Moodspins | The WINner: Gerald Ford

Politics

The WINner: Gerald Ford - 1913-2006

By Eric Szulczewski ⋅ December 27, 2006 ⋅ Post a comment | Email the author

If deaths come in threes, then obituaries must come in threes as well. Since I’m on a roll with them, a third obit in five days isn’t that hard of a nut to crack, really. I’m in that sort of mood anyway. Call it my version of Holiday Spirit.

The overriding problem here is where to throw this column. Moodspins is the obvious place. After all, we’re talking about a political figure here. But it’s not the only location. This obit can easily go into Tailgate Crashers. After all, which president did more for golf than Gerry Ford other than Eisenhower? And the guy was an outstanding football player at Michigan during the mid-30s. Reality Dish would also be an appropriate location for it. He was a supporting player in the first and possibly greatest Reality TV series of them all, the Watergate Hearings (to hell with American Idol, this was the real deal, and it’s sad that most of you weren’t there to watch it like I was). How about Prime Time Pulse? The case can be made that Saturday Night Live wouldn’t exist today if not for Chevy Chase’s impersonations of Gerry during that landmark first season. Popcorn Junkies? If not for Gerry, his wife wouldn’t have had the clout to open her little finishing school in Rancho Mirage, through which a good portion of the Hollywood Acting Elite has matriculated. So it’s a tough choice. Moodspins wins because I’ve got posting access there and I haven’t contributed anything there in a while. They deserve it.

It’s actually appropriate that I do this. After all, I’m possibly the only person on the IP staff with substantive memories of the Ford Administration. I was nine and a half when Gerry took the oath of office on that miserable/wonderful day in August 1974. Even I knew at that age that getting rid of Nixon was a good thing. I understood perfectly well that, at the very least, the President of the United States had acquiesced in the commission of crimes and, at the very most, actively participated in said crimes. He had to go. However, never underestimate the brainwashing that one can experience growing up in a household headed by a WWII vet who’d become the exact demographic match of what would, a few years later, be called a “Reagan Democrat”. My liberalism, especially my social liberalism, came from elsewhere.

Watergate and Nixon’s resignation was a black mark against America; that I understood (I was a pretty savvy nine-year-old, especially when it came to politics). We didn’t have the dubious benefit of what happened in Britain to the Macmillan Government. When they went down, it was for a cool reason. Commission of crimes and bunches of expletive-deleted audio tapes can never beat out a good sex scandal. So, now we had a president that had been taken down for sleazy activities while in office, while a guy who had never been elected to the office of vice-president, a guy who was chosen to replace another sleazebag caught with his hand in the cookie jar, a guy chosen simply because of his rep for cleanliness (membership in the Warren Commission nonwithstanding), was now the Most Powerful Man In The Free World. This didn’t make sense.

Of course, this was the mid-70s. Nothing made sense. Brezhnev and Mao were making nice-nice with the US. We’d stopped going to the moon when we were on the verge of continuing the conquest of space that seemed to be our destiny. Disco started to explode in popularity. Henry Kissinger was not only the most powerful person in the world, he was a sex symbol. Serious political commentary had transitioned away from the New York Times and moved to Rolling Stone (courtesy of God Himself, HST). The most fashionable movies were porn flicks; even Brando got nekkid on screen. And our Arab allies turned against us because we supported our Israeli allies once too often. And that’s where Gerry Ford’s problems began.

But first, let’s deal with Ford himself. He was a pleasant, effective leader in the House as a representative from Michigan, a centrist Republican who was in the Rockefeller wing of the party but knew how to make deals with the opposition and the more conservative Nixon and Goldwater wings. He was an unobjectionable choice for Veep when Spiro Agnew went to the joint. In fact, there was a lot of relief when Ford was the choice, because at least everyone knew that, unlike Agnew, he wouldn’t go off on torrents of verbal diarrhea. For those of you who’ve only experienced Dan Quayle’s moron-fests as the apex of Veep-idiocy, it’s hard to describe Agnew and his effect on the Warm Bucket Of Piss that the office represents.

So, anyway, Ford was approved as Veep. Now, that was in 1973, when Nixon’s fate was still unknown. Sure, John Dean had started telling Congress everything he knew about what was going on at the White House, but no one even imagined at that point that this would escalate to the point where Nixon would be out. But then more and more became known, the situation started to decline and then, before articles of impeachment could be introduced, Nixon was gone. Suddenly, the appointed vice-president was now president. 1974 may have been the most chaotic year that Western governments had ever seen. You not only had the Nixon-Ford transition, but at the time of Nixon’s resignation, Harold Wilson was heading up a minority government in the UK (which would become a bare majority a few months later), Pompidou had just died in France and Giscard d’Estaing and Mitterand were having the first of their fights to the death, and in West Germany, Schmidt was trying to get the country on the path to recovery from the Guillaume revelations that had destroyed Brandt’s government. Given the general state of chaos, the Soviet Union could have had a field day, if they had understood what was going on. Both Anatoly Dobrinyn (long-serving and long-suffering Soviet Ambassador to the US) and Oleg Kalugin (then the KGB’s highest-ranking man in Washington) have told numerous comic stories about attempting to explain Watergate to the Politburo, and the aging apparatchiks in charge not understanding one thing about what was happening to the government of the Main Enemy.

(In fact, Brezhnev was upset that Nixon was forced to resign. He knew he could deal with Nixon. He had no problems with Nixon. It took him a little while to figure out how to deal with Ford, but eventually he became comfortable in that regard. The person he was most terrified of, even more than Reagan, was Jimmy Carter. During the 1976 election, he commanded the KGB First Directorate to get any dirt they could on Carter and use it. Unfortunately, the FCD couldn’t find anything on Jimmy, and Brezhnev blamed them for Ford’s narrow loss.)

Unfortunately, Ford started off his administration by doing the one thing guaranteed to piss off the majority of Americans: he pardoned Nixon for crimes Nixon might have committed while in office. He did it in the worst way, too: on a weekend, when the news cycles would be lighter and any immediate indignation would be mollified by the time Cronkite came on the air Monday night. Ford said he did it in order to start the healing process from the damage that Watergate had done to the body politic. In point of fact, Americans didn’t want to start the healing at that point. They wanted to know more. What was there beyond the Smoking Gun Tape? The question that Peter Rodino had asked had not been answered: what did the President know and when did he know it? Americans wanted and needed to know. That was the only thing that would provide closure. And despite the release of numerous memoirs and even the release to the public of the Watergate tapes, we still don’t know. Nixon took that secret to his grave, and Ford allowed him to do that. It even allowed Nixon to rehabilitate himself in the late 80s as a foreign policy expert (which, admittedly, he was). Letting Nixon go scot-free may have been the one act that cost him the presidency in 1976.

(For another possibility, Ford’s stumbling when exiting a plane, caught by the news cameras, may have been a factor as well, especially after Chevy Chase took advantage of the action and the free-wheeling, anything-goes atmosphere of that first season of Saturday Night Live. Before that, presidential parodies had been few and far between. Vaughn Meader’s parody of the Kennedy White House, David Frye impersonating Nixon on Ed Sullivan…that was it. But SNL has been a showcase for presidential impersonation. One might say that it helped make the careers of Chase, Ackroyd, and Ferrell. Ford was the first target of SNL, and his image among the youth watching that show took a big hit.)

Of course, as any fan of Bill Clinton (you know, the right-thinking people) can tell you, it’s the economy, stupid. And Ford inherited a mess. US support for the Israelis in the 1973 edition of their continuous war with indigenous Muslims was the straw that broke the camel’s back for the Arab nations in OPEC. Gas prices quadrupled within a few months. If you thought that the sight of three bucks a gallon at the pump last year was something, you should have been around in ‘73, infants. When gas had been a quarter a gallon for the longest time and then, suddenly, every gas station in the country had to buy new price signs with three digits, when suddenly rationing schemes and long lines at the pump began to form, that was a shock. And in 1974, the chickens came home to roost. Suddenly, everything was skyrocketing in price. The word “inflation” suddenly was on everyone’s lips. Inflation suddenly became a bigger threat to the American Way Of Life than communism. America psychologically transitioned from the disaster in Vietnam to the disaster at the grocery store.

What was Gerry Ford’s great initiative, his sign of leadership at the top in this crisis, his solution to get everyone involved to save what was left of their paychecks? Why, have everyone wear buttons, of course!

If it hadn’t been for the Have A Nice Day Smiley-Face, the button symbol of the Seventies would have been “WIN”. “Whip Inflation Now”; pithy, concise, right on message, and completely and totally useless. Ford’s economic stimulation packages worked about as well as any other stimulus package coming from a Republican, namely, not at all (remember Dubbaya’s three hundred buck check to every American and how well that worked to get the economy back on track?). Prices kept rising, cars kept gulping down gas and Detroit refused to move away from its guzzlers, thus forcing Americans into the arms of the Japanese, who provided fuel-efficient cars, the US’s balance of trade started to go completely out of whack…the best that could be hoped for was a new equilibrium, but that wouldn’t arrive until after the 1976 elections.

And there, Ford had problems as well. He’d made a tactical error which would not only cost him greatly, but would be devastating to the United States as a whole in years to come. With Ford now president, he needed a new vice-president. He chose Nelson Rockefeller, the symbol of what was still a vibrant left-center wing of the Republican Party. This greatly upset conservative Republicans, especially ideological conservatives, and especially ideological conservatives of a religious bent. Their party was now actively ignoring them. They needed someone who’d be a standard-bearer. They weren’t going to rely on Barry Goldwater again, since he’d moved from the ideological to the pragmatic phrase of his career. However, there was a certain governor of California who’d recently left office who’d stayed the ideological course and seemed to accept the right-wing Christian program. And when he declared for President…

And now I have to debate whether or not to use my favored term for said person in an obituary column. I don’t think I will, out of respect for a former president. Ford, not that one, whom I have no respect for.

The 1976 Republican primaries were the last thing that Ford needed. Although it’s been said that no Republican candidate could have won in 1976, being a sitting president having to go through a primary fight did not help what chances Ford had. Reagan pounded him on the economy, the negotiations to turn the Panama Canal over to Panamanian control, and other issues. The volatile North Carolina primary in particular was devastating to Ford. However, Ford learned from those experiences. After he beat out Reagan for the nomination, he shored up his conservative credentials by giving the veep spot to Bob Dole. His reputation began to recover, especially since he was going to go up against someone who wouldn’t gut-fight in Jimmy Carter. Americans, though, wanted an outsider, someone who hadn’t been tainted by Watergate. In a battle between the ineffective and the innocuous, innocuous won a close victory. On January 20th, 1977, Gerald Ford became an ex-president, with all perks due to him.

He decided to live a rather quiet life for an ex-president. A little golf, a little writing, a little lecturing, nothing much. The status as celebrity devolved to Betty. It was her crusade against drug abuse that gained public attention. Thanks to her, getting off drugs became as fashionable as doing them. She’s become a brand name for rehab, like Xerox or Kleenex. Gerry let her do it, mostly because he wasn’t going to stop her. She’s never been the retiring housewife type. In fact, Betty’s become the progenitor for the Active Ex-First Lady. Lady Bird Johnson was very active when her husband was in office, especially in the crusade against pollution, but toned down her activities after her husband left office, at least in the public eye. Pat Nixon was really prevented by circumstance from being publically active after the resignation; besides, she didn’t really have any public crusades. Jackie O…we’re not going to talk about. But Betty Ford started a trend. Just because she didn’t have the bully pulpit anymore didn’t mean that her cause had to suffer. She may be America’s best-loved ex-first lady. On the contrary, her husband was America’s best-loved ex-president from 1977 to 1981 because his only competition was Nixon.

Yes, that means that we have Hitlary because of Betty Ford. Don’t blame her for that. And let’s face it, Hitlary serving in the Senate (and soon back in the White House) is going to be better than our near-future fate of thirty years of seeing Laura Bush on PSAs talking about how Johnny Can’t Read.

The Ford Presidency set the tone for the social changes that began during his presidency. We couldn’t deal with Watergate and Vietnam, so we took ‘ludes and snorted coke. The drugs made us want to dance, so we started going to discos, where we did more drugs. Then the dancing and drugs made us horny, so we went home and had sex, usually with more than one person at a time. Some people were sick of other people dancing and having great sex, so they created punk and did different drugs, which blotted out the fact that they were too ugly to have sex. Then some religious freaks totally hated the fact that all the best drugs were being done in discos and CBGBs and that the Bible wouldn’t let them indulge in sex with people other than their spouse, so they captured the White House. They couldn’t stop the sex, though; AIDS had to come along to do that.

That really makes me wonder. One of my favorite What If scenarios in politics involves Gerry Ford. What if he’d seen the writing on the wall and not run in 1976? Most of the strong Republican candidates were tainted by Watergate, even if they had nothing to do with it. Just being anywhere near Washington in 1972 was toxic. Rocky had decided to get out of the veep job (and would only have another year or so to live anyway), but Ford dropping out might have prompted him to run for the big one anyway. Reagan would have been his competition, of course, and then you would have seen a fight for the soul of the Republican Party between its left and right wings. If Reagan had been defeated by a liberal Republican instead of a centrist like Ford, might that have stopped the Religious Reich in its cradle, just like the conservatives went underground following Goldwater’s disaster in 1964? Or would it simply have spurred the freaks on, just as Reagan’s primary defeats in 1976 did? Was 1980 inevitable? Could we have avoided the nightmarish fourteen years (plus two more to come) of Reagan and Dubbaya?

Best of all, can I sell a house on an alternate history of America from the 1976 election onward? In today’s replica of 1974, with gas prices and food prices on the rise, a guy has to make money somehow. Maybe I’ll find an old WIN button and slap it on, just for old times’ sake. Gerry would have wanted it that way.