The American Vice Presidency (70 page)

In 1969 amid speculation that he was acting at the behest of the White House, Ford initiated a campaign to impeach Supreme Court Justice
William O. Douglas in a period during which two Nixon nominees for the court, Clement F. Haynsworth and W. Harrold Carswell, were rejected. Douglas’s lifestyle—multiple marriages and divorces, some to women forty years his junior, financial irregularities, and his liberal philosophy—was raised against him, leading to Senate committee hearings at which Ford testified. He denied he had ever been asked by Nixon or his White House to bring the impeachment charges, and the matter was dropped, but it left a shadow over Ford’s reputation.
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The stormy political year of 1972 was highlighted by the foiled June break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters by burglars in the hire of the Nixon reelection committee. The Democratic chairman of the House Banking and Currency Committee, the seventy-nine-year-old Wright Patman of Texas, undertook an investigation of the money trail of payments to the burglars, whereupon Nixon’s right-hand man, Bob Haldeman, wrote in his diary that Nixon “wants to be sure we put the screws on Congress to turn off the Patman hearings.”
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At a taped meeting with Haldeman and the White House counsel John Dean, Nixon specifically mentioned some Republican committee members whom Ford should approach, including one ambitious member: “After all, if we ever win the House, Jerry will be the speaker and he could tell him if he did not get off—he will not be chairman, ever.”
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On the committee vote to hold hearings, all sixteen Republicans voted against, along with four opposing Democrats, and the hearings were abandoned, by a vote of twenty to fifteen.

On Election Day, despite the unfolding Watergate scandal, Nixon and Agnew easily won reelection, and it appeared the matter would blow over. Ford continued in the House as a loyal Nixon ally through two political explosions that in a short time would rocket him first into the vice presidency and then the presidency. First, the forced resignation of Agnew in October 1973, described in
chapter 39
, and then Nixon’s own culpability in the Watergate cover-up, which forced him to resign as well the next August, made Gerald Ford the fortieth vice president and then the thirty-eighth president without having been elected to either office.

With Agnew on the way out, Nixon drew an assurance about the popular Ford from the Democratic House Speaker Carl Albert: “He would be the easiest man that I know of to confirm in the House of Representatives. There wouldn’t be any question in my mind but that he would be
confirmed, and it would not be a long, drawn-out matter either.” Later, Albert claimed, “We gave Nixon no choice but Ford. Congress made Jerry Ford President.”
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So Nixon, having abandoned hopes of replacing Agnew with John Connally, turned to good old Jerry Ford, everybody’s friend on Capitol Hill, the safe bet to be confirmed by Congress under the new Twenty-Fifth Amendment.

On October 12, Nixon called Ford in, told him he was his choice, and asked him what his political plans were. Ford told Nixon he had promised his wife, Betty, that he would retire from politics after finishing his vice presidential term and had no plans to run for president after that. “Well, that’s good,” Nixon replied, according to Ford, “because John Connally is my choice for 1976. He’d be excellent.”
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Ford knew where he stood from the start.

Congressional hearings were held from November 7 through 26 on Ford’s confirmation. According to Alexander Haig, Nixon’s chief of staff at the time, both Democrats and Republicans in Congress let Nixon know that support of Ford would be contingent on release of the White House tapes. Haig wrote later he feared that a continued vacancy in the vice presidency as the Watergate inquiry grew closer to Nixon might yet put Carl Albert in the Oval Office.
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On October 20 in an act of open defiance, Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox. Richardson flatly refused and resigned, as did his deputy William Ruckelshaus for the same reason, in what came to be known as the “Saturday Night Massacre.” The deed was then done by the third in command at the Justice Department, Solicitor General Robert Bork. The Supreme Court ordered that the tapes be turned over to the Senate investigating committee, and the Ford confirmation finally went forward.

In late November the Senate overwhelmingly endorsed Ford, and a week later the House completed his confirmation. He was sworn in with Nixon present, even as new Watergate pressures continued to imperil Nixon’s own security as president. The new vice president identified himself as “a Ford, not a Lincoln,” a modest comparison with which most in the chamber, knowing him well, could agree. William Greider of the
Washington Post
, one of the nation’s most perceptive and fair reporters, wrote of him, “The more they thought about Jerry Ford, the more they thought of him.”
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Nixon told Ford he wanted him to attend cabinet and National Security
Committee meetings and be his chief liaison with his old colleagues in Congress. But under the threatening circumstances to Nixon, Ford was put to work shoring up the Republican Party around the country for the next eight months. As the year dragged on, there were disclosures, including the embarrassing eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap in one of the tapes being transcribed by Nixon’s personal secretary, Rose Mary Woods. Ford’s travels became virtually a nonstop defense of the man who had put him a heartbeat from the presidency. He found himself repeatedly insisting he believed in Nixon’s innocence of covering up his administration’s and his own involvement in the whole sordid affair and its aftermath. But Ford’s defense of Nixon was a limited one, in that he kept saying Nixon was “innocent of any impeachable offense.”
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As the
Washington Post
reporter covering Ford’s vice presidency, I interviewed him in early July 1974 aboard
Air Force Two
about the noose tightening around Nixon’s neck and the difficulty of defending the man he might well soon succeed. He did not want even to talk about the prospect, as if doing so would be an act of disloyalty. Nonetheless, he acknowledged that he was probably hurting himself politically with his continuing profession of Nixon’s innocence but said anything less would be taken as abandonment of him.

On the final weekend of this salvage mission, as Ford was campaigning and speaking in Mississippi and Louisiana, key Republicans, including the Senate minority whip Robert Griffin of Michigan, learned of the “smoking gun” tape of June 23, 1972. On it, only six days after the Watergate break-in, Nixon spoke of efforts to cover up the White House involvement. Word was flashed to Ford, and on returning to Washington he issued a brief statement saying it would serve no useful purpose for him to say anything at all regarding the possible impeachment of Nixon.
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As Ford’s longtime aide Bob Hartmann wrote later, “No longer was [Ford’s task] to save the president who appointed him but to save the presidency he might inherit.”
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On August 1, Haig came to Ford’s office and asked him whether he was ready to assume the presidency “in a short period of time.” Ford said he was, and according to him a discussion ensued of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment and also of the presidential powers of pardon. Ford wrote of what Haig told him: “According to some on Nixon’s White House staff, Nixon
could agree to leave in return for an agreement that the new president—Gerald Ford—would pardon him. Haig emphasized that these weren’t his suggestions.” Ford went on to note, “Because of his references to pardon authority, I did ask Haig about the extent of a President’s pardon power,” and Haig cited a White House lawyer as saying, “A President does have authority to grant a pardon even before criminal action has been taken against an individual.”
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Intentionally or not, Haig seemed to have planted the notion in Ford’s head.

On the night of August 8 on nationwide television, Nixon announced that he would resign the next day, rationalizing his reason for doing so: “I hope I will have hastened the start of the process of healing which is so desperately needed in America.”
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It was hardly a confession of wrongdoing, attributing his decision to loss of sufficient support in Congress to go on. The next morning, after Nixon had made emotional farewell remarks to his staff and others in the East Room of the White House and flown into California exile, Ford took the presidential oath in the same room and declared to a relieved nation, “Our long national nightmare is over.” Aware that he had just become the first president not elected by the people after having been the first vice president not elected by them, he said, “If you have not chosen me by secret ballot, neither have I gained office by secret promises. I have not campaigned either for the presidency or the vice presidency. I have not subscribed to any partisan platform, I am indebted to no man and to only one woman, my dear wife Betty, as I begin the most difficult job in the world.”
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To fill the vacancy caused by his ascendance to the presidency, Ford chose the former governor Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York, soon confirmed. On Sunday morning, September 8, Ford announced the unconditional pardon for all of Nixon’s alleged Watergate sins, saying neither Nixon and his family nor the country at large could stand the drawn-out ordeal that a criminal prosecution would have entailed. “My conscience tells me it is my duty,” he told a shocked nation, “not only to proclaim domestic tranquility but to use every means that I have to insure it.”
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The first protest came from Ford’s newly appointed press secretary, Jerald terHorst, previously the Washington bureau chief of the
Detroit News
, who instantly became a hero to many in the press corps for submitting his resignation on the spot to his old Michigan friend. Around the country,
the conclusion was drawn: that a deal had been struck whereby Ford had agreed to pardon Nixon before becoming president himself. Ford flatly denied the allegation and testified before the House Judiciary Committee investigating the matter.

In any event, Ford served in the Oval Office through the remainder of the second term to which Nixon had been elected. In 1976, despite saying earlier that he would not seek a term of his own, Ford did so. He turned back a strong challenge for the Republican nomination from the former governor Ronald Reagan of California in that year’s primary elections and at the party national convention in Kansas City. But the long shadow of the Nixon pardon hung over his general-election campaign against the former Democratic governor Jimmy Carter of Georgia, and he lost narrowly that November.

In gaining the Oval Office, Jerry Ford far exceeded his earlier quest to become House Speaker. But in his eight months as vice president he was unwittingly reduced to the role of a bit player in what is generally considered to be the worst American political scandal up to that time. Years later, his pardon of Nixon was judged by many as wise as well as compassionate, yet would remain the most controversial if memorable act of his presidential tenure.

In retirement, the still robust Jerry Ford lived an active physical life, playing golf and skiing at homes in Rancho Mirage, California, and Vail, Colorado, and lecturing for nearly thirty more years. He died at age ninety-three on the day after Christmas 2006 and was buried at the Ford Presidential Museum, in his hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan.

NELSON A. ROCKEFELLER

OF NEW YORK

I
n the country where it’s said that every mother’s son can become president, Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller was one of the relatively few who could legitimately say, as he did later in life, “When you think of what I had, what else was there to aspire to?”
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One of the five grandsons of John D. Rockefeller, touted as the richest man in the world, Nelson fell one rung short as the forty-first vice president. After failing to be elected to the presidency and famously saying he wasn’t built to be “standby equipment,” he finally accepted appointment to the second office in 1974 by President Gerald R. Ford, himself elevated to the highest office upon Richard M. Nixon’s resignation in the Watergate scandal.

Rockefeller’s early notoriety came to him as an heir to the millions of the founder of the Standard Oil Company, but his roots also sprang from political soil as the maternal grandson of U.S. Senator Nelson W. Aldrich of Rhode Island. As Senate majority leader, Aldrich was regarded the prime defender of the nation’s great trusts and combines and was dubbed “the arch-representative of protected, privileged business” by muckraker Lincoln Steffens.
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He used his influential position in the Senate to become a multimillionaire himself through the sale of his trolley lines in Providence to the New Haven Railroad. Young Nelson’s advancement rose initially through the Rockefeller name and empire, and he turned to elective politics only after a series of appointive positions in government, including those
in the administrations of the Democratic president Franklin D. Roosevelt. They convinced him that the power he sought had to be attained through his own political enterprise. While Nelson Rockefeller never achieved the one goal he thought worthy of his aspirations, he brought a high degree of progressivism and public service to what came to be known as Rockefeller Republicanism.