The Ford presidency

A few days ago, the New York Times published a remarkable bit of dialogue taken not from a play but from an actual exchange of private conversation between the President of the United States and one of his closest friends.

This man's name will be totally unknown to this generation and barely remembered even by people alive and politically kicking in 1952. He's the former governor of Pennsylvania, William Scranton and he's one of the seven close friends whom President Ford keeps on tap not as political advisers so much as friendly outsiders who are called on from time to time to say frankly what's right and what's wrong with the president's performance. 

This sounds like a healthy, sensible thing to do but in fact it's a very startling innovation. When you look back in our time, all the way to Hoover who departed from the White House in 1933, it's hard to find a close friend of a president, let alone seven, who isn't there, right inside the White House, maybe grumbling from time to time about this issue or that, but on the whole a friend dedicated to blowing the president's trumpet almost as a routine act of political loyalty. 

It's true that every president, like every king, has a court jester – a non-political buddy who's on call to provide diversion for the president when he's up to his gills in controversy or political machination. Such men, like the wealthy Vincent Astor in Roosevelt's day, take the president out on their yacht for a fishing trip or, like Johnnie Maier, they lighten the dark nights with a poker game and funny stories. 

But it has been, increasingly in our time, the rule and maybe the curse of the presidency that it has turned the White House into a court where even the closest friends are political generals protecting the president from his enemies; some people say protecting the president from the people. But, at any rate, men who, certainly since Truman on, regard their first duty of citizenship as unwavering personal loyalty to the president with the ghastly perversion of citizenship we all saw in the American record between October 1973 and October 1974, namely the first resignation in history of a vice president in the face of criminal charges, the first resignation of a president and the first pardon of a president for alleged criminal acts. 

So now we've just learned, President Ford keeps on hand seven men who are not in the government, don't work in the White House, are not friends called in to boost the president's morale when he's feeling low, but constitute a kind of informal review board of the president's actions, telling him as often when he's wrong as when he's right. 

Well, to come to that bit of dialogue recounted by Mr Scranton, it went like this: 

The president: Bill, you're opposed to the Nixon pardon.

Scranton: That's right.

The president: You weren't very enthusiastic about my economic programme.

Scranton: That's right.

The president: My food stamp decision drove you right up the wall.

Scranton: It sure did.

The president: You didn't favour military aid to South Vietnam.

Scranton: No, I didn't. 

The president, said Scranton, paused a moment there and said, 'Then why are you for me at all?' And Scranton replied, 'Because you're honest and decent and the first president I ever knew, and I've known several, who could talk to me like that.' 

Well, you wouldn't exactly build a presidential campaign on a snatch of dialogue like that but I suspect it bodes a lot of ill for the almost innumerable number of squabbling Democrats who have either announced they're running for the presidency next year or will, sooner or later, do so. 

If there's one thing the political commentators, and most politicians in both parties, agreed on, say, six months ago, it was that President Ford would be a caretaker president. After all, the people didn't vote him in. He's the first appointed president and the general view of his political performance in office, as the polls kept showing, was dim indeed. 

A good friend of mine, a lawyer who might be described as an embittered idealist, certainly a lifelong Democrat though he's now disgusted with the feuds and fractions that have made the Democrats in Congress fail so far to stop any of the president's programmes, this lawyer had a cutting response for me when I suggested some time during the winter that it was something to have in the White House a man who might not be the most intellectual president in history but presented the novelty, these last dozen years or more, of a transparently honest man. 'Listen!' said my lawyer, 'You have a grandson who's blue-eyed and comical and honest as the day is long, you want him to be President of the United States?' 

Well, the other day I dropped in to see him and he was as restless and moody as ever, no sign on his horizon of a Moses or an Adlai Stevenson. He'd just read a piece in a national conservative magazine proposing the ideal ticket for 1976. 'Can you believe it? Can you believe it!' he kept saying, gingerly holding the offending journal at arm's length like a bad, but still wriggling, lobster, 'Can you believe it? They say the country can be saved if we elect Ronald Reagan as President and George Wallace as Vice President. Reagan and Wallace? Ye Gods! They're not conservatives,' he said scornfully, 'they're far rightists. Might as well call in a couple of Portuguese generals!' 

Well, that's a pretty intemperate sentence but I quote it because it was only the preface to his next remark and it came, remember, from a man who I don't think has ever voted Republican in his life. 'But,' he said, with a gusty sigh, 'they're not going to make it. And you know why? Because an awful lot of people like me are going to vote for Gerald Ford.' He announced the name incredulously as if he'd said Woody Allen or Mrs Whitehouse. This was an impulsive remark, obviously, not one based on the careful balancing of pros and cons that so many serious newspaper editors seriously believe is how people vote. 

That same evening, I asked the lawyer's wife how she felt about her husband's dramatic switch. 'Well, for myself,' she said, 'I think I might vote for that Texan, what's his name? Benson, Bentson, Bentsner? I like his looks and his voice somehow reminds me of Roosevelt.' 

That is the stage we are at with the line-up of Democrats who have already come out as runners. We barely know their names and we have quite a time attaching the proper name to the proper face. We all know Senator Muskie of Maine and old Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota. It's hard to realise now that he was once the 'terrible Turk' of the young Democrats nearly 30 years ago. Harder still to think of him way back there as the vice president and now he's the bouncing old liberal of the party. And if the Democrats have to skip over the seven or eight already in training and fall back on him, I should think that the Democrats, saving some unforeseen catastrophe, are in a very bad way indeed. 

What, the well-informed person will want to know, but what has Ford done? Well, there again, I think a lot of Americans who've come around to more than a liking for him would have to hedge a little. What he's done, in the main, is manage to veto the Democrats programmes on energy, tax raising, prohibiting strip mining, and for as long as anybody can remember, the Democrats have failed to rally enough votes, the necessary two-third majority in Congress, to override the president's veto. 

The president's veto on legislation – which was invented in the constitution as an emergency check on any majority that might ride roughshod over the country – the veto was always regarded in the early days of the republic as an extraordinary weapon but for a hundred years or so it's been a regular weapon of a president who sees the Congress trying to frustrate his own legislative programme. 

Under Ford, it has become 'the' presidential weapon and you might well wonder why it has succeeded so often when you consider that, for the last 40 years or so, both the Senate and the House have had liberal Democratic majorities. In the present Congress, the Democrats have whopping majorities, 62 to 38 in the Senate, 290 to 144 (better than two to one) in the House. 

Surely it shouldn't be difficult for the Democrats to whip around on issues that are more regional or humane than party issues and get a two-thirds majority to override any veto the President could slap down? But they've failed time and again and what this does, I think, is to impress on people not so much the rights and wrongs of the liberal Democrats programme, but their woeful inability to unite with the other factions in their party and get anything done at all. 

It was a dreadful moment in the history of the Democratic Party when the Speaker of the House, Mr Albert, who in the American system is not just a referee of debates, he's also the leader of the majority party in the House, Mr Albert confessed in public that his party was weak through its divisions. 

But people don't judge the political temperature only by the fevers and chills in Congress. They look to see what's happening in the country and if it's good, they tend to attribute the good to the man in the White House – a simple inference but one made by the people of every nation on earth. 

When President Ford decided to give everybody a rebate on last year's income tax, literally, every one of us got a cheque from the government for a thousand dollars or a hundred dollars or something in between. The Democrats who were, of course, forced to pass such a gorgeous little bonus, they said it would have no effect on inflation or anything else. Well, maybe it didn't, but another rule of politics is that, when B happens after A, B happened because of A. The tax cheques came in and in one month the average worker was taking home four per cent more goods than he'd bought the month before. A year ago, the inflation rate in this country was 12 per cent. The president said it would come down to eight. Well, it's down to six per cent and while unemployment is at nine per cent, the House has unanimously passed a bill which the president re-drew to make many thousands of new jobs this summer. 

It's a sketchy picture of statesmanship but if the recession is over and inflation stays down and the Democrats go on fiddling and feuding, Gerald Ford next year might well unite enough of the people fed up with the liberal left and scared of the conservative right and bring them over to take possession, with a massive majority, of the centre which is the place that most Americans love to live and deposit their votes.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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