‘Meet the Press’ transcript for Oct. 28, 2007

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

“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.

“‘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?’

“I told him that Safire, Pat Buchanan 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 going to 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, 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.”

When he told you that, you must have wanted to run to a telephone and report it.

MR. TOM DeFRANK:  Well, actually, I wanted to call my parents, but the fact of the matter is, Tim, I, I was as thunderstruck as he was.  And, of course, he, he knew immediately he’d blurted out something that he shouldn’t have said.  After all, this was a huge—this would have been a huge scoop.  But...

MR. RUSSERT:  So he grabbed you around the tie.

MR. DeFRANK:  Well, what happened is, he, he hands me Bill Safire’s column, and I say what I say, and of course, 34 years later I’m a little astounded and, and chagrined that I would said—I certainly wouldn’t have said that in a similar circumstance today.  But when I don’t basically say, ‘You’re right, it was off the record,’ he jumps up, comes around the table and very gently grabs my tie and says, as you have, as you have described.  And I saw my journalistic career passing in front of my eyes.  I’d been assigned to the—to Ford because my boss, the legendary Mel Elfin of Newsweek, was convinced he was going to be president.  He said, “Nixon’s finished.  You’re going to go to the White House when Ford is president.” And I remember saying to myself, “This is great.  My meal ticket to the White House has just said to me, ‘You print this and you and I are finished.’” And I was 28 years old, and I was scared to death.

MR. RUSSERT:  He said, “Write it when I’m dead,” and you said OK.

MR. DeFRANK:  I said OK.  He stuck his hand out, we shook hands, and we didn’t talk about it again for 17 years.

MR. RUSSERT:  Mr. Safire, when you read Gerald Ford talking to John Osborne in The Republic, not by name, not by name, it was backgrounding at best.

MR. WILLIAM SAFIRE:  Mm-hmm.

MR. RUSSERT:  But you called up Vice President Ford and said, “You’re the source, aren’t you?”

MR. SAFIRE:  Right.

MR. RUSSERT:  And he ‘fessed up?

MR. SAFIRE:  You bet.  Because I felt this was a year before Nixon’s resignation.  There was plenty of time for Nixon to do all the right things and not have to resign.  As a matter of fact, I, I made a mistake.  I, I wrote a memo to Nixon about two or three months after I’d gone to The Times, and said “Here’s how you get over the taint of Watergate.” And when you read the thing now, 35 years later, it made sense, you know.  And I said to Abe Rosenthal, who was then the executive editor of The Times, “Look at this memo I sent to Nixon.” And he didn’t even read it, he just pushed it aside and said, “The next time you have advice for a politician, you give it in The Times.” And he was right.  And for the next 30-some odd years, that’s what I did.

But in this case, I see John Osborne, who’s a great reporter and a straight shot, saying, attributing it to nobody and speaking only on my own authority, that’s the rules of not for attribution, that’s deep background.  Not everybody obeys that anymore, but he did.  And then he proceeds to say what, what kind of an administration Ford would give.  Who he would fire—and he would fire Schlesinger , he would keep Kissinger.  And he sort of said, “This would be my Cabinet.  This would be my White House staff,” and this is a year before the president resigns.  I felt that was unseemly, so I took a pop.  I misspelled his name.  I’m sorry about that.  It’s—what is it?

MR. DeFRANK:  It’s Gerald with a G, Jerry with a J.

MR. SAFIRE:  Yeah.  So that was another mistake.  But—so I told him in the column, this is the wrong thing to do.  And so I, I called him up, and he returned the call.  Wonderful thing, you’re a columnist for The New York Times, you can do this.  And he—and I said, you know, this came from you, didn’t it?  Although Osborne’s piece carefully didn’t say who it came from. And he ‘fessed up right away, and said, “Maybe I shouldn’t have done it, but I did it.”

MR. RUSSERT:  In your reporting, did Vice President Ford take any steps to help bring about the resignation of President Nixon?

MR. DeFRANK:  No, Tim, but traveling with him day after day on this twin engine Convair, this very unimperial Air Force Two with five other reporters, we saw this, this tightrope that Ford was always trying to negotiate.  He thought Richard Nixon one of—was one of his good friends.  He was trying to defend and support the guy who had named him vice president.  He was also trying to save his beloved Republican Party from going down the drain in November, which he failed to do, of course.  And he was, he was trying to be fair to his conscience.  And I think every day something would happen that said to him, “Maybe you’re being lied to here.” So he was trying to negotiate this very tricky process.

MR. SAFIRE:  Yeah.

MR. RUSSERT:  It’s the public and private side.  This was Jerry Ford on MEET THE PRESS defending, defending Richard Nixon.  Let’s watch.

(Videotape)

MR. LAWRENCE E.  SPIVAK:  In a recent U.S. News interview you said, and I quote you, “I’m positive the president is innocent of any involvement in Watergate,” end of quote.  Can you tell us why you are positive?  Have you seen evidence that the rest haven’t seen?

VICE PRES. GERALD FORD:  I haven’t seen concrete evidence, but I have talked to the president about it, and I’ve been in many meetings where it was discussed by the president and with others.  And I’m absolutely certain that if you go back and reflect on the circumstances in 1972--here the president had just come back from China, historic action on the part of our government. The president was in the process of negotiating with the Soviet Union.  The president was trying to end the war in Vietnam.  I’m sure he turned to those running the re-election campaign and said, “I have these major matters that involve the national security and the well-being of the American people, and you run the campaign.” Unfortunately, those that ran, some of them apparently ran it badly.  But I’m convinced that the president was preoccupied with these very important matters, and therefore I’m convinced he had nothing whatsoever to do with Watergate.

(End videotape)

MR. RUSSERT:  A big public defense.  In 1991 this is what the same Gerald Ford told you.  “After years of reflecting on his conduct, Ford admitted he could be fairly faulted for giving Nixon too much benefit of the doubt.  On some level, perhaps, Ford may not have wanted to know the truth.  That certainly would have made his defensive duties for—far more difficult to pull off.  Regardless, he didn’t press Nixon for a ‘just between old friends’ accounting of the facts and regretted his timidity.  ‘All the time that this thing kept getting hotter and hotter and hotter, whenever I would see him alone, I’d try to find out whether I was being fully informed.  To be honest with you, Tom, I never said “Mr. President, were you involved?  Did you know?” In retrospect, I probably should have.’”

MR. DeFRANK:  Tim, I have a theory here, and I think—can’t prove it—but I think he didn’t, he didn’t ask him because he didn’t want to know because he knew.  And I think if he knew, if he...

MR. RUSSERT:  He couldn’t go on MEET THE PRESS and say those kinds of things.

MR. DeFRANK:  Exactly right, yeah, and have a bigger problem than the lapels on, on that old suit, which are wider than I am.

MR. RUSSERT:  Let me move on to Ronald Reagan.  Because this was very striking in your book, Tom DeFrank, and we’ll bring in Bill Safire on this and get his sense of the public and private man.  Here’s what Tom DeFrank writes about Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford:  “Three days after Ronald Reagan died Ford joined millions of his fellow Americans in mourning the country’s heartfelt loss.  ‘He and I became very good friends,’ Ford told CNN’s Larry King.  ‘Let me be’” “‘forthright:  I think Ronald Reagan was a first-class president, and I treasured my relationship and association with him.’

“Baloney.  Ford neither liked nor respected the former Hollywood actor.  He considered Reagan a superficial, disengaged, intellectually lazy showman who didn’t do his homework and clung to a naive, unrealistic, and essentially dangerous worldview.” How do you know that?

MR. DeFRANK:  I know that because he told me that several times, and there’re lots of quotes from the books that, that back that up.  At one point he said, “I have to say he was not a technically competent president, but he was a hell of a showman, he had a hell of a flair.” And he also says at one point—told me at one point that, that foreign leaders had told him the same thing. President Ford said “Foreign leaders have said they were appalled by Reagan’s lack of, of knowledge of the issues.  On the other hand, they all agree with me that he was one hell of a salesman.” So, he said it many, many times.  But I want to say, to put this in context and in fairness to President Reagan, from the day that President Reagan told the world about his Alzheimer’s in 1994, Gerald Ford never uttered another unkind word about him.  As a matter of fact, for the next 12 years, Ford would say all that bitterness about ‘76, something like this really puts it into perspective.  But up until that time, from ‘77 to 1994, he was still bitter at Ronald Reagan.

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