38.) Gerald Ford 1974-1977

"Our long national nightmare is over." - Gerald Ford, August 9, 1974

~~~

Gerald Ford is the only person in American history to reach the vice presidency and the presidency without being elected to either. Despite this, he was a popular president - for 1 month. But then he pardoned Nixon, and it was all downhill from there. Follow along as Ford rides his athletic gifts from Grand Rapids to The University of Michigan and eventually Yale, serves his country in World War 2, then embarks on a quest to become Speaker of the House, only to discover the presidency instead. Once there, he'll grapple with the legacy of Watergate, and a bedeviling rise in unemployment and inflation that threatened to send the country's economy over the cliff.

Bibliography
1. Gerald Ford – Douglas Brinkley
2. Richard Nixon: The Life – John Farrell
3. Ronald Reagan: The life – H.W. Brands
4. The Vietnam War – Ken Burns (documentary)
5. Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush – Jon Meacham
6. Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream – Doris Kearns Goodwin
7. Indomitable Will: LBJ in the Presidency – Mark K Updegrove

Transcript

Welcome to abridged presidential histories with Kenny Ryan, episode 38, Gerald Ford, aka, Mr. Nice Guy

SPEECH - long national nightmare is over.

It’s hard to know what to make of Gerry Ford. He’s largely forgotten today, but if you have heard of him, it’s likely for one of two reasons.

Chevy Chase’s bumbling impression of him on Saturday Night Live. - hilarious, look it up.

Or you know Ford’s the guy who pardoned Nixon.

But is that a fair legacy? - the punchline who pardoned Nixon. Was he doomed by circumstance? Would anyone who followed Nixon have struggled to escape Watergate’s shadow?

Or was he the right guy, at the right moment, 

We’ll find out. But I promise you one thing. We’re going to tell a lot more Gerry Ford jokes along the way.

–

Leslie Lynch King Jr. was born on July 14, 1913 - and I know what you’re thinking. Leslie Lynch King Jr? Who the heck is that? Well. That’s Jerry Ford. He just doesn’t have that name yet.

What? How did a King become a Ford? Well, let me tell ya. His father, Leslie King Sr, was a domestic abuser. And a monstrous one at that. Days after little Leslie was born, King barged into the hospital room brandishing a knife and threatening to kill his wife and child. He was only stopped when a nurse summoned the police to remove him.

Little Leslie’s mother, Dorothy, had long been thinking of leaving King Sr. - he’d been beating her since their honeymoon and only the pregnancy had stopped her from leaving sooner - but this was the last straw. 

Dorothy abandoned King and fled with the baby to Grand Rapids, Michigan, to rebuild her life.

It couldn’t have been easy, a single mother with a baby in an age when you just didn’t see that very often, but Dorothy found safety and support in Grand Rapids. And soon, she found a good man, too. 

Gerald Rudolf Ford was a kind and simple paint salesman. He wasn’t educated - and he wasn’t related to wealthy automaker Henry Ford, bummer - but he was enterprising enough to provide for Dorothy and her baby.

The pair married in 1917 when baby Leslie was 4 years old and raised the child with no knowledge of his birth name or the father Dorothy had fled. They raised young Leslie simply calling him Junior, and so everyone assumed that if he was junior, and if his daddy was Gerald Ford, that he must be Gerald Ford, too. 

He did eventually learn the truth. His birth father even tracked him down one day. But Junior was a Ford now, and he made it official when, at the age of 22, he legally changed his name to Gerald Ford Jr. Honoring the stepfather who had loved him so much.

Ford was a friendly child. He was an Eagle scout and an average student, but a pretty darn good football player. With Ford lining up at Center on offense and Linebacker on defense, his high school won the state title in 1930 and Ford was named to the All-state squad, which was good enough to convince a local group of Michigan alumni to send him to The Big House on a football scholarship. But football scholarships in the 1930’s weren’t like the football scholarships and NIL deals of today, so this wasn’t a ticket to easy street. Ford still had to work at the university cafeteria to make ends meet. But the ends did meet. And so football proved a path to a life-changing college education. If not for that scholarship, he may never have gotten out of Grand Rapids.

The Michigan Wolverine football team went undefeated during Ford’s sophomore and junior years… when he was still riding the bench. When he finally broke into the starting lineup, he was named MVP! Of a team that spectacularly collapsed, losing 7 of its 8 games.

MVP was good enough to get Ford into the 1935 College All Star game, though. which back then was played against actual NFL teams. Woah! He did well enough in that game to earn offers from the Green Bay Packers and the Detroit Lions, but the NFL of 1935 wasn’t the NFL of today, either. So Ford said no and pursued a law degree instead. He got a job coaching boxing and football at Yale University and kept applying to the Yale law school until they relented and let him in, which they finally did after three years of trying. He graduated in the top third of his class.

Which, geez, football is really paying off for this guy.

Ford opened a law practice back in Michigan after graduating Yale, but that lasted only until the empire of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into World War II. 29-year-old Gerald Ford enlisted in the naval reserve and, requesting combat duty, was deployed to the south pacific as an anti aircraft gunner on a light aircraft carrier called the USS Monterrey. When they weren’t fighting, he was the ship’s physical education director. And so it was Ford’s idea to install basketball hoops on the carrier’s aircraft elevator to keep the crew in good shape and their spirits high. I highly recommend you google “Gerald Ford Navy Basketball,” as there are some awesome photos of a young Gerald Ford playing pickup basketball games with the crew on this carrier elevator as players watch from the flight deck above. That’s gotta be a top-10 pickup basketball setting ever. So cool.

After the war, Ford returned home to Michigan and decided to run for office against a well-entrenched Republican congressman.

Ok, so why did Ford take on an incumbent? Didn’t he know incumbents win more than 85% of their races?

Well. Maybe he didn’t know that. But he did know that he cared about veterans issues, and the incumbent didn’t. And he did know he supported the Marshall Plan - to rebuild a peaceful Europe - and the incumbent didn’t. And he also knew he was personally pissed off at the local party boss who supported the incumbent, over a perceived disrespect from before the war. So what the heck, let’s go for it!

It was going to be an uphill battle, but Ford deployed a shrewd tactic to rally a sizable base of support to him before the race even began. He identified a handful of influential local republicans who he thought would have the best odds of unseating the incumbent, he visited them at their homes, and he said, “I think you should run for Congress and I’d like to support you.” And all three of them said, “We don’t like the incumbent, but he’s unbeatable. How about you run instead and we’ll support you?”

And just like that, Ford established a base.

And then Ford just put his nose to the grindstone and hit the streets campaigning his butt off. Luckily for Ford, the incumbent was so overconfident in his reelection that he never came home to campaign, and the voters noticed. Come election day, they gave Ford an overwhelming victory - electing him with 62% percent of the vote - 24,000 to 14,000. 

True - this was just the primary. But Michigan’s 5th district was a staunchly republican one and he easily won the general election later that year, capturing 60% of the vote.

And then he got married! A year earlier, Ford had met Betty Warren at a party and the pair had hit it off. There had only been one problem - Betty was already married. She was finalizing a divorce, but Ford didn’t want his relationship with a divorcee to become a scandal during the campaign - which it probably would have in 1948 - so he put off marriage until after he’d won the primary. For their honeymoon, Ford took Betty to a University of Michigan football game. The pair were married the rest of their lives and, let me tell ya, Betty Ford is a great character. She would get her husband in hot water for her support of Roe v. Wade and an Equal Rights Amendment - These are not republican positions and Ford would have to disavow them to appease the political right - but she would become immensely popular as a first lady, openly talking about pre-marital sex, marijuana use, the benefits of psychiatric help, and a mastectomy she underwent for breast cancer. And by talking about this, more women started checking themselves for breast cancer and you saw a national bump in diagnosis and treatment.

Betty Ford, simply is, awesome.

But most of that is still well down the road. We just got Ford elected to Congress. A 24-year congressional career is about to begin. Ford entered Congress 2 years after future presidents  Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy. But unlike them, Ford never aspired for the presidency. His great aspiration was to become speaker of the house.

Ford wanted it so much, that soon after arriving, he told his staff to research the careers of past speakers to see how they’d obtained their gavels. They reported that 3 past speakers and president Garfield had chaired the house appropriations committee, which determines where the money goes and is therefore incredibly powerful, so Ford befriended both Democratic and Republican leaders on that committee and, when a seat came available in 1950, they gave it to him.

And that’s pretty much what Ford did for the next 20 years. When folks back in Michigan asked him to run for senate, he said… naw.

Life didn’t really get interesting again until November 29, 1963 - one week after John F Kennedy’s assassination - when Lyndon Johnson appointed Ford to the 7-member Warren commission, the commission formed to investigate the murder of John F. Kennedy.

Ford… was basically an absentee member. He was still mostly focused on his work with the appropriations committee. But there are 2 things of note with Ford and the Warren commission. First, when the commission’s draft report stated “there was no conspiracy to kill Kennedy,” Ford asked that it be changed to say “We found no evidence of a conspiracy to kill Kennedy.” He asked for that simply because he thought it was more clear - They found no evidence. That’s the truth. But he may have come to regret it. For years afterward, conspiracy theorists would point to this as proof that hey, maybe there was a conspiracy! The commission didn’t say there wasn’t one! And that kinda just ticked Ford off. He may have asked for the language in the report to change, but for the rest of his life, he’d publicly say there was no conspiracy to kill Kennedy and he hated the Oliver Stone movie.

Then, a few months after that wrapped up, Ford challenged the incumbent house minority leader for the minority leadership position and beat him. This meant Ford was now the highest ranking republican in the house - all the GOP needed to do was win a majority and bam, his dream of being speaker of the house would be realized!

About that.

Ford didn’t know it then, but the republican party wouldn’t recapture the house for another 30 years. Yeah! Not until 1995! So, elected minority leader, he was close, but also oh so far away.

But that doesn’t mean the following years were boring. Before the 60’s were over, Ford got involved in Nixon’s machinations against the Supreme Court.

Background - In 1969, Nixon successfully forced progressive Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas to resign from the court by ordering the justice department to investigate him until he quit. Nevermind that Nixon’s first nominee to replace Fortas was a segregationist accused of bigger crimes than Fortas was accused of. 

Feeling empowered by this success, Nixon told Ford to open impeachment hearings aimed at 71-year-old progressive justice William O Douglas, who had been put on the Court by FDR in 1939. Ford’s stated reasoning for the impeachment included: 

1. Douglas had published a book analyzing and defending the anti war movement; 
2. Douglas had written an article that appeared in a magazine that also had pornography; and 
3. Douglas had once received money from a group with ties to the Vegas gambling industry. 

Ford claimed he obtained his evidence through independent research, but he actually got it from Nixon’s justice department, which was secretly gathering dirt that could help force liberals off the supreme court.

The accusations all either failed to stick or were just kind of silly, so the impeachment failed and Ford ended up looking kinda silly.

It wouldn’t be the last time.

But you know, there are benefits to being the president’s hatchet man.

On August 6, 1973 - less than a year into Nixon’s second term - news broke that vice president Spiro Agnew was under investigation for bribery, conspiracy, and tax evasion dating back to his time as Maryland Governor and continuing into his time as Vice President - and they had him dead to rights. The VP had accepted envelopes of cash in - literally, physically in - the vice president’s office. 

One month later, October 10, 1973, Agnew signed a deal with prosecutors that would keep him out of jail if he paid a $10,000 fine and left the vice presidency immediately. 

Just like that, the vice presidency was open.

But how do you fill it? Well, according to the recently passed 25th amendment, quote: “Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of the Vice President, the President shall nominate a Vice President who shall take office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both Houses of Congress.”

And this created a heck of a dilemma. The Watergate scandal was already a year old by then and people were starting to realize it could take down Richard Nixon. And now that there was no VP, do you know who is next in line? The speaker of the house, who was then a democrat! And, per the 25th amendment, anyone Nixon nominated to replace Agnew as vice president would HAVE to be confirmed by a Democratic Congress.

If the Democrats wanted to play hard ball, they could have refused to confirm anyone Nixon appointed, impeached Nixon, and then the Democratic speaker of the house would have become president!

But the Democrats weren’t in the mood for hard ball. They told Nixon they’d vote on the merits of his candidate.

So Nixon turned to his republican caucus and asked them to submit names of people they thought should be vice president. Three names rose to the top - the liberal wing of the party wanted New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, a liberal republican. The conservative wing of the party wanted California Governor Ronald Reagan, who you might have heard of. And Nixon wanted former Texas governor John Connelly - a one-time Democrat who had been riding in Kennedy’s car when Kennedy was assassinated and who had also been wounded in that attack.

None of these names were going to be palatable to everyone, though, so Nixon looked down to the fourth name on the list - Republican minority leader Gerald Ford.

Ford… he might do. Nixon had almost picked him as his running mate when he ran for president back in 1960, and he’d obviously known Ford since they both entered Congress in 1947. Ford had also been doing a good job obeying Nixon’s bidding in Congress lately.

But, Perhaps most importantly, the Democrats told Nixon that Ford could get confirmed.

6 days after Agnew’s resignation, Ford was nominated, and 2 months after that, he was sworn in. It was December 6, 1973, and Gerald Ford was 60 years old. He would serve as Vice President for just 8 months.

And in those 8 months, well, he found the job wasn’t quite what he’d expected it to be. Ford had been told that he’d be Nixon’s ambassador to Congress. Instead, he was Nixon’s ambassador to the American people. Ford was dispatched all across the united states, flying 118,000 miles and logging 500 public appearances during his 8 months in the vice presidency. 

And these weren’t all lofty events. He seemed willing to show up for anything. The joke soon emerged, “If you are having a banquet and you can’t get the local chief of police to speak, ask Vice President Ford.”

One journalist wrote, “someone ought to do Jerry ford a favor and take his airplane away”

And the speeches he gave, they were not the friendly Gerald Ford speeches of old. They were attack dog speeches. Nixon’s team had so little regard for the vice presidency that they gave Ford speeches they had written for Spiro Agnew and ordered him to read them verbatim. 

To help Ford defend Nixon against the watergate charges, he actively avoided learning anything about the investigation. Which, well. Just because you refuse to look at the evidence, that doesn’t make someone innocent.

When the first impeachment articles were introduced against Richard Nixon, with 21 democrats and  6 republicans voting in favor, Ford said. “The fact that every one of the democrats on the committee voted for it lends credence that it’s a partisan issue, even though some republicans voted for it.”

You can see why people are starting to make fun of him.

Ford would later justify his committed defense of Nixon by saying he’d once asked Nixon’s Attorney General, John Mitchell, if Nixon was innocent, and Mitchell had said “Yup!” But… Mitchel was indicted on charges of obstruction of justice and conspiracy, including perjury and lying to the FBI, months earlier. So that’s an odd person to put your trust in.

In late July, 1974, Nixon’s lawyers heard the ‘smoking gun tape’ where nixon ordered the cover up of the watergate. The gig was up and they all knew it. At a cabinet meeting on August 6, Ford told Nixon “No one regrets more than I do this whole tragic episode, I have deep personal sympathy for you, Mr. President, and your fine family. But I wish to emphasize that had I known what has been disclosed in reference to Watergate in the last twenty-four hours, I would not have made a number of the statements I made either as Minority Leader or as Vice President.... I'll have no further comment on the issue, because I'm a party in interest. I'm sure there will be impeachment in the House. I can't predict the Senate outcome." 

Which is not an easy thing to say to a president.

Two days later, Nixon called Ford to tell him what the rest of the country would soon find out - Nixon would retire at noon tomorrow and hand the duties of the presidency to his vice president.

At a moment of constitutional crisis, Gerald Ford was about to be thrust into power.

—

And so, on August 9, 1974, 61-year-old Gerald Ford, a 24-year veteran of Congress who had dreamed of becoming speaker, and instead became the president, was sworn in as president of the United States. Because he became vice president when Agnew resigned and president when Nixon resigned, Ford is the only person in American History to serve both of those roles despite never being elected to either. But what did the world and the country look like when Ford became president? Let’s look around.

Internationally, the big news was the end of the war in Vietnam! For the moment, anyway. The United states had signed a deal where it pulled out of south vietnam in exchange for a return of captured american prisoners and a promise that the north wouldn’t invade the south again. Which surely it won’t, right? Naw. Nawwww.

Domestically, the United States was in pretty rough shape. 

Economists were vexed to see that inflation and unemployment were both on the rise. According to economic theories then in vogue, when inflation goes up, that must mean the economy is doing good and so unemployment should be going down. And yet, there the numbers were staring everyone in the face. More people were going out of work and the goods they depended on were going up in price and nobody could explain why. Ford would have to attempt to fix it.

He’d also have to grapple with a growing distrust in the U.S. government. The pentagon papers - which revealed presidents had lied about the vietnam war - and watergate had badly shaken americans faith in their leaders. If Ford wanted to win a second term, he was going to have to win some of that trust back.

But if that was his goal, boy, he sure stumbled off the blocks, dropped the ball, and then shot himself in the foot with the American people.

Ford did initially enjoy a brief honeymoon period. Most americans were so happy Nixon was gone that they were more than willing to give this long-time congressman a shot. He seemed friendly enough. He even sent the Washington Post, whose reporting on Watergate had led to Nixon’s resignation and Ford’s presidency, a signed photograph that bore the caption, “I got my job through the Washington Post.”

And hey, that’s pretty funny.

But then, on September 8, 1974 - exactly one month into the job - he called for a televised address to say this:

“__FORD AUDIO__

That’s right. One month on the job, Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon for all and any crimes he may have committed during his time in the presidency.

Or, as Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein told his colleague Bob Woordward, “The son of a bitch pardoned the son of a bitch!”

National reaction was similarly shocked and incredulous. The day after the pardon, Ford was interrupted during a speech in Pittsburgh by chants of “Jail Ford” and his approval ratings dropped from 71% to 50.

Ford knew that pardoning Nixon was going to be incredibly unpopular. When he’d floated the idea by his staff a week earlier, they’d been shocked speechless by it. So why’d he do it?

Well, if you asked Ford, he said he did it so the nation could move on. Watergate investigations were still taking Congressional time, still working through the court systems, and he was being asked about it every day. He had a presidential agenda he wanted to advance, and he became convinced that the only way to do so was to Pardon Nixon so Watergate could be put behind him.

But there might be one other reason Ford pardoned Nixon.

Eight days before Nixon resigned, his chief of staff, Alexander Haig, had met with Ford to discuss the options available to Nixon and solicit Ford’s advice. Nixon could cling to power and dare the senate to impeach him, he could pardon himself and touch off a constitutional crisis, or… Or, and I’m quoting Ford’s memoir here, Haig told Ford that, quote, “Nixon could agree to leave [office] in return for an agreement that the new president -- Gerald Ford -- would pardon him.” 

Haig wanted to know which of the 3 options Ford supported. That’s right, Nixon’s right hand man directly told Ford, ‘Nixon will leave office if you agree to pardon him,’ and was waiting for an answer.

Ford claims he refused to answer the question in the moment, when it was just him and Haig in the room, but when he told his staff what had happened, a shocked aid warned “Silence implies assent.” So Ford called Haig back to emphatically tell him that he was not answering the question and his silence was not answering the question either.

But. Well. Nobody else was in the room when it happened. It was just Ford and Haig. Was there a deal? We’ll never know. All we do know is that Ford says a deal was proposed by Haig, and then Nixon resigned, Ford became president, and then Ford pardoned Nixon, at great political cost to himself.

Which brings us to the big question, maybe the only question, of Ford’s presidency: Was it a good idea to Pardon Nixon?

Well, Bob Woodward, one of the journalists whose reporting on Watergate had taken down Nixon, later came to think it was the right move, calling it an “act of courage” that accomplished Ford’s goal of allowing the nation to move beyond Watergate. And it did. I mean. Nixon was pardoned. There could be no trial. No punishment. There was no point of further investigation.

But I disagree. And I disagree, in part, because I think the pardon is a corrupting power in the hands of an executive. When a president can pardon anyone of any federal crime, this encourages their more radical loyalists to break any law they like to protect their guy, knowing the president can pardon them.

And we’ve seen this happen numerous times since 1974.

Bush Sr. would later use the pardon to protect himself and Reagan from the Iran contra investigation in 1992, Bush junior would use it to protect himself and Dick Cheney from the Lewis Libby investigation, and Donald Trump would use it to protect himself from the Russian collusion investigation.

We have seen more criminal activity from presidential administrations after the Nixon pardon than before, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

So, anyway, that’s the Nixon pardon. Ford’s administration never recovered from it.

Which is why there’s not much else to report from Ford’s presidency. He was basically politically dead after the first month. And his failed attempts to heal an ailing economy didn’t help his cause, either.

In the opening months of Ford’s presidency, 1974, inflation was at its highest level since price controls were removed after World War II and unemployment was at its highest level since the great depression. They called it “Stagflation” and everyone was scrambling for answers. 

And Ford, he thought he knew the answer.

Remember when Roosevelt ended a bank run by giving a fireside chat where he explained how the banking system worked and telling folks, just put your money back in the bank and it will be there tomorrow?

Ford tried to channel his inner Roosevelt when he gave a speech attempting to explain inflation and telling Americans that if they just spent less each day than the day before, that should end inflation! He even had a bunch of buttons to hand out to everyone ‘Whip Inflation Now,” which, when you make it an acronym, that spells “WIN” 

But. Well. Remember what I was saying a moment ago about Ford’s credibility after pardoning Nixon? Yeah, nobody was buying it. 

So, in November, 1974, Ford asked for a $5 billion dollar tax hike. Arguing to the nation that this would end the recession - If folks had less money to spend, businesses would have to stop raising prices and inflation would fall, but what about the high unemployment? 

Before this idea had had a chance to go anywhere - just three months later - Ford aboutfaced and said that instead of a $5 billion dollar tax hike, what the country really needed was a $14 billion dollar tax cut. What? 

If you cut taxes, the old logic dictates, businesses will have more money to hire people and drive down unemployment - but then what about the high inflation? 

This rapid turnaround - calling for a tax hike one day and a tax cut 3 months later - further eroded Ford’s credibility. And I hope you can also see what a pickle he was in. We know what policies cut inflation, but they often cause more unemployment. And we know what policies reduce unemployment, but they often cause more inflation. Nobody was sure they knew what policy could combat both.

The Democratic party, which held steep majorities in the senate and the house, just got together and passed the bill it wanted to pass without him - an economic relief package coupled with a jobs program. And Ford signed it. Inflation and unemployment came down a little bit, but Stagflation will make a return when Carter gets to office.

Ok, so what caused this mystery case of Stagflation in the 70s’?

Here’s my take on it - inflation is simply the raising of prices. It happens when a businessman or woman says “The public today pays a nickel for a can of soda, I bet we can convince them to buy it for a dime.”

But how do you convince them to buy it for a dime? Marketing can do the trick. We’ve all seen how brand names cost more than generic goods in the grocery store. That’s because, through marketing, they’ve convinced you their products are better. But marketing isn’t the only way.

You can also do it by eliminating alternatives.

If I’m competing with 2 other companies to sell you hammers and then I buy both those companies, you now have to buy your hammers from me, and I can charge you whatever I want.

But buying companies is expensive. And after one company buys another, well, now they have 2 of everything. 2 factories. 2 accounting departments. 2 marketing offices. 2 c-suites. Maybe even 2 store locations next to each other.

So what do you do next? You consolidate. You fire a bunch of people. Or, in business speak, you ‘find efficiencies.’

That’s how you get higher prices and higher unemployment.

And wouldn’t you know it, a major wave of corporate mergers occurred from 1965 to 69, just before unemployment and inflation began their climb.

This is what I blame for stagflation.

There is one more thing worth mentioning, though.

If a company can get it into everyone’s head that it’s not mergers or marketing that’s allowing them to raise prices, but rather a mysterious force called “inflation,” well, that will keep folks paying, because they’ll blame “inflation” instead of greed. When the public expects prices to go up, that’s a golden opportunity for companies to raise prices.

Costco has sold hot dogs for the same price, a buck fifty a dog, for 40 years. A product that’s immune to inflation. Imagine that.

All this is to say that Ford’s approach, telling folks to spend less, was a valid strategy. If a soda company doubles the price of soda and everyone stops drinking it, that price will come back down. The problem for Ford was, because of his pardon of Nixon, and a strong current of anti-government distrust, nobody listened. So it didn’t work.

So, domestically, it wasn’t going well for Ford. How about his international hand? At least Nixon had ended the vietnam war, right?

About that.

When Ford became president, Vietnam was technically still divided between a communist north and capitalist south but at peace under the Paris Peace Accords Nixon had signed, but there wasn’t actually much peace. The Americans were gone, but the Vietcong were applying constant pressure, and then that pressure became gains that became an avalanche. By April of 1975, Ford was receiving the same warning LBJ and Nixon had received - South Vietnam had weeks to live if the U.S. didn’t send aid. But in Ford’s case, Congress tied his hands. Laws had been passed that expressly forbade sending aid to Vietnam.

During an April 23 speech at Tulane University, Ford said the Vietnam War was finished as far as America was concerned, and the crowd of students broke into celebration and relief.

Ok. So we weren’t going to send more troops or aid. But… 6,000 Americans were still in South Vietnam, working at the embassy, serving as advisors, or in the business sectors. What about them? And those 6,000 Americans had 30,000 vietnamese wives and children. What about them? And what about the tens if not hundreds of thousands of south vietnamese who had supported American forces during the vietnam war and who were likely to be murdered if the south fell. - what about them?

As south vietnam’s army collapsed in the face of North Vietnams final victorious invasion, Ford moved quickly to approve a mass exodus of all these people to the United States, saying nobody would be turned away. 40,000 people were evacuated from Saigon’s airport, until shells from the approaching North Vietnamese army closed the runway. But there were still 1,700 americans in Saigon. As communist soldiers entered the city, the evacuation moved to the U.S. embassy rooftop, where a line of helicopters kept sweeping in to save who they could. When the U.S. cruisers and carriers out at sea ran out of space, helicopters were pushed off their decks and into the ocean to make room for more refugees. As American helicopters reported North Vietnamese anti-aircraft missiles were tracking their movement and might fire any moment, Ford ordered an end to the evacuation. The American Ambassador was ordered to board the last helicopter, and as it rose into the sky, shrank into the distance, and disappeared, American involvement in vietnam truly was over.

South Vietnam had fallen.

The fall of Saigon was chaotic, tragic, and had likely been inevitable for years. If you really want to, you can blame Ford for not beginning the evacuation earlier, but I don’t. The fleet stayed off the coast of Vietnam for several more days to pick up any refugees who sailed out to meet it, then departed for American shores. Ford ordered that all vietnamese refugees who reached the fleet be allowed to resettle in the United States, and congress obliged. 

Given this streak of bad luck and self-inflicted mistakes, it’s little wonder that Ford attracted a challenger in the 1976 Republican Primary - former California governor Ronald Reagan. Ford was forced to tack hard right to fend off the conservative Reagan - he even had to jettison his VP, liberal republican Nelson Rockefeller; and distance himself from comments by his wife, who publicly defended abortion and seemed to approve smoking marijuana and pre-marital sex - and that was barely enough to fend off Reagan for the republican nomination, 1,121 delegates to 1,078 - yeah, super narrow! But then Ford had to try to tack back toward the political center for the general election, and nobody believed him. He’d become a joke now. As LBJ quipped, “There’s nothing wrong with Jerry Ford, he just played football too long without a helmet.”

Or, another LBJ zinger, “Ford’s too dumb to fart and chew gum at the same time.”

On SNL, comedian Chevy Chase turned Ford into a bumbling, clueless moron who couldn’t operate a telephone.

And, during an actual debate with Jimmy Carter - the first televised debates since kennedy-Nixon in 1960 - Ford seemed to turn into a parody of himself when he said “there is no soviet domination of Eastern Europe” and then doubled down on the statement when the moderator gave him a chance to clarify.

On November 2, 1976, Ford lost his reelection race to Democratic outsider Jimmy Carter. The economic and global challenges that had vexed Ford would be Carter’s problem soon enough.

So how had the United States changed during the three years of the Ford administration? 

Well, in a first step toward healing the wounds of Vietnam, ford declared a conditional amnesty of any vietnam deserters. This did not apply to draft dodgers, who were still considered criminals, but it did allow anyone who deserted the military during vietnam to earn an amnesty if they first performed 2 years of public service. Not bad.

In congress, a distrustful public demanded investigations of the nation’s spy apparatus, and what it found was horrifying. The so-called Church Committee, named for its chair Idaho Senator Frank Church, revealed the FBI’s CointelPro operation, which surveilled and infiltrated american political and civil rights organizations to disrupt them - CointelPro had been used against everyone from the Ku Klu Klan to Martin Luther King Jr. - and the committee discovered the CIA had drugged american prisoners in secret mind control experiments. It was nuts, and the American people have never trusted their government the same since.

One other major domestic story was the bankruptcy of New York City. That’s right, laden with expensive pensions and old infrastructure its tax base couldn’t keep up with, New York was facing a bankruptcy crisis. And when it asked the Ford Administration for financial assistance, Ford said no, which led to the New York Post headline “Ford to City: Drop Dead.”

Ford eventually worked out a deal where New York got relief in exchange for cutting its expenses, and playing tough appeased conservative critics, but it did cost him a few more jokes at his expense. Like this one: “the president was loath to help New York during its fiscal crisis because he has bad memories of the city’s great blackout. He was trapped for six hours on an escalator.”

Internationally, there is one event I want to mention - the Helsinki accords. In 1975, Ford negotiated a deal with the Russians where he recognized their borders and they recognized “human rights” and “self determination of peoples.” At the time Ford signed it, it was hugely unpopular at home. He just became the first president to recognize soviet borders in eastern europe! But it would prove a powerful PR tool in the years ahead. When the soviets oppressed their citizens, everyone in the world would be able to point to this accord and say ‘Hey, Komrade, you promised these people had rights, remember?’ it would prove a rallying flag for the popular uprisings that swept the soviet bloc a decade later.

As for Ford, he lived another 29 years - right on into the 21st century. And as he grew older, the country grew more conservative, and Ford found himself increasingly in the political center. Positions that had once been republican were now anathema - pro affirmative action, pro gay marriage, pro gun control - that’s not today’s GOP. 

But, early on in this retirement, ford nearly did get back in the fight. After Ronald Reagan won the 1980 GOP nomination, he became enamored with the idea of having ford back on his ticket as VP - a gesture of ultimate reconciliation to GOP moderates. He offered Ford a literal, physical peace pipe backstage at the party’s convention and pressed Ford hard to consider the offer as he sweetened the pot. What if Ford was no ordinary vice president, but a super vice president! With veto power over key appointments, an expanded national security role, or maybe straight up serving as VP, Secretary of defense and national security advisor all at the same time? 

Nobody had ever offered a vice president such sweeping powers before. The night before Reagan’s acceptance speech - so less than 24 hours before a VP had to be named - Ford gave a live television interview to Walter Cronkite where Cronkite asked if Ford was demanding, quote “something like a co-presidency.” Ford didn’t endorse the idea, but Reagan had been watching. And for Reagan, the very fact that Cronkite had said the words “co-presidency,” that broke the allure of getting Ford on the ticket. Nancy Reagan, we’ll hear more on her in Reagan’s episode, advised her husband that a former president could never be expected to take on the role of vice - it was impractical. At 11:30 pm that night, with hours to go before a vice presidential nominee would have to be revealed, Ford told Reagan he wouldn’t accept the role, and Reagan said he’d stop asking.

2 minutes later, Reagan asked George H W Bush to be his running mate instead, and Ford graciously exited the political stage.

26 years later, Ford died at his home in Rancho Mirage, California, from a number of health complications related to his advanced age. It was December 26, 2006. He was 93 years old.

If you’re going to remember Ford for three things, I suggest

• One: He’s the only president who was never elected president nor vice president
• Two: He Pardoned Richard Nixon
• Three: Because he pardoned richard nixon, he lacked the political power to fight stagflation on his own terms and came as close as any modern incumbent has ever come to losing reelection to a challenger from his own party. 

Thank you for listening to today’s episode of Abridged Presidential Histories.

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The music in today’s podcast is a public domain recording of the United States Army Old Guard Fife and Drum Corps. 

The primary biography for today’s episode was Gerald Ford, by Douglas Brinkley

In our next episode,I’ll talk to the director of the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum, Brooke Clemente, about a presidency lived within the maelstrom as GOP politics shifted under Ford’s feet.

That’s next time, on Abridged Presidential Histories.