An Ordinary Man by Richard Norton Smith

Author:Richard Norton Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-02-04T00:00:00+00:00

FOR THE POLITICAL animal, nothing is more easily rationalized than a lost cause. During golf games that fall at Burning Tree Country Club, a tony all-male preserve with a $12,000 initiation fee, Tip O’Neill predicted disaster for Ford’s party in the November elections.

“It’s going to be an avalanche,” chortled O’Neill.

Had the decision been left to Don Rumsfeld, Ford would have stayed off the campaign trail. By sticking to his official duties, it was argued, prioritizing economic management over partisan barnstorming, the unelected president might bolster his public standing while distancing himself from the impending wipeout. Truth be told, not many GOP candidates were clamoring for his help. Ford was a much less valuable political commodity after September 8 than before. In the end, however, the old warhorse could not resist the clang of the bell. So he visited nineteen states before election day, traveling twenty thousand miles and delivering at least eighty-five speeches before a numbing array of airport rallies and half-empty arenas. In Cleveland, former Ohio governor James Rhodes, trying for a comeback against Democratic incumbent James Gilligan, pleaded a scheduling conflict to avoid sharing the dais with Ford. A presidential fundraising breakfast in Oklahoma City drew an embarrassing fifty-nine patrons. Recycling lines he had used as vice president, Ford warned of “legislative dictatorship” and “one party government” should Democrats achieve their goal of a veto-proof Congress. Before one audience he even suggested that “peace could be in jeopardy” unless apathetic voters did their civic responsibility by voting Republican.*

Ford’s campaign regimen made for a grueling schedule. “He didn’t want to leave the White House until four or five o’clock,” Special Assistant Terry O’Donnell remembers. “You know we’d fly out to Iowa to do a dinner for a congressman and a friend of his and he’d fly back because he wanted to be in the office in the morning because that’s the people’s business.” He didn’t want to spend the night “even though that would be the easy thing to do.” The last weekend of the campaign Ford was in California, where polls showed state comptroller Houston Flournoy, the GOP’s candidate for governor, rapidly gaining on Jerry Brown, son of Ronald Reagan’s two-term predecessor, Edmund “Pat” Brown. It was no accident that, before departing for the West Coast, Ford signed legislation making it illegal to deny credit to women on account of their sex. But if his gesture was intended to deflect talk of the pardon as a campaign issue, it was easily overshadowed by the simultaneous announcement of the latest monthly unemployment rate of 6 percent, a psychological tipping point whose timing could not have been worse for Republicans like Flournoy.

As for the man most responsible for his party’s plight, Richard Nixon remained politically radioactive even while fighting for his life. Ford had earlier in October expressed a desire to call the former president, who was facing surgery to avert potentially lethal blood clots, only to be talked out of it by Rumsfeld. Hours after the operation, performed on the morning of October 30, Nixon went into shock due to massive internal bleeding.

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