Reflections and Regrets

Ford testifying about his pardon of Nixon in 1974.

"Now, what happens after the break-in is more significant. If Nixon had said, 'I knew nothing about it, people that I trusted were involved, I'm firing those who knew about it,' the whole damn thing would have been washed out. From that point of view it was something, it wasn't a nothing. It's tragic, and if the tapes hadn't been made, if the cover-up hadn't been carried out, I think Nixon could have survived. It was the after-the-fact manipulation, the cover-up, that created the disaster."

In the summer of 1994, I was invited to make a speech in Beaver Creek. That venue was coincidence enough, but the timing was doubly karmic: August 9, the twentieth anniversary of Richard Nixon's resignation and Jerry Ford's accession. Knowing Ford would be there on his summer hiatus, I called his house and asked to see him. "Sure, I think we can work that out," he said. I began by asking if there was a memory that stuck in his head from that momentous day.

"Probably the most intimate and dramatic was when I went in to see Nixon. He told me that that night he was gonna announce publicly that he was resigning and would do so the next day. As I recall, that was around eleven, eleven-thirty in the morning on the eighth.

"I was surprised about how cool and composed he was. He said he was doing it because it was in the best interests of the country and knew I was capable of handling the job. He urged me to keep Henry Kissinger on as secretary of state. It was a warm but, you know, obviously an emotional meeting. I think I said, 'I'm sorry it all happened.'

"As you know, I didn't have any ambition to be president; I had hoped to be speaker. But I also was very confident I could handle the job. I had no reservations at all." Personal sadness for Nixon tempered what Ford nevertheless admitted was an undeniable high: "I felt good. I didn't want the job, but it was gonna be mine. Honestly, Tom, I had absolute confidence I could do the job."

I asked him if he believed Richard Nixon was "a bad man." He vigorously rejected the characterization.

"Well, if you take his whole character, he had about a five to ten percent flaw in his character, and so ninety to ninety-five percent of his character was good, [but] every once in a while for unexplainable reasons the bad part of the character would take over.

"I think he had strong convictions and that would overcome his good character traits. You know, that happens. Some of us have a temper; some of us have more temper than others, and every once in a while we'll fly off the handle. I think in this case the bad would overcome the good, and it was just too bad."

Ford had observed him angry at times, but never the Evil Nixon captured on some of the White House tapes: "I never saw it to that extent. I know he had bitter feelings about certain elements—some in the press, some of his political opponents. But I never heard him go off as strongly as the tapes indicate, or the Haldeman diaries."

The two presidents whose lives and careers were seismically altered by Watergate were utter polar opposites. One was a terminal neurotic, consumed by demons, prone to compiling enemies lists, ill at ease in social settings; the other was gregarious, forgiving, everyone's friend, and a bit naïve.

A former senior assistant likes to point out, moreover, that in vetting his travel itineraries in retirement, Ford routinely asked aides to build downtime into his schedules to visit whatever old friend happened to live in the neighborhood. Nixon was never one of those old friends he asked to see.

Yet Ford always considered himself a close Nixon friend, one of the few. They went way back; the Quaker from Whittier, California, was elected to the House in 1946, two years before Ford won a seat from Grand Rapids, Michigan. A few months after Ford's arrival in 1949, they were among the fifteen members who founded the Chowder and Marching Society, a Republican social group. "I knew him intimately from January of 1949," he said. "I campaigned for him, he campaigned for me. We were very close—as close as anybody could get to Nixon—because of our relationship with the Chowder and Marching Society."