Gerald Ford is the only person to serve as president without being elected to either the presidency or the vice presidency. He was handed a poisoned chalice and for many he's only remembered as the butt of Saturday Night Live. But there's much more to his story.Don's guest is Professor Kathryn Brownell, author of 24/7 Politics: Cable Television and the Fragmenting of America from Watergate to Fox News.Edited by Tim Arstall, Produced by Freddy Chick, Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast.
Chapter 1: What made Gerald Ford an unelected president?
Thanks so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be back.
There is a fascinating biographical fact from Gerald Ford's earliest youth that I alluded to in the opening. And I just want to state it up front because I think it strikes a chord, a theme that is resonant throughout his entire life. Ford was born... Leslie Lynch King Jr. in Omaha, Nebraska, July 14th, 1913. But his parents separated weeks later and then divorced.
His mom and him moved back to Grand Rapids. And very soon afterwards in her life, his mom meets a guy named Gerald R. Ford. who is a very respectable guy with a wonderful painting business. And he gives that name to his newly or soon to be adopted son, Gerald R. Ford. And that's how Ford becomes his name. It's a fascinating thing.
And I think it's important only to understand at the outset that Gerald Ford always played a role in accommodating disruption. That's my point. And when that is imprinted early on in life, it sticks with you.
Absolutely. And that's something that you could see throughout his congressional career. He was really respected as someone that everyone liked, didn't cause a lot of controversy, didn't cause a lot of waves. And indeed, when Nixon had to find and appoint a replacement for Spiro Agnew after he resigned, the Watergate investigation had been heating up. And Speaker of the House, Carl Albert,
urged Nixon to pick someone that everyone liked. That was really what he urged. And he said, the person I encourage you to do, the one that everyone likes, is Gerald Ford.
Right. We'll get to all that in detail, but it's important to understand. I mentioned he is an enigma. People sort of never quite understood who he was because he was always kind of in the background of American politics. But that's kind of where it comes from, this psychology. He had three stepbrothers as a result of that remarriage.
He attended University of Michigan and was a star athlete, big time. Wolverine's MVP two years in a row, 1934 and 35. And this becomes important to me. I don't know why, but... Later on, he is incorrectly identified as a klutz, when in fact, this man was an astonishing footballer who almost went pro with the Green Bay Packers and the Detroit Lions. They were vying for him.
He went the path of law instead. He passes the bar in Michigan after he studied law at Yale, then joins the Navy in World War II, sees a lot of action in the South Pacific on an aircraft carrier called the USS Monterey. I just think it's important to understand this guy had a heck of a life early on and was very celebrated, even had a New York City model for a girlfriend.
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Chapter 2: How did Ford's early life shape his presidency?
I mean, it's so contrary to... to the reputation he has later on. He runs for Congress out of Grand Rapids, 1948. He beats the isolationist incumbent, Bartel Jonkman. Give me an idea of this time after World War II. What is the national politics in terms of the Republican Party?
Yeah, so the 1948 elections, especially in Congress, are really significant. You've got a very divided Democratic Party. And so the Democrats are really dividing between their southern wing. You have the Dixiecrats that kind of storm out of that convention. And so the Democratic Party is starting to come undone around some issues, especially around race in the aftermath of the war.
The Republican Party is not that much more unified. It also has these disparate wings. You have these more conservative pulses that are critiquing this notion that the United States should be an active global leader. And I think that that's something that really kind of comes out. Gerald Ford is on the other side.
He's very much part of this more moderate Republican party that is emerging that will coalesce.
around Dwight Eisenhower in 52 and really gained strength that the United States could and should be a world leader and should not rescind from that global stage the way that many, this isolation impulse, both in the Republican Party and there's some in the Democratic Party, but there is an isolationist, more conservative impulse in the Republican Party that loses out in 48 and then again in 52.
It's so interesting. I mean, I so value this series that we've done because it's given me perspective on the whole 20th century, really. But what happens after Truman, after World War II and his desegregation of the military, et cetera, right up until Brown versus Board of Education under Eisenhower, that whole period is really the engine of such discord, isn't it? It really splits everything.
Both parties, really. And it begins to set you up for Goldwater in 64 and then Nixon later on. And everything that kind of ripples through even to modern day starts at that period.
Yeah, it really is the beginning of a partisan realignment where parties go from being more regionally. and kind of finding common ground economically to really becoming more ideologically different. And in 1948, they were not ideologically different. In fact, there were a lot of ideological differences within parties, a lot of regional divides, a lot of class divides as well.
And so you really do, it really is the beginning of the political realignment that you see particularly Bursting on the scene in the Republican Party in 64 and then very much on display in 1980. Right.
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Chapter 3: What were the key events leading to Nixon's resignation?
You know, what's interesting is that this is under done under the 25th Amendment. Of course, the articles of the Constitution have originally ideas of the vice president stepping in, but they really changed the Constitution or sharpened it, I guess, with the 25th Amendment in light of the Kennedy assassination. 1967, this happened.
Yeah, and that's what's really interesting is because in the wake of the Kennedy assassination, there's a lot of attention to this question of succession and who has authority. But again, it hadn't actually been implemented until this. So it's the first time. So it's making constitutional history because it's the first time that they're following this new procedure.
which ultimately says that when there's a vacancy in the office of the vice president, the president shall nominate a vice president that will have to then be confirmed by the majority of both houses of Congress.
Right. This has not been attended to before. And this sets him up, as I said in the opening, to become the only unelected president in our entire history. So fascinating. From the moment Ford is inaugurated as vice president, December 6th, 1973, hardly approved by his congressional colleagues, as we said, Watergate then continues to unfold over the next year. Nixon won't resign until August 1974.
So that's 10 months after he's been named to vice president. We're going to run into the moment that Nixon gives up the office. He is called secretly on August 1st, 1974, by Alexander Haig, who was Nixon's chief of staff, who tells him to prepare. How does Ford go about this? Give me the whole experience that he's going through at this point.
Well, again, I think it's important to remember that there was a sign that this was coming. There was a feeling that things were moving and that impeachment was very, very real. And that is the only reason that Nixon was willing to resign, because he understood that after in May, the House Judiciary Committee began debating articles of impeachment.
And then, of course, there is this legal debate over the tapes. And does Nixon have privilege over them? Are they his property? The Supreme Court weighs in on the tapes in July, and then it becomes very clear that this is going to be the hard evidence.
And then people in Senate, notably Barry Goldwater, one of, again, the leader of this conservative wing, the Republican Party, who had gotten behind Nixon, who, as he was embattled, felt that they found common ground. They argued that it's this liberal media that's out to get Nixon. And so they found this common ground.
And then Barry Goldwater, when the evidence of the tapes comes out, he feels that Nixon had lied to them. He felt very betrayed, as did many people across the ideological spectrum in the Republican Party. And so he walks very famously down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Oval Office and tells Nixon that he has lost the support of his most ardent supporters.
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Chapter 4: How did Ford approach the challenges of his presidency?
So let's state this outright. Ford has nothing to do with Watergate, but he's going to find it hard to escape its shadow. That's the problem. Simply because it was hard to believe that there wasn't some kind of deal behind the scenes, that this healer of the nation would also be a partner of a crook. On August 8th, 1974, he is inaugurated and he announces our long national nightmare is over.
Many of us rolled our eyes. No, it's not. It just started. But thank you, Gerald Ford. He has done what he came to do. He's bridging us back to normalcy. That's how he sort of saw himself.
Yeah. And he in that in that same address, he talked about the importance of truth and straight talk. Those are the two terms that he used. And he really pledged that he would be honest to the American people after all of the deception and dishonesty that had been uncovered.
During the previous two years, but he's dealing with disillusionment. He's dealing with hostility, the political and well, the media environment is just a completely new, you know, can of worms after after The Washington Post is breaking all this stuff and it just gets kind of worse and worse. He's the guy who's really sort of standing there going, whoa, whoa, whoa.
This all used to work because we kind of got together, you know, over the Congress. But now the executive branch has just become the star of the show like never. Well, not like never before. It used to be under FDR. It's reemerged as a huge focus of Washington politics that hadn't been in my lifetime at the time. It was really a brand new game.
Yeah, by the 1970s, when Ford steps into the office of the presidency in 74, the president is the star in a way that even surpasses what Franklin Roosevelt did because of television, right? So it's not just the voice of the president that people are hearing. They're seeing him on this televised bully pulpit that Ford had actually pushed against in Congress for more opportunities for Congress
to have access to television because he and many others in Congress felt that TV had given the presidency too much power, too much power to set the presidential agenda, too much power in the public imagination at the expense of Congress. So Ford had been pushing in the 1960s for
using the equal time clause of the FCC in a way that would allow members of Congress like himself to be on television more. So he understood what this had done in terms of shifting the attention to the presidency. What he didn't understand were all of the behind the scenes mechanisms that into the production of the president as a television star.
And this is what he struggled with, is that he had a very small press operations as a representative from Michigan, very, very tiny. And they served many different roles. They weren't just focused on communications. When you go into the White House, you have an entire team of people that are constantly thinking about your image and your message and the staging and the presentation.
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Chapter 5: What impact did television have on Ford's presidency?
He's pursuing this Rose Garden strategy to try to bring, restore faith and prestige and integrity to the president, but he does that via the media, right? So he has to have this apparatus, while at the same time, people are concerned that that apparatus is the problem. It's part of the problem of corruption and hiding misdeeds as well.
But then you have the tail wagging the dog problem of media becoming its own big mess. You've written about this in your book. I'll plug you, 24-7 Cable. It's an important book because that is really such a huge theme in our society even today. I should point out, I mentioned Chevy Chase. This is the Saturday Night Live for audiences elsewhere who might not understand this.
At the same time as Gerald Ford comes along, this amazing show that's on today, 50 years later, is Saturday Night Live. And the star of that show is Chevy Chase. And Ford was just crosshairs for these guys because he was this nice guy president who was trying to do everything right but doing everything wrong at the same time somehow. A perfect foil, a perfect target for mockery.
And they make hay with him and do all sorts of things. This is what I mentioned in the beginning. He was characterized as this klutzy guy who was just sort of falling up and down stairs all the time and doing everything wrong. He was none of those things. He was a very, you know, poised individual, but it was the times. And so he was really getting the fray from what Nixon started.
Tell me how they portray him. What does he look like on that show?
Absolutely. So it's November of 1975 and Chevy Chase is debuting his new impersonation of Gerald Ford. And if you watch it, he doesn't dress like him. He doesn't try to impersonate, you know, the sound of his voice or any of his mannerisms. All he does is knock things over and he's klutzy.
And that's how, and you have, you know, this unpresidential seal that's on a podium, but that's really all that they're doing. But anyway, this was really new in terms of directly tackling saying, I'm Chevy Chase, right? And that's how he, or sorry, I'm Gerald Ford. So this starts in November and it made Ron Nussin, Gerald Ford's press secretary, it just made him cringe.
And then, but then he thought like, is there a way we can use this? And so that March, he and the president decided that they're going to invite Chevy Chase to perform at the White House Correspondents Dinner. And the president actually tries to turn the tables and says, I'm Gerald Ford and you're not, right? And so he sees this as a way to kind of tap it and try to reverse the narrative.
It's this battle of co-optation. Al Franken saw Ron Nussin when they were in the New Hampshire primary. And he said, you know, we should have you on the show. And Ron Nussin considered the offer. And ultimately, after the success of that March dinner, when Gerald Ford was in person, you know, kind of turned the tables on Chevy Chase, he decided that he would guest host the show.
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Chapter 6: How did Ford aim to restore trust in the presidency?
Absolutely. There had not been a television debate since 1960. And part of that is because those debates loomed large in the mind of Richard Nixon. He firmly believed that he lost the election because of those debates. The reality is much more complicated. But in his mind, it was those debates that like that really that triggered his downfall there. Lyndon Johnson in 64 is not going to debate.
He's, you know, he's the incumbent at that moment is running for election, right, as president. And so he's certainly not going, there's no incentive for him to debate. In 68, Richard Nixon sure is not going to do it. And he's not going to do it in 72. And so finally, you have these debates that
this question of will debates bring more transparency, more accountability by, you know, forcing the candidates to answer questions on TV directly to citizens. And there was a consensus that, yes, these are good things. It was about restoring accountability. And again, more of this transparency to the political process.
And it was the League of Women Voters, right? I mean, they were sponsoring the debates. That sounded so good in the ERA days.
Absolutely. And they're all about getting women to turn out, getting all of these different citizens engaged in the political process. And so, yes, absolutely. The League of Women Voters, they take charge, you know, they sponsor these debates. And both the parties agreed to them because they realized that in this broader environment where there's more scrutiny,
This scrutiny was originally seen as essential to ensuring that there's no corruption or unethical behavior. Of course, this is part of this broader tension is that you have more and more media scrutiny, but also then more efforts to control images. And so both sides are polling responses and polling issues. So it's actually less authentic.
but it was deemed as part of restoring authenticity to politics. And so it's this mass-mediated tension that really comes out of these debates. And it's part of this broader landscape that Ford and Carter are both navigating.
So the classic bio question, what do you make of Gerald Ford's legacy as a president? It's so short lived.
I think that he really is this transition person, a person that attempted to restore faith and integrity in democratic institutions after they were really called in to question. And he really does try to fulfill that role. You know, he says that, look, this is an example that the system works.
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