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December 30, 2006

Jerry Ford: A Man of Decency and Common Sense

By Richard Reeves

PARIS -- Gerald Ford was planning to leave the House of Representatives in 1976 after 26 years to become a lobbyist. Instead he became president. It was all an accident; many of us thought it was a mistake. He just happened to be the last man standing after Vice President Spiro Agnew quit under investigation for taking bribes and President Nixon quit to avoid impeachment.

We all laughed at him, at least a lot of us did. Ford, a star athlete as a young man, stumbled and fell down a lot in public, and there was a thesaurus of words he had trouble pronouncing, beginning with "judgment." His version was "judg-E-ment." When he was appointed to replace the disgraced Agnew, I was writing articles for New York magazine illustrated by doctored photographs showing him as Bozo the Clown. On a new NBC television show called "Saturday Night Live," Chevy Chase became famous for saying he was Ford and then tripping and falling down.

My articles expanded into a book, "A Ford, Not a Lincoln," which was widely praised and made the best-seller lists. Nobody mentioned that I was wrong. I was the clown.

I am not saying that now to avoid speaking ill. One small comfort for me professionally was the fact that Ford lived long enough for me to understand him better and to apologize for some of what I had written as a young man. On a television show in 1996, someone remarked on how funny the Ford book was. I mumbled something about it being too harsh. The editor of American Heritage magazine, Richard Snow, called the next day and asked what I meant. That led to a piece in the magazine under the title, "I'm Sorry, Mr. President."

The article made some news, and Ford graciously thanked me and said fair and nice things about me. We corresponded a bit, as we had in the 1970s -- and that was nice, too.

What I wrote all those years ago had to do with his official and absolute pardoning of President Nixon for all possible criminal acts and civil liability during his sordid years in the White House. At the time, Ford told me that he did it because he had to get past Watergate. Otherwise, whatever the circumstances of the pardon -- and it well may have been part of the deal that got Nixon to resign -- the press would have made the country ungovernable if it followed the former president as he was dragged from courtroom to courtroom, month after month, year after year. I laughed at that.

Now, I think I was wrong. Watching the sad copycat journalism of the O.J. Simpson murder case -- and, later, the Monica Lewinsky affair -- I realize that he was right. Nixon in court would have been Circus Maximus. The coverage, as the press blurred lines between news and entertainment, would have eclipsed such mundane subjects as inflation, Vietnam and the Cold War. In the end, I agreed that the pardon, which essentially destroyed Ford's chances to be actually elected president on his own in 1976, was what made it possible for the United States to move on rather than wallow in its own frustration and mudslinging.

So, Ford took a real beating in 1976. He was a Washington fixture who became an easy target of both parties. His opponent in the Republican primaries, Ronald Reagan, no passive loyalist he, came close to beating Ford with a relatively vicious anti-government campaign. Then Jimmy Carter, a former Democratic governor, pummeled him with a relentless anti-Washington campaign. Ford was both in the right place at the right time and the wrong place at the wrong time.

Ford seemed energetic because he worked hard and loved to travel, but he was too passive to be president, and probably would not have done well if elected. I asked him once what was the most exciting event of his World War II experience as a naval officer. He told me of stepping onto an aircraft carrier deck during a storm, being knocked off his feet and sliding on his back across the runway's slippery surface, saved from being hurled into the sea by the nets along the sides along the ship.

But, passive or not, he had one great achievement that was not often mentioned in this week's tributes. He was a significant force in the passage of the human rights covenants of the 1975 Helsinki Accords signed by 35 nations, including the Soviet Union. At the time, the conventional wisdom was that the accords ratified Soviet domination of the countries it occupied after World War II. Ford believed Soviet acceptance of the accords would encourage dissident movements and international monitoring of communist repression. He was right; Helsinki was a critical step on the road to winning the Cold War.

"Jerry Ford," as he liked to be called, was not a great president, nor a great man. But he was a great American, embodying some of the decency and common sense of ordinary men and women. He saw his duty and did it as well as he could, better than most of us realized at the time.

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