In My Time (16 page)

The ’74 midterm elections, reflecting the fallout from Watergate and the pardon, had been a train wreck for the Republican Party and the new president. Looking ahead to 1976, Ford did not feel presumptuous in believing he deserved a united party and a clear path into the general election campaign. But many conservatives had another idea and plenty of reservations about a full term for Ford. They were upset for one thing about the Helsinki Accords, which had been signed by thirty-five nations and included provisions mandating respect for human rights and affirming the recognition of national boundaries. Ford’s critics emphasized the latter, viewing any affirmation of Cold War borders as legitimizing the Soviet Union’s control of satellite states. The president and his foreign policy advisors placed greater value on Helsinki’s unprecedented human rights language, which legitimized the right of the United States and other Western countries to insist upon universal standards of human rights, even within the Soviet sphere. American presidents and diplomats would thereafter be as entitled to raise human rights issues as they were to raise matters of arms control or trade preferences with our communist adversaries. Ford believed that Helsinki would open the door to a debate the Soviets could never win, while giving
courage to dissenters and protestors across the Soviet empire. And time would show that he was right.

Conservatives who viewed Ford as too prone to compromise with the Soviets also pointed to an episode involving Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the great Russian novelist and historian. Solzhenitsyn had won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, but it wasn’t until 1974 that an English translation of
The Gulag Archipelago
was published. This three-volume masterpiece about the brutal life in Soviet forced labor and concentration camps, some of it based on his firsthand experience, made him famous in America. Having been expelled from his homeland, Solzhenitsyn had recently settled in Vermont and had expressed a wish to meet the president. I thought it was a great idea and advised Ford that by all means a man of such standing should be received in the Oval Office.

But Kissinger and his deputy, Brent Scowcroft, argued strongly against it. While they respected Solzhenitsyn’s courage and genius, they felt that such a meeting, which was being championed by Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, could become an irritant in our dealings with the Soviets at a time when delicate arms control negotiations were under way and a summit meeting with General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev was under consideration. So, initially at least, Ford decided against the meeting with Solzhenitsyn. And though the decision seemed minor at the time, we paid a heavy price for it. That refusal to see the most powerful witness against Soviet tyranny became a centerpiece of the conservative foreign policy case against Ford.

Oddly enough, one decision of the greatest consequence was scarcely remarked on by Ford’s critics. In the fall of 1975, he nominated Chicago federal judge John Paul Stevens to succeed Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. Here was a chance to fill a seat on the high court that had last been vacant in 1939, and yet in the Ford White House there was remarkably little discussion as to how to proceed. The president turned the matter over to Attorney General Edward H. Levi. Ed, in turn, conducted a brisk search and settled on a well-regarded judge whom he had known for years. With that, the Senate put the nomination
on the calendar and Stevens was confirmed unanimously less than three weeks later. This was just how things were done in those days. Justice Stevens went on to serve nearly as long as Douglas did, with a record equally pleasing to liberals. I like and respect John Paul Stevens a lot more than I do his judicial philosophy, but I’ve wished we had not simply left the choice up to Ed Levi. For his part, however, Ford never regretted the choice he made, and his opinion mattered more than mine. In any case, his sole Supreme Court nomination came and went with practically no objection.

What did wear us down month after month was the portrayal of the president as a hapless, clueless bumbler. The ridicule in the media really took off after the president, deplaning on a rainy day in Salzburg, Austria, slipped on the wet stairs and tumbled to the tarmac. After that, even a very ordinary spill on the ski slopes became a subject of scrutiny and hilarity for the press corps. For the public, the sight gag was immediately understandable, and there was little to be gained by pointing out that Jerry Ford, the former star athlete, had remained a strong and graceful man well into middle age. He was far more athletic than any of his predecessors since Theodore Roosevelt, and the fact that the press witnessed the occasional spill was partly because he was so active.

The bumbler image had become one of those stock jokes that was too good to let go of. Before long, it became a mainstay of the weekly comedy show
Saturday Night Live.
The president took it all good-naturedly and even played along with the jokes on occasion, but I could never say the same about my own attitude. I thought it was deeply unfair, and it still bothers me when I think about it. The image of President Ford as some sort of dimwitted stumbler hurt badly in the general election, and the press was not above keeping the gag going just for that reason.

Of course, it didn’t help that our rival for the Republican nomination looked so surefooted and was always camera-ready. I had my first glimpse of Ronald Reagan in October 1974 when both he and Ford were attending a black-tie dinner at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles. I was in the room when the president received him beforehand.
The two of them settled into deep armchairs in front of the window of the presidential suite with a nighttime backdrop of high palms and the lights of the Hollywood Hills.

I remember thinking that the former movie star cut a very impressive figure. Tanned and tailored in a way I’d never seen matched in Washington, this was a guy who knew how to carry himself. People as far back as the 1950s had sized up Ronald Reagan as presidential material and now for the first time, I could see why. On that evening in 1974, neither man knew for sure what 1976 would bring for them and their presidential ambitions, and they cordially chatted about everything except the possibility that they would soon be rivals.

Our initial strategy in the White House was to try to put pressure on Reagan not to challenge the president in the first place. It seemed worth attempting because even well into 1975 no one knew for sure whether Reagan would get into the race. We kept in touch with him through intermediaries, chiefly Tom Reed, who had been California’s Republican national committeeman and would become air force secretary. Tom was a Ford man but he knew Reagan well, and the Reagan people listened to him. The same was also true of Stu Spencer, a campaign strategist who had helped Reagan win the governorship and was now signed up with Ford.

AS THE 1976 ELECTION played an increasingly important part in our day-to-day lives, Rumsfeld assigned me responsibility for campaign-related activities.

In Aspen Lodge, the president’s cabin at Camp David, with President Ford (Official White House Photo/David Kennerly)

As I looked at the task ahead, I became convinced there was no way Ford could win election without first making some fairly dramatic changes in his administration. Part of the problem, as I saw it, was that in the national security area we were still operating with the same structure and personnel we had inherited from the Nixon administration.

In the Cabinet Room of the White House with President Ford and his National Security Council, including Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, CIA Director George H.W. Bush, National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs David Jones. We were dealing with the crisis in Lebanon in the summer of 1976. (Official White House Photo/David Kennerly)

The president had never clearly established the perception that he was in charge of national security policy. Henry Kissinger’s continued position as both secretary of state and national security advisor created the impression that he had more control over foreign policy than the president did.

There was also the crucial matter of the vice presidency. Rockefeller had been very loyal to the president, but I believed he would be a huge liability in the upcoming battle with Ronald Reagan. The only way Ford could win was by capturing part of the conservative base that leaned toward Reagan. That would be impossible if his running mate were Nelson Rockefeller, the same man who had tried to stop Barry Goldwater in 1964. And if it became known that Rockefeller would not be on the ticket, we could expect a number of Republican leaders to support Ford with an eye to being chosen as his running mate.

I wasn’t shy about making my point of view known, but having handed over the campaign portfolio to me, Don was more focused on improving the internal functioning of the White House. He began working on what turned out to be a very long memo to the president, urging him to remedy such matters as lack of accountability on the part of White House staff and lack of coordination across policy areas. I had some ideas for it too, and it grew into a
pretty frank document
.

In order to convey how seriously we viewed the situation and to give the president complete freedom to make necessary changes, we both wrote out and signed resignation letters. This wasn’t a matter of saying unless you accept our recommendations, we will quit; rather, we were telling Ford that if his idea of changes included moving us out, we’d make it easy for him.

Near the end of October 1975, the president caught a bad cold and spent a couple of days upstairs in the White House residence instead of coming to work in the West Wing. Don and I took advantage of the opportunity to go see him and lay out our concerns and recommendations. It was clear that the president himself had come to some of the same conclusions, and within days he would carry out a sweeping set of changes.

He personally told Rockefeller that he would not be on the ticket in 1976. The vice president was obviously disappointed, but he remained loyal to the president to the end and delivered New York’s delegates to Ford at the convention. Henry Kissinger agreed to step down as national security advisor while continuing as secretary of state—there
being no question that he retained the full confidence of the president as his chief foreign policy advisor. His deputy, Brent Scowcroft, moved into the NSC job.

Jim Schlesinger was relieved of his position as secretary of defense. Although Jim was a very talented man with an impressive résumé, he had not endeared himself to the president. As we were pulling out of Vietnam, miscommunication between the Pentagon and the White House had resulted in an announcement that all Americans had been safely evacuated from Saigon, when in fact sixty-one marines remained on the grounds of the embassy. The president had never forgotten that embarrassment, nor had he ever forgiven Schlesinger for launching a verbal assault on the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. After Congress had rejected our defense budget, the president asked Schlesinger to make an unapologetic case for it, but Ford was stunned when he got reports of his defense secretary going after the chairman, George Mahon of Texas. Mahon was a longtime colleague of Ford’s on the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee and one of his dearest friends.

Schlesinger did not go quietly. The president later told me that his parting with Jim was one of the most unpleasant sessions he ever had.

Another change came at the CIA, where Director Bill Colby had become something of a liability because of all the controversy surrounding allegations of wrongdoing by the agency. Bill had begun his intelligence career in the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA. He was the station chief in Saigon during most of the Vietnam War. In 1973 Nixon chose him to replace Schlesinger when he moved Jim from the CIA to the Pentagon. Now Bill clearly knew another change was coming. In fact, I had a feeling he was relieved to step down. George H. W. Bush was brought back from China to take his place.

Elliot Richardson, ambassador to the United Kingdom, was made secretary of commerce and later replaced in London by Counselor to the President Anne Armstrong. Rogers Morton, who had been secretary of commerce, became both a counselor to the president and Ford’s campaign manager.