When Ford Was in the White House
A rather important anniversary slipped by last month, while I was on vacation - the 20th anniversary of Richard Nixon's resignation and Gerald Ford's succession to the presidency. I was feeling guilty about the fact that the occasion had passed without comment, here or almost anyplace else, until I put in a call to Jerry Ford last week.</br></br>"Betty and I decided to downplay it ourselves," he said. "We had a quiet dinner with some friends here at Beaver Creek {Colo.} and agreed we'd have a bigger gathering when we reach the 25th."</br></br>That low-keyed approach is typical of Ford, who has never been much for fuss and ceremony. But, as I mentioned to him, part of my vacation reading was a book published earlier this year, "Time and Chance: Gerald Ford's Appointment with History." Written by James Cannon, a longtime Newsweek reporter and editor who later worked on the staffs of Ford, Nelson Rockefeller and Howard H. Baker Jr., it is a vivid reminder of the critical role the quiet man from Grand Rapids, Mich., played in the greatest constitutional crisis this Republic has faced since the Civil War.</br></br>"Now," Ford said on the phone, "people in their twenties have no recollection of it at all. They have no way to recognize the trauma of Watergate, the Vietnam War. Those were major crises. Jim's book brings out the tension that was in the atmosphere."</br></br>Tension does not begin to describe it. In the space of 10 months, from October of 1973 to August of 1974, these things happened: The vice president of the United States, Spiro T. Agnew, was forced to resign rather than face criminal charges of accepting payoffs for political favors; a new vice president, Ford, was selected by Nixon (after Nixon was persuaded that his first choice, John B. Connally, was not politically viable) and, in a never-before-utilized procedure, Ford went through confirmation hearings in both the House and Senate and was confirmed by overwhelming votes of both bodies.