Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (15 page)

In time, Ford had some success in these endeavors. As the columnist Hugh Sidey said in late 1976, “Ford’s stewardship was a welcome change from the decade of disarray that began with the bullet that killed Kennedy.”
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But the scars that disfigured American society were deep, and some of Ford’s early moves added to the pain. Many people opposed his offer of clemency to draft dodgers who undertook alternative service. Others, especially liberal Democrats, rejected his primary medicine against stagflation—lower federal spending. A relaxed and open administrator who gave subordinates fairly free rein, the president was slow to alleviate interpersonal tensions within the White House, many of which pitted Nixonera holdovers against new appointees. A group of ranking Republican senators publicly complained in mid-October, “Some people feel that if Jerry Ford is not over his head in the Presidency, he’s in very deep. He hasn’t demonstrated, ‘I am in charge.’”
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Ford’s decision in early September to pardon Nixon especially damaged his standing. Critics, including Republicans who were worried about the upcoming fall election, were shocked and surprised at the move, for which Ford, secretive on the subject, had not prepared the nation. Opponents charged that he had made a deal, either at the time of being nominated for the vice presidency or in the last, dismal days of Nixon’s presidency. General Alexander Haig, Nixon’s chief of staff, had mentioned the possibility of such a deal to Ford prior to Nixon’s resignation. There is no evidence, however, that Ford and Nixon ever discussed such a deal. Rather, Ford pardoned Nixon because he wanted the nation to move on. Later, many Americans agreed—Reeves included—that if he had not done so, endless investigations and trials would have ensued, reopening the wounds of Watergate.
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Still, the blow to Ford’s presidency was severe, and his party took an electoral drubbing in November. In January 1975, his personal popularity hit an all-time low of 37 percent.
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By then Ford had begun to bring greater discipline to his administration. In September he had replaced Haig, who had temporarily served as his staff coordinator, with Donald “Rummy” Rumsfeld, a political ally who as a “Young Turk” congressman from Illinois had backed him for minority leader of the House in 1965. During the Nixon years, Rumsfeld had headed the Office of Economic Opportunity, which oversaw the War on Poverty, and then become American ambassador to NATO. It was evident to people who encountered Rumsfeld that he was a smart, combative, and tough administrator with considerable political talent. Some of his rivals in the Ford years thought he was imperious, self-promoting, and restlessly ambitious. Henry Kissinger, Ford’s secretary of state, observed that Rumsfeld was a “skilled, full-time politician-bureaucrat in whom ambition, ability and substance fuse seamlessly.”
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Though Rumsfeld only slowly moderated dissension within Ford’s inner circle, he greatly centralized operations during his time as chief of White House operations, cutting 60 of 540 people from the staff by January 1975. In a Cabinet shake-up in late October that the media dubbed the “Halloween Massacre,” Ford selected him as secretary of defense. Rumsfeld, only forty-three years old at the time, was the youngest man in American history to take over that key post. At the same time, George H. W. Bush, until then America’s top envoy to the People’s Republic of China, was named head of the CIA, and Brent Scowcroft, an air force general, replaced Kissinger (who continued to be secretary of state) as national security adviser. All three men were to play important roles in later years: Bush as president, Scowcroft as Bush’s national security adviser, and Rumsfeld as George W. Bush’s controversial, highly visible defense secretary.
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Both as Ford’s staff coordinator and as defense secretary, Rumsfeld solidified his standing in the administration. In the process, he helped conservatives to marginalize more liberal Republicans who were close to Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. Recognizing his political weakness, Rockefeller announced in November 1975 that he would not run on the Republican ticket in 1976. Thirty-four-year-old Richard Cheney, who had worked under Rumsfeld both at OEO and in Ford’s White House, replaced his patron as top White House aide to the president. Cheney’s Secret Service code name, “Backseat,” epitomized his manner, which was low-key and faceless. He had little time for small talk or for pomp and circumstance. Cheney was discreet, tough-minded, and efficient. Anxious to restore presidential authority that had been whittled away after Watergate, he labored to ward off further congressional incursions on executive power. The youngest presidential chief of staff in history, he proved to be a skilled political operative. During Ford’s campaign for election in 1976, he became a highly trusted adviser and strategist.
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Changes in personnel, however, could not solve problems that plagued Ford’s efforts to cure the ills of the American economy. More of a traditional free-market conservative than Nixon, he hoped to reduce the role of government in the affairs of the nation. Like the chairman of his Council of Economic Advisers, the serious and influential Alan Greenspan, he yearned to cut discretionary spending on social services, notably in health and education, so as to reduce the growing federal deficit and to curb the rate of inflation, which had mounted to double-digit size in early 1974. In October, he called for a 5 percent surcharge on corporate and personal income taxes (for families earning more than $15,000 a year). After proclaiming that his administration would Whip Inflation Now (WIN), he and his aides pinned WIN buttons to their lapels.
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It was Ford’s misfortune, however, that a sharp recession descended in late 1974. Seeking to counter it, Ford announced his support in January 1975 for sizeable income tax cuts and rebates. Congressional Democrats attacked this “flip-flop” and seized the political initiative. In March 1975, they approved an even larger tax cut, of $22.8 billion. Ford, overruling aides who worried that such reductions would increase an already rising federal deficit, concluded that it would be politically suicidal to veto the cuts (which are almost always popular with voters) and reluctantly signed the tax reduction bill into law. But he also used many of his sixty-six vetoes to curb governmental spending in the next few months. Though Democrats succeeded in overriding him on several occasions—twelve times during his seventeen months in office—they raged at his assertiveness and at the conservative Republicans who sustained his vetoes. “This has been a government by veto,” Democratic senator John Pastore of Rhode Island complained in 1975. “We’ve got the minority dragging the majority by the nose.”
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Still later, in October 1975, the president further surprised conservative foes of deficits by calling for a permanent tax cut of $28 billion, to be offset by reductions in federal spending. Though the Democratic Congress approved a bill in December that extended the earlier tax cuts for an additional six months, it refused to reduce spending, and Ford vetoed the bill. A year of partisan wrangling over taxes finally closed in late December, when Congress approved—and Ford signed—a tax cut like the one that he had earlier vetoed, in return for a vaguely worded promise from Congress that it would seek a reduction in government spending if tax revenues declined.

Battles over energy policy provoked further partisan warfare. These had already become contentious following the jacking up by OPEC of overseas oil prices after the Yom Kippur War between Israel and Arab foes in late 1973. Ford, consistent in his market-oriented approach to economic problems, believed that the answer to higher energy costs was a phased-in decontrol of domestic oil prices. Decontrol, he conceded, would lead to higher prices for consumers, but it would therefore discourage consumption and promote conservation. Higher oil prices, moreover, would act as an incentive for domestic producers to increase production. The law of supply and demand—more supply, less demand—would bring prices back down in the longer run.

When Ford outlined his plan in January 1975, however, Democrats (save some of those who represented oil-producing states and districts) were quick to oppose it. Decontrol, they charged, was a boon to energy producers and a burden on low-income Americans, who would have to pay more for heating fuel and gasoline. They called instead for the maintenance of controls and for a politically popular rollback of prices for newly produced domestic oil. Frustrated, Ford finally gave way and signed a compromise bill in December 1975. Though it rolled back prices, it also authorized gradual decontrol over a forty-month period. His decision, damned as yet another flip-flop, angered some of his advisers, including his conservative treasury secretary, William Simon, who insisted that the market should have been allowed to work its magical ways.
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Whether these governmental measures helped the American economy is difficult to say. This is because market forces do a great deal to determine the course of economic life. Pretending otherwise, politicians in charge of the economy claim credit when things get better, and blame opponents when they do not. In late 1975 and early 1976, the American economy did improve a little. Inflation, which had soared in 1974, fell, and unemployment dipped. On the other hand, the economy remained unsettled, worsening slightly as the 1976 election approached, and Ford, having been whipsawed between Democrats and conservative Republicans, did not seem in control of the situation. His administration had a huge $74 billion deficit in 1976 and received generally unflattering marks for its management of the economy.

Critics of the president, meanwhile, continued to depict him as a bumbler. After he stumbled while descending from Air Force One, comedians, notably Chevy Chase on television’s new program
Saturday Night Live
, had great sport mimicking him. They poked fun at his golf game, which was erratic enough to place spectators at risk. Other critics cried that Ford was unfeeling, especially after he refused to support a federal bailout of New York City in October 1975. The
New York Daily News
ran a widely noted headline: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” Ford eventually relented by agreeing to support a federal loan to the city. This may have been too little too late. Many people complained that the president had flip-flopped yet again.

M
ANAGING FOREIGN AFFAIRS
, with which Ford had had little experience prior to 1974, proved to be almost as frustrating over the next two years. Relying at first on key holdovers from Nixon’s foreign policy team, he struggled to reconcile personal and bureaucratic struggles between Defense Secretary James Schlesinger and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, an advocate of détente with the Soviets. Each was strong-willed and highly egotistical. Leo Cherne, a foreign policy adviser, observed that Kissinger was “one of the most gifted men ever to serve his government, and not altogether eager to deny it.”
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Until November 1975, when Rumsfeld replaced Schlesinger, bureaucratic infighting hampered foreign policy making.

At first the most troubling issues concerned Southeast Asia. Although the United States had pulled its soldiers from Vietnam in January 1973, angry recriminations about the war continued to roil American society and politics. Later that year, Congress passed the War Powers Act, aimed at curbing presidential authority to involve the nation in war. When Ford made it clear that he considered the measure unconstitutional, he infuriated foes in Congress. Throughout Ford’s tenure in the White House (and for years thereafter) many conservative Americans insisted that anti-war liberals had “tied the hands” of the military in Vietnam, thereby losing a war that could have been won. In 1974–75 they demanded that the United States give military aid to South Vietnam. Returning veterans chafed at what they perceived to be the ingratitude of Americans who had stayed home. Other activists insisted that the government do something to help POWs and to locate the many fighting men who were MIA, or missing in action.
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Efforts to aid South Vietnam fell on deaf ears in Congress, which from 1973 on adamantly opposed efforts to supply increased military assistance to the beleaguered pro-American governments of South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Frustrated, Ford in mid-March of 1975 considered Kissinger’s suggestion that the United States send B-52 bombers on a strike against enemy forces that were assailing South Vietnam. At this point David Hume Kennerly, Ford’s irreverent, jeans-clad White House photographer, helped to nix this notion, telling him, “Mr. President, Vietnam has no more than a month left, and anyone who tells you different is bullshitting.”
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The B-52s stayed home.

As North Vietnamese invaders smashed through impotent South Vietnamese resistance in early April, Ford asked Congress to provide an additional $722 million in emergency military assistance and $250 million for humanitarian and economic aid. Congress refused, causing the normally even-tempered president to exclaim, “Those bastards!”
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Anti-aid legislators retorted, as earlier, that the United States had blundered arrogantly and disastrously into the Vietnam War, in which more than 58,000 Americans and as many as 2 million Vietnamese had died. Use of napalm and Agent Orange had incinerated villages and devastated the countryside. American bombing and warfare in Laos and Cambodia had helped to intensify armed rebellions in both nations, which, like South Vietnam, were in danger of imploding in early 1975. Reciting these and other tragedies, opponents of military assistance gave Ford no quarter.