Gerald R. Ford

I worked in Washington early in my career and as a result of who I worked with had three encounters with the thirty eighth president. The first was when he was in Congress. I was working for a congressman from Michigan and Jerry Ford was the leader of the delegation. At that point there were 19 members from Michigan and the GOP had a majority of those seats. Ford always seemed like an inclusive kind of guy to me in those meetings where the GOP members and their senior staff would meet. We would discuss this or that issue that was before the congress and Ford seemed to seek out ideas from both members and staff. That was very much appreciated as a young staffer. My congressman was relatively junior (having been elected in the 1966 GOP restoration) but in that group Ford worried little about seniority.

The second instance came when I went back into the White House to work for William Simon. Ford was then Vice President. The job with Simon was an exciting one. The hours were very long - often beginning near 7 AM and ending at midnight - seven days a week. But because Simon was then head of a new effort on energy and because the US was in the middle of an oil embargo things happened quickly. My wife was taking a course at GW after her normal day of teaching in Alexandria. I think the class started at 4 or 5 PM. I was supposed to pick her up and take her from Foggy Bottom to Southwest where we lived. I am not sure why I had the only car we had that day. She called my secretary and asked when I would be picking her up - it was December and cold. My secretary replied, "Jon may be a while, he is having dinner with the Vice President." We were called into a dinner that evening on the drop of a hat. My wife said to my secretary, "I guess I will have to find my own way home." That dinner was designed to brief the Vice President on some oil regulations that the Federal Energy Office was about to put out. As I remember the dinner, there were about six of us present, including Mr. Ford, he asked tough questions about the draft regulations. But he was also very cordial in the discussion.

The third encounter was when I was back in California. Ford was getting the reputation, in part because of Chevy Chase and Saturday Night Live, as a bumbler. I was in DC for some event and called a friend who was working in the White House Press Office. She invited me to come over and watch the President deliver his press briefing on the upcoming budget. At that point the press room was a hot place because of the lighting requirements of TV. I filed into the back of the room. Normally, the President offers a statement, takes a few questions and then hands it over to his OMB head to cover the details. Ford came up to the podium and offered some brief remarks and then looked down at Sara McClendon, who at that time had been a reporter in the White House for thirty plus years. McClendon was a fixture in the White House press office. She had a grating voice and represented a bunch of papers, many small ones in Texas. She asked some inane question about some obscure office which one of her papers would be interested in and Ford looked at her and said "Sarah, we have done the following with that agency." I thought that was interesting, it was easy to anticipate what she might ask but it showed the president was well prepared. But then for the next eighty or ninety minutes, Ford answered a barrage of questions on the budget from a wide range of reporters. He demonstrated a detailed understanding of the budget he was about to propose. It showed him as a thoughtful political leader. I am not sure that any president could have demonstrated that kind of detailed knowledge of his budget. Unfortunately, that night the three news channels missed that story. They continued to berate Ford as someone who had "played football without a helmet" and the image stuck in 1976. Clearly, the press had an agenda.

What struck me about Ford was the grace with which he accepted the things that came to him late in his career. I believe he made the decision which cost him his presidency just as he said he did. But the media, looking always for conspiracies, would not accept it. I am not sure whether had he not pardoned Nixon that he would have been a great president. I think he probably would have won the 1976 race. Certainly, some of his assumptions about issues like how to confront the problems of inflation were a bit loony. I also wonder whether the country needed to go through Jimmy Carter, who was arguably the worst president of the 20th century, in order to get to Ronald Reagan.