Off-the-record conversations with Ford

“In my growth in government, I never planned on moving from one spot to another, but I always felt what I was doing would prepare me for the next opportunity. You have to have the confidence that you’re available and competent if lightning strikes, and if that’s plodding, it seems to have worked. What counts in this world is what works, not

what some outsider thinks is a better way.”

This zigzag dissertation was very familiar to that tiny band of media regulars who traveled with him. On any given day, Ford could either be Nixon’s staunchest defender, or say something that suggested growing distance between the two. Sometimes it was just his sloppy rhetoric, and sometimes it was deliberate. Usually, we never knew which.

Even so, his “if lightning should strike” remark struck me at the time as more than a little pregnant.

I stood to leave, and so did he. But he wasn’t finished. He asked me to put away my notebook.

“Before you go, I want to show you something. What do you make of this?”

Under ordinary circumstances, this unscheduled postscript to our conversation would never have happened. But about ten minutes earlier, Miltich had gone into another room to take a phone call, then fallen asleep on a sofa. So it was just the two of us. A reporter’s dream, a flack’s nightmare: no minders.

Ford handed me a copy of Bill Safire’s withering appraisal of his behavior, the very same damning column I’d read on the plane only a couple of hours before.

His tone was more perplexed than angry, but there was no doubt he was annoyed with the pounding he’d been getting from Nixon’s men. Clearly, he’d been doing a slow burn for weeks.

“Why would Bill say something like that?” Ford wanted to know. “He knows I’ve been damn loyal to Dick Nixon. Dick Nixon knows I’ve been loyal. Why do they do this?”

If this conversation were occurring today, I doubt I’d say what I said then. Chalk my answer up to the impetuosity of youth.

I told him that Safire, Buchanan, press secretary Ron Ziegler, and their fellow White House partisans were kicking the dog because despite their fierce loyalty to Nixon, most of them were pragmatic enough to realize where this Greek tragedy was heading.

“They’re angry and they’re bitter because they know Nixon is finished,” I replied. “It’s over. He can’t survive, and you’re gonna be president.”

Before I had time to reflect on my own audacity, Ford floored me with his totally unanticipated answer.

“You’re right,” he said. “But when the pages of history are written, nobody can say I contributed to it.”

I was thunderstruck: Moments before, he’d assured me Nixon would ride out the firestorm. Now, impulsively, he’d blurted out the truth. Four months before it actually happened, three months before the Supreme Court ordered Nixon to turn over the tape recordings that would doom him, Ford had just admitted he knew in his gut that Nixon was a goner and he would soon become America’s 38^th, and first unelected, president.

Ford was thunderstruck as well—at himself. In a millisecond, he realized the enormity of his mistake, and like many a politician before and since burned by his own loose tongue, he tried to take it back.

“You didn’t hear that,” he said in an even but urgent tone.

“But I did,” I stupidly replied, without thinking.

“Tom, you did not hear that.”

I was speechless—literally. That wasn’t what he wanted to hear.

Ford walked around his desk and confronted me directly, face-to-face. I got an unobstructed view of his blue eyes; they weren’t friendly.

Towering above his quarry, he gently grabbed my tie and said in a firm tone of voice, “Tom, you are not leaving this room until we have an understanding.”

I said nothing. I couldn’t; I was utterly petrified, literally scared beyond words. I was twenty-eight years old, having the time of my life, and the vice president had just dropped a giant Hobson’s Choice on my head: agree to forget what I’d just heard and give up an unbelievable scoop, or risk terminally alienating the next leader of the free world, whom I’d been cultivating for the last four months.

We stood there for perhaps fifteen seconds, but the old cliché about something seeming like an eternity is the only accurate way to describe the moment. Out of sheer panic, I was unable to speak.

Then he said, “Write it when I’m dead.”

I was too frightened and witless to negotiate, and surrendered my journalistic sword with enormous relief.

“Okay.”

Ford let loose of my tie and stuck out his hand; I took it. Our deal was struck.

In an instant, the conversation was expunged from the record. “Nice to see you, Tom,” he boomed. He asked me to tell my wife hello, and walked me to the door. “See you tomorrow,” he chirped, as if Armageddon hadn’t just been averted.

The next morning, the travel corps assembled at the Palm Springs airport for his one-day trip up to Monterey. He greeted me warmly, asked about my wife and son, and said once again he’d worried about them. It was as though our relationship-altering exchange the previous day had never occurred.

It would be seventeen years before we spoke about that seminal moment again.

I never told my superiors at Newsweek what I’d heard. But part of me felt unbelievably guilty about that. So after he became president, I tried to salve my conscience somewhat by filing the second clause of what he’d said in April for the issue of the magazine published the Monday after he was sworn in: “When the pages of history are written,”

Newsweek reported him privately saying months earlier, “nobody can say I contributed to it.”

As I’d promised him, however, I kept Ford’s operative first two words to myself (and my wife, Melanie)—until now.

Admittedly, this astounding display of indiscretion will be seen by most experts and historians as totally out of character for Jerry Ford. For the most part, that’s true. Not always, however. He was an extraordinarily nice guy, but the truth is that Ford had one hell of a temper. He usually kept it in check, but every once in a while, he could suddenly erupt with incendiary force—and sometimes blurt out an ill-advised remark before recapturing his composure.

Such an outburst occurred, in remarkably similar circumstances, a couple of weeks after our fateful encounter in Palm Springs, while Ford was on a two-day swing through the South.

Inside the White House, it was common knowledge in the spring of 1974 that the Air Force chief of staff, General George Brown, was about to be elevated to chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Several senior Air Force officers were being considered to succeed Brown. Ford had his own candidate: General John C. Meyer, the commander in chief of the Strategic Air Command. They were old friends, dating from the days when Meyer was an Air Force liaison officer on Capitol Hill. In fact, the Brooklyn-born officer had been posted as head of the Air Force lobbying operation for the House of Representatives in 1948, the same year Ford was elected to Congress.

Meyer had invited the new vice president to visit SAC headquarter sat Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska, in February, and Ford eagerly accepted. It was a twofer for the veep: a chance to see a friend, and also visit the site of the Woolworth Avenue home in Omaha where he’d been born in 1913.

In early May, Ford knew the White House was close to a decision on the chief of staff job, so he pressed his Air Force aide, Lieutenant Colonel Bob Blake, for a status report.

On May 3, Ford began a two-day swing that included stops in Columbia and Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Afterward he flew to Hilton Head for a round of golf, memorable only because his tee shot on the first hole beaned a woman spectator.

Shortly after Air Force Two landed, Ford’s naval aide, Commander Howard Kerr, called Washington and was informed by Blake that Meyer had lost out to General David Jones. The announcement would be made public in about ten days.

After his golf round, Ford was sorting through some paperwork at a desk in his hotel suite when Kerr knocked on the door, walked in, and delivered a message he knew the boss wouldn’t like.

That was an understatement. Ford was so enraged that he leaped to his feet and blurted out, “Goddammit, Howard, when I’m president this—”

Abruptly, he caught himself in mid-sentence.

“You didn’t hear me say that,” he barked at his nonplussed naval assistant,

who, like me, just had. Unlike me, however, Kerr had the presence of mind and common sense to salute smartly, and excuse himself. Ford sat back down and resumed his reading, still boiling.

He was his usual jovial self by dinnertime. But Ford had been so furious,

so momentarily out of control, that Kerr assumed there must have been more to the story. Thirty-three years later, he speculated that Ford may have been led to believe that Meyer would get the job and felt double-crossed by his enemies in the White House. That’s a plausible theory; there are always winners and losers in the appointment sweepstakes, and Ford was a big boy about that. It’s not likely he would have reacted so viscerally unless there was some perfidy involved in the selection. But Ford never mentioned the matter again to Kerr, and Jones’s new job was announced a few days later, on May 14.

In subsequent years, I had several dozen interviews with Ford, including at least thirty during his retirement. But I didn’t resurrect our 1974 conversation for seventeen years, and even then it was by accident.

In August 1991, during the first of our write-it-when-I’m-gone interviews, I’d asked him to reminisce about Watergate. At one point in the conversation, he repeated his standard refrain about not really knowing he’d be president until Nixon chief of staff Major General Alexander Haig came to his office in early August to alert him that Nixon’s position was imploding rapidly and Ford should prepare for the worst—or best, I suppose, depending on one’s view of Nixon and Ford.

“After that meeting, the odds were overwhelming that I would be president,” he said. “Of course, even then, Haig was saying, ‘One minute he’s going to resign, the next minute he’s going to fight it through.’”

I felt I had to challenge that sanitized version of history, so I reminded him of our Easter 1974 exchange, when he’d asked me why Nixon’s men were trashing him, and I’d replied it was because they knew Nixon was toast and Ford would soon be president. I resurrected our conversation essentially verbatim, ending with his insistence to me that history would conclude he’d never greased the skids for Nixon.

“Well, I felt very strongly about that,” he ducked, pointedly not challenging my reminder that he had agreed with me that he’d be president before long.

I tried again by raising a heavily camouflaged version of his Hilton Head exchange with Howard Kerr, whom I didn’t name. But I repeated what I’d been told Ford said then: Goddammit, when I’m president . . .

He paused for a moment before answering.

“If it happened,” he said, “I don’t recall it. I can honestly say it might have happened, but I don’t recall it. And it would be out of character [from] the role I was playing.” That was certainly true.

It was significant, of course, that Ford didn’t deny our encounter had happened. He couldn’t, because it had.

Excerpt from Write it When I’m Gone: Remarkable Off-the-Record Conversations with Gerald R. Ford by Thomas M. DeFrank, by arrangement with G. P. Putnam’s Sons, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc., Copyright (c) 2007 by Thomas M. DeFrank. In stores October 30th.

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