An Ordinary Man: The Surprising Life and Historic Presidency of Gerald R. Ford

By Richard Norton Smith

Wall Street Journal Top 10 Best Books of 2023

“Richard Norton Smith had brought a lifetime of wisdom, insight, and storytelling verve to the life of a consequential president—Gerald R. Ford. Ford’s is a very American life, and Smith has charted its vicissitudes and import with great grace and illuminating perspective. A marvelous achievement!” -- Jon Meacham

From the preeminent presidential scholar and acclaimed biographer of historical figures including George Washington, Herbert Hoover, and Nelson Rockefeller comes this eye-opening life of Gerald R. Ford, whose presidency arguably set the course for post-liberal America and a post-Cold War world.

For many Americans, President Gerald Ford was the genial accident of history who controversially pardoned his Watergate-tarnished predecessor, presided over the fall of Saigon, and became a punching bag on Saturday Night Live. Yet as Richard Norton Smith reveals in a book full of surprises, Ford was an underrated leader whose tough decisions and personal decency look better with the passage of time.

Drawing on hundreds of interviews and thousands of documents, Smith recreates Ford’s hardscrabble childhood in Michigan, his early anti-establishment politics and lifelong love affair with the former Betty Bloomer, whose impact on American culture he predicted would outrank his own. As president, Ford guided the nation through its worst Constitutional crisis since the Civil War and broke the back of the most severe economic downturn since the Great Depression—accomplishing both with little fanfare or credit (at least until 2001 when the JFK Library gave him its prestigious Profile in Courage Award in belated recognition of the Nixon pardon).

Less coda than curtain raiser, Ford's administration bridged the Republican pragmatism of Eisenhower and Nixon and the more doctrinaire conservatism of Ronald Reagan. His introduction of economic deregulation would transform the American economy, while his embrace of the Helsinki Accords hastened the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Illustrated with sixteen pages of black-and-white photos, this definitive biography, a decade in the making, will change history’s views of a man whose warning about presidential arrogance (“God help the country”) is more relevant than ever.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Apr 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9780062684189

Richard Norton Smith

Director of five presidential libraries, a familiar face to viewers of C-Span and the PBS News Hour, Richard Norton Smith is the author of, among other works, Thomas E. Dewey and His Times, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Patriarch: George Washington and the New American Nation; and On His Own Terms; A Life of Nelson Rockefeller.

Book preview

Dedication

For Oliver Sipple

Epigraph

Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.

—RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

A Note to the Reader

Introduction: A Capacity for Surprise

Prologue: Seven Days in June

Part I: Junior, 1912–1950

1: Secrets

2: Luck and Pluck

3: Yale

4: The View from the Bridge

5: Betty

6: Time for a Change

Part II: Everybody’s Friend, 1950–1972

7: A Modern Republican

8: The Middle of the Road

9: The Congressman’s Congressman

10: The Warren Commission

11: Holding the Line

12: The Good Soldier

Part III: The Replacement, June 1972–October 1974

13: Ahead of the Curve

14: The Worst Job I Ever Had

15: My God, This Is Going to Change Our Whole Life

16: Change and Continuity

17: The Pardon

18: Clearing the Decks

Part IV: Riding the Tiger, October 1974–December 1976

19: Run Over by History

20: A President in the Making

21: The Cruelest Month

22: Starting Over

23: The Dangerous Summer

24: The Cat Has Nine Lives

25: The Road to Kansas City

26: I’m Feeling Good About America

Part V: When Is This Retirement Going to Start? 1976–2006

27: Do What You Can

28: Lights in a Tree

Epilogue: God Help the Country

Acknowledgments

Selected Bibliography

Notes

Index

Photo Section

About the Author

Also by Richard Norton Smith

Copyright

About the Publisher

A Note to the Reader

THE CIRCUMSTANCES SURROUNDING Gerald Ford’s formative years, and the several boyhood names by which he was identified, could hardly be more muddled. Born Leslie King Jr. in July 1913, he was two weeks old when his mother, fearing for both their lives, abandoned her brutish husband. Eventually she and her infant son settled in Grand Rapids, Michigan. There she met and in time married a local businessman named Gerald Ford (Sr.). Throughout his childhood the future president was variously known as Junior King, Junior Ford, plain Junior or its diminutive Junie. I have employed these names as appropriate, while making every effort to avoid confusion with either his blood father or the stepfather he considered his true parent. The reader is both forewarned and reassured that the problem solves itself by the time Junie Ford reaches his fifteenth birthday and is rebranded Gerald R. Ford Junior, the name by which he was known until the 1962 death of his stepfather.

Introduction

A Capacity for Surprise

Bob Woodward (to Ford speechwriter Robert Hartmann, seventeen years after publication of Hartmann’s tell-all White House memoir): Is there anything that stayed hidden that I should know about?

Hartmann: Ford was hidden.

NO ONE WAS more surprised to find himself invited to a White House stag dinner in the spring of 1975 than Senator George McGovern, the prairie populist crushed by Richard Nixon in the 1972 presidential election. McGovern’s fierce opposition to the Vietnam War had made him persona non grata to presidents of both parties. Lyndon Johnson never invited me to dinner, the South Dakota Democrat told Nixon’s successor. And you can be sure that Richard Nixon didn’t.

I know, George, replied Gerald Ford. That’s why I asked you. Policy disagreements notwithstanding, the house belongs to everyone. Now more than ever.

Ford’s penchant for the unexpected was not always so gracefully executed. On a Sunday morning in September 1974, a disbelieving nation woke to the news that he was pardoning Nixon for any and all offenses relating to the June 1972 Watergate break-in and subsequent cover-up that led to the president’s resignation. Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post spoke for millions when he told his journalistic partner Bob Woodward, The son of a bitch pardoned the son of a bitch. Ford used even harsher language in explaining his action. Nixon really fucked up the pea patch, he told a White House visitor. It will cost me the ’76 election, but I had to do it.*

Overnight Ford’s approval rating dropped twenty-two points, a descent unmatched in the history of public opinion polling, and a fair measure of how profoundly he had misread the popular mood. Privately Ford countered that he wasn’t forgiving Nixon so much as he was trying to forget him; more precisely, to redirect his energies, and the country’s attention, toward a rapidly deteriorating economy as well as escalating tensions in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Whatever his motives, Ford’s methods of deciding the fate of his disgraced predecessor shredded any stitches of trust woven during his first month in office. With the stroke of a pen the nation’s only unelected president had smudged his claims to legitimacy. He also wrote the opening sentence of his historical obituary.

Nearly half a century later, Ford remains the president with an asterisk beside his name. The least self-dramatizing of men, long before No Drama Obama, he guided the nation through its worst constitutional crisis since the Civil War. Later he broke the back of the harshest economic downturn since the Great Depression. And he accomplished both with so little fanfare that he got scant credit for either. To the contrary: in popular memory Ford is wedged between three Shakespearean predecessors—the idealized JFK, tormented LBJ and self-destructive Nixon—and the transformative figure of Ronald Reagan, a sunny revolutionary who remade his party as he replaced the existing New Deal–ish consensus with one suspicious of, if not hostile to, government solutions.

In such company Ford appears out of his depth, the genial embodiment of a decade recalled more for polyester and platform shoes than as an incubator of meaningful change. It was his misfortune to take the helm in a time of cultural upheaval, during which irony curdled into snark and authority was flogged like a medieval penitent by Saturday Night Live, the satirical game changer that cut its teeth on the new president’s alleged clumsiness and intellectual shortcomings. Admittedly no Great Communicator, Ford’s verbal gaffes inspired a New York Magazine cover depicting him as Bozo the Clown.* A commemorative marker in his hometown of Grand Rapids allegedly read, GERALD FORD SLIPPED HERE.

That Ford should be the last American president capable of conducting his own press briefings on the annual federal budget testifies to an expertise gained during a quarter century as a congressional appropriator. But it was no substitute for Rooseveltian eloquence or Reaganesque wit. This presents a special challenge to the Ford biographer, one neatly summarized in an exchange between the present author and a writer friend whose familiarity with my 2014 life of Nelson Rockefeller evoked a tart parallel. From Rockefeller to Gerald Ford, he mused. That’s the difference between a peacock and a brown sparrow. With the perspective of almost five decades and eight post-Ford presidencies, the subsequent cooling of partisan emotions and access to papers and oral histories formerly off-limits, the time is right for a comprehensive Ford biography that combines scholarly rigor with popular accessibility.

When Jimmy Carter in his 1977 inaugural address complimented his predecessor for all he had done to restore public trust during his brief White House tenure, he fostered an image at once flattering and curiously stilted. In the years since, most Ford portraiture has been of the two-dimensional variety. There is Ford the Healer, saddled with inherited failures (the economy, Vietnam, a runaway CIA) the resolution of which evokes his response when the family’s golden retriever soiled the presidential carpet. Waving off some White House stewards, Ford said that no man should have to clean up after another man’s dog. Yet that is exactly what he was forced to do, repeatedly, as president. In the shrewd observation of biographer John Robert Greene, Ford the Healer becomes the man who saved the country from Nixon, prepared the country for Carter and Reagan, and did little of substance on his own.

A second, even less complimentary scenario replaces Ford the Healer with Good Old Jerry, congressional warhorse–turned–presidential caretaker, a man whose personal decency could neither compensate for his limited vision nor overcome the stigma of his association with Richard Nixon. Notwithstanding his bold assertion on August 9, 1974, America’s long national nightmare was not over. Far from it. Balancing continuity against change, having no wish to tar innocent staffers with the guilt of their White House superiors, Ford waited too long to expel Nixon holdovers whose allegiance would always be suspect. Nobody leaves the plane without a parachute, he announced. On another occasion he declared, My whole philosophy of life is—I don’t assume somebody is trying to screw me. Such comments prompted a query rarely heard around 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue: Can a president be too nice to succeed?

Much as Ford’s public life deserves fresh appraisal, it is his personal story that most calls into question the familiar formulas: An ordinary man summoned by extraordinary events. A politician without guile. What you see is what you get. The reality—at least the one I have been able to piece together—is considerably more nuanced. Ford’s nice guy reputation masked an ambition intense even by modern standards. In 1960 he mounted a vigorous, if futile, campaign to be Richard Nixon’s running mate. That he learned of Vice President Spiro Agnew’s legal problems at least six months earlier than he ever acknowledged is revealed here for the first time, as is his cultivation of Democratic support to fill the vacancy left by Agnew’s resignation in October 1973.

Regarded as the ultimate Nixon loyalist, Ford as vice president actually chafed in the role of presidential defender (he later confided to Dick Cheney the eight months he spent in the job were the worst of his life). When Nixon’s old nemesis Earl Warren died in July 1974, Ford went out of his way to honor the liberal chief justice by pausing before his bier in the Supreme Court building, well aware of the offense it would give his boss. That same month Warren’s successor as chief justice, Nixon appointee Warren Burger, joined a unanimous court in ruling that the embattled president must turn over to the Watergate prosecutor hitherto secret White House tape recordings. The decision effectively sealed Nixon’s fate, yet even then efforts to spare him a courtroom trial and possible conviction put Ford’s presidency at risk before it began.

Ford had his wife, Betty, to thank for questioning the motives of White House chief of staff Alexander Haig after Haig mentioned a presidential pardon in the same breath as a putative Nixon resignation. As president, Ford repaid the debt by embracing Betty’s work on behalf of the Equal Rights Amendment, refusing to attend the 1975 Gridiron Dinner unless it was opened to women, and making Carla Hills only the third woman to occupy a seat around the Cabinet table. Do you know who would make a great Supreme Court justice? Ford asked White House lawyers when a high court vacancy presented itself in December 1975. Barbara Jordan. It’s hard to imagine anyone else in his administration identifying the decidedly left-of-center congresswoman from Texas as a suitable replacement for the retiring William O. Douglas. Clearly, Gerald Ford could be a surprising man.

WAS THERE EVER a Ford Administration? inquired novelist John Updike. Evidence for its existence seems to be scanty. For once the writer’s powers of observation failed him. As the tectonic plates of consensus inched away from the Washington-centric outlook prevailing since the 1930s, Ford established himself as the first true post–New Deal president. Less coda than curtain raiser, his administration serves as a bridge between Nixonian pragmatism and the more doctrinaire conservatism of Ronald Reagan. Case in point: economic deregulation (which Ford preferred to call regulatory reform"). It began on his watch with the railroad and financial services industries, gathered bipartisan momentum under Carter and Reagan and achieved global respectability and a new emphasis on privatization in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain.

Ford’s free-market approach represented a decisive break from his predecessor’s wage and price controls. His economic policies anticipated the monetarist strategies of Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan. Meeting economist Arthur Laffer in a hotel bar where the father of supply-side economics drew his famous curve for them, Ford agents Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney were inducted into Reaganomics before its namesake was.* Hoping to reduce American dependence on Middle East oil, Ford proposed a variety of incentives to increase domestic energy production. Unable to legislate the rapid decontrol of oil or natural gas prices, he succeeded in establishing the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, a fifty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit and the first CAFE standards to make American cars more energy efficient.

The Ford domestic agenda stretched beyond economics and energy policy. In Boston, court-ordered school busing ignited riots reminiscent of the mobs outside Central High School in Little Rock a generation earlier. The resulting crisis competed for attention with a botched campaign to combat swine flu; a pair of presidential assassination attempts; IRAs and ATMs; the near insolvency of America’s greatest city; the unanimous confirmation of a Supreme Court nominee selected for his intellect, not his ideology, after a congressional hearing in which no one raised the subject of abortion; and a bicentennial observance that joyously affirmed how much the country’s mood had improved since the bleak summer of 1974.*

Foreign policy afforded a still greater contrast with the status quo as Ford, a career legislator, battled his former colleagues to uphold what he called the imperiled presidency. As memorable as the image of Richard Nixon’s helicopter carrying a disgraced leader into exile are the helicopters of Saigon evacuating Americans and thousands of their South Vietnamese collaborators from rooftop landing pads in April 1975. Practically speaking, there was little Ford could do to prevent a final humiliation as North Vietnamese forces overran the South’s capital. Yet in the days immediately after the fall of Saigon he averted an even greater surrender, by shaming a resistant Congress into funding the resettlement on American soil of thousands of Vietnamese refugees. To do less, Ford argued, was to add moral bankruptcy to military defeat.

The Helsinki Accords, signed in August 1975, traded recognition of existing postwar boundaries in Europe, as favored by the Soviet Union, for the mutual acceptance and enforcement of human rights on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Widely denounced at the time, Helsinki is now regarded as an important milestone on the road to European liberation. In the volatile Middle East, the American president took steps to separate the warring parties as a prelude to substantive peace talks. Ford might have achieved more in foreign affairs but for domestic politics. Fears of a Reagan challenge from the right caused the administration to slow-walk potentially historic deals restricting nuclear weapons and returning the Panama Canal to the nation whose sovereignty was affronted every day it remained in Yankee possession.

Ford displayed greater intestinal fortitude in revamping US policy toward Africa, dispatching Secretary of State Henry Kissinger on the eve of a crucial Republican primary in Texas to proclaim support for Black majority rule in the former Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). This in turn sent an unmistakable signal to South Africa’s apartheid regime that its days were numbered. So bold a departure, however admirable in the abstract, was unlikely to advance the president’s chances among Lone Star Republicans sympathetic to Ronald Reagan’s harsh criticism of détente with the Soviet Union.

No one grasped this more instinctively than James Baker, then a junior Commerce Department official, soon to distinguish himself as the president’s shrewdest delegate counter and manager of his fall campaign against Jimmy Carter. Baker registered his unhappiness with Chief of Staff Dick Cheney, who shared his concerns, but had been unable to convince the president of the political risks entailed in Kissinger’s mission. Cheney urged Baker, if he felt so strongly about the issue, to make his own appeal directly to the old man. An appointment was scheduled, allowing Baker to reiterate for the president the dangers inherent in the administration’s African U-turn. If Kissinger’s travels couldn’t be postponed, pleaded Baker, might not the secretary at least forgo a big splashy press conference in advance of his departure? Through it all, Ford sat quietly—everyone agrees he excelled at listening—puffing on the pipe he sometimes used to control the pace of decision-making.*

When his turn came, Ford thanked Baker warmly for sharing his views. He praised Kissinger for the job he was doing in Africa. Moreover, he added, I think he ought to tell the American people about it. And, anyway, the thinking Republicans in Texas will understand.

Mr. President, replied Baker, with respect to this issue, there are no thinking Republicans in Texas right now.

Ford’s ability to laugh at his own expense was severely tested that spring, as he struggled to put down Reagan’s conservative uprising. The immediate problem was his campaign style, best described as plodding, and made worse by speeches that had the opposite of their intended effect. When he walked onto a stage, Ford once confessed, I’m never quite who I want to be. Pitted against the mediagenic Reagan, whose Hollywood training and natural charisma put him in a class with FDR and JFK, Ford evoked a high school coach exhorting his underdog players before the big game. From Reagan’s California the legendary strategist Stu Spencer was recruited to convince a sitting president, slow to grasp the theater of modern politics, that he risked squandering the advantage of incumbency unless he stayed off the campaign trail altogether.

Armed with the latest discouraging poll data, Spencer was admitted to the Oval Office, where an enthusiastic Ford anticipated a heavy travel schedule for the fall campaign. After several failed attempts at candor, Spencer abandoned euphemism in favor of the direct approach.

Forgive me, Mr. President, as a campaigner, you’re no fucking good.

It is hard to imagine an ordinary man—still less any modern American president—calmly accepting this evaluation. Yet Ford gave no sign of offense. Cut to the sequel, in which veteran journalist Jules Witcover included the incident in Marathon, his book on the 1976 campaign. Spencer’s reaction can easily be imagined. Appalled to see his crude putdown in print, the campaign strategist vented his anger on Dick Cheney, the chief of staff who had sat in on the Ford-Spencer meeting. The stoical Cheney listened for a while, then took advantage of a brief pause in the verbal abuse to remind Spencer they had not been alone in the Oval Office. Indeed, a third person had been present as Spencer offered his blunt estimate of the president’s alleged shortcomings on the stump.

Suddenly it dawned on Stu Spencer. Improbable as it seemed, it was Ford himself, quietly amused by his adviser’s act of lèse-majesté, who had leaked the story to Witcover. He may have lost an election, but not his capacity for surprise.

Prologue

Seven Days in June

I was standing this far away from John Mitchell and he looked me right in the eye and he lied to me. That damn guy lied to me.

—GERALD R. FORD

JERRY FORD IS nothing if not self-disciplined. A month shy of his fifty-ninth birthday, the congressman from Grand Rapids exudes the vitality of a much younger man. A lanky six feet in height, Ford may be losing his hair, as the sandy-blond thatch of his youth retreats to a darkening corona. But he retains his waistline. The punishing round of calisthenics with which he starts each day, followed by twenty minutes of laps in a backyard heated pool, is little changed from the regimen long ago prescribed a square-jawed high school football hero. The sound of her husband splashing in the olive light of predawn serves as an alarm clock of sorts for Ford’s wife, Betty, at least on mornings when he is home. Since he became House minority leader in 1965, there have been years when he devotes more nights to the rubber chicken circuit than to 514 Crown View Drive in suburban Alexandria, Virginia.

Today, June 17, 1972, is such a day. Why would Jerry Ford spend Father’s Day weekend attending to the needs of a Michigan district whose voters have returned him to office twelve times since 1948? Chalk it up to personal ambition, and a will to win undiminished in the quarter century since Ford took on the local political establishment and ousted an entrenched GOP congressman who thought America’s global responsibilities ended somewhere around the Indiana state line. A friend privy to Ford’s grueling travel schedule once prescribed time on a California golf course, golf being a Ford passion second only to politics. I wish I could do this more often, Ford told his friend in the clubhouse after their game. But I’ve got to go out there and win those seats so I can be Speaker.

His single-minded pursuit of the gavel once wielded by Henry Clay and Sam Rayburn exacts a heavy toll. After seven years as minority leader, even Jerry has grown weary of the endless road shows, the indistinguishable hotel rooms and smoky banquet halls that separate him from his wife and children. He feels guilt over the additional burdens imposed on Betty Ford, forced in his absence to function as mother-father, house disciplinarian and congressional surrogate. She holds down the fort, says her oldest son, Mike. She’s the anchor for the whole family. A stylish former dancer and model, Betty gamely battles a pinched nerve and the grinding pain of arthritis, chronic conditions dulled by pills and a vodka and tonic or two, which help fill the hours between adolescent crises and Jerry’s phone calls from the road.

Lately the Fords have pursued their own version of détente. Should November fail to deliver Jerry’s long-sought goal of a Republican House, he will retire after one more campaign, at an age when he may reasonably hope to earn enough as a lawyer and part-time lobbyist to provide his family some comforts unaffordable on a congressman’s salary. And Betty and her children can reclaim the man neatly summarized in the career advice he gives to anyone contemplating a life in politics. "Don’t, Ford advises potential candidates, if you

aren’t willing to work 70 hours per week,

have family or marital problems,

expect to make a great deal of money,

do not like people and working on their problems,

are thinned skinned [sic] and can’t take public criticism,

are only interested in the glamour of the title or the responsibility.

Over the years Ford’s attention to the residents of the Fifth District has bordered on the pastoral. When, early in his congressional career, a visiting member of the Daughters of the American Revolution fell on a Washington street corner and broke her ankle, no one knew how she was going to get back to Michigan, until Ford offered to drive her there himself. A quarter century later, he still insists that every letter addressed to him receive a personal response, within twenty-four hours if possible. This includes high school debaters researching their topic, candidates for a small business loan and the female traveler who desires an introduction to officials at the US embassy in London so she won’t be lonely on Thanksgiving Day. Following a rash of UFO sightings in Southern Michigan, Ford was showered with letters and telegrams demanding a federal investigation. He duly complied, even while acknowledging doubts about planet people possessed of the antigravity secret roaming the universe at fifty thousand miles per hour.

Ford’s Capitol Hill office opens at seven a.m., two hours ahead of his colleagues. We campaign 365 days a year, he reminds his staff. As a result, scarcely a birthday, wedding, obituary, civic award or graduating class in West Michigan goes unrecognized by the United States Congress. An elderly couple, otherwise unknown to their congressman, is nevertheless touched to receive anniversary greetings under his signature. Years later, on learning that the wife is in a nursing home, close to death, Ford drops by for a consoling visit. The strongest weapon in a political campaign is the good credited to you by word of mouth—this Ford credo goes a long way toward explaining him and the congressional mindset he personifies. By stressing individual contacts over ideological mandates, Ford defines leadership in transactional terms, constituent service on a grand scale. His is a vision of government suspicious of visionaries. When asked the secret of his political success, Ford reveals more than he perhaps intends by replying, I made everyone else’s problems my problems.

To those who know him merely as a partisan scrapper and indifferent orator, Ford is an easy man to underestimate. At the White House, domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman imagines that in another life he might make a successful Grand Rapids insurance salesman. Detractors liken him to the furniture, solid but unexciting, for which his hometown is nationally recognized. I keep reading that I’m a plodder, that I’m not one who shakes up the establishment, says Ford. It is an assessment he is quick to dispute, citing not only the youthful insurgency that first landed him, a Republican, in Congress in the Democratic year of 1948, but his subsequent willingness to cross party lines and substitute constructive opposition for outworn dogma. His press secretary, Paul Miltich, struggles to find an accurate label to encapsulate Ford’s politics. He is both a liberal and conservative, concludes Miltich, a kind of young Eisenhower. Twice in recent months Ford has signed a discharge petition to pry legislation out of the House Rules Committee—once for the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, which would assure women legal equality with their male counterparts; and once for legislation halting the practice of court-ordered busing to achieve racial balance in the nation’s schools.

A Nixon stalwart since their first encounter on the floor of the House in January 1949, Ford is a cosponsor of the president’s Family Assistance Program who nevertheless objects to its proposed $2,400 annual income as inadequate for a family of four. Uncomfortable with his party’s racially insensitive mantra of law and order, he much prefers the phrase order with justice under the law. A child of the Depression, Ford has been known to roam the halls of Congress switching off lights to save money. Office workers testify to his habit of wearing pencils down to their stubs. Yet he also supports limits on campaign spending, abolition of the Electoral College and the extension of voting rights to eighteen-year-olds. His executive secretary, Mildred Leonard, says she has never known a more even-tempered man. True to form, Ford admonishes a newcomer to his Washington staff, You have to be nice, even if you have a headache.

Obscured from all but a few intimates is the anger inherited from his blood father, a disreputable wife abuser whose violent behavior drove Ford’s mother, less than a month after the birth of their only child, to seek safety under the roof of Chicago relations. Those who know him best liken Ford to a well-mannered member of the family Ursidae—98% teddy bear and 2% grizzly. He is at his best in small groups, where his evident integrity and command of subject offset any charisma deficit. Along with a near-photographic memory for names and numbers, Ford has a functional turn of mind, impatient with abstractions. As an eighth grader his son Steve aspired to a place on his school’s freshman football team. The boy shared this ambition with his father, who noted the long odds against such a promotion. But I’ll tell you what, the elder Ford interjected. If you can do one thing that nobody else can do, I can get you on the team.

It didn’t take long for him to identify such a talent. There’s nobody that can snap for punts, he told Steve, and I’m going to teach you how. True to his word, in seemingly endless backyard drills, Michigan’s onetime star center showed the boy how he had snapped the ball for the Wolverines. Evidently the lessons took, for Steve Ford made the freshman squad, and went on to earn his letter, all because he—his father the congressman—came up with a plan to get me on the team.

HAS SUCCESS SPOILED Jerry Ford? Hometown critics point to his national profile and incessant travel as evidence that he has outgrown the people who first sent him to Washington. It is to counter such arguments that he returns as often as he does. A classic early bird who thrives on six hours of sleep a night, Ford begins this Saturday with a ninety-minute skull session courtesy of Vern Ehlers, a Berkeley-trained nuclear physicist lured away from the California school to build a physics department at Grand Rapids’ Calvin College. Inspired by comments made at a meeting of the American Physical Society, Ehlers wrote his congressman offering to recruit other scientists to informally advise him on matters of relevance to their field. Expecting a form response, Ehlers was surprised to receive, two days later, a phone call from Ford’s administrative assistant Frank Meyer.

Jerry really thinks it’s a great idea and he’d like to have you put that together.

Soon all three men were discussing the panel’s organization and membership. Were they interested in hearing from Republican scientists exclusively? Ehlers asked. Of course, said Meyer.

Well, I don’t see why, Ford interrupted. We want scientific advice, not political advice.

Ever since he has consulted Ehlers and his brethren on issues ranging from surface coal mining to the proposed SST supersonic airplane (Ford supports the revolutionary aircraft despite objections from his brain trust). This morning he proves yet again that scientists have no monopoly on deductive reasoning. By nine forty-five, having wrung out all the useful information he can, Ford thanks the group’s members for their time and expertise. Ehlers stays behind to pose a question of his own. Here you are, an extremely busy congressman, he tells Ford. You come back on the weekend; you meet with constituents; and then you come and meet with us and spend an hour and a half or two hours . . . and you seem to enjoy it. Why?

Ford slips an arm around the professor’s shoulders. Well, Vern, you’ve got to recognize one thing. You’re the only people who meet with me for the purpose of giving me something instead of asking me for something. All day long I sit in that office and people come in and ask me for favors. And you come along and you’re here to help me.*

A few minutes later Ford strides onto the stage of Welsh Auditorium, an art deco relic named for a Depression-era mayor of Grand Rapids. Nearly four thousand members of the Michigan VFW greet him as a kindred spirit. In his speech Ford combines praise of Nixon for his outreach to historic adversaries in Moscow and Beijing with a hard-liner’s call for the development of new weapons systems, if only to enable future presidents to negotiate from a position of strength. Ford mentions a forthcoming trip to the People’s Republic of China, on which he is to depart at the end of the week. Afterward a meager lunch of cottage cheese doused in A.1. sauce is followed by the dedication of a government housing project in the nearby village of Rockford. No doubt Jean McKee, his personable Democratic opponent in this fall’s contest to represent the Fifth District, will contrast Ford’s support of the Rogue Valley Towers with his earlier votes to cut Section 8 funding. She has a point, though Ford is far from the first fiscal conservative to oppose a Washington-funded initiative, only to lobby its administrators for a seat on the gravy train.

For proof one need look no further than Vandenberg Center, a bland compound of boxy government office buildings in downtown Grand Rapids replacing a much-loved Victorian-era city hall. In the windblown plaza a rawboned abstract sculpture, all curves and sharp edges, evokes the rushing river from which the city derives its name. Forty-three feet of plated steel, painted industrial orange, La Grande Vitesse (the great swiftness) resembles nothing so much as a derrick-less oil well pumping up crude from the Michigan tundra. The work of celebrated artist Alexander Calder, it is the brainchild of a local arts enthusiast named Nancy Mulnix. In the spring of 1967, prompted by a visiting curator from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Mulnix wrote Congressman Ford to determine whether the federal government might be willing, through the recently established National Endowment for the Arts, to help underwrite a civic artwork dignifying the featureless expanse of Vandenberg Center. Ford just as promptly endorsed her request with a call to Roger L. Stevens, founding chairman of the endowment.

A legendary theatrical producer, Stevens was to prove the wiliest of bureaucrats. By authorizing the nation’s first publicly funded work of art for Grand Rapids—self-proclaimed Furniture City and Calvinist bastion—Stevens hoped to allay conservative suspicions that his was an elitist enterprise contemptuous of flyover country. Enlisting the House Republican leader as his cosponsor was strategic icing on the cake. One week after her appeal to Ford, Nancy Mulnix received an encouraging phone call from Stevens. Ultimately the NEA pledged $45,000 to the project. When at last the components were shipped across the Atlantic and bolted into place—Aaron Copland composed a fanfare for its June 1969 dedication—La Grande Vitesse transformed more than a barren patch of downtown Grand Rapids.

Equally dramatic was the change visible in the congressman representing the Fifth District. At the outset, Ford readily admitted to House colleagues, I did not know what a Calder was. But I can assure the members that a Calder in the center of the city . . . has really helped rejuvenate Grand Rapids. As president, Ford would award Calder the Presidential Medal of Freedom and, at a time of budgetary austerity, authorize a significant hike in NEA spending. His personal taste in art remained defiantly traditional. When the builders of his presidential museum came to him seeking artistic guidance regarding a work to grace the building’s entrance, Ford made two requests. He did not want a statue of himself greeting visitors, he told them. And whatever art the committee came up with, he hoped it would be representational and not abstract.*

Sunday, June 18

It was late last night when Ford returned to the Pantlind Hotel from Lansing and an appearance before the American Legion Boys State convention. Since nothing he said there was likely to stop the presses, the news that commands his attention on this quiet Sabbath is not to be found in the Grand Rapids Press but in a fragmentary report broadcast on his car radio en route to Grace Episcopal Church, where he frequently ushers with his brother Dick. Five men with apparent links to the Central Intelligence Agency were arrested early Saturday morning while attempting to bug Democratic National Committee offices located in the Watergate complex in Northwest Washington.

Flabbergasted by what he hears, Ford is naturally curious about the origins of the break-in. It is one more distraction in a week crowded with preparations for his China trip and an escalating battle to enact a federal revenue-sharing program, cornerstone of President Nixon’s so-called New Federalism. Under the administration’s plan, financially beleaguered state and local governments would receive $5.3 billion as a down payment on a five-year commitment totaling $30 billion. For Grand Rapids and its environs, this windfall translates into an additional $20 million to construct sewerage systems and provide summer jobs for inner-city youth. Because the money comes virtually without strings, replacing categorical grants that can ensnare federal aid in onerous red tape, revenue sharing poses a radical departure from the centralization of power in Washington that began with the New Deal and reached new heights under Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.

Ford has another reason to champion revenue sharing. Breaking with Senator Robert Taft’s classic admonition that the duty of the opposition is to oppose, Republicans under Ford have adopted a new battle cry: We have a better way. Replacing a less aggressive GOP leader in January 1965, Ford appointed more than a dozen task forces to develop Republican proposals on health insurance, voting rights, aid to education, environmental protection and the war on poverty. On his own he pitched a Human Investment Act designed to lure private dollars into the nation’s worst pockets of unemployment. After a sluggish start, Ford and his legislative allies began to punch above their weight, their morale boosted by Ford’s tireless campaigning for constructive conservatives like George H. W. Bush of Texas. It is so important . . . that we offer solutions to problems and that we dispel the image of Republicans as aginners, wrote Bush, now Republican National Chairman but in 1967 a freshman congressman singled out for advancement by Leader Ford.

That said, nothing promoted by Ford has roused such fervent opposition as revenue sharing. Conservatives in both parties look askance at any initiative adding to the federal deficit. Liberals fear the slow unraveling of national standards and a diminished role for Washington in guaranteeing social and economic justice. Only recently the bill’s sponsors were forced to postpone final action for two weeks, in the hope that Speaker Carl Albert would round up additional votes among his Democratic brethren. Even now the outcome is in doubt.

Monday, June 19

Ford begins his legislative workweek in the pastel blue Congressional Prayer Room just off the Capitol Rotunda. Here he and a quartet of Republican colleagues—collectively dubbed the Five Sisters—meet for spiritual reflection every Monday morning at seven thirty. By then it’s a safe bet the supplicants will have seen this morning’s Washington Post, the contents of which might drive less devout legislators to their knees. According to the Post, four of the five burglars arrested at the Watergate two days ago have ties to the Cuban exile community in South Florida. The fifth, James McCord, is reportedly security director for the Nixon reelection campaign.

The news prompts some waggish commentary from Democratic lawmaker Lionel Van Deerlin.

Mother is merely a shoplifter,

Sister picks pockets with me.

Brother prowls only in pawn shops—

But Dad’s with the GOP.

Whether Ford is laughing may be doubted. As it happens, he has on his calendar a previously planned meeting with John Mitchell, the Nixon attorney general, who, earlier this year, left the Justice Department to oversee the president’s reelection effort. First, however, Ford visits his longtime friend Jack Marsh, a former Democratic congressman from Virginia whose office is eight floors above the Committee for the Reelection of the President (CREEP) at 1701 Pennsylvania Avenue. Jerry, I know this fellow McCord, Marsh greets him, and I know he works closely with John Mitchell. A few weeks earlier McCord, then in the act of establishing a nearby office for Martha Mitchell, had asked if he could borrow Marsh’s telephone and copying machine. The same visitor had identified himself as security chief of the Nixon campaign.

McCord’s apparent involvement in the recent break-in rattles Marsh’s nerves. It doesn’t help that McCord has known ties to the CIA. Ford offers reassurance. Dick Nixon is much too smart a politician to have been involved in anything like that. His subsequent encounter with Mitchell tests his confidence. Sufficiently curious to arrive a few minutes early at the offices of CREEP, Ford asks Mitchell directly:

John, did you or anyone at the Nixon campaign committee have anything to do with the break-in at Democratic National Headquarters?

Absolutely not, says Mitchell. And the president? Mitchell repeats himself, fervently. Accepting what he is told, Ford returns to the Capitol. There the full House is going into session in an atmosphere conducive to election-year pandering. Before it adjourns for the day, members will unanimously approve an increase in benefits received by two million disabled veterans, not forgetting Spanish-American War widows in their largesse. Only after its regular business is concluded does Speaker Albert recognize a handful of lawmakers for prearranged special order speeches: orators like Florida representative Robert Sikes, who berates the Weather Bureau for its inflated forecasts about an early season hurricane named Agnes. When the storm falls short of its hype, inflicting no damage in his Panhandle district except to the tourist trade, the vigilant Mr. Sikes threatens a full-scale investigation of the bureau.

Ford misses Sikes’s presentation, having promised an office interview to consumer advocate Ralph Nader as part of his Congress Project to survey the voting records of all 535 members.* In the day’s most pleasant surprise, the minority leader finds his evening schedule uncluttered by the interest group receptions and candidate fundraisers that often prevent him from enjoying a family dinner at 514 Crown View Drive. En route to Alexandria in the chauffeur-driven black Cadillac that is one of the perks of his job, Ford scans the afternoon papers. A news junkie accustomed to reading half a dozen journals a day, his practiced eye is drawn to a quote in the Washington Star attributed to White House press secretary Ron Ziegler, and mocking the recent break-in at the DNC as a third rate burglary.

Ford has no way of knowing that last night at his Watergate apartment John Mitchell presided over an alcohol-fueled discussion of how to destroy evidence of criminal wrongdoing. To his campaign deputy, a baby-faced Brutus named Jeb Stuart Magruder, Mitchell hinted slyly, Maybe you ought to have a little fire at your house tonight.

Tuesday, June 20

It is not far from the truth to say that Congress in session is Congress on public exhibition, Woodrow Wilson wrote in 1885, while Congress in its committee rooms is Congress at work. A century later Wilson’s claim is validated each morning the House is in session, as bills and budgets are incubated in some twenty-three standing committees. Most of what Ford knows about government he learned in committee. As minority leader, however, he is excused from such deliberations. His Tuesdays generally begin at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, in the White House Cabinet Room, where the portraits of Eisenhower, Theodore Roosevelt and the aforementioned Wilson may be bipartisan, but the guest list is limited to members of the GOP. Here Ford and Senate Republican Leader Hugh Scott flank President Nixon around an oval mahogany table donated to the room by Nixon himself.

Proximity should not be confused with intimacy. Little about the weekly strategic review is spontaneous, the agenda having been prepared in advance by Nixon chief of staff H. R. Haldeman and domestic policy czar John Ehrlichman. That both men hold Congress in minimum high regard is among the capital’s worst-kept secrets. This morning the Cabinet Room is silent, owing to the president’s late return from an extended weekend in Florida and the Bahamas. At the hour customarily reserved for his legislative allies, Nixon is instead discussing with Haldeman and John Mitchell how to prevent any investigation of the Watergate break-in from exposing a host of Nixon campaign horrors, as Mitchell labels them.

This frees Ford to concentrate on the House debate over revenue sharing—more precisely, over the closed rule adopted on an 8–7 vote by the Rules Committee that will govern the debate if the full House goes along. Adoption of the rule will vastly expedite the approval process by precluding amendments and limiting overall debate to eight hours. At once parliamentarian, traffic cop, amateur psychologist and father confessor, Ford treats the members of his caucus as self-respecting adults. He never cajoles, says Maryland representative Larry Hogan. He is persuasive. He works hard. He’s the kind of guy who, when he comes to you, you listen. A notable exception to this consensus is the famously prickly gentleman from Iowa, H. R. Gross. Looking as if he might have just stepped out of a Grant Wood painting, Gross is a self-appointed scourge of the bureaucracy. His indignant cry, Who dreamed up this boondoggle? is an integral part of the House’s daily routine, like the chaplain’s prayer.

Thoroughly bipartisan in his nitpicking, Gross opposed restoring former president Dwight Eisenhower to his five-star status if it meant he would draw a general’s salary on top of his presidential pension. In November 1963 he demanded to know the gas bill for the eternal flame marking the grave of John F. Kennedy. There are three parties in the House, Ford remarks in bemused exasperation. Democrats, Republicans and H. R. Gross. After twenty-three years in Washington—he and Ford were sworn into office on the same day in 1949—Gross retains an evergreen capacity for outrage. It will surprise no one that he is a staunch opponent of the State and Local Fiscal Assistance Act of 1972, this euphoniously labeled revenue sharing bill, which he insists in view of last year’s record $26 billion federal deficit should more accurately be labeled a debt- and interest-sharing bill. His argument is taken up by other critics, loath to admit why Congress is so reluctant to loosen its grip on spending—the idea, long advanced by Ford, that in eliminating the bureaucratic middleman, Washington will surrender to grassroots Americans more than the nation’s purse strings.

At the leader’s desk he keeps tabs on the argument roiling his colleagues, scribbling notes while entertaining requests from favor-seeking members of his caucus. They reciprocate his loyalty, encapsulated in a trademark colloquialism. I’ll be with you sled’s length, he tells them, and while they may scratch their heads over Ford’s meaning, they know they can take his pledge to the bank. His reluctance to crack a whip should not be mistaken for timidity. Good Old Jerry can play hardball if the stakes are high enough. Case in point: when a vacancy opened on the Federal Communications Commission, activists in the White House Office of Telecommunications Policy urged the president to select Ted Ledbetter, a Washington, DC–based communications consultant. If nominated and confirmed, Ledbetter would be the first African-American FCC commissioner. Unfortunately for his chances, a rival candidate, veteran Detroit broadcaster James Quello, had enlisted the support of his good friend Gerald Ford.

The ensuing contest, uneven to begin with, was abruptly terminated through a phone call from White House congressional liaison Max Friedersdorf to Ledbetter’s sponsors in the OTP. Minority Leader Ford wished them to know that, unless they dropped their promotional efforts on Ledbetter’s behalf, he would see to it that their entire office was zeroed out in the forthcoming budget. Quello, a Democrat, got the job, and kept it for twenty-four years.*

The clock over the Speaker’s rostrum is approaching six. Still the House drones on. Unable to wait any longer, Ford springs up the aisle and outside to a waiting car. He is due at Blair House for a dinner in honor of retiring members of Congress and hosted by Vice President Spiro Agnew. The two men have a relationship that is less rivalry than cultural misunderstanding. A quiet dissenter from Agnew’s alliterative attacks on a press corps the vice president considers biased, Ford routinely supplies his private home phone number to scribes in search of a story (the main number at 514 Crown View Drive is already listed in the phone book).

Anyone questioning the power of the press to dictate Washington dinner table dialogue would change their tone after eavesdropping on the low murmur of conversation at Blair House. Again it is the Washington Post that spoils the party. Earlier today it exposed E. Howard Hunt, a CIA operative turned $100-a-day consultant, whose name and White House phone number have turned up in an address book belonging to one of the Watergate burglars. Hunt’s cover blown, John Ehrlichman directs him to get out of the country. As it happens, the messenger entrusted with these instructions by Ehrlichman is himself general counsel to the Nixon reelection campaign. More than that, he is Hunt’s coconspirator in planning the Watergate break-in. And he has a history with Gerald Ford.

Wednesday, June 21

At the White House this morning, H. R. Haldeman succinctly identifies G. Gordon Liddy for the president as the guy who did this. Nixon quickly falls in with Ehrlichman’s plan to have Liddy take the rap for Watergate. The news of Liddy’s involvement jolts Ford, and for good reason. Three years have passed since Ford shared Liddy’s résumé with the Treasury Department in hopes of securing a political appointment for this gun-loving, self-dramatizing soldier of fortune. As an assistant prosecutor in New York’s Dutchess County, Liddy earned a reputation for lock-’em-up flamboyance sufficient to win him second place in a hard-fought 1968 Republican congressional primary. The winner was Hamilton Fish IV, liberal heir to the lawmaker immortalized by his Hudson Valley neighbor FDR as one-third of the incurably obstructionist trio of Martin, Barton and Fish. The younger Fish’s chances in November looked good, complicated only by Liddy’s continued presence on the ballot under the banner of the New York State Conservative Party.

That fall, Ford was guest of honor at a GOP picnic and rally where Fish and others sought his help in finding employment for the potential spoiler. I said sure, I’d see what I could do, Ford recalled later. At the time he gave the matter little thought; over the years, he had entertained countless similar requests. Following Fish’s victory in November, it became clear that Liddy’s best chance for political preferment lay with the incoming Nixon Administration. After the required endorsements from local and state Republican organizations were produced, Ford made a phone call to Eugene Rossides, assistant secretary of the Treasury for Enforcement and Operations. In April 1969 Liddy received his political appointment as a special assistant for Organized Crime. A month elapsed before he thanked Ford for his assistance. He had intended to write earlier, said Liddy, but as Ham Fish may have mentioned I interrupted a robbery a few blocks from the White House a short while ago, and in the course of losing a fight with four of them broke a bone or two.

Liddy’s flair for publicity, no less than his appetite for clandestine action, made him ill-suited for the bureaucratic backwaters of Treasury. Originally assigned to Operation Intercept, an anti-drug campaign aimed at the porous border with Mexico, Liddy had been transferred out of Treasury in July 1971, after he delivered a fiery attack on the administration’s gun control policy before the National Rifle Association. Far more to his liking was Liddy’s new position, a $26,000-a-year gig beside Howard Hunt in the White House Special Investigations Unit formed to plug government leaks following publication of the purloined Pentagon Papers (thus the group’s colloquial designation as the Plumbers).

THAT WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON is zero hour in the fierce campaign to enact revenue sharing. Debate over the proposed closed rule pits Democratic whip Thomas P. Tip O’Neill for the yes side against H. Allen Smith, a former FBI agent who, like Ronald Reagan, left a boyhood home in Dixon, Illinois, for the greener pastures of California. Each man is allotted thirty minutes in which to argue his side’s case, the time to be apportioned among like-minded members anxious to see their names in print (not for another seven years will C-SPAN broadcast House proceedings to 3.5 million cable TV subscribers). A robust argument ensues as opponents claim the federal government has no revenue to share, and that such a program will make local and state governments more, not less, dependent on Washington.

To the contrary, counter supporters of the bill, most of the challenges of the coming decade—water and air pollution, transportation, the disposal of solid wastes—will demand local solutions. Passage of the legislation before them will kindle a revitalized federalism to coincide with America’s bicentennial.

Amid the volleys of claim and counterclaim, Ford prowls his party’s side of the chamber like a coach pacing the sidelines in the fourth quarter. In a close call wavering or uncommitted members can expect to hear from the minority leader or one of his lieutenants. Hesitant lawmakers are then lined up at the back of the House chamber, ready to be summoned in the event their votes spell the difference between an administration victory or defeat. I need three, Ford calls out from his frontline position, and a sheepish trio of party loyalists break ranks to announce a change in their vote. Today he is relieved of such anxieties, so confident is he about the bill’s chances of passage. As the time for debate expires, Mr. O’Neill of Massachusetts moves the previous question. Mr. Smith of California demands the yeas and nays. The closed rule is approved by a vote of 223 to 185. A motion is entertained to remake the House into a Committee of the Whole, prerequisite for any final action on the bill.

The arcane language billows like smoke, obscuring the fact that most important House business does not transpire beneath a watchful public in the galleries. Rather, it unfolds behind thick doors, around the dinner table and the punch bowl. Capitol Hill receptions constitute the fourth branch of government. A cottage industry for Washington caterers, they are the lifeblood of hungry staffers, and a blight on their employers. After more than twenty years of small talk and canapés, Ford avoids most such affairs, requiring as a condition of his attendance the presence of at least one representative from the Fifth District.

Even then, his participation is fleeting. Encircled by lobbyists and flatterers, he has learned to make his exit as inconspicuous as possible. Keep your feet shuffling all the time, he advises less experienced colleagues. You get to your destination in that way without offending anyone.

Tonight his calendar lists no fewer than six receptions, culminating in a big bash at the Sheraton Park Hotel courtesy of the National Education Association. Complicating his party-hopping efforts are torrential rains from the former Hurricane Agnes. Reportedly hundreds of motorists are trapped by floodwaters inundating Rock Creek Parkway and scenic Canal Road in the city’s northwest quadrant. Mr. Sikes of Florida may wish to revise and extend his earlier remarks about the Weather Bureau.

Thursday, June 22

Though downgraded to tropical storm status, Agnes has overnight brought disaster to the mid-Atlantic region. The governor of Pennsylvania is driven from his Harrisburg mansion by rising waters. In the nation’s capital, residents of the Watergate are observed on their balconies sipping champagne and gawking at refrigerators and caskets bobbing atop a furious Potomac River. Eventually sixteen deaths are attributed to the storm in the District alone. Defying the elements, Ford attends the monthly breakfast meeting of Michigan’s Republican congressmen at the Capitol Hill Club. The weather that concerns him is political, and the breakfast affords a late opportunity to buttonhole hesitant colleagues before the final roll call on revenue sharing.

At midmorning, Ford stops by the White House at the invitation of General Alexander Haig, Henry Kissinger’s deputy on the National Security Council. Too busy to see Ford, Nixon is preparing for an afternoon press conference, the first public test of the nascent Watergate cover-up. For all that they agree on, Ford finds it easier to defend Nixonian policies than the president’s exclusionary approach to GOP dissidents. You have to have some people way out in front, says Ford. He has never been one to read people out of their party.

I can get tears in my eyes when I think about Jerry Ford, gushes Paul Pete McCloskey, an early, outspoken critic of the Vietnam War who infuriated the White House earlier this year by waging a quixotic campaign to deny Nixon renomination. A poor showing in the New Hampshire primary caused McCloskey to drop out of presidential politics and file for reelection from the Northern California district he has represented since 1967. His anti-Nixon apostasy guaranteed the rebel a hotly contested primary and likely defeat, until Ford flew to the West Coast to personally vouch for McCloskey’s character as one of those way out in front without whom the political process would be diminished. On primary day, McCloskey eked out a win by 867 votes. Not surprisingly, he regards Jerry Ford as the most decent man I ever knew in the political arena.

THIS EVENING IT’S a safe bet that Pete McCloskey won’t be among one hundred Republican lawmakers descending on the White House to have their pictures taken with a president whose reelection they regard as certain. Also MIA is Minority Leader Ford, who is too immersed in last-minute wrangling over revenue sharing to break away. An atmosphere of anticlimax pervades the House chamber as arguments made familiar through repetition merely postpone what they cannot prevent. Only once does Ford personally intervene, moving swiftly to defeat an eleventh-hour attempt to push back implementation of revenue sharing by six months. Proponents say this would save $2.7 billion. Ford counters that any such delay would break faith with elected officials at the state and local levels.

In short, a deal is a deal. The amendment is rejected, and the final bill passed by a vote of 274 to 122. It is after eleven p.m. when Speaker Albert brings down his gavel. Tonight Ford’s sleep will be even shorter than usual as he and Betty are leaving for China in the morning. Before then, however, he has one more obligation to fulfill.

Friday, June 23

A waterlogged capital is still recovering from its brush with a hurricane when, a few minutes after eight, Ford is shown into the Old Family Dining Room of the White House. Its name derives from Jacqueline Kennedy’s decision to have her family take their meals in more private quarters on the second floor. Accompanying Ford is Congressman Hale Boggs of Louisiana, his Democratic counterpart in the House, and soon to be his China traveling companion. The two men have an easy camaraderie dating to their service on the Warren Commission, which investigated the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Frequent debaters at the National Press Club, they will sometimes choose their topic while riding down Pennsylvania Avenue to the club building at Fourteenth and F Streets. After a vigorous airing of differences before a lunch crowd of journalists and their guests, the minority and majority leaders retrace their steps in time to resume jousting in the well of the House.

Cementing their friendship is that rarest of attributes in official Washington, the ability to laugh at oneself. This was put to the test during a recent trip to the National Zoo. Intended to publicize their forthcoming China adventure, the visit produced the week’s unlikeliest photo op. In the zoo’s reconverted rhino house, Ford and Boggs were pictured greeting Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing, two giant pandas given to the people of the United States by the Chinese government in recognition of Nixon’s opening to the People’s Republic. Accustomed as the two politicians may be to playing second fiddle to more electrifying performers, this was the first time a rival for public notice had urinated in their direction.

The incident might stand as a metaphor for their White House breakfast. A year has passed since Boggs’s withering criticism of the aging J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI gestapo prompted a lively telephone exchange between Nixon and Ford in which the latter, telling the president what he wanted to hear, declared, He’s nuts! (Nixon’s parting admonition to Ford: Keep kicking them in you-know-where.) The tone of this morning’s dialogue is more civil. The president recycles memories of his February trip, describing meetings with the Chinese leadership in between spoonfuls of cottage cheese, wheat germ and yogurt flown in daily from California. An hour passes. The men rise from the table, shake hands and go their separate ways. Ford and Boggs board a White House helicopter for the short flight to Andrews Air Force Base, where they will meet up with their wives and the rest of their party.

At 10:04 a.m., even as the military jet carrying the congressional travelers taxis down the runway at Andrews, the door to the Oval Office opens to admit H. R. Haldeman. He has new and disturbing information to impart on the Democratic break-in thing being probed by the FBI. Unfortunately, he tells Nixon, "their investigation