Ford, Not a Lincoln
WHITCOMB, ROBERT
Ford, Not a Lincoln Post-White House table talk of the 38th president. BY ROBERT WHITCOMB Write It When I’m Gone Remarkable Off-the-Record Conversations with Gerald R. Ford by Thomas M....
...Toward the end, even the likes of the Kennedys were giving him an award for pardoning Nixon...
...Of course, readers must bring skepticism to postmortem works of this kind: The subject is not around to comment on the accuracy of the quotes...
...His death was no tragedy...
...The pipe-smoking Ford seems almost out of Currier & Ives...
...he didn’t like the rope line...
...He was still an elitist...
...It’s not really pulled together, and kind of fl ops around...
...I mean that.’’ (As for Al Gore: “He’s such a bore.’’) Many of the fi nal pages are a sometimestedious description of Ford’s declining health, the clinical details of which will surprise few people of a certain age...
...He generally loved to be liked...
...This guy [Bill Clinton] loves the rope line—and the rope line loves him.’’ Ford was a famously nice man, with a moderately good sense of humor, and capable of making some perceptive and interesting remarks about his times...
...And indeed, the subtitle of this work is misleading...
...Nixon, of course, resigned in August...
...With so many years of remarks by such a genial public fi gure, there almost has to be...
...And from then on, and especially between 1991 and 2006, the politician and the reporter, by now great pals, had numerous offtherecord chats in which Ford would ruminate freely and securely...
...He said of his rival for the 1976 nomination: “Totally off the record, he was not what I would [call] a technically competent president,’’ considering him a lazy showman...
...Ford lived to be 93 years old, and was in good health until near the end...
...But there may be too many conversations here, which might have worked better as a long magazine article...
...In any event, DeFrank, a longtime White House correspondent for Newsweek and now the New York Daily News’s Washington bureau chief, promised the then-veep that he wouldn’t report that remark until Ford was dead...
...The Man from Michigan was a smart politician, but rarely prone to eloquence, and sometimes to such verbal gaffes as not seeming to realize in the disastrous 1976 presidential debate with Jimmy Carter that the Soviets dominated Eastern Europe...
...Ford expresses dismay over Jimmy Carter—saying, in 1980, “God help us’’ if he were reelected...
...Ford didn’t like or respect Ronald Reagan, whose choice not to campaign for him in 1976 he considered “one of the four reasons’’ for his loss to Jimmy Carter...
...But there is much tautology in this volume, as the author insists on repeating what are effectively the same remarks...
...The revelation being pushed hardest by the marketers—that thenVice President Ford blurted out to DeFrank in April 1974 that he knew that events would soon remove Richard Nixon from the White House and make the former House Republican leader the new chief executive—now seems small beer, though it might have been nitroglycerine at the time...
...He had the benefi t of a very long political retirement, during which his charms expanded in the public mind and his fl aws virtually disappeared...
...Jerry Ford seems a comforting historical fi gure these days, as the economic and political traumas of his time in power have receded in memory...
...Robert Whitcomb, editor of the editorial pages at the Providence Journal, is the coauthor of Cape Wind: Money, Celebrity, Class, Politics, and the Battle for Our Energy Future on Nantucket Sound...
...For example, referring to John F. Kennedy, Ford said: “John [Ford didn’t call him Jack] was great, but all John had was the press...
...Not that things were particularly soothing in Jerry Ford’s brief vice presidency and presidency...
...Does anyone remember the high infl ation, the fi rst energy crisis, the ignominious evacuation from Saigon, the Communists’ mass murder in Cambodia...
...Write It When I’m Gone has been selling remarkably well for a volume about a politician all too often considered plodding and, lamentably, without scandal...
...And some of them are simply boring, even to an admirer of Ford (including me...
...Few people who followed the career of Jerry Ford (and I did in a modest way as a baby editor and fi llin World-Wide column writer at the Wall Street Journal at the time) will fi nd anything astonishing here...
...And there’s an odd randomness about it: a quotation about this, a quotation about that, then a quotation about this yet again...
...BY ROBERT WHITCOMB Write It When I’m Gone Remarkable Off-the-Record Conversations with Gerald R. Ford by Thomas M. DeFrank Putnam’s, 272 pp., $25.95 Somehow the idea of a scoop and the name Gerald R. Ford do not mate...
...In Ford’s case, that upbringing was by a mother and a stepfather who was a far better father-fi gure than Ford’s biological father, whom the former president castigates as a notably selfi sh, infantile, and nasty man—one of the best passages in the book...
...Which may be one reason for its success after the foreign and domestic churn of the past few years...
...The former president didn’t want to deal with the recriminations or, apparently, the hurt feelings that would fl ow from the premortem release of his observations...
...Which isn’t to say there isn’t a lot that’s engaging...
...I remember many such fi gures from my own Midwestern/small-town New England families, and miss them in this frantic, attention-defi cit-addled age...
...Nevertheless, he had his tart moments, too...
...For that he never forgave Reagan, although he showed compassion when the latter developed Alzheimer’s disease...
...So DeFrank had to wait until December a year ago for Ford to go to his reward and the reporter to his computer to polish up his many, many conversations with the Giant of Grand Rapids...
...What he meant, I think, was that they didn’t accept the domination...
...And of course, some of my middle American relatives were every bit as nasty as Jerry Ford’s father...
...And regarding the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Ford said of Clinton: “He’s got a sex sickness...
...Still, DeFrank is an honorable man, and we can take the book on faith...
...But what Write It When I’m Gone does evoke more than any other thing is a certain kind of “normal,’’ stolid, kindly Main Street Republican of the fi rst three-quarters of the 20th century: leery of big change, affable in a certain way, generous and quietly confi dent that a traditional Middle American upbringing would produce competence for any duty that could be thrown at him, including the presidency...
Vol. 13 • January 2007 • No. 18
