 Please welcome Mark Lawrence, Susan Ford-Bales, and Richard Nordstein. Well, thank you so much, Mark, for that kind introduction. And welcome, everyone, to the LBJ Presidential Library, despite I understand the darkening skies outside. It's wonderful to have you here for what I think will be a really memorable conversation with our two truly distinguished guests. Susan and Richard, thank you so much for being here and giving us this opportunity to speak a little bit about the 38th President of the United States, a man who I think it's fair to say hasn't gotten the attention that he deserves in tellings of American history generally and the history of the American presidency in particular. But Richard, your monumental, magnificent book, monumental in more ways than one, will no doubt do a lot to, maybe our event tonight will do a little to shine an important light on someone who deserves to be understood more fully. Richard, let me start with you in this book. An ordinary man, the surprising life and historic presidency of Gerald R. Ford. There's a lot of detail in this book and we'll get into some of that, but I wanna ask you about what's on the cover, the title that I just read. You use three adjectives here, ordinary, but also surprising and historic. So there's a paradox here, no doubt a very deliberate paradox between ordinariness and yet surprising and historic. Tell us what you intend by this. The ordinary man is obviously ironic, which I think you'll learn on about page one. There is very little that was ordinary about Gerald Ford or the life that he led. And by the way, as dark as the clouds may be, they were a lot darker in August, 1974. Had he done, you know, there are so many things I wish I'd asked him now, you know, look your back. Well, the president Ford I think went to his grave believing that history would regard his chief legacy as his efforts, successful efforts, after the Watergate scandal and the tumult of Vietnam and the assassinations and social upheaval of the 60s to restore a sense of trust in American government and the presidency especially. He cleaned up a lot of messes, in other words, not only Watergate, but Vietnam. Remember the rogue CIA that needed to be investigated? That seems to happen periodically every 20 years or so. The biggest surprise I would suggest, maybe at the beginning of this discussion, is Ford underestimated his historical impact. To me, he's much more, as a president, much more about what he initiated than what he cleaned up. Give you two very quick examples. And it's only with time and the perspective of time that these things are apparent. Talk to a young person today, they find it hard to believe that not so long ago, bureaucrats in Washington decided where a plane could fly or what a truck could carry or where you could get a home mortgage. The fact is that Gerald Ford began economic deregulation. He got, and then it became bipartisan, the Carter and the Reagan administration's embraced, but it started with Ford. He got the railroads deregulated, he got the financial services industry deregulated. And so the next time you go to an ATM machine, tip your hat to Gerald Ford because it's part of his legacy. Foreign policy, in the summer of 1975, he took heat from the right and the left for something called the Helsinki Accords, which at the time, the critics said, you're conceding to the Soviet Union, they're Eastern European Empire. And now we know that in fact, the Helsinki Accords planted the seeds of resistance throughout Eastern Europe and indeed in the Soviet Union and was a major milestone on the road to the collapse of the Soviet Union. There's a reason why presidential reputations tend to rise over time is because they're at their nadir when they leave office. Frankly, we're sick of them. I mean, there's a fill in the blank, Bush fatigue, Obama fatigue, I mean, it's bipartisan because they've been overexposed, because they've been divisive partisan political leaders, and then they get to be elder statesmen, but not all of them rise to the occasion. So, I'm no names. One last thing, and that is, and we'll hopefully get this out of the way. People ask me all the time, what would Gerald Ford think about today's politics? Well, the question pretty much answers itself, but here's what he had to say. In 1980, he'd only been out of office a few years, and a reporter who he trusted asked him, really interesting question, inverted the usual question, and he asked him, what are the most disqualifying attributes in a president? And Ford thought, he said, arrogance. He said, not that the American people would ever elect an arrogant president, but he said, and I'm talking vicious arrogance. Those are his direct words. He said, then God helped the country, and Gerald Ford was the least arrogant. And indeed, one reason why this book is necessary, this discussion is necessary, maybe a rewriting of history books is necessary, is because being the opposite of arrogant, he was also incredibly modest, and he didn't, my awake at night, unlike perhaps some presidents, worrying about what future academics might say about him. And in that sense, a little bit ordinary, so it's not totally ironic that you're using that adjective. One of us. Okay, fair enough, fair enough. Susan, you obviously had a unique vantage point to observe your father's life and career in politics. What adjectives come to mind for you? Well, I'm only five chapters into the book, so I can't comment on the whole book. But I think from what I've, and I'm doing the audio book, because I'm in my car a lot, and that's the easiest way to do it. So far, I'm very impressed at the way Richard has explained him, and I think he's done a very good job. I've learned some details about my family that I didn't know about his- The bigamist? Yes, the bigamist in the family. I went, really? Okay. Didn't know, dad never talked about that. Do you think he knew about it? I don't know. I don't know either. I think we should explain here. Yeah. Well, go ahead, Richard. You discovered it. A lot of people know that he came from a really broken home. People don't know how broken a home was. And it tells you a lot about Gerald Ford. He could have destroyed his mother's divorce papers. They were his, he was under no obligation to make them available to researchers, but he felt he had an obligation to history, and he really believed in the library. And so the arrangement was made that on his death, this material would become available to researchers. And I, among other things, the first person to read Gerald Ford's baby book. And there's a point- Well, you weren't the first. We worked as we found it. Okay. I will concede. I stand corrected. They should have been the first people to read it. But there's a page that says, baby's first automobile ride. Well, it turns out baby's first automobile ride was taken when he was two weeks old. Two days after his birth father, who quite frankly was a scoundrel, walked into the bedroom with a butcher knife, threatened to kill both mother and child. And Dorothy King, later Dorothy Ford, is an extraordinary woman. And when you think of the limited options that women in that situation had in 1913, she slipped out of the house, crossed the Mississippi to Iowa, took a train to Chicago where she had a sister, eventually moved to Grand Rapids, where she met Gerald Ford, who became Gerald Ford Sr. There was never a formal adoption for reasons- Which a lot of people don't. They all call him his stepfather, which really, he was not a stepfather. He was his father by name, I guess is the only way you can put it. So Gerald Ford Sr. had a father named George Ford. And one of the things that was uncovered in the course of research and youth book is that George Ford basically abandoned his family several years before he died. He was living with a woman who purported to be his wife, and he died in a very suspicious train accident. And I personally believe she pushed him in front of the train, but I haven't found a document, so I can't, you know, but in any event, and I'll tell you how bad it was, she was going to bury him, and a member of the Ford family found out, and literally went from Grand Rapids to St. Louis, and retrieved the body, and that's why George Ford is buried where he's buried. But anyway, the important thing about this is not the scandal. The important thing is that his son, the future Gerald Ford Sr., decided at a very early age that he was going to be a very different man, and it's that very different set of values that he in turn passed on to his son in all but that name. And there's no doubt that Gerald Ford Jr., as he was known until 1962, always hooked upon Gerald Ford Sr. as his father. Yeah. Susan, we interrupted you. No, that's okay. I don't know where we were going, but. And the adjectives, general impressions that you would offer of your father. He was a very real guy. He would be very much comfortable in a situation like this. I remember when we did, he got the postage stamp for him, and you know, and that was after he died, he was astounded and pleased by the aircraft carrier being named after him. He never expected, his expectations for his future had nothing to do with things that he benefits he got, wonderful honorary benefits that he got. He was just a real guy and loved to play golf, loved to be with his family, loved to watch his sons play football. So yeah, I mean, he would be in this crowd just as comfortable as anybody. And he liked people. That's, you know, he had this wonderful list of do's and don'ts for aspiring politicians. And the most important thing is you've got to like people. You've got to be willing to work 70 hours a week without, like he said, there's no glory in this job any more than there is in any other job. I mean, he had a very healthy, healthily controlled ego. Your cousin, Kim? No. My cousin, Jim, Bobby, Greg. Greg, forgive me, Greg, Greg. I can go down the list. Well, no, no, Greg said something really interesting. Not long before your dad passed away, he was visiting with him out there. And he said at one point, he said, you know, Uncle Jerry, I'd really like to know what you attribute your successive politics to. And your dad said, well, I made everyone else's problems my problem. Well, that's revealing. But then I found eventually he used the exact same wording to describe what made his mother special. And so clearly, we've talked about his father and all but name, but clearly Dorothy Ford had an enormous impact on him. And you, I mean, you knew her very well. I was 10 when she passed. I mean, I knew her well, but I didn't know her as well as Linda and Julie and Muffy did, who were 10 years older than me. But no, Dorothy was a woman to be reckoned with. She was not your typical grandmother by any means. She would come and visit the children and stay in a hotel. She didn't stay in the house with us because she lived in Michigan. But when you went to visit her, I would stay in her apartment with her. And I do remember the last house that she and grandpa lived in. But she was very stern and she was, but very loving. I had a beautiful, exquisite doll collection of dolls that she collected for me in her travels all over the world, which the museum now owns. But she was, I mean, she was a wonderful, but she had four boys. You had to be strict. I mean, she had four boys to handle and they were fairly close in age. Well, and the president's not well known. Because he did such a lifelong job of concealing it. He had a temper. He said, the one thing I inherited from my birth father was his temper and he didn't mean it as a compliment. Someone very close to him said, he was 98% teddy bear and 2% grizzly. And the problem was you never quite knew when the grizzly was going to emerge. But you know. It normally came out on the golf course. Or I imagine watching Michigan football. A Michigan football game. We gave him finally one of those yellow bricks that he could throw with the TV and not, because that was his passion. Richard, another characteristic that jumped out at me in your book was Gerald Ford's ambition. In fact, you write about this in your introduction. You say that Ford's nice guy reputation masked an ambition, intense, even by modern standards. Why have we missed that ambition in thinking about Gerald Ford? We weren't very observant. We weren't very curious. Plus, the persona of good old Jerry seemed inconsistent with, and when I say ambition. Okay, here's a guy who entered politics after the war in effect. His dad and he took on a corrupt political machine that dominated Grand Rapids, and indeed at one point dominated the state. His father slept with a gun under his pillow, giving you an idea of what the political climate was in Grand Rapids. So he entered politics. The thing that bothered him was when people said that he was just a party guy. Because he got into politics as an anti-establishment candidate in many ways. In 1948, he ran for Congress. He was ambitious, but it was the ambition about an idea. And the idea was that after World War II, we were not gonna repeat the mistake we made after World War I. And he said this as someone who'd been a pre-war isolationist. One of the things I discovered was, J. Edgar Hoover personally blackballed your dad's application to be an FBI agent when he found out that he had been involved in the America First. Never mind that he quit America First. But anyway, ambitious, yeah, he was ambitious, but Lee Hamilton, the great congressman from Indiana, said to me, he said, you know, he was ambitious, but he cloaked it nicely was the way he put it. But by 1960, he was interested in being Richard Nixon's running mate. And that, you know, is not terribly well known. It also speaks to the closeness of the relationship that existed between the whole Nixon family and the Ford family. But his great ambition, as you know, was to be Speaker of the House. And it's only when he realized after 72 that that was not gonna happen that he was interested in replacing Spiro Eggner when that opportunity arose. That interest in the vice presidency, going back to 1960, was really fascinating to me. I certainly did not have any clue about that. Well, he thought it would be a nice job from which to retire. He had promised your mother, finally, that he would leave politics in 1976, and he would still be, I don't know if he'd be 63, so he could have a second career as a lawyer lobbyist. And if he started that career as a former vice president, not a bad place to start. So Susan, if this ambition is one of those things that perhaps we've missed a little bit over the years in thinking about your father, are there other qualities or other dimensions of his character that might surprise us that you could help us understand? No, I mean, I would say he was a teddy bear, but I am also the only girl and the baby of the family. So I will say I probably have a little bit different view. I wouldn't say he was as hard on me as he was on the boys, except for there are times when he dropped the hammer, yeah, it was not good. But it was one of those things that he was one of the most incredible listeners. And as a kid growing up, you could go to him and say, but dad, this is what happened. You could tell your story and feel heard, but Richard knows he was an incredible listener. And I think his cabinet would say he was an incredible listener. He always listened to the many sides of something before he made his decision. He was a very fair person and even laid into life. I mean, both my parents were extremely fair and everything that they did, if they did it for one child, they did it for another child or they did the same for every grandchild, they were very into being fair. And I think that's hard to come by. We talked a little bit already about the earliest phases of Gerald Ford's life and the very important biographical details, Richard, that your book teases out. Let me fast forward a little bit further into his life. I was really struck by your chapter on Gerald Ford's service in the Second World War. I thought that was one of the most powerful chapters of the whole book. I wonder for both of you, what impact did his service, perhaps you could describe what that service was very briefly, have on his outlook across his political career? Well, it's interesting for someone who had been in America Forest discovered, for the first time, that he had simultaneously been trying to pull strings to get into the Navy. He wanted to be in of service to his country. And initially, he was accepted and there was a program of basically, they would collect the best athletes in the country and they were going to train future officers and so on and so on. And he did that for a year, but he didn't want to spend the war. He wanted to be where their action was. And so he pulled every three acre, think of it, he got on a improvised aircraft carrier of sorts called the Monterey, which by the way, traveled more miles than any ship in World War II in the Pacific and saw a lot of action. And he was in the thick of it. And he very quickly rose, I mean he became assistant navigator and a real favorite of the captain. And the great story of course, in December 1944, there was a typhoon and the moderate one point, they were ordered to abandon ship, it was that bad. 60 foot waves coming up over the ship. And he got out of his bunk, smelled smoke, the ship was on fire on top of everything else. He hurried up onto the main deck, the ship works in the storm and he went down on his back the length of the ship. And the reason we're here tonight is because there was a two inch metal railing around ships, it's called a tow rail and it was put there to keep tools from going overboard. Well in this case it kept going overboard. And he immediately returned to his duty post, but not before saying the prayer from Proverbs that he had been taught as a boy and that he had said first the day that his birth father appeared out of nowhere and introduced himself. He walked into the hamburger joint where young Ford was working, he said, you're Wesley King. And he said, no I'm not, I'm Gerald Ford. And he said, no you're Wesley King and I'm your father. That's how he met his birth father. That's a drama, you know. But the war was really critical in a lot of ways. He thought as president, it certainly wasn't disqualification if you hadn't had military service, but he thought serving in the military was an enormous asset for any commander in chief because so much of the modern presidency, even in peacetime, deals with. And he was known as the expert on Capitol Hill on defense issues. When John F. Kennedy became president in 1961, he could not get his own party's leadership to support foreign aid or a lot of defense spending. And he went, wouldn't happen today, he went to Gerald Ford who even then was known and Ford brought with him 75 Republicans and they managed to in a bipartisan way get the Kennedy program through. Which is one, the whole Ford-Kennedy relationship again is one that people don't really know. It was close, Kennedy had great respect for Ford and he knew that he was someone that other people would listen to on those issues. Gerald Ford comes back from the war and pretty quickly he is indicating a strong interest in running for public office. And of course he wins his House race in 1948 against the odds initially but then he has a grip on that seat for 25 years. Wins handling of course rises through the hierarchy on the Republican side in the House. I wish we had time to go into so many interesting twists and turns across those 25 years but let's talk about the really big question. How do we explain what an enormously successful politician he was in thriving in the House of Representatives and the way that he did. Can I ask Susan a question about this? Oh no, no no, you're the only person who can answer it because there was a downside. I mean the fact is there were years when he was on the road more nights than he was at home. And that obviously had an impact on all of you and certainly on your mom. Can you talk about that and how he, A, how he dealt with it then and do you think in later years whether guilt or whatever he tried to make it up? Oh I think he definitely tried to make it up. Yeah, I mean he was gone. He tried to be home every Sunday night for dinner. So Sunday nights in our house, you did not, it's one of the few nights you did not ask to have friends over for dinner because mother having had three boys and then me, she always had enough food to feed a few extras because somebody would bring somebody home for dinner. So Sunday night was a very cut dry private family only dinner and he would fly or drive or do whatever he had to do to get home for Sunday dinner which was always of a special time. But he was gone, he was gone a lot because he was not only campaigning for himself but he was out campaigning for other people to get their seats. So I mean Lucy knows this story very well too. But we got used to it. I mean we didn't know any other way. Luckily we had a housekeeper by the name of Clara who is with us for 25 years and she filled in the gaps when my dad was gone and helped manage the household with my mother but I think later in life he tried to always be there and traveled to our homes to see his grandkids in their environment and it wasn't always going to grandma and grandpa's house it was them coming to us and doing things like that. No, I'm very definitely. And also you need to know cause she's probably not in a position to tell the story herself but Mrs. Ford would tell the story. The day you were born. No I can't tell that story. No. But she can't correct me either. But I know the story you're gonna tell. But she can't correct me either. No, your father took your brothers, your elder brothers to a game with the Washington, the Sad Sack Washington Nationals. What was it, sorry? First in peace, first in war, last in the National Ways or whatever the slogan was. And they went because it was Mickey Mantle day, okay? So your brothers wanted to see Mickey Mantle and they were perfectly willing to weave your mother and yourself. And Mrs. Ford always said, adding to the humiliation was that her doctor was watching the game. Because he wanted to see the Ford men at the gate and allegedly, at least she told the story, you were born during the seventh inning stretch. So. So he went home, dropped the boys off at the house with Clara. And then he came to Columbia Women's Hospital, which is no longer there in Washington. To see his, and you know, back then you didn't know if you were having a boy or girl. Much less be there for the birth and found out he had a girl. So I was originally, Steve was supposed to be the girl and Steve was going to be Sally. And so she threw out the name Sally and I guess went with Susan. So that's. You prefer Susan to Sally? I do, I do. Richard, I still want to talk about, Gerald Ford's rise through the house, but since we're off here on another thread at the moment, talk if you would, Susan, about your mother's role. You've touched on it a little bit, but her role both in terms of maintaining the household, but also contributing to her husband's political career. Well, you know, it's interesting because, first of all, Dad never talked about when he was in the Navy. I mean, that was just not, but I think that's very common with so many whose parents were in World War II. My mother would go down and give tours of the Capitol. So that when constituents came in town from Michigan, that way she could be involved in his life and she would give tours of the Capitol. But she also, like Lucy's mother, did the Senate Wives Club and the fashion shows and the Congressional Wives Cookbooks. And they were very much a group. And I think that's the thing I find the most offensive to the way it is today, is that our congressmen and senators are not friends. Tip O'Neill was a dear friend at our household. And they brought their families with them to watch. I mean, I grew up with those kids and we went to school and we went to church together and we did all of that. And there was no discussion about politics or are you a Republican or a Democratic? It didn't matter. But the wives were very much supportive of each other. And I would say they were probably their support group because those wives knew what the other wives were doing too, that they were home with these kids. You mentioned the House at a cost. He became minority leader in 1965. And Charlie Hallock was a Republican incumbent who Ford took on, again, the insurgency and beat him by three votes. Bob Dole's delivered four votes from Kansas and that was the margin of victory. And Ford, an agency reciprocated in somewhat more generous fashion 11 years later. But Charlie Hallock afterwards, he was a character. He said, don't ever tell me what a goddamn nice guy Jerry Ford is. But it is well known that there were moments when President Johnson and Congressman Ford had their differences. But the wonderful way the sort of story ends, the last Sunday or the next to last Sunday, the very end of his term, Sunday morning, Ford's at home in Alexandria and he gets a call from the White House. The President would like to see you. And he said, of course, he drops what he's doing. And he goes, and he showed up to the family quarters, to the Lincoln sitting room, little rooms next to the misnamed Lincoln bedroom, which was really his cabinet room. Anyway, there's LBJ towering as he did probably in any room, but particularly in something as small as the Lincoln sitting room. And he just basically wanted to bury the hatchet. And he said, you know, Gary, we've each said some pretty rough things about each other, but I never questioned your integrity. And Ford reciprocated. And before they were done, LBJ put his arm around him and said, I just want us to be friends when you walk out of this room. And if there's ever anything I can do to be helpful. And a year later, just a little, I guess the April of 1970, when President Johnson had his heart attack in Charlottesville, he said one of the very first people he heard from was Jerry Ford. And subsequently, it's no secret that Mrs. Johnson became one of their most cherished friends. I mean, everyone loved Mrs. Johnson, but the Fords loved her because they had a lot of time together. And she came, to the rededication of the museum in 1997. And of course, West Michigan in April is not to be confused with Paris in April, or anywhere else in April. And it was literally the 20s. And they were all sitting up there. But Mrs. Johnson, there was no way she was gonna miss the fund. And Barbara Bush was self-appointed, was mothering her that day. And I think had a fur coat he put over. Anyway, it was endearing. But it demonstrates, again, this great conundrum is why do we only have elder statesmen? I mean, what is it about that period of life when people can sort of outgrow whatever partisan shell, you know, women's their context? But thank God for former presidents and God knows for former first ladies. They got along with each other, even though it wasn't an LBJ who accused Jerry Ford of playing too much football without a helmet. Absolutely. But the funny thing is, but President Ford actually could laugh. I mean, I don't think he enjoyed it, but he was big enough to laugh. And he got under, the reason he said that was because Jerry Ford had a demonstrated capacity to get under President Johnson's skin. It wasn't something that erupted spontaneously from LBJ's standpoint. There was a perfectly good reason to insult Jerry Ford. Yeah, and wasn't it at the correspondence dinner? I think you recount this story very nicely where Gerald Ford put the helmet on and mocked himself showing a capacity for making light of what could have been, I suppose, a more tense relationship. Yeah. Absolutely. Which is, you need a sense of humor in that life. Okay. Fast-forwarding again. The vice presidency. As Mark I think mentioned in his introduction, Gerald Ford becomes vice president under unprecedented circumstances. The 25th Amendment is put into practice for the first time. Talk about how that process played out for Gerald Ford. How was his name advanced for that role? To what extent did he pursue that position and how did he ultimately become the choice? One of the biggest discoveries in this book, and I would not have used it if I only had one source, even a really good source, but I have two impeccable sources who were there. Who know that as of February 6th, 1973, which is about six months earlier than he ever acknowledged in his memoir, he was aware of Spiro Agnew's serious legal problems. And he had talked to his Democratic counterparts just to alert them to what he had been told and that we might have to talk about down the road. Who knows? The irony is, well, maybe not ironic, he said later on it's the worst job he ever had. He told Dick Cheney it was the worst eight months of his life. And of course, not only, I mean, it's not fun being vice president under the best of circumstances, but he was vice president under the worst of circumstances because he had to in effect both defend Richard Nixon and maintain his own credibility against the possibility that he could not even admit was a possibility that he might succeed Richard Nixon. Absolutely impossible tightrope walk that he was doing. And I think when you look back at it intensively, it's actually pretty remarkable how skillfully he managed so that when the time came, it was worth... He got an inheritance that was worth something. You know, the Nixon White House wasn't thrilled. They would have liked John Connolly to be vice president. John Connolly had the kind of brass-plated assurance that appealed to someone like Richard Nixon. And yet, he genuinely regarded your dad as a friend, not just a political friend. He did say to someone on a telephone conversation that I'm sure he didn't think would ever be quoted, a debatable assessment. I think he vetted as a compliment. He described your dad as an honest Truman. Now, whatever he meant to most of us, that's a compliment. I'm not sure Richard Nixon was a big Truman fan, but even he mellowed a little bit, but he emphasized honest. And nobody ever questioned Gerald Ford's honesty or integrity. And it turned out the biggest miscalculation of his career, Richard Nixon thought that Gerald Ford was his insurance. And he growth, he misassessed the mood of Congress. Because they knew your dad as well as they did, they were perfectly prepared to replace Richard Nixon, if that's where the facts led with Gerald Ford. And not lose any sweep over it. So we know, we've heard, we've talked about this tonight that Gerald Ford was ambitious, wanted to be speaker, had put his name out there for vice president a couple of times. So it couldn't have come as a total shocker to see your father, Susan, become vice president. And yet this period had to be an absolute whirlwind from October of 1973, when Gerald Ford is suddenly vice president. And then in August of 1974 is president. Share with us a little bit of how all that played out on the home front in your life. Let me just preface it, I was a junior in high school. So that relieved me of everything for that reason. School was extremely important. Getting my grades was very important. I was attending a private girl's school in Bethesda, Maryland. I got Secret Service assigned to me, which was, so I got Secret Service before my mother got Secret Service because I had a threat from the SLA. My name was right below Patty Hearst. So it really upset my life a lot. I had to move out of the dormitory. I was a border at this school in Bethesda and I would go Monday through Friday and I would come home on the weekends and then go back on Sunday evening. It really upset my life and had to commute and everything else. And if anyone knows Washington traffic to go from Alexandria, Virginia, because we didn't have a vice president's residence then. Mother was working on it. It used to be the Admiral's Naval Observatory, thank you. Admiral Zumwalt had been there. Yeah, up on Massachusetts Avenue near the cathedral. Right, and so they were working on fixing it up. But mother really didn't want to deal with the fact that dad might become vice president. She was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's not gonna happen. No, that's not gonna happen. And so I would come home on the weekends and Sam Donaldson, if you all remember Sam Donaldson, was in our front yard for days and days and days. And because our phone number was in the phone book because my dad believed in his constituents, if they needed to get hold of him, he should be in the phone book. So every 30 minutes, one line, the phone would ring. This is Sam Donaldson. Has anything changed? Can you tell me anything? So I said to my mother, I said, you go up and lay down and take a nap. I can handle this. I'm a junior in high school. Most foolish thing that ever happened. And when she woke up, I was like, it's all yours. I don't ever wanna do that again, but it was crazy. I mean, it was really, Mike and Jack were in college. Steve and I were the only ones home at that point. Steve would have been a senior in high school, so it was crazy time. And I take it, this was not something you talked about around the dinner table. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I mean, we talked about issues around the dinner table, but we didn't talk about that. No. You may have been the only family in America that summer. It wasn't talking about it at the dinner table. I think dad was probably too afraid to bring it up because my mother might have taken a butcher knife to it. So. Unfortunately, I think the thing that most Americans probably know most about the Ford presidency is the pardon of Richard Nixon. There's so much more to it, and we'll talk about that in a minute, but let's talk about the pardon. How could we not? Why did Gerald Ford do it? And was it the right move? Yeah, I once spent three hours in a Grand Rapids hotel room wargaming the part with him. I'm thinking there must have been a better way to do it. And I came away basically convinced that there was no really easy way to do this. He himself said, it's cool to the book, you can't pull off a bandage slowly. And where it was mishandled, and this is new. I found Phil Buchan was Gerald Ford's arguably one of his best friends, early wall partner and conscience in President Ford's, okay? Phil Buchan was not convinced of the rightness of the pardon. It didn't matter because President Ford made it clear that this was, he'd come out of a press conference where he naively thought the reporters would wanna talk about all the things he was trying to deal with, inflation and NATO and Vietnam. And of course all they wanna talk about was Richard Nixon. And here's where I think he could be called naive. Because he saw the good in everyone. He assumed that included reporters, which was a serious error of- But he had a wonderful relationship with the press. He did, oh no, absolutely, I mean it's, but on that particular occasion, he had convinced himself that because he was preoccupied with all these other issues, the country was. And I think it was an eye-opening. So he walks out and he walks into the Oval Office and Phil Buchan's there. And he basically says to Phil Buchan, I want you to research the law if I decide to issue a pardon. He said something really interesting. And I know it because Phil Buchan's wife kept a diary with that crown. And he said that he wanted to relieve Leon Jaworski, the special prosecutor of the burden of deciding whether or not to prosecute a former president. The irony is, before Leon Jaworski died in 1983, he admitted to a couple of friends that he had no intention of indicting Richard Nixon. If he could possibly avoid it, he really didn't wanna go there. Richard Nixon, so anyway, so Gerald Ford is trying to deal with all of these problems. And every day he's being way-wayed. 25% of his time is devoted to Mr. Nixon's papers and tapes and legal prospects. For whatever it's worth, Gerald Ford believed that at the course of justice were followed, that Richard Nixon would almost certainly be indicted, tried and found guilty of at least obstruction of justice. The impression that some people had was that he left at the press conference was that he was perfectly willing to let the wheels of justice grind, but would probably see to it that Nixon never spent a day in a jail cell. So that there would be a pardon, but it would be down the road. But the problem with that is, he went to Leon Jaworski through back channels and Jaworski said it would be a year or two years before we could have a trial, which means that uses up the rest of Gerald Ford's presidency. And so while the country and the media, let's face it, this was the great, you know, it was said of the abdication. That was the greatest story since the resurrection. Well, this was the greatest story certainly since the abdication. And the media was obsessed with it. The country was obsessed with it. And Gerald Ford had to basically, there was only one person who could get Richard Nixon off the national agenda. So as I say, he wasn't forgiving Richard Nixon. He was trying to forget Richard Nixon. And that was the motive. I don't think it was explained. And unfortunately, Phil Buchan, who was a very merciful guy, went out and left the impression with the press that in fact it was an act of mercy as opposed to, you know, frankly, a calculated effort to try to move the country's interest forward. Susan, what are your thoughts about the pardon? Well, you know, I don't think I understood it as, you know, by then I was a senior in high school. So, you know, I think at that age it didn't, I didn't understand the impact it was going to have on the country. I think it took years for me to listen to my dad and talk to my dad. I remember the tension more than anything. My dad's an easygoing person and he was not on pins and needles, but he just wasn't himself. Because you only get one shot at that. You can't undo it. So it's either this or that. And that's what I remember is the tension. And it probably did cause him a little bit of lack of sleep. Remember, the project Richard Nixon is inseparable from the speech two weeks earlier, which was all part of the same effort to try to heal the nation's wounds, holding out a conditional amnesty for Vietnam evaders. And that frankly contributed as much to his drop in the polls as anything, because a lot of people who would have been nominal supporters just couldn't understand why you're doing this. And the other, the history that he made, okay, he's the only president to pardon the president. He's the only president ever then to appear before a congressional committee to explain in public on television to take as many questions as they had why he did what he did. So Gerald Ford remains in the presidency for almost two and a half years, not quite as long as he hoped to remain in the presidency. But nevertheless, as you established, Richard, it was a really consequential period in American history. What do you both think are the major accomplishments of the Ford presidency? Well, I'll give you one example that has been misinterpreted and has a wonderful sequel. Remember the famous headline, New York City Drop Dead, supposedly telling New York City, which was on the verge of bankruptcy after years of misgovernance, quite frankly, bipartisan misgovernance? The fact there is, Ford was practicing tough love. There was no other way to get New York to face facts. I mean, free tuition for students at the city university, I mean, on and on and on, benefits that it could no longer afford. And he didn't think the American taxpayers should pick up the tab. Well, he lost New York narrowly in 1976 and that cost him the presidency. Hugh Carey, the Democratic governor of New York who was Ford's sparring partner, told me, A, Jerry's never got the credit he deserved for saving New York and B, oh yeah, I voted for him against Jimmy Carter in 1976. As did, by the way, George McGovern and Bess Truman. Make of it what you will. The people who knew your dad the best thought the most of him. The critics tended to be people who either bought into a stereotype or from a distance or a partisans or whatever had legitimate beefs, but they weren't people who'd actually been around him, seen him in action. Richard, you mentioned earlier the Helsinki agreements. You mentioned deregulation as two really important and easy to overlook accomplishments of the Ford presidency. Texas related, all right? At the two weeks before the Texas Republican primary, Ronald Reagan is charging on the Panama Canal Treaties and waving the flag and President Ford has decided he gets absolutely no recognition for this. The most dramatic U-turn in American foreign policy, certainly since Nixon went to China, Gerald Ford decides basically to flip Nixon's foreign policy toward Africa. No longer will the United States prop up white minority governments, beginning in Rhodesia. And he sends Henry Kissinger two weeks before the Texas primary to go all over the continent to meet with what this did, among other things, was to send a signal to the apartheid government in South Africa, your days are numbered, all right? Okay, so Jim Baker, who is then a junior official in the Commerce Department, would become the chief delegate counter at the Ford convention and then run the fall campaign. Baker was a very politically true guy. He called up Dick Cheney and said, you know, this is killing us in Texas. And Cheney said, look, I've been trying to persuade him but I can't get anywhere if you want to, you know. So they made an appointment and Baker comes into the Oval Office and he talks again, your dad excelled at listening. But you know, a man without guile, well, it's funny. He said he used pipes to control the pace of a conversation. Lighting a pipe takes a little bit of time and while you're lighting it, you can think about what you want to say. And then of course he interpreted, he psychoanalyzed the difference between pipe smokers and cigar smokers. Cigar smokers are more flamboyant than pipe smokers. Anyway, he's sitting there with his pipe, you know, listening to Jim Baker, tell him all the reasons why this is a bad idea. And it's a terrible idea that Henry Kissinger before he leaves is gonna have a big splashy press conference to call attention to the history that he, Henry Kissinger, is making in Africa two weeks before the Texas primary. And the president listens and he said, well, Jim, I really appreciate your coming over to, you know, to tell me about this, but you know, I think Henry's doing a good job and I think the American people deserve to know about it. And he says, besides, you know, I'm sure every thinking Texas Republican will understand. And Jim Baker says, Mr. President, on this issue, there are no thinking Texas Republican. Kissinger went. Policy in Southern Africa was overruled, history was made, and I guarantee you zero poor gets no credit. Susan, I wanna give you an opportunity to address the same question about the most important achievements of your father's presidency. Well, you know, it's interesting because I have five grandchildren, the oldest being 16 and a female and quite the jock, shall we say. And I have informed her that Title IX, that her great-grandfather did Title IX and she's like, what, you know, I had to explain to her what Title IX was. They don't understand that, but you know, my age group does. I think the biggest thing about my dad is he did heal the nation. He didn't solve all the problems, he didn't have time to solve all the problems. I think if he would have gotten four years to add on to his two plus, he would have ended it, inflation would have been better, we wouldn't have been wearing wind buttons and all those other things. But I think he truly healed the nation and he was the right person at the right time. He was that nonpartisan who could reach across the aisle and get things done and things people work together for the nation. And I think that was the biggest thing. Fascinating, so you, the right person at the right time, what's running through my head is the right person maybe for our time. Seriously, what are the lessons, the implications of Gerald Ford's brand of politics and perhaps his presidency for our own moments where many of the things that he represented seem to be in such short supply. Are there lessons from his presidency or perhaps from his longer life that we should all be reminded of? Let me read you one paragraph. This is from, I think the best speech your dad ever gave. It's the fifth of July, the day after the bicentennial boil out. The day before my birthday. Okay, well, I'm sure this was a warm up. Anyway, he got in a helicopter, flew down a Monticello to preside over a naturalization ceremony for 150 of the newest Americans. And he talked to them about his Sunday school class in Grand Rapids and the teacher who told him all about Joseph's many colored coat. This is what Gerald Ford said in 1976. If you want relevance. Black is beautiful as a model of genius which uplifted as far above its first intention. Once Americans had thought about it and perceived its truth, we began to realize it's so a brown, white, red and yellow beautiful. I see a growing danger in this country in conformity of thought and taste and behavior. We need more encouragement and protection for individuality. The wealth we have of cultural, ethnic, religious and racial traditions of valuable counterbalances to the overpowering sameness and subordination of totalitarian societies. And this is how he concluded to the newest Americans on Jefferson's front lawn. You came as strangers among us and you leave here citizens equal in fundamental rights, equal before the law with an equal share in the promise of the future. Jefferson did not define what the pursuit of happiness means for you or for me. Constitution does not guarantee that any of us will find it. But we are free to try. Thank you. Thank you. Not bad. I haven't gotten that for you. Well said. Susan, anything that you would want to share on? Talk about the Carter Ford relationship in the later years and your mother and Mrs. Carter and the agreement they had regarding each other's funerals and all of that, which might surprise people. Well, I think it surprised anybody. I think it surprised us family members too because they were such arch rivals in the campaign. And then for them to become dear, dear close friends later in life and wrote op-eds together and did many, many things together. My mother and Mrs. Carter worked on the parody bill and they would talk about it too to be taken on on Capitol Hill. They would go up there, the two of them and Mrs. Carter talking about mental health and mother talking about substance use disorder, go up there and talk to the congressmen and senators and why parody was so important and they needed to be treated equal. Yes, it finally passed. It's still a little wishy-washy. But I also sat on Mrs. Carter's journalism group for about nine years working on that. And it's just a pleasure to have such a warm friendship between their family and our family. And I remember mother calling Mrs. Carter asking her to be one of the eulogist at her funeral. And it wasn't agreed upon that, oh, okay, Betty, if you're gonna do that for me, then I'm gonna do it in return. Same with dad and President Carter. So it's just a really nice, it reminds me of the old Tip O'Neill, Carl Albert days. It just didn't matter. They were good people. Yeah, and it actually foreshadowed the in some ways even more improbable friendship closer to friendship between, say, Bill Clinton and the Bush family. Right, yeah. Which again, gets back to the elder statesmen, you know? But isn't there a book that talks about the President's something that- Oh, the President's Club. Thank you. Yes, yes. That talks about the different friendships and relationships, so, yeah. Susan, I think you've just been providing an answer of a sort to the final question I wanna pose to you. What is Gerald Ford's legacy in a nutshell? Richard's probably better. He knows more about him than I do. You know, I was spanked as a child, so. I just think he was a really human man. And he had no ego. I never saw his ego. He was just very much a human being and a decent human being. Well, what? Please, Lucy. I'm sitting here and feeling that this, there's something that needs to be said and maybe you're fully aware of it and maybe you're not. But one of the highlights of this light word is life. Was when Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter came to speak. And there, you could have let a pin drop in that room. These two men walked out with all of us anticipating. They angst and their agitation that might be present on that stage. And they showed 1,100 people that night what true patriotism is all about. And most of the women were in tears and many of the men were too. Because they showed simply the best amongst us. And it is something that is a heritage to this library and to this country that I do not want you to close this evening without being appreciative of just what that meant for this library and to this family. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you so much, Lucy. And Richard, your thoughts on Gerald Ford's legacy. Well, it takes about 700 pages. So, and I don't think we have that. I don't think we've got quite that much time. Very simply, Gerald Ford went into politics for the right reason. He went into politics because of ideas. And yeah, sure he was ambitious, but the ambition never crowded out. Read the list of do's and don'ts. Why you want to go into politics and why maybe you don't want to go into politics. And he made an enormous sacrifice. His family made an enormous sacrifice. But in the end, I think maybe he was proven right. I like to think that most people are mostly good most of the time. That's what he would want us to believe. That's, I think, the attitude he would want us to adopt in, even in these very trying times. To know Gerald Ford, it seems to me, is to feel a very timely optimism about what we can do. Well, on that wonderfully optimistic note, Susan Ford Bales, Richard Norton Smith, it's been such a pleasure to share this stage with you. Thank you so much. Thank you to everyone for being here.