Casserly wrote these were chief among Ford’s problems with the Right. In fact, it only scratched the surface. Goldwater, thinking he was helping his old adversary, said “I’ve always thought Nelson Rockefeller would make a good Secretary of State,”
11
but this only served to pour gasoline on the problem.
Throughout 1975, the debate about Rockefeller continued. Ford speech-writer Casserly told a reporter from Mutual Radio, “Jerry Ford does not say one thing in public and something else in private. And he has made it clear he wants Rocky. . . . The President will not drop someone without serious reason. . . . Ford is loyal.”
12
Meanwhile, Hartmann contended that conservatives had nowhere to turn and had to stay with Ford regardless of his policies or personnel decisions. While Reagan was increasingly vocal in his criticisms of Ford, he still was mindful that Ford was the President. Others around Ford, including Dick Cheney, urged him “to pay more attention to conservatives in the party.”
13
But by July of 1975, relations between Ford and Reagan had hit near rock bottom. Ford was still miffed at Reagan for a radio commentary in late 1974 that he believed was a swipe at his foreign policy. But Reagan let Ford have it with both barrels in a column about Ford’s slight of Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn during his visit to Washington in the first week in July. In a column that appeared in many papers on July 15, the former California Governor wrote,
Press Secretary Ron Nessen gave out a succession of reasons why there wouldn’t be a meeting between Solzhenitsyn and the President. First, the President couldn’t attend the dinner because he was scheduled to be at a party for his daughter. Then, it seems, there wouldn’t be a subsequent meeting because Solzhenitsyn hadn’t requested one. Next, Nessen said, the President doesn’t ordinarily meet with
private
personages (he met that very week with Brazilian soccer star Pele). Then, “for image reasons, the President does like to have some substance in his meetings. It is not clear what he would gain by a meeting with Solzhenitsyn.” For substance, the President has met recently with the Strawberry Queen of West Virginia and the Maid of Cotton.
Finally, the real reason for the snub surfaced: a visit with Solzhenitsyn would violate the “spirit of détente.”
14
Solzhenitsyn was the Russian author who had gained fame for his book,
The
Gulag Archipelago
, a chronicle of the Soviet Union’s treatment of political prisoners, including himself. Solzhenitsyn had too much sunlight for the Kremlin to simply execute, so he was deported and emigrated to America. Jesse Helms and the conservative movement took up his cause and had approached the Ford White House for a meeting between the President and the famous dissident. Coin-cidentally, Reagan’s column appeared the day Laxalt announced the formation of Citizens for Reagan.
By this point, Reagan was on a course he probably could not reverse, even if he had wanted to. The personal insults from the Ford White House were more than he could stomach, and he certainly had the ideological reasons to make the race. Hartmann wrote of the tension between the two: “Ford thought Reagan was a phony, and Reagan thought Ford was a lightweight, and neither one felt the other was fit to be President.”
15
Even after the announcement of Citizens for Reagan, the Ford forces were in denial about Reagan’s candidacy and could not face the prospect of running against someone they did not understand or respect. Nessen could not understand the rationale for a Reagan campaign, writing in his book,
It Sure Looks Different
from the Inside,
that Ford “wasn’t doing badly,” thus answering his own question.
Nessen went on to write,
Ronald Reagan—former movie actor, former Governor of California, darling of the conservatives—loomed larger and larger through 1975 as a threat to Ford for the nomination of his own party. At first, the Ford White House refused to believe that Reagan would challenge an incumbent conservative Republican President. When the reality of the threat sank in, various strategies were tried to discourage Reagan from entering the race and to win his constituency over to Ford.
—An indirect effort was made to talk Reagan out of running.
—Ford selected a conservative Southerner as his Campaign Manager,
Army Secretary Howard “Bo” Callaway of Georgia.
—Ford did not interfere when Callaway suggested that Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, detested by conservatives, was a hindrance to Ford’s nomination, at least in the South.
—The President issued his own arm’s-length statement, saying the delegates at the convention would decide whether Rockefeller would be his running mate. And when Rockefeller finally decided he’d had enough humiliation and withdrew from contention for the Vice Presidential nomination, Ford did not try to talk him out of it.
—Published statements of support for the President were solicited from leading Republicans around the country. The Ford campaign organization in California conspicuously included several prominent former Reagan backers.
—The President shifted his policies further to the right.
16
Nessen was mystified at how Reagan could run. However, Ford’s policies did not shift noticeably to the right. They arguably moved left, showcased by the snub of Solzhenitsyn and the equally controversial Helsinki Accords. The Accords were the culmination of years of negotiations between the West and the Soviets dealing with Eastern Europe and mutual respect for borders drawn up at Yalta and Potsdam during World War II. Critics charged it was a one-way agreement favoring the Russians to the detriment to the Warsaw Pact and the “Captive Nations” of the Baltics. Despite the embroilment, Ford traveled to Helsinki, Finland, in August of 1975 to sign the Accords at the urging of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
The agreement with the Soviets was yet another stumbling block for Ford and his handling—or mishandling—of the Accords. Congressmen like Republican Ed Derwinski of Illinois, who had large constituencies of Eastern European immigrants and descendants, were furious at what they perceived as the United States “selling out” Eastern Europe to the Soviets. Some even went so far as to refer to Helsinki as “the new Yalta.”
17
Inside the Ford White House, the arguments over Helsinki were just as heated. Kissinger and State Department officials argued for Ford to state publicly that he was signing the Helsinki Accords because they were “balanced,” while anti-Soviet hardliners in the Administration wanted Ford to use tougher language. Concern grew between Dick Cheney, Ford’s cerebral young Deputy Chief of Staff, and Jerry Jones, another Ford staffer, that Reagan would score political points with the Helsinki Accords.
Casserly described the scene of one of Ford’s meetings: “Cheney and Jones zeroed in on Reagan. They insist that Reagan is making mileage in his attacks on détente, that détente is an issue. [They] sound as if they are certain that Reagan [will] formally announce as a candidate.” In the meeting, Ford wrongly observed, “A good theme is that détente depends on a strong national defense. If we don’t have a strong national defense, we won’t need détente. If we don’t have détente, defense costs will rise greatly. It seems to me that we have the best of both worlds.”
18
Steven Hayward, in his landmark book,
The Age of Reagan
, explained the controversy well:
Kissinger’s private intellectual pessimism [over the future of the West] might be of little account had it not been perceived as the basis of his enthusiasm for the Helsinki accords of 1975. . . .
The central strategic problem in Europe during the Cold War was the fate of divided Germany, and the nature of any prospective reunification between East and West Germany. A united, “neutral” Germany would favor Soviet interests and complicate the task of defending the rest of western Europe, and hence be unacceptable to the West. But the Soviets were not about to give up East Germany if it meant its incorporation within NATO. . . .
West Germany especially wanted a clause endorsing the “peaceful change of frontiers”—a code phrase not only for reunification with East Germany but also for prudent border adjustments with Poland. The Soviets would only accept the clause if the treaty also included the principle of “inviolability of frontiers”—a code phrase for recognizing existing borders. . . .
The deeper problem with the “inviolability of frontiers” clause is that it represented a
de facto
recognition of Soviet dominance of Eastern Europe. Kissinger saw this as no more than a concession to reality, since there was no prospect of a military liberation of Eastern Bloc nations, and the tradeoff of having the Soviets agree to the principle of de-alignment outweighed the concession to military reality. But especially in the case of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia—three independent nations the Soviets absorbed by brute force in the 1940s—the acknowledgement of “inviolability of frontiers” ran counter to American policy, especially the annual congressional observance of “Captive Nations Week,” which was specifically intended to remind of the three Baltic nations.
19
Helsinki also ran opposite the staunch anti-Communism of conservatives and the American people. Recognition of the “Captive Nations” had been in the Republican Party platform since 1948. Human rights were also addressed in the Accords. But to critics, it seemed a one-way street. Hayward summarizes conservative sentiment on the issue, saying, “a pledge to observe human rights meant little in regimes without a free press or a judicial process to secure human rights.” Reagan was opposed, saying, “I am against it, and I think all Americans should be against it.”
20
At Kissinger’s urging, Ford signed the documents. Noted political analyst Michael Barone speculated years later that it may have been the stinging criticism he received over Helsinki that led him in the second debate with Jimmy Carter to misstate American foreign policy, declaring, “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.” Barone thought Ford meant to say that the West and the people of Eastern Europe will never allow the Soviet Union to dominate their desire for freedom and independence.
21
However, the criticism that Reagan and his conservatives leveled at Ford over Helsinki and détente paled in comparison to the uproar over Betty Ford’s interview with Morley Safer on CBS’s
60 Minutes
in August of 1975, in which she condoned abortion, marijuana use, and extramarital affairs. Ford, who had trouble enough from the Right over economic and foreign policy issues, now had religious leaders hollering for his scalp. Betty Ford’s comments drove them right into Reagan’s—and later Carter’s—eager arms. Religious leaders across the country denounced the First Lady. Ford himself could only shrug his shoulders, but his more seasoned operatives knew her comments had damaged his campaign.
This was not the way that Ford and his people would have wanted to celebrate his one-year anniversary in the White House. And still, Callaway was attempting to get friends of Reagan’s, like Holmes Tuttle, to call Reagan and tell him not to run.
Meanwhile, Ford’s angst about Reagan manifested itself in more and more complaints to his staff and anyone who would listen. He complained that Reagan never seemed to be around to meet the President or the Vice President at the airport, or that Reagan charged for political speeches, or that Reagan’s public statements were increasingly critical of his Administration. “Reagan is a virtuoso of the political double-entendre, and you never really caught him taking a personal swipe at the President until a good deal later. But Jerry Ford could read his radar, and he didn’t like it,” Hartmann wrote. “Knowing he wasn’t in Reagan’s league as an orator or drawing card didn’t soften his distaste. Ford usually wasn’t one to harbor mean feelings, but Reagan brought out the worst in him.”
22
Cooler heads in the Ford White House—like Cheney and Bill Timmons, Ford’s talented political aide—did not agree with the others around 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue about Reagan’s interest in running or his intelligence or his appeal. Mel Laird, an old buddy of Ford’s from their days together in the House, never disguised his loathing for Reagan. He thought Reagan was without substance. In this, he and Hartmann agreed. The topic of Reagan was center stage for much of 1975 in the Ford White House. It would have flattered the old actor to know how much people were talking about him.
Adding to Ford’s problems, by mid-August 1975, his approval numbers had plummeted to a meager 38 percent in the Harris poll and only a 45 percent approval rating in a Gallup poll. The Harris survey had his disapproval at a Nixon-like 60 percent.
23
Over the summer of 1975, both the
Washington Post
and the
New York Times
ran lengthy articles on how Ford’s looming Presidential campaign would manifest itself. Both articles came to the conclusion that Ford would pursue a campaign of “moderation,” proving once again that reporters and editors make lousy Campaign Managers.
The Washington press corps was also closely covering much of the infighting in the White House. The Ford camp was embroiled in such turmoil that Mrs. Ford took it upon herself to take a swipe at Hartmann in the media. Aides were leaking to the media that Ford was “peaking too soon,” a favorite political cliché at the time. Moderate Republican Senators were imploring Ford to play down the conservative rhetoric. In a meeting with the President, the Senators advised him that his conservative base inside the GOP was fine, and he should concentrate on the Democratic and Independent vote for the 1976 campaign.
Infighting in Ford’s White House was part of the daily routine. Hartmann and Rumsfeld fought over everything—often publicly—including mess privileges and preferred parking for their respective staffs. Rockefeller was a particular sticking point. They managed to agree on the problems posed by Kissinger, though for wildly different reasons. White House speechwriting provided another example of the disarray inside the Ford White House, as a dozen or more people sometimes edited the President’s speeches. At one point, Hartmann told his staff not to put their names on drafts for the President’s review, a step that struck the writers as absurd since each of them had to meet with Ford to review their respective speech drafts.
24