Gerald Ford’s Fifteen Minutes

I originally intended this post for last year, it being the 50th anniversary of the ascension of Gerald R. Ford (Leslie Lynch King, 1913-2006) to the U.S. Presidency. But I didn’t get to it, and this years works even better, for it marks the 50th anniversary of Chevy Chase’s sketches lampooning his supposed clumsiness on Saturday Night Live.

Unlike most, I do not describe Chase’s bit as an “impression”, for it was never that. It is more like a disrespectful, nihilistic, non-impression. Chase used his own personality and his own voice, and merely reduced the President of the United States to one element of his make-up, putting his occasional klutziness under a sort of hostile magnifying glass. It was kind of punk in a way. While my description may sound disapproving I assure you I laugh whole-heartedly whenever I watch it. It’s like watching the shenanigans of a kid in class when the teacher steps out for a minute (and again I assure you that as a pre-teen and teen, my friends and I did Chevy Chase impressions at school). For Chase, the teacher was Ford, and the entire nation was the classroom.

Respect the office, you say? A lot of people having been saying that in recent years, as well. But what does that mean? You do not respect an office. An office, a title, is an abstraction. You can not respect an office any more than you can fight a war on drugs, or preserve the symbolic sanctity of a flag. You can respect an office-holder, and in many cases you ought to, but in America that has never been compulsory. As yet there is no law against comedy, but I grow fearful that may change.

Anyway, one of Ford’s virtues was that he was easygoing. He even went so far as to send his Press Secretary Ron Nessen to be a guest on Saturday Night Live and be in sketches with Chase playing Ford, a truly bizarre spectacle in retrospect, but which I took totally in stride as a kid. Ford was not like Nixon, who made an enemies list which included people who made fun of him. But Ford did pardon Nixon, and that was pretty unforgivable, and seemed, and seems, pretty fishy.

In my two-part Jimmy Carter essay, I spoke of the Man from Plains as the first President whose tenure I had the opportunity to witness from soup to nuts. That wasn’t quite true. I witnessed Nixon’s resignation and departure in real time, and was certainly paying attention during the whole of Ford’s Presidency, as much as a kid does, anyway. What I meant about Carter was that he was the first I knew from his candidacy all the way through his Presidency. And Ford was never a candidate. Ford was named by Nixon as a replacement after his elected VP Spiro Agnew, was forced to resign in disgrace following all sorts of corruption charges. Aside from being a college football hero, Ford was best known for being a Michigan congressman for nearly a quarter of a century, and House Minority Leader for a good chunk of that. (My ex-father-in-law served in the Congress with him, as it happens). Ford had excellent political experience, but certainly no Presidential ambitions. In the age of Nixon, who was ambition itself poured into a mold of flesh, this came off as a plus, though.

As with Harry Truman, the nation felt fairly lucky in their accidental president insomuch as no absolute disasters befell the nation while he held the reins. That said, all were pretty well dissatisfied with him as well. Inflation and unemployment, exacerbated by the simultaneous outlays of the Great Society and the Vietnam War, flared. South Vietnam fell to the Communists and Ford was unable to convince Congress to support an ally we had made a million promises to. One can argue that the real disgrace, the real “loss” of Vietnam, came not with the Paris Peace Agreement of 1973, but with America’s abandonment of South Vietnam two years later. You could also argue that Ford’s ineffectualness was what inflamed the conservative wing of his party and made Ronald Reagan (who primaried him in 1976) possible. Ford was pro-ERA. He made liberal republican Nelson Rockefeller his VP. His wife Betty was a vocal supporter of the Roe v. Wade decision. Yet in spite of all that, the left didn’t like Ford either. The Nixon pardon stank in their nostrils. It’s not like he was letting loose the floodgates of socialism and civil rights and returning America back to 1968 or anything. Within a couple of weeks of each other, Manson family member Squeaky Fromme, and lone looney Sara Jane Moore both attempted to assassinate him, both with revolutionary motivations. Clowns to the left of me, Jokers to the right!

Ford didn’t want to run for the office he never asked for in 1976, but he succumbed to pressure. Even so, he only lost narrowly to Carter. The popular vote went roughly 50% for Carter, 48% for Ford. A house divided against itself cannot stand.

For more Presidential ruminations see the Travalanche Hall of Presidents here.