See pictures from the life of Gerald Ford
A word likely to be prominent in many obituaries of Gerald Ford is “accidental”. This is because he is the only man to have served in the Oval Office without ever having been directly elected either as president or vice-president. But this accidental sense was reinforced by the events of his time in office and his bumbling style. The same obituaries will also conclude that his main achievement was restoring the credibility of the White House after the Watergate debacle.
I take issue with this conventional wisdom. Ford was not an “accidental” president if that label implies his rise was random. Nor was his conduct in power the most important aspect of his time in the White House. The right word for him is “unwitting” — he benefited, unwittingly, from the death of one President Kennedy, and then, unwittingly, prevented another Kennedy presidency.
The men who wrote the American Constitution were ambivalent about the role of the vice-president. They were so ambiguous that when William Henry Harrison became the first President to die in office in 1841 there was heated debate as to whether his successor, John Tyler, should be referred to as President or Acting President. The Founding Fathers had also declined to outline what to do if the position of vice-president fell vacant either because the sitting president was dead or gone, or if the vice-president had died, resigned or retired between elections. As a result, when such circumstances arose, the United States just went on without a vice-president, leaving instead the Speaker of the House of Representatives next in line of succession to the White House.
This remained an academic constitutional issue until the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Lyndon Johnson, the Vice-President, took the oath of office but for 14 months his successor in the event of his death was John McCormack, Speaker of the House, an elderly gentleman palpably unsuited to serve as the leader of the free world at the height of the struggle with the Soviet Union. Prompted by Kennedy’s death, the Constitution was finally altered. The 25th Amendment states that if a vacancy for vice-president occurs, the president should put forward a name but both chambers of Congress have to approve that suggestion.
Without that change, Ford, then the leader of the Republicans in the House of Representatives, would never have become President. In October 1973, Vice-President Spiro Agnew resigned in disgrace when it was discovered that he had taken bribes while Governor of Maryland. Richard Nixon sought a replacement who would not split his own Republicans and yet was acceptable to the Democrats who controlled Congress. Ford was not an “accident”; he was the most plausible figure who fulfilled these political requirements. Less than a year later Nixon himself was history and Ford was elevated to the presidency.
What of his time as President? The standard script observes that his modest demeanour earned him instant and unexpected popularity, which he then wasted by pardoning his predecessor in a manner that smacked of a sordid arrangement between them. His Administration was then assailed by inflation and unemployment at home and the demands of the Cold War overseas, which at one stage looked as if they might overwhelm him.
Ford was challenged for the Republican nomination in 1976 by Ronald Reagan, who nearly unseated him, and left his party convention a whopping 36 percentage points behind Jimmy Carter, yet clawed his way back to an inch of victory. His recovery, the argument goes, was due to his underlying decency. This dignity was summed up by the first sentence in his successor’s inauguration address, which ran: “For myself and for our nation I want to thank my predecessor for all that he has done to heal our land.”
So far, so moving: but also, so what? After the imperial presidency constructed by Johnson and taken to its catastrophic conclusion by Nixon, whoever followed them could do nothing else but downsize. And after landslide Democratic victories in the 1974 congressional elections had left Republicans an endangered species in Washington, Ford had no choice but to talk tough on the economy yet focus on international affairs. He did this as competently as could be expected in turbulent times yet the notion that he had any option but to be a humble leader is improbable. He had no personal mandate, few partisan supporters to rely on in Capitol Hill and Americans would not have tolerated arrogance.
The true Ford effect was, once again, an unwitting one. By beating Reagan in the battle for his party’s nomination he saved Reagan from himself. It is very doubtful whether Reagan could have stopped Carter in 1976 — Ford as the incumbent President was the only Republican with any chance of winning — and if Reagan had lost against the Democrat peanut farmer that would have been the end of him.
What if, as he nearly did, Ford had defeated Carter? He would have faced a heavily Democratic Congress, a severe economic recession in 1979-80 and an ageing cabal in Moscow intent on sending troops into Afghanistan. He would have been ineligible for re-election in 1980 but, in these conditions, the Republican candidate would surely have been doomed at the polling stations. The odds are that the White House would have been captured by the most prominent Democrat in the land — Edward Kennedy.
The world we live in today might have been very different if that Kennedy, not Reagan, had occupied the Oval Office in the 1980s. He would not have followed policies that led to almost constant economic growth over the past 25 years nor taken on the Kremlin to the point where the Soviet Union imploded.
“What if” is an ultimately unanswerable question in history. Yet it is the real story of the Ford years.
Tim Hames