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Gerald Ford It’s personal

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Listen to Presidential at http://wapo.st/presidential

This transcript was run through an automated transcription service and then lightly edited for clarity. There may be typos or small discrepancies from the podcast audio.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: What's a memory from your dad's presidency that comes back to you often? One that, just for some reason, has stuck with you the most?

STEVEN FORD: I have a funny story that's a great memory. It was the first time we had dinner in the . And you have to remember that we didn't get to move into the White House for seven days, because, when left, they weren't able to pack up all their belongings quick enough. Their daughter and son-in-law, I think, stayed and packed all their clothes.

So, we had to go back to our little house in Alexandria, Virginia, and for the first seven days of dad's presidency, and I remember that first meal after Dad became president -- after he got sworn in that day, we're sitting around the dinner table, and my mother was cooking and my mother looked over at Dad. She was at the stove, and she goes, 'Jerry, something's wrong here. You just became president. And I'm still cooking.'

And that was the memory that sticks out the most of what a strange time that was -- that, for seven days, we had to live in our little house in suburbia and Dad would commute to the .

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: This is , the youngest son of President who took over when resigned from office. I'm Lillian Cunningham with The Post, and this is the 37th episode of “Presidential.”

PRESIDENTIAL THEME MUSIC

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Gerald Ford's presidency wasn't just because he took over for the only president, Nixon, who had ever resigned from office. It was also rare because Ford had never even been on the campaign ticket. Nixon's original vice president was . But in 1973, Agnew had to resign over criminal charges of money laundering and tax evasion. So, Nixon had to nominate a new vice president, and he picked Gerald Ford who, at that point, was the Republican House minority leader. The Congress confirmed Ford, but then less than a year later, in August 1974, Nixon also had to resign.

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And that thrust Gerald Ford into the presidency, making him the only American president to never have been elected to any national office by voters [across the U.S.]. He became both vice president and then president through these extraordinary constitutional backup plans.

So, we have some really neat guests for this episode. Berkeley professor Daniel Sargent will discuss some of the most notable foreign and domestic events during Ford's brief time in office, including the end of the .

And I'm also going to talk with , who was Ford's White House photographer. Ford was actually one of the first presidents to have one. And Kennerley has some amazing stories of being such a close observer, quite literally close, to Ford's time as president.

But before all of that, President Ford's youngest son Steve was kind enough to talk on the phone with me about his father's life. And I thought: Why not shake things up a little and instead of a biographer for this first portion, we'll have someone really close to Gerald Ford talk about his character traits and his path to the presidency?

So, Steve, it's an honor to have you on this podcast.

STEVEN FORD: Thank you very much.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Yeah, well, thank you. Tell me about your dad's childhood, maybe starting with the fact that he wasn't actually born with the name Gerald Ford.

STEVEN FORD: Yeah, I think Dad's childhood is one of the key things that drove him into the success he got to in the public service area, in that, you're right, he was born with a different name -- Leslie King.

And his mother had married a man who was physically abusive, who literally beat her on her honeymoon. And Dad was born shortly after that -- nine, 10 months later. And so, he came up in a physically abusive situation with a father, but thank God he had a wonderfully strong mother.

His mother, Dorothy, -- one night her husband came at her with a butcher knife, and Dad was just a baby. And she fled in the middle of the night and left Omaha, , and went across the , across the to Council Bluffs, , and she hid out for two or three days with Dad, who was just a young child.

And she waited for her father to come down on the train from to pick her up and take her back home. She filed for divorce. And you think about how strong a woman she must have been because, you know, back in 1914, 1915, women didn't leave marriages. And here was a woman that was willing to take the shame of a single mother with a child back then.

She eventually moved to Grand Rapids, and met a wonderful man, and his name was Gerald R. Ford, Sr. And he took my dad in when he married Dorothy, and that was the man that invested in dad's life. That was a man that, Gosh, made sure he had the right school teachers, the right football coach, the right church pastor, the right Boy Scout leader.

He was 16-years old and Dad didn't know that Grandpa Ford was not his real father. Dad was

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 2 working at lunchtime when he was going high school to make some money flipping hamburgers at a burger joint across the from the high school. And a man walked in and said, 'Is there a Leslie King here?' And my dad had never heard that name, and then he said, 'Is there a Jerry Ford here?'

And my dad said, 'Yeah, that's me.' And this man who was his biological father said, 'I'm your real father.' And dad was shocked. He did not know the story. Grandma and Grandpa Ford had never told him. And he sat down with this man, and he said he'd just come from Detroit, bought a new Cadillac, had a new wife and was headed to a new ranch he bought in . And he wanted Dad to join him, and my dad was shocked.

He thought he was crazy. You know, 'You've not been a part of my life.' And he went home and told his mother, and they sat down at the kitchen table. And they told him the real story and that's how he found out, And he never heard from his real dad ever again.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Wow. So, one question I always ask in these podcast episodes is: What would it be like to go on a blind date with this president -- which feels like an inappropriate question to ask you, but maybe you can just give us a sense at least of your dad's character. If someone were to meet him for the first time, what sort of traits they would notice most about him?

STEVEN FORD: You know, he was kind of the athlete, the square -- the guy that always did it the right way and probably wasn't the smartest guy in the room or the most , but he had the most common sense.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: What's the story that you always heard of how he and your mother met?

STEVEN FORD: I think they were set up on a blind date. Dad had seen her, and asked a friend, you know, 'Who's that gal?' And they said, 'That's Betty Bloomer.' So, someone arranged for them to meet and have cocktails with some other folks. And that's how they met. And when he was dating my mother, he told her, he said, 'Betty, I want to marry you, but I have a secret, and I can't tell you yet.' And that was that he was going to run for Congress. And she swears that if she knew he was going to go into politics, she never would have married him, but it worked out pretty good.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, he does win that congressional seat, and then he spends 25 years as a congressman -- from 1949 to 1973 -- and he's even House minority leader for those last nine years of it. So, what did you see of how your dad operated as a congressman?

STEVEN FORD: His best friend in Congress was Tip O'Neill, the Democratic speaker of the House. They would fight on the floor of Congress about legislation and get something hammered out -- a compromise. And then, that night, Tip O'Neill would be at our house for dinner. And that was the difference between politics back then and today -- they knew how to work together, not to be enemies, and find compromises.

It would hurt Dad to see how toxic politics has gotten. I remember Dad talking to me and saying, 'How am I going to work out something in Congress with someone on the other side of an issue if I can't break bread with them, if I don't know where their sons are going to college or what their dog's name is?' It's relational, and we don't see that today.

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 3 LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Do you remember finding out that your dad would be vice president? Do you remember that moment? You must have been in your last year of high school, right?

STEVEN FORD: Yeah, it was in October of 1973, and I was in my senior year of high school. And when you think about when Richard Nixon went to pick the next vice president after Spiro Agnew had to leave office, Jerry Ford's name was not on the top of that list. The top of that list would have been , former Republican governor of ,or , former Democratic governor of .

But and , the Democratic leaders of Congress, went to Nixon, and they said, 'This is who you can get through Congress -- Jerry Ford.'

That was what bolstered him to the vice president and, eventually, the presidency. I remember the night he got called by the White House to let him know that he was going to be the choice. And then they were going to announce it later. We were just sitting around having our family meal, and all of a sudden, this phone call came. The interesting thing is, my mother -- after 25 years in Congress for Dad -- had finally convinced him to retire. She was tired of politics, and she was ready to go back to Michigan and he was going to start his law practice or something.

And then Nixon asked him to be vice president. My mother was not happy at all. She didn't like the idea. And I remember my dad putting his arm around her and saying, 'Betty, don't worry. Vice presidents don't do anything.' And that didn't really work out.

And the next thing you know, ten months later because of Watergate, we end up in the White House.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Do you think he ever had aspirations to be president? Or Congress was really his dream job?

STEVEN FORD: Dad never had aspirations. You never heard him talk about anything like that. His aspiration was to be speaker of the House with a Republican majority. So, that never happened.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Yeah. And do you remember the moment you found out he was actually going to be president?

STEVEN FORD: I do. I remember that when it all happened very, very quickly. I think most people remember those pictures of Richard Nixon boarding a helicopter and waving at his staff, family and friends. You know, we backed off, got out of the way as the helicopter took off, and we headed into the of the White House for dad to be sworn in.

And then the strange thing is, most times when you get a new president, there's parties and galas and parades. It's a celebration. But that's not what this was. This was a . You had a man who was now going to walk in the East Room of the White House, put his hand on the Bible, take the oath of office -- that had not been elected by the American people -- never happened before in the history of this country. You had a , a with the Russians, an economy that was in shambles. You had , double-digit unemployment. Stock market had crashed. You had an energy crisis.

And here was a man that had not been elected by the American people that was going to lead

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 4 . It was -- yeah, it was a scary day. And it's interesting. I look at Dad's presidency as sort of the, at times, forgotten president -- because when he left office, all the troops were home from Vietnam. They were in talks with the Russians for a new SALT agreement. The Helsinki Accord, you know, there were tremendous Cold War things that had happened. The economy was back moving again, and inflation had been cut. But yet, in some respects, his whole presidency will be defined by one thing, which is the Nixon .

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Did you have any window into your father's thinking about the pardon?

STEVEN FORD: At the time, I thought probably the same thing most Americans thought. I told dad, 'You know, they're going to crush you if you pardon Richard Nixon.' But if he were here today, he would tell you it was the right thing to do at the time to heal -- that the country had to move on.

And he explained it to me one day after the presidency, and I think if he'd talked to the American people this way, they might have even and understood. And he said, 'A president, sometimes, is like a father of a family. You know, the kids get out of line or do something, there's consequences - - but sometimes, you can elect to not carry out the consequences to the full extent because by carrying them out to the full extent, it's going to divide the whole family and hurt the family. So, for a decision about the whole family instead of just prosecuting one, the father gives grace and mercy.'

And I think that's what he did with the Nixon situation. People were so close to it at the time -- Watergate -- they wanted Nixon prosecuted. But I think Dad saw through that anger and said, 'You know, we've got to get beyond this. The nation needs to heal.'

And so, it cost him his political career.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Ford's decision to pardon Nixon was one of the big reasons why he would ultimately lose the 1976 election. But interestingly, over time, a lot of people would, in hindsight, come to see that decision as a mark of Ford's leadership, not actually as a failing.

And one of those people who had a change of heart was Washington Post reporter , who was on last week's episode. And here's what he told me:

BOB WOODWARD: Gerald Ford, when he pardoned Nixon, I always thought was the ultimate corruption of Watergate. All these people go to jail, and Nixon goes free. It turns out Ford was really interested in getting Nixon off the front page because he was going to be investigated, certainly indicted probably tried, maybe jailed -- we'd have two or three more years of Watergate and Ford said to me in one interview, he said, 'I needed my own presidency.' So, what looked like in 1974 the ultimate corruption turns out to be actually an act of courage in because Ford paid an immense political price for the pardon because of the suspicions there was a deal.

GERALD FORD CLIP: 'Mr. Chief Justice, my dear friends, my fellow Americans -- the oath that I have taken is the same oath that was taken by and by every president under the Constitution. But I assume the presidency under extraordinary circumstances never before experienced by Americans. This is an hour of history that troubles our minds and hurts our hearts. Therefore, I feel it is my first duty to make an unprecedented compact with my countrymen. Not

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 5 at inaugural address, not a fireside chat, not a campaign speech -- just a little straight talk among friends. And I intend it to be the first of many. I am acutely aware that you have not elected me as your president by your ballots. So I ask you to confirm me as your president with your prayers.'

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: These are remarks that Gerald Ford gave on , 1974 following his swearing in.

GERALD FORD CLIP: 'My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over. Our Constitution works. Our great republic is a government of laws and not of man. Here, the people rule. But there is a higher power, by whatever name we honor him, who ordains not only righteousness, but love -- not only justice, but mercy. As we bind up the internal wounds of Watergate, more painful and more poisonous than those of foreign , let us restore the Golden Rule to our political process.'

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, here now to talk about Ford's presidency is Daniel Sargent. He's an associate professor at the University of , Berkeley. And he's an expert on policy and history of the . Well, thanks so much for talking with me, Daniel.

DANIEL SARGENT: I'm delighted to.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, we know the political backdrop for Ford taking over the presidency, Nixon's and the public's lack of confidence in their leadership now -- but why don't you just set the scene for what's going on outside the White House at this time when he takes over the office?

DANIEL SARGENT: Absolutely. It's sort of a mixed picture when Gerald Ford becomes president.

Economically, the situation is really quite serious -- the oil crisis that unfolds in the winter of 1973 to 1974 has a pretty catastrophic impact. It triggers the severest of the post-war era. Policymakers are confounded by the combination of stubborn inflation and economic recession.

There's a great deal of political clamoring for leaders in Washington to put Americans back to work and put the economy back to rights. In , the aftermath of the oil crisis creates a set of serious challenges in the Middle East. The 1970s, I think, in a lot of ways, represent a kind of hinge between the classic kind of bipolar world that comes into being at the end of the Second and the more chaotic, less organized, less coherent world that we that we inhabit today. So, look, it's during the 1970s that the goes from being a net exporter of oil and money to the world to being a net importer of oil and money.

It's in the 1970s that the Cold War ceases to be an overriding preoccupation, although it will resurge briefly in the 1980s under Reagan, and we begin to contemplate new kinds of leadership role and responsibility for the United States.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: The Vietnam War obviously is also coming to an end. What about Ford's character and his time in Congress, his career up until this point, has equipped him well to start tackling some of these challenges? And then, conversely, what was he less suited or at least less prepared to have to handle as president?

DANIEL SARGENT: Ford, crucially, is a man of the Congress. His background as a congressman engenders an orientation to compromise, to conciliation, to bipartisan collaboration. You know, it

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 6 may be important to remember that Ford becomes a minority leader of the Republican caucus in the House in the immediate aftermath of the Goldwater debacle in 1964.

So, you know, the searing defeat of Goldwater's presidential campaign sort of serves as a cautionary example. It discourages Ford from embracing a Goldwater style of ideological politics and convinces him that the Republican Party must be moderate. So, this practice that Ford has in bipartisan legislative politics, I think, makes Ford a different kind of president. He's much more oriented to empathetic engagement with adversaries than I think is typical of Cold War presidents more broadly. His instincts are those of a legislator more than a commanding chief executive.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Where do you see that playing out in his leadership style as president -- his approach to ?

DANIEL SARGENT: I mean, aside from the pardon of Nixon, one of the first key decisions that Ford makes as president is to Vietnam draft dodgers and deserters. And Ford's decision is really very interesting because, on the right, Ford is under pressure from supporters of the war -- supporters for the military, who do not want there to be any amnesty whatsoever.

On the left, Ford is under pressure from opponents of the war who want a total and unqualified amnesty for draft dodgers. And what Ford does, you know, very typical for Gerald Ford, is to seek a compromise between those positions. So, what he proposes back in September 1974 is a qualified amnesty whereby draft dodgers will be granted legal amnesty in exchange for the fulfillment of specific terms and conditions, including, I think, two years of community service to substitute for the military service they didn't perform.

That, I think, is a classic Gerald Ford move seeking to find consensus, to find middle ground.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: It might be interesting to pause here for a moment and talk about some of the people in Ford's administration. So, he inherited Nixon's cabinet and staff -- people like . But what was Ford's approach to, you know, making decisions about who he kept, who he let go, how long he let some of Nixon's choices stay before he replaced them? And what did those staffing decisions tell you about Ford and his leadership style?

DANIEL SARGENT: Ok, first thing is that the presidential transition that occurs in August 1974 is totally unique in the annals of American political history. Every other vice president who becomes president becomes president under tragic circumstance. When Lyndon Johnson takes over from President in November 1963, the way that Johnson sort of legitimates himself as president is to wrap himself in the mantle of his deceased predecessor. Ford uniquely has to achieve legitimacy by situating himself, at least to some extent, in opposition to a disgraced predecessor, and that's a very unusual kind of challenge.

For the purposes of sustaining managerial continuity, Ford does persevere with as White House chief of staff for a little bit more than a month. But Ford from the very beginning is convinced that Haig cannot remain as a long-term White House chief of staff. Haig had controlled the paper flow to the president. He had controlled the president's schedule. Haig really substituted as a kind of deputy president who mediated access to the president for the broader White House staff.

Ford wants a much flatter organizational structure. So, what he tries to create initially with Donald

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 7 Rumsfeld -- as his new chief of staff, Rumsfeld's appointed in late September is a more open kind of administrative structure within the White House.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: And what would you consider some of the most interesting and significant relationships that he had? The dynamic between him and Kissinger?

DANIEL SARGENT: When Nixon meets with Ford upon the cusp of his retirement, he tells Ford, 'The one essential man, the one man whom you must keep, whom you cannot replace is Henry Kissinger.'

And Ford does keep Kissinger through the entirety of his presidency. And he's an immensely powerful secretary of state. I think Ford broadly shares Kissinger's vision for what U.S. foreign policy ought to be, and that engenders a pretty positive working relationship between the two.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, let's talk a little bit about Ford's leadership on the global stage. How do you see his approach to diplomacy and his relationship with other foreign leaders being different from some of his predecessors?

DANIEL SARGENT: I think that Ford's personal diplomacy was one of his great, great strengths as president. You know, Ford, as he becomes president, is, of course, immediately and famously acclaimed by the domestic media for his humility, for his openness, his candor, his honesty. Those basic and defining human characteristics, I think, also serve Ford very well in the international arena.

During 1974, there are also significant leadership transitions in , in France and in Great Britain. And Ford, very quickly, forges excellent working relationships with the new leaders of each of those countries. As a result in part of those close personal ties, the mid 1970s become a heyday of cooperation within the Western . It's during this phase that the G-7 summits are set up as a framework for coordinating economic policy and the fruits of that cooperation -- the G-7 summit -- continue to the present day.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: When you look at U.S.- relations, in particular, how important do you think the chapter that is Ford's presidency is in the overall story?

DANIEL SARGENT: I think it's important to remember that Watergate really plunges the future of U.S.-Soviet relations into considerable uncertainty. In the Kremlin, there is not a lot of comprehension as to why Nixon is being removed from the presidency. From the standpoint, of course, of Communist Party leaders who seized power in a violent coup d'etat, the idea that a president could be removed over a comparatively minor legal infraction is not intuitively obvious.

And what Ford accomplishes is to very quickly restabilize the working relationship that Nixon and Kissinger built. You know, Ford is a very genial, easygoing character; and his geniality, I think, is a powerful lubricant to smooth U.S.-Soviet relations.

You know, Ford, for example, goes to at the end of 1974 to negotiate the terms of a new arms control agreement with . He very quickly builds a good rapport with Brezhnev. You know, in one memorable gesture, as he's departing from from the , Ford takes off the coat that he's wearing, which is a kind of luxurious wolf's skin coat, and gives it to Brezhnev as a parting gift, a gesture that Brezhnev seems to very much appreciate.

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The two men achieve a good working relationship thanks, I think, to Ford's candor, his generosity, his openness -- and this helps to sustain that relationship through a very difficult phase.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: But he was doing this all while taking some heat back home from Americans for it -- there are people who still think Russia is the kind of capital 'E' enemy, and to engage with them in this way at all is the wrong choice, the wrong move for the American president, right?

DANIEL SARGENT: Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. Ford is dealing with a Congress that is dominated by progressive Democrats, the so-called . And, you know, some of these Democrats are convinced by the mid 1970s that the Cold War is over, and that the United States ought to be either demilitarising or devoting itself to new purposes in the world.

At the same time, he's being assailed on the right by critics convinced that the Soviet Union is still enemy number one, and that Nixon and Kissinger have given away far too much in their quest for arms control. So, Ford is being assailed, really, from from both sides.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, skipping over to Vietnam. What sort of choices was Ford facing in terms of how to navigate the end to U.S. involvement in Vietnam?

DANIEL SARGENT: OK, here, too, I think Ford is caught between domestic political realities and difficult international challenges.

Of course, Ford has the misfortune to become president just as is beginning to set in motion the military offensive that will overthrow the South Vietnamese government and reunify Vietnam under Communist auspices, which is exactly the outcome that the United States went to war in Vietnam to prevent.

And this occurs -- begins to unfold -- within a matter of months after Ford having assumed the presidency. Meanwhile, of course, the American public is heartily sick of the Vietnam War. Congress, which is now dominated in both the House and the Senate by the Democratic Party, is determined that the United States must not re-engage in Vietnam. So, when Ford and Kissinger go to Congress in early 1975 to ask for appropriations to support , Congress says no.

What Ford does -- which, I think shows once again his instincts and effectiveness as a conciliator -- is to give a public speech in in April 1975 in which he declares famously that the Vietnam War is, so far as the United States is concerned, now over.

Much as he had done with Nixon and Watergate, Ford tries to draw a bold line under what had been a very difficult phase for the United States in order that the country can move on and begin to heal.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, back home, the economy was deteriorating and there's an energy crisis as oil prices are spiking. And how does Ford go about tackling these issues, and how successful are or unsuccessful is he at doing that?

DANIEL SARGENT: I don't think Ford was especially successful in terms of the results that he achieved, but I think what we see when we look at Ford's leadership -- on domestic, economic and

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 9 specifically energy issues -- is a combination of policy realism and political courage. Ford tries, from the very beginning, to get to grips with the energy problem and with the broader economic malaise that the United States is experiencing. To do this, he makes a series of important institutional changes within the White House.

One of the key changes is the creation of the Economic Policy Board. Here, of course, there is a powerful contrast with Richard Nixon, who hadn’t been an expert in economic matters and disinterested in economic policy. Ford, in contrast, has training in . He was an economics major at Michigan as an undergraduate. And he's deeply versed in the federal budget by dint of his experience as a congressman, and he's profoundly committed to making good economic policy.

Ford makes energy the centerpiece when he goes to Congress in to give the address. He calls for the nation's first coherent, integrated energy policy. Ford predictably runs into stubborn political opposition in the Congress because one of the core components of his energy policy is an increase in the tax on gasoline.

Ford understands that you cannot reduce consumption of gasoline unless you increase the price that consumers pay for gas at the pump. But, you know, the enthusiasm in the Congress for raising gas taxes is predictably low. And so, Ford's energy policy flounders, and that's a source of great frustration to President Ford.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, yes, Democrats controlled Congress, but he was someone who had really spent his entire career there. And as you had said before, he's someone who was known for being able to work well with colleagues on both sides of the aisle. Why do you think he didn't have more success as president being able to really just rally the support of Congress for some of his visions?

DANIEL SARGENT: I mean, Ford is a conciliator, but he's also a fairly conservative Republican. You know, his conservatism is deeply founded in his own personal story. Ford is as frugal in his personal habits, convinced of the virtues of frugality in budgetary matters. His conservatism is deep, and it's intuitive. Now, as president -- as a conservative president, much more fiscally conservative than Richard Nixon had been -- he's up against a Congress that is probably the most progressive left wing congress of the entire .

So, Ford is struggling against, you know, political circumstances that are not at all conducive to his vision of how the federal government ought to be run -- of what federal policy, particularly economic policies, ought to be.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, one thing that hasn't come up yet in our conversation is race relations.

DANIEL SARGENT: You know, the Ford administration is interesting, right? Because it locates, in the aftermath of the Nixon administration -- an administration that self-consciously pursued a policy of what , Nixon's adviser on domestic issues ,characterized as a policy of benign neglect towards race issues -- sort of the guiding assumption, I think, was that in the aftermath of the civil rights accomplishments of the , the federal government could now take a step back and let American society assimilate the changes that the 1960s and the Civil Rights movement had wrought.

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 10 I don't see the Ford administration as marking a significant departure from that policy of benign neglect. I think one area in which race relations becomes a politically explosive controversy for the Ford administration has to do with the of domestic race politics and foreign policy. Kissinger and Ford realize that is reprehensible and make a decisive choice in the spring of 1976 to align the United States with the aspirations of black majorities in southern . That's a move that is unpopular with the Republican Party base and doing so really cost him politically.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: And then, ultimately, in the presidential election, what do you think is at the heart of why Ford lost?

DANIEL SARGENT: I think the heart of why Ford lost is Nixon's . I think the stench of Watergate, the stench of Ford's , was too powerful for President Ford to escape in November 1976 when the Democratic candidate, , who's an effective campaigner -- an effective political communicator -- is able to present himself as a force for political reform, a force for openness and transparency and honesty in government. Ironically, of course, Ford, as president, is an open, honest and transparent chief executive, but mobilizing those qualities in the electoral arena is always going to be very difficult for a president who became president as a consequence of Richard Nixon's disgrace.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: When you look back at Ford's time in office, what do you think was the greatest impact that he had on the office of the presidency?

DANIEL SARGENT: The Ford presidency,, and perhaps the Carter presidency that followed it, look rather like outliers in the broader history of the post-war presidency. You know, the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. famously characterized the the 20th century presidency -- at least the 20th century presidency that begins with FDR -- as an presidency.

I think that Ford repudiates that imperial veneer and Ford strives to redress the constitutional balance between the legislature and the presidency -- a balance that really became distorted in the Johnson and Nixon years. Carter, I think, tries to do much the same thing. I think both present themselves as humble presidents -- as presidents who are servants of the people, not personifications of sovereign power.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: As a coda to this episode, I thought we'd talk about something that hasn't really come up yet in this audio podcast, and that's visual imagery of the presidency. Photography, as a medium, has been really important in the modern presidency in capturing and preserving our collective image of these leaders.

So, I got on the phone with David Hume Kennerly, who was Ford's White House photographer and actually one of the very first White House photographers in American history. So, we're going to talk about what it was like to witness and chronicle Ford's presidency up close.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: David, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me.

DAVID HUME KENNERLY: I'm happy to be here.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, one of your earliest encounters with Gerald Ford was when you photographed him for the cover of TIME magazine in 1973.

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 11 DAVID HUME KENNERLY: Right. The first time I met Gerald Ford, he was the minority leader. I was dispatched by TIME magazine up to Capitol Hill to get a picture of Ford, who was on the list as possible replacements for Vice President Spiro Agnew, who had resigned. When I showed up there, he was very friendly. And he said, 'Oh, you're wasting your time.'

And I said, 'Well, if it doesn't work out, you'll have a nice picture for your wall.' I posed him by a window. I refer to that as Rembrandt lighting. And later that night, Nixon announced he was going to be his choice. And that photograph ended up on the cover of TIME. It was his first TIME cover and my first TIME cover. But, you know, one of the things that I've thought about it since then was he, at that moment, didn't know he was going to be picked.

He tells this whole story about getting the phone call from Nixon and that he was on a line at his house -- didn't have a separate line -- and so asked Nixon to call back so Betty could hear it. But if you think about what people go through these days and the vetting process just to the Nth degree, there was no vetting. I mean, it's pretty extraordinary, if you think about it.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Yeah. And it was that first encounter that sparked a beginning of friendship, then a working relationship between the two of you?

DAVID HUME KENNERLY: Well, what happened after he was selected by Nixon, he had to go through this whole congressional process of hearings. So, TIME -- something they would never do these days -- assigned me to cover him full time. And because of that, I went out to Vail with them when they were skiing, and I got to know him and Mrs. Ford and the family.

Do you want me to talk about the night that he selected me to be his photographer?

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: I was actually just about to say -- tell me about that.

DAVID HUME KENNERLY: Boy that was -- I was 27-years old. There were, oh, I think maybe a dozen press people covering him. So, I was one of those people. I was the only photographer on the plane with him usually; and the night before, Nixon announced he was going to be resigning. And then, I have a whole sequence of photos of Nixon getting on his helicopter, flying away and then I photographed the swearing in of President Ford.

But that night, I was invited to come over to the Ford House. They had a very modest split level home in Alexandria, Virginia. And at one point, during the evening, President Ford said to me, 'Do you mind staying? I want to talk to you after everybody else left.'

It wasn't, like, a big crowd. They had friends, and certainly some family members were there. And so, we sat in his living room, and I never will forget this -- because I'm a kid from a little town in Oregon. I don't come from any political background, no money. My dad was a traveling salesman. And here I am, sitting in the room with the president -- it was one of those sort of out-of-body experiences. He was puffing on his pipe, and I knew he was going to ask me about the White House photographer. I had grave reservations about it.

I said, 'Well, I'd be very interested in doing it on two conditions. One: I report directly to you. And two: I have total access to everything that's going on.' And he kind of stopped smoking his pipe, and I thought, 'Oh, this is great. I basically have just told the president of the United States to take his job and shove it. I wonder how my parents are going to react to this.'

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And then he started laughing and said, 'You don't want on the weekends?'

That was pretty much that. The next day, we concluded the deal. I started working for him, and those were the circumstances. I had full run of the place.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Yeah. So, I think it would be interesting to hear you just talk a little bit more about what sort of access, or lack of access, presidential photographers had before you. And then, how you did recast the role?

DAVID HUME KENNERLY: Well, I think the history of the White House photo office started with President Lyndon Johnson and his White House photographer was Yoichi Okamoto. Okamoto, or Oki, as we called him, was the in presidential photography. I don't think anybody to this day has done it better than he did. He had a very dramatic president. All these huge stories of the time -- from of Martin Luther King and the war in Vietnam. And Oki as the first civilian to hold the job as White House photographer.

Ollie Atkins, Nixon's photographer, was second. I was the third. Oki was the Mozart of White House photographers. His photographs were extraordinary -- not just like single photos, but telling whole stories. And it was unbelievable. And then when Ollie Atkins had the job, he had practically zero access. In fact, the Nixon photo archives are a desert. And then President Ford hired me, and I had remarkable access to not only the president, but the family upstairs, downstairs.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Did President Ford seem to just really understand and appreciate the power that images could have in his presidency -- that he gave you such access?

DAVID HUME KENNERLY: I think President Ford appreciated the images, but unlike Johnson, who was a very vain man and, Oki told me this: He would, if he didn't like the way a picture looked -- even to sign it and send it out to somebody -- he wouldn't do it. President Ford honestly cared less about that. He's more interested in doing his job and letting me do mine.

And there were no two Gerald Fords. The man was not only selfless, but he treated everybody the same in private and public. There wasn't a guy backstage making disparaging remarks about any , like you've heard with Nixon tapes. And Gerald Ford was -- what you saw was what you got. He was a truly genuine, honest, wonderful human being.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: I found it so interesting -- I read that, in 1975, while you were his photographer, that you went to Vietnam to document the war's toll by that point; and that when you came back, Ford had wanted to see your photos from the trip and he had many of them put up in the so that they could serve as a reminder to him and his staff of the devastation.

And I found that so powerful and so interesting that he could see the value not just in you photographing him but that your eyes could serve as another set of eyes for him to see the world through.

DAVID HUME KENNERLY: I don't think any presidents ever had a briefing like I gave President Ford when I came back from Vietnam. Danang had fallen. I was up in Nha Trang when it had to be evacuated. I went over to less than two weeks before it folded, and I've shot all these pictures of refugees, and really the human toll of what was going on -- and it was very emotional

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 13 for me, because I'd spent two and a half years in Vietnam. I knew a lot of the people who were being displaced. I had friends of mine that were begging me to take their children with them.

When I showed the pictures to President Ford, I also told him that, despite what anybody was saying, I thought Vietnam maybe had three or four weeks left before it was going to collapse -- South Vietnam. And in fact, it happened 3 1/2 weeks later. But somebody was so offended by having these pictures up on the wall of the White House, they took them down on one evening. And President Ford got so mad and ordered them put back up and that he would fire anybody who messed with them.

He said, 'It's really important that everybody here knows what's happening -- that we're not just surrounded by cheery color photos of state dinners and parties.'

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Do you remember which photos were the ones that were hanging in ?

DAVID HUME KENNERLY: I do. There were pictures from Cambodia. There was a photograph of a woman dying in a hospital. There was a little refugee girl. There were refugees at Cam Ranh Bay. There was a ship filled with escaping South Vietnamese soldiers who had bugged out from Danang. It was a devastatingly difficult thing for him to have to be the president to end the war under those circumstances. And I was the one person who had been in the war and was also right there in the room when he pulled the plug.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: I was hoping that you can tell me the highest and the lowest moment that you saw of him in the presidency.

DAVID HUME KENNERLY: I think one of the high points -- and it was the moment that I really felt he took over command of the office -- was during the Mayaguez situation, which was when an American ship had been taken over by the . There were Americans on board. They took them off, and they were holding them hostage. This is, you know, right after the Cambodian fall under the Khmer Rouge. And he oversaw that whole operation, and I really believe that was when he had totally assumed the presidency. And then, his actions resulted in the Americans being released, every one of them without being injured. That was a real high point.

And he had the opportunity to bomb the Cambodians. He was being encouraged to take stronger action, but he said, 'Look, I'm not going to make the Cambodian people pay for what happened to us in Vietnam.' And to me, that's leadership. It's not like trying to teach people a lesson or take revenge. And the payoff -- of what he did -- was actually the right course of action.

A low point was -- one, for sure -- was when Mrs. Ford had been diagnosed with breast . He was very emotional about that. They were about as close as a couple could ever be. That was a low point. And losing the election -- he almost won. The day he lost the election, he literally couldn't talk -- could barely croak. For like two weeks, he kind of wore his voice out.

And when we walked back to the Oval Office, it was me and Terry O'Donnell, who was his personal aide, and Terry and I were probably the two people who spent the most time with him outside of the immediate family. And he put his arm around Terry and said, 'Terry, I really appreciate it.' I mean, you could barely hear him. He was whispering. 'I really appreciate everything you've done for me. If there's anything I could do for you to help after we leave here, let me know.'

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And Terry and I both burst into tears. I mean, it was just so emotional, and it was such a difficult defeat, but it was very emblematic of the kind of person he was -- always putting other people ahead of himself.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: You have gone on to photograph so many other presidents as well. Have you noticed that there was something different about him?

DAVID HUME KENNERLY: The difference between him and people who really wanted to be president -- he wouldn't walk over his mother's dead body to get there. It wasn't his dream, his aspiration. And being backstage with Ford, I thought: ‘This is so uplifting -- that someone like him could actually be the president of the United States. This is a good commentary. Gerald Ford was a good commentary of the kind of people we have in this country.’

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