MTP Transcript for Dec. 31

MR. RUSSERT: You know, it is remarkable watching Gerald Ford in life and now in death, the grace, the dignity, the bearing. The most athletic man ever to sit in the Oval Office, and yet, Chevy Chase of “Saturday Night Live” made his reputation and here he is here, imitating President Ford for knocking things over and falling over the desk and so forth. I had a chance to ask President Ford about Chevy Chase. Let’s listen.

(Videotape, April 13, 2000):

MR. RUSSERT: President Ford, you were the best athlete ever to serve as president. You played on national championship football teams. Graduated in the top fourth of your class at Yale Law School. How did you put up with Chevy Chase?

PRES. FORD: Well, it wasn’t very pleasant.

PRES. JIMMY CARTER: I thought it was great, Jerry.

PRES. FORD: But I think you learn, if you’re going to be in politics, certainly at the national level, you have to have a thick skin and you have to let the comments or the remarks roll off your back. If you sit around and worry about what is written or said, you can’t concentrate, Tim, on the things you ought to be working on.

(End videotape)

MR. RUSSERT: Tom Brokaw, Jerry Ford, Midwest nice. Just get it done. Do your job and not worry about these kinds of things. And when someone pokes fun, share the laugh.

MR. BROKAW: Well, I also think it had something to do with the way he came to the office. He was not a man who sought that office. He wanted to be the speaker of the House, so he arrives there by accident without design and without the kind of inbred hubris that brings a lot of the people to that office. He was completely at ease with himself and he had earned that condition in many years in the House of being in the minority, of getting beat up by his friend, Tip O’Neill and going out across the country 200 nights a year trying to get Republicans to get there. So he was prepared, in many ways, for all the, all the slings and arrows that a president can get because he checked his ego at the door, Tim.

MR. RUSSERT: What was, what was his North Star, Tom?

MR. BROKAW: Pardon me?

MR. RUSSERT: What was his North Star?

MR. BROKAW: His North Star was his patriotism, Tim. And the fact that he really felt committed to this country and to the ideals of how he had grown up. Eagle Scout, Pledge of Allegiance every day, Main Street values in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He was a man of the service clubs of America who went off to war and came back and joined his fellow veterans in saying, “We can make this a better place.” I really believe that that’s what motivated him. He served in the Congress for 13 consecutive terms, getting elected by 60 percent every time. And he just cared about the nation.

MR. RUSSERT: Bob Woodward, final thoughts on Gerald Ford?

MR. WOODWARD: Yeah. But, but there’s another dimension to Ford, and in these interviews over the last couple of years, I asked him to think about who he was and what his experiences were. And he said, “Look, people think I’m a figure of the establishment.” He said, “I’m a renegade.” And then he made a very convincing case about how, as a young man coming back from World War II, he’d been an isolationist. World War II convinced him he had to go—become an internationalist. And he ran against—in Michigan, you know, that’s, that’s, that’s the fodder—and he ran against an isolationist congressman and won. He spoke in these interviews much more openly about what he felt, how—his deep reservations about the Iraq war. His reservations about Vietnam and how, in the ‘50s, he had gone to talk to the French generals, who said, “Oh, we’ve got this licked,” and then the, “the French got their ass kicked,” as he said.

So there, he had a much better understanding. And, and you, you see in this that the presidency’s a straightjacket, public life is a straightjacket, and somebody wanted to break out of that and say, “Look, I understood a lot of this. I got what was going on. I understood what a great secretary of state Henry Kissinger was.” But as he said, Kissinger was somebody with the thinnest skin of anyone Ford knew in public life. So there, let, let’s mourn the man as he really was and not be taken in by some of the, the cautious rhetoric that public office requires.

MR. RUSSERT: Amen. And this morning, we offer Mrs. Ford and her family our deepest sympathies, and we keep the former president in our thoughts and prayers. Tom Brokaw, Bob Woodward, thanks very much.

MR. WOODWARD: Thanks.

MR. BROKAW: My pleasure.

MR. RUSSERT: Coming next, we look back at ‘06 and, yes, onto ‘07, and of course, ‘08, a presidential year. Our roundtable is next. A special New Year’s Eve day MEET THE PRESS continues.

(Announcements)

MR. RUSSERT: The year that was, the year that’s going to be. Our New Year’s roundtable, after this station break.

(Announcements)

MR. RUSSERT: And we are back. Welcome, all. Before we get to looking back at ‘06, and ahead to ‘07 and ‘08, Michael Beschloss, you have the cover story in Newsweek magazine. And you interviewed President Ford, embargo until his death, where he tells you that he wishes President Nixon had been more forthcoming in acknowledging wrongdoing or guilt. He did have the legal case in his pocket, U.S. Burdick, saying...

MR. MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: He did.

MR. RUSSERT: ...acceptance of a pardon is admission of guilt. But he said, “I would appreciate it if he had done more.” Talk about that.

MR. BESCHLOSS: Well, you know, you were talking with Bob and Tom about the fact that he went through this firestorm because he gave the pardon. He knew that that would have been less of a firestorm if he had been able to get from Nixon a statement saying, “Look, you know, I know that I did terrible things in Watergate. I admit my offenses, I admit my responsibility.” Nixon was unwilling to do that. And for years, Ford, you know, sort of talked to himself, why wasn’t able to—I able to persuade Nixon to sign a statement of guilt? Late in life, just before I talked to him some years ago, he said he had discovered that Al Haig, his holdover chief of staff from Richard Nixon, he felt that Haig had gone to Nixon and essentially transmitted to him the message, “Ford’s going to give you the pardon anyway, don’t sign a statement of guilt, you don’t need to.”

MR. RUSSERT: Bill Safire, do you think Richard Nixon ever thought about being more forthcoming about his guilt, responsibility?

MR. WILLIAM SAFIRE: I don’t think he, he felt that he was guilty. And I think he felt—now, I don’t know this, I didn’t interview him about it—I think he felt that he had given a sword, as he put it, to—on television once, to his enemies. And the most important thing I think that came out of those powerful moments, when Tom Brokaw talked about that, that last speech he made before he got on the helicopter, he did say at the very end that if you hate people who hate you, you destroy yourself. Now, that meant that he understood what had happened. And more than admitting to a coverup, which he obviously played a part in, more than that, the understanding that hating people was a way of destroying yourself, I think, was the big understanding that Nixon came to.

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