was essential to stiffen the backbone of the Shah, to offer clear indications that, whatever the disputes about oil, the United States simply would not permit the Shah to fall.

  Sometime in the early evening, as the Secretary of State was struggling into his tuxedo for a night of parties, a State Department messenger came to his door, and handed him an envelope that had come through a series of cutouts from a source deep inside the Shah’s Niavaran Palace. Kissinger read it with a growing sense of satisfaction: Whatever troubles the Shah would encounter in the coming year or two, there was no chance at all that this administration—the Kissinger-Ford administration—would preside over the downfall of so crucial a friend.

  IT DID NOT TAKE long for Kissinger’s fears to become reality. Unrest had been a more or less permanent part of the Shah’s regime, from both the left and the right. Now, without the flood of oil money that price increases would have bought, Iran’s economy suffered a series of hammer blows through the first half of 1977. Cutbacks in arms purchases, suspension of construction projects, the cutting of subsidies to interest groups such as the influential mullahs, all made the fears of experts like political scientist James Bill more and more of an impending realty: “Time is not on the side of the Shah of Iran.”

  No one, of course, can say what would have happened in Iran had Jimmy Carter won the 1976 election. With no experience whatsoever in foreign policy, Carter would likely have relied on a mix of the Democratic Party’s experienced diplomats and academic experts with a wide mix of hawkish and dovish views. Nor can anyone say for sure how Carter’s emphasis on human rights would have shaped his policy toward Iran.

  With the Ford victory, however, there was no ambiguity.

  “Carter had Vietnam angst,” Brent Scowcroft said much later. “He tho
ught we had been wrong; he thought America would have to pay a price. I think with Carter, the U.S. would have been on the defense. Ford didn’t have any of that. So when we saw what was happening in Iran, all of us thought as soon as the demonstrations broke out, that they had to be nipped in the bud.”

  If anything, that resolution was strengthened in early January, when Kissinger revealed the contents of the Shah’s unsent letter to Ford. For the Shah, Kissinger said, survival of the dynasty overrode anything else. He was telling them in no uncertain terms that he was fully prepared to turn “elsewhere” for support—and if that meant a deal with Moscow, he would do it. The U.S. had to convey to the Shah its unconditional support, and give him all the help he needed to restore order.

  So in September 1977, when 5,000 protesters gathered at a Muslim shrine in the holy city of Qom to protest a government-sponsored newspaper attack on the exiled Khomeini, and the Shah’s troops fired on the crowd, killing twenty, the U.S. government expressed only “regret at the loss of life” and its “firm support for the government of His Imperial Majesty.” That unwavering support was repeated when, forty days later, in accord with Muslim tradition, Shiites gathered in several cities to mourn the deaths at Qom, and once again the Shah’s troops responded with deadly force, killing more than a hundred. Whatever doubts the Shah may have had about America’s support, they were resolved by the strong messages of support—which may be why Reza Pahlavi was finally able to face head-on the most closely guarded secret of his life.

  He was dying.

  He had known it for years. In 1974, Dr. Jean Bernward, a prominent Paris-based hematologist, received an urgent request from a trainee of his to come to Tehran as soon as possible to examine a patient whose identity he would not reveal but who turned out to be Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who was bothered by an enlarged spleen. What was really ailing him, a bone marrow test revealed, was chronic lymphocytic leukemia. The Shah refused any more testing, out of fear others would learn of his illness; nor did he follow the doctors’ advice to start taking an anti-cancer drug. By 1977, the Shah’s physical condition was deteriorating, but a combination of tightly controlled public appearances and a heavily censored press managed to keep that fact largely hidden.