Reflections and Regrets

Thomas DeFrank met Gerald Ford in 1973, shortly after Richard Nixon introduced the new vice president to the nation. Then a Newsweek correspondent, DeFrank was one of a handful of reporters who covered Ford as vice president and then as president. In his new book, Write It When I'm Gone: Remarkable Off-the-Record Conversations with Gerald R. Ford, DeFrank (now D.C. bureau chief of the New York Daily News), recounts the myriad conversations he had with Ford until his death in 2006. Many of those chats included the former president's musings on his embattled predecessor.

Ford testifying about his pardon of Nixon in 1974.

At eleven o'clock on the morning of August 26, 1991, I arrived at Gerald Ford's mountain hideaway in Beaver Creek, Colorado, a few miles from Vail, where he'd been going to ski for decades. We settled in for the first of sessions that would continue for sixteen years. I quickly reviewed the simple ground rules we'd already established: nothing he said could be printed until after his death. I also promised I wouldn't tell anyone else what he'd said.

Inevitably, we got around to what we both recognized was still Topic A seventeen years after the fact: Richard Nixon and Watergate. I asked him to explain about the tightrope he'd maneuvered between defending his former House colleague and growing increasingly suspicious that he was being lied to about Nixon's involvement.

"I never honestly hoped I would be president," he said. "I wanted Dick Nixon to survive, and therefore I was always trying to be protective of the presidency and to make it appear that I wasn't lifting a finger to undercut him and to become president; therefore I really never anticipated I would be president until the Thursday or Friday before I actually became president.

"Until I saw or heard the evidence of the smoking gun, I always hoped, and based on Nixon's assurance to me, I didn't think he would be impeached—and if he wasn't gonna be impeached, I doubted if he would resign."

After years of reflecting on his conduct, Ford admitted, he could be fairly faulted for giving Nixon too much benefit of the doubt. On some level, perhaps Ford may not have wanted to know the truth; that certainly would have made his defensive duties far more difficult to pull off. Regardless, he didn't press Nixon for a just-between-old-friends accounting of the facts, and regretted his timidity.

"All the time that this thing kept getting hotter and hotter and hotter, whenever I would see him alone, I'd try to find out whether I was being fully informed. To be honest with you, Tom, I never said, 'Mr. President, were you involved? Did you know?' In retrospect, I probably should have.

"But whenever I would be alone with him, and we would talk about what was happening, he would frequently say, 'You know, Jerry, I've been so involved in foreign policy trips abroad, with the Middle East, with Brezhnev, et cetera, I never had time to get involved in these domestic matters and things of this kind.' And the clear inference was he neither was involved in or knew about it. And I accepted that, because it was a clear statement from him telling me what he was doing and he was not involved in either the planning, the execution, or otherwise."

"So he lied to you, but he wasn't the only one," I suggested. "No," Ford agreed, distinctly remembering a meeting he and Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott had with John Mitchell and Jeb Magruder to complain that Nixon's 1972 reelection committee was cutting Republican campaign officials out of the loop. It was a breakfast meeting only two days after the infamous break-in of Democratic National Committee headquarters that launched the Watergate crisis.

Assurances. "I got there early, walked into Mitchell's office, and I said, 'John, that was a stupid thing that happened last Saturday night. Did you know about it, were you involved?' And John Mitchell looked me right in the eye and said, 'I didn't know about it; I wasn't involved.' So on the basis of that and the assurances from Nixon, I assumed the White House and the Department of Justice were in no way involved."

Mitchell's lying hardly exonerated Nixon, Ford readily agreed. That led him into a philosophical discussion whose centerpiece was the observation, hardly novel with him, that has become a fixture of Washington's scandal firmament: it's the covering up of political chicanery, not the original act, that usually dooms politicians.

"It was not a big deal," he said, referring only to the break-in of DNC headquarters at the Watergate Office Building. "Those kind[s] of spying on political opponents or political parties—that was kind of the atmosphere in those days.

"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."

Stubborn. "I think now as I did then, that in the area of foreign policy, he was as good if not better than any president I've known. [But] he had a character flaw: where even when he made a mistake and knew it, he would not admit it. Why? That I've never known, Tom. It was a stubbornness, self-righteousness that was just a damn shame."

In his memoirs, Ford says he got a thank-you phone call from Nixon about ten days after the pardon. He told me that in their annual birthday calls he and his predecessor had never mentioned the pardon in the seventeen years since that brief phone chat. He didn't seem perturbed by what some might conclude was a colossal lack of gratitude on Nixon's part; perhaps the less said about an awkward and controversial act, the better. In fact, Ford confided that the two presidents had confidentially agreed they should avoid appearing together to avoid fueling speculation that the pardon had been part of a precooked deal between the two. "I call him on his birthday, he reciprocates on mine. When Betty or Pat are ill, we exchange phone calls," Ford volunteered.

Occasionally they did appear together; at Ronald Reagan's request, they and Jimmy Carter represented the new president at the 1981 funeral of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. They joined Carter and George H. W. Bush at the dedication of the Reagan Library in 1991. And over the objections of some aides, President Ford had visited an ailing Nixon in a Long Beach hospital in October 1974 when he almost died from an attack of phlebitis.

But by design, they never got together privately, even long into retirement. "It's a good relationship, but we obviously don't think it's a good idea for us to be together," he conceded.

I asked whether there was any truth to the rumors that he pardoned Nixon in part because he thought his former House colleague was becoming a basket case while waiting to learn if he'd be indicted. "Subjectively, it probably was a factor. I was hearing that he was terribly distraught. I don't know whether you could call it irrational, [but] he was despondent, had an unhealthy state of mind."

Asked about skeptics who will always believe there had to have been a deal, Ford said emphatically: "Well, my reaction to that is my own firm knowledge and conviction there wasn't one. And I've done my utmost, including a personal appearance before a House subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee, where I was interrogated by about twenty members of the House. As I understand it, that was the first time a sitting president had gone up to the Congress since Abraham Lincoln [to testify]. I don't know how I could have been any more forthright."

Over the years, he'd become even more entrenched in his belief that he'd done the right thing. "I have no reservations at all. I do feel strongly it was the right thing for the country, and whatever political consequences for me, I accepted."

Ford had been even more emphatic when reflecting during Nixon's funeral: "I was very pleased that the press overwhelmingly talked about the good things he has done rather than the tragedy of Watergate. I was pleased that the ceremony went off so well. Clinton was there, the four other presidents, the atmosphere was very, very good.

"Subjectively, I said to myself, 'If I hadn't pardoned him, would this have taken place?' I happen to believe it would have been very unlikely. No question, Tom: he would have been indicted. The probability is he would have been convicted. It would have been a long, tortuous appeal. The odds are he would have gone to jail. The country would have lost the benefit of his continuing statesmanship in foreign policy."

Three years later, after Nixon's death, he was even more ambivalent. "We had some great, enjoyable time together. I couldn't help but be sad about how ill-advised and just plain stupid he was in the way he handled the cover-up. In reflection, Tom, it's incomprehensible."

I ended that first interview in 1991 by asking how he hoped history would remember him. He was predictably modest: "That I was a dedicated, hardworking, honest person who served constructively in Congress and in the White House."

Reprinted from Write It When I'm Gone: Remarkable Off-the-Record Conversations with Gerald R. Ford by Thomas M. DeFrank (G. P. Putnam's Sons). Copyright © 2007 by Thomas M. DeFrank.