Off-the-record conversations with Ford

Thomas DeFrank's new book, "Write It When I'm Gone: Remarkable Off-the-Record Conversations with Gerald R. Ford," is filled with Gerald Ford's candid comments and thoughts about Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Dick Cheney and more.

Below is an excerpt.

April 1974
Ironically, the interview that triggered a relationship with Gerald Ford lasting a third of a century, as well as a unique journalistic arrangement, wasn’t even supposed to be an interview. I was just being neurotic.

In today’s unappetizing environment of message discipline, control freaks, and endless political spin by phalanxes of cynical, robotic handlers, it’s hard to imagine there was ever a time when a reporter could ask to see the vice president of the United States without it being a major production.

But it was a different age, and a different vice president.

Ford had set off on an uncharacteristically long nine-day trip in April 1974 that included a few days of Easter R&R in Palm Springs, sandwiched between political events in Missouri and California. But my first son had just been born, and since I’d missed most of the pregnancy barnstorming with Ford, I pulled myself off the trail to be with mother and child for a couple of weeks.

By the time I was able to catch up with the entourage, I would have missed the first five days of the trip. That was a long time to be out of the Ford loop, so before leaving for the coast I asked Paul Miltich, his press secretary, for some time with the veep once I arrived in the desert. He ran it by Ford, who agreed readily, which was his usual reaction when dealing with his media regulars. Since he and we were flying to Monterey for a full day of events early on the morning of April 18, Ford penciled me in for face time in the late afternoon of Wednesday, April 17, not long after my flight arrived in Palm Springs.

I didn’t have much of a reporting agenda in mind; it was little more than a courtesy call, a routine catch-up after being away from the cocoon. I simply wanted to see what I’d missed and to get a fix on what was on his mind. I told Miltich I wasn’t looking for a story, just some background.

En route to Palm Springs via Chicago, I leafed through a reading file of Ford clips I’d missed during my paternity leave. One was an April 10 column by William Safire in the New York Times headlined “Et Tu, Gerry?” (That was a common error when writing about Ford; it was Gerald with a G, but Jerry with a J.)

A former Nixon speechwriter and lifelong loyalist, Safire had taken Ford to task for perhaps the most boneheaded move of his vice presidency: in a late-night, highball-lubricated Air Force Two interview with The New Republic’s courtly John Osborne, Ford had openly speculated about which Nixon cabinet members and White House staffers he’d keep (like Henry Kissinger), and which he’d cashier (like Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger and White House press secretary Ron Ziegler), if by chance he became president.

“A few diehards might consider it unseemly for the vice president to be confiding his plans for the assumption of power while the body of the sitting president is still warm,” Safire drily observed.

Osborne hadn’t written that Ford was his source, but it was so transparently obvious that Ford telephoned Safire to admit his culpability and try, unsuccessfully, to explain away his lapse in judgment.

“Mr. Ford betrays a lack of understanding of the uniqueness of his role,” Safire lectured. “He is the first vice president in American history whose own actions could help make him president. He must be at once loyal and independent; both his own man and the president’s man; a defender uncorrupted by the defense. This duality requires more political

skill than we have recently seen in Mr. Ford; he will miss the brass ring if he grabs at it.”

The other item that caught my attention was the transcript of a mid-March public television interview with Bill Moyers by Patrick Buchanan, another rabid Nixon partisan.

In a passage clearly trying to shore up Nixon’s shaky political standing by touting his geopolitical strengths, Buchanan had damned Ford with faint praise: “I think Gerald Ford would make a conscientious effort to continue the policies of the President. I like the Vice President. I admire him . . . but I do not think he has the knowledge or range or capacity that the President currently has to conduct American foreign policy.”

In other words, the veep was indeed a Ford, not a Lincoln, as he himself regularly observed—and certainly not a Nixon.

His aides liked to stress that as a Yale Law School graduate, Ford knew he had above-average intelligence, so he didn’t bristle when detractors poked fun at his candlepower. Maybe so, maybe not; these days we’d call that political spin. But by then I’d been around him enough to know that questioning his loyalty to Nixon was an enormous hot button for him. I already knew he’d been furious after hearing about Buchanan’s shot. I had no idea he might still be simmering about those barbs a month later.

Ford was staying at Sunnylands, the lush, secluded private estate of Walter Annenberg, the megamillionaire communications magnate.But because Annenberg didn’t want Ford aides and particularly reporters trampling around his home and private nine-hole golf course, Ford also had an office at the low-rise International House Hotel in Palm Springs, where his staff and traveling press were head-quartered. That’s where I caught up with him an hour or so after arriving in the desert.

The vice president had just come in from the golf links, where, he forlornly admitted, “My handicap took a beating.” He was wearing a sky-blue Munsingwear golf shirt with the ubiquitous penguin insignia, khaki slacks, and tan Hush Puppies with white socks.

He greeted me warmly and immediately asked about my family, wanting to know all about the new arrival and saying he and the rest of the traveling crew had missed me and were glad I was back on the tour.

He knew all about the difficult delivery but wanted more details. “I worried about them,” he said.

I hadn’t planned it to be an interview, but as we got to talking, it inevitably developed into one.

Alternating between puffing on his pipe (Edgeworth was his brand) and sipping ice water from a plastic cup, Ford fretted that nobody believed him when he said he absolutely wasn’t running for president in 1976.

“I understand why they don’t believe me,” he remarked. “They’ve seen so many alleged noncandidates become candidates that they just don’t think anybody is sincere in not wanting to be president.

“I just don’t have that terrible drive to be president. And besides, I’ve taken the blood oath for Betty.” He’d promised his spouse he was retiring to Grand Rapids in January 1977, and that was that.

Curiously, however, Ford stuck by his refusal in our February interview to make a Shermanesque statement unequivocally taking himself out of a 1976 run.

“I just don’t think a person ought to tie himself down too much,” he said. “Circumstances beyond my control could always have some impact.”

Like being a sitting president by 1976, I thought to myself. Ford didn’t like contemplating that doomsday scenario and hated having the subject brought up, and reporters did bring it up constantly. He claimed he hadn’t done any contingency planning, even in his head, and was annoyed about press reports to the contrary.

Even so, he admitted, “You have to be pragmatic even about things you don’t want to happen, and the truth is I don’t want it to happen. But I don’t think about what I might do as president, because it only leads to difficulties. The truth is, I don’t sit around making plans, because I don’t want it to happen and I don’t think it is going to happen” (emphasis added).

If it did, though, Ford was absolutely confident he could handle the rigors of the Oval Office.

“I think I’ve always been qualified for any job I’ve undertaken, and everything I’ve done in government over twenty-five years would certainly give me the background, the knowledge, and the friends to do a good job. If lightning should strike, I certainly wouldn’t sit there fearful of being incapable of handling the situation.”

I reminded him that not all Americans, much less his Democratic critics, agreed with his rosy self-assessment of his talents. Contrary to his staff ’s disclaimers, talk like that always irked him, and he especially seethed at the notion he was a foreign policy lightweight.

“Most of the people who say that don’t know the opportunities I had in the Congress to be fully exposed to international matters,” he argued, citing his dozen years on the Defense and Foreign Aid Appropriations subcommittees. He also reminded me that he was one of only five House members on a secret CIA subcommittee that received highly classified intelligence briefings.

“Most of those people who make that comment,” he added, “weren’t around when I was going through this educational process, and they’ve become instant foreign policy experts.”

He also made clear his annoyance at the frequent political shorthand that he was a low-voltage plodder.

MORE FROM MEET THE PRESS

Meet the Press Section Front

Nov. 29: Rick Warren, Bill & Melinda Gates Nov. 22: Senate roundtable, Brinker, Snyderman Nov. 15: Clinton, Duncan, Gingrich, Sharpton Nov. 8: Casey, Barbour, Rendell, roundtable, Brokaw Nov. 1: Tim Geithner, David Plouffe, roundtable Oct. 25: Cornyn, Schumer, Burnett, Sorkin, roundtable Oct. 18: Jarrett, Dodd, Kyl, Shriver, Podesta Oct. 11: Levin, Graham, McCaffrey, Myers, roundtable Oct. 4: Ambassador Susan Rice, roundtable Sept. 27: Bill Clinton, Paterson, Kyl, Webb Meet the Press Section Front   Add Meet the Press headlines to your news reader: