The Demons of Gerald Ford

Jerry Ford hates america. Not all of America. He keeps tucked like an armored pocket Bible next to his heart a xenophobic compendium of the glories he imagines she wore in an imaginary golden age. When the flag flew high over a nation of honest yeomen, when government was best because it governed least, when honest folk spurned cities because cities bred the spirochetes of sin, when virtues were plain, skins white, values puritan and businesses mom and pop, when the lazy poor deservedly starved and the inferior shuffling blacks knew their place and paradise was country-club golf on a sunny Saturday afternoon--true believer that he is, this is the America that he adores. But the America of conflict and diversity, of poverty and races, of promised equality and government brave and strong enough to guarantee it, of massive forces massively joined in a struggle for the future--the America that is the real and contentious and idealistic and unfinished place in which we live--Jerry Ford hates, with the ferocity of a man whose deepest childhood fears have not yet, at 63, been laid to rest.

If he has seemed otherwise, if he has seemed a genial and modest man, his voting record as a Congressman and his priorities as President belie that dissimulation. Across 28 years of elective and appointive office, Ford has worked unrelentingly to oppose those Government programs designed to aid the weak, the disenfranchised, the poor and the disadvantaged. While promoting the largest possible defense budgets, he has maneuvered to cripple, gut or void every civil rights bill he has seen introduced. He's against food stamps. He's against free school lunches for the children of the poor. He's against national health insurance, public housing, aid to education, rent subsidy, unemployment compensation for farmworkers, increased Social Security benefits, an increased minimum wage, support for mass transit from the Highway Trust, abortion on demand, busing, strip-mining regulation, gasoline rationing, "liberal" Supreme Court decisions, public works. He prefers unemployment to inflation. He's in favor of school prayers and the CIA.

These are the classic positions of an Old Guard Republican, and it would be easy to pass them off as the automatic reflexes of a dutiful conservative. But no human being is merely an automaton; we are what we are because of choices we make among the pressures and opportunities that contend within us. "People," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, "seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character." While Richard Nixon was able to believe, or pretend to believe, whatever suited his immediate needs, Jerry Ford's Old Guard positions have held steady through decades of time and change, because they are deeply entrenched convictions. He has never wavered from them and he doesn't waver from them now. They must therefore relate to his own ecological balance, to the dynamics of his shadowy interior.

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There is this about the Anglo-Saxon voice, scarred sequela of the Anglo-Saxon morality that aborted it: its quality of strain. Put to service for its many official uses--counting cadence, propounding goals, condemning the faint of heart, exhorting ambition, praising the American way of life--it comes out thin, pitched too high, without range unless deliberately trained. And the fair, blue-eyed, broad-bottomed men, the recent masters of the world, who early train their bodies to hardness, invariably neglect its training, as if in the midst of their stylized manhood, a manhood as circumscribed by fear as a life of crime, they want to leave a desperate clue.

Gerald Rudolph Ford, a.k.a. Gerald Rudolf Ford, Jr., a.k.a. Leslie Lynch King, Jr.--five-fingers bowlegged, according to his sometime tailor (and imagine him suffering those tailor fingers between his legs), and 38th President of the United States by vote of the House of Representatives, where he served as water boy and center for 25 years--has such a voice. Compare Kennedy's nasal arrogance, Johnson's bully bellow, Nixon's oleaginous announcerese. Even Eisenhower, another Anglo-Saxon but hardened to confidence in the cowboy West, spoke more forcefully, though something burbled caution going by. To consider Jerry, foursquare, fundamental Jerry, and overlook the pathology of his Calvinistic larynx is to misunderstand the forces and conflicts that made him what he is; and since he is temporarily in charge of our mutual destinies, we misunderstand him to our discomfiture if not to our immediate peril. Like all our Presidents, perhaps like all men everywhere, he lives behind a mask; but unlike most of our Presidents, he didn't design that mask himself. He doesn't swear in public, but he doesn't swear in the privacy of the Oval Office, either. The God for whose judging, all-seeing eyes the craftsmen of the Middle Ages finished and decorated even the sealed interiors of chests and cathedral walls has eyes for him; and sometimes at noon--today at the pinnacle of his power as in quieter days past--with Machiavellian Mel Laird kneeling improbably at his side, Gerald Ford prays aloud for guidance, knowing that tape recorders far more sensitive than the ones Nixon used are running without switch or deletion high above the famous desk. The Presidency is a terrible burden, or so we have been told; but more terrible by far is the burden of the true believer, and there's a live one in the White House now.

He wasn't always so. Look at Jerry when he was three. He's sitting on a wicker chair beside a wicker couch on a Grand Rapids front porch, his feet in high, lace-up shoes. Over his solid baby body he wears white short pants and a white blouse with crisp cuffs and a white dickey fore and aft, a sailor suit without the contrasting piping--the darling of his mother, the favored first-born son.

The boy's head and face arrest us. His mouth open, he looks back over his right shoulder at someone outside the photograph's frame. A round head. A mouthful of sturdy teeth. Hair pale as straw cut in a Dutch-boy bob, bangs halfway down the wide brow clipped straight across the front. Below the bangs, lively eyes squinted against the sun. Health, happiness, innocence and physical force surprising in a child so young: Buster Brown.

But the photograph deceives, as all the later childhood photographs--somber when others are smiling, aggressive when others are content, wary when others are at ease--do not. Because at three, hardly out of diapers, this Buster Brown has already lost a father and a name, has been stripped of the identity awarded him at birth and forced to assume a second identity necessarily and forever less secure, has been bereaved by desertion and almost immediately thereafter inwardly shamed. If you think I make too much of this, wait and see.

He was born Leslie Lynch King, Jr., at 12:35 a.m. on July 14, 1913, in Omaha, Nebraska, the Sun conjunct Neptune in Cancer within a close orb. His mother, Dorothy Gardner King of Grand Rapids, was nearly beautiful, plump in the manner of the day and big-breasted. His father, his mysterious father, a wool trader from Wyoming, is as shadowy and fascinating a man as Biff's diamond-mining uncle in Death of a Salesman, the daredevil fellow Willy Loman never was. What took young, single, sexy Dorothy Gardner to Omaha in 1911 or 1912? Did she run away from home? Why did she marry a wanderer like Leslie King? The man must have been exotic, romantic, a cowboy, and the woman, "lots of fun and very softhearted," in the words of her first-born son, the woman out on the wild packinghouse town, would have been an easy mark for that.

She never told her son why the marriage failed (and, more to the point, he never seriously asked). "Things just didn't work out" is the most he remembers her ever having said. Dorothy King was divorced in 1915 and went back to Grand Rapids with two-year-old Leslie, Jr., in tow, and there met and almost immediately married Gerald Rudolf Ford, fourth child and only son in a family of four, whose father had died when he was young, a paint-and-varnish salesman in a city of booming furniture factories.

And then the curious and cataclysmic event, the renaming of Dorothy's son. Jerry says he knew it only later, but he lies, however unintentionally. Whatever his mother called him, little Leslie would have known his real name and his real father before the age of two, would therefore have known when his first full name was taken away. We walk by then and talk by then; we remember deeply, even searingly, by then, though later we forget deeply, too; and fathers who are vain enough to name us after themselves, to put their brand on us, as Leslie King did, aren't likely to keep it secret.

Erasing that first childhood name, giving the boy a new identity, was an act of generosity on Dad Ford's part, proof to Dorothy of his love: He married her and accepted the child as his own. He went beyond stepfatherhood and legally adopted the boy. But Gerald Ford, Junior? He might have named little Leslie Tom or Dick or Jimmy, as he later did his three natural sons; Leslie wasn't his first-born son; he was the son of another marriage and another man. Greater love, then? Repair, one generation removed, of Dad Ford's own early loss? All that, certainly, to his great credit, but certainly also some flicker of shame, in the pious Middle West of the early 20th Century, at his wife's divorce. And of jealousy that another had impregnated her first. And of that malign spirit of expropriation, extending even to human flesh, that lies within the Anglo-Saxon heart. All these ambivalences the tow-headed Buster Brown had to ravel, before his feet had even touched the floor.

The paint company--Ford Paint & Varnish, manufacturing and distribution--was established in Grand Rapids, the furniture capital of the world, in 1929, three weeks before the Wall Street Crash. Dad Ford started his company and simultaneously moved his family to an expensive house in East Grand Rapids. Who starts a business and buys a new house the same year? A cockeyed optimist, a man whose wife wants visible wealth? The Depression almost wiped them out. Dad Ford couldn't handle the mortgage on the house. He forfeited house and down payment, too, and moved to a smaller residence in a poorer section of town. Jerry--Junie, as he was called then, for Junior--had to petition the school board and ride the bus to stay at South High, with who knows what smoldering sense of indignation? He hated busing then; he hates it now. But Jerry was never afflicted with the stresses in his family house; he learned to handle stress in other ways.

How did Junie grow? By being a certain kind of boy--an outdoor boy, an athletic boy, a boy with a problem. Like George Washington, Junie Ford had his cherry tree. "He was a strong-willed little boy," a former neighbor recalls. "If he didn't want you to climb his cherry tree at the particular moment, no one did. He would climb up it and say, 'My tree.' There would be perhaps six or seven of us, older than he was, but he could hold his own. But Alice [the neighbor's twin sister] went up anyway, so he stepped on her hand. Actually, he stood on her hand, until she screamed. Then he took his foot off. A very headstrong little boy."

"My very young years," he told novelist John Hersey during the week he allowed Hersey to wander with him through the White House, "I had a terrible temper. My mother detected it and started to get me away from being upset and flying off the handle. She had a great knack of ridicule one time and humor the next, or cajoling, to teach me that anger--visible, physical anger--was not the way to meet problems.... She taught me that you don't respond in a wild, uncontrolled way; you just better sit back and take a hard look and try to make the best decision without letting emotions be the controlling factor." Sensitized to overcontrol by his mother's fear of anger, ridiculed, humored and cajoled, Jerry had to put his feelings somewhere. Where did his anger go?

Football. Ford's youthful forte, the delight of his metaphor and the school of his life. Of the three modest articles and one co-authored book that throughout his entire professional lifetime are the only written words to be published in his name, one, written with John Underwood and published in Sports Illustrated, is titled In Defense of the Competitive Urge, and in it the then--Vice-President offers a remarkable opinion: "Broadly speaking, outside of a national character and an educated society, there are few things more important to a country's growth and well-being than competitive athletics." Since competitive athletics have had almost nothing to do with any country's growth, least of all that of the United States, Ford can only be talking about himself.

So: football, where aggression, anger, a very visible and socially acceptable hatred of the other--the timid, the less able, the unlucky, the weak--carries the day. Ford put his feelings through the psychic projector and they beamed out contempt for the weak. South High football coach Clifford Gettings was the beginning of a line of bully father figures to whom Ford would claim loyalty and, unlike the later ones--men like the late Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, who Ford claims sponsored him for Congress but whose records give no indication of anything more than the most formal of connections, men like Richard Nixon--Gettings at least claims loyalty to Jerry in return.

Because he admires force, Ford likes to remember his stepfather as a tough man, but his brothers disagree. Brother Dick recalls only one instance of physical punishment in the Ford house, when Tom came home late for dinner and got a ruler broken over his rear. Coach (continued on page 209) Jerry Ford (continued from page 84) Gettings was a bear of a man, a model of athletic deportment. You showed up on time for his practices; you got a lap to run for every minute you were late. Gettings remembers being ten minutes late himself one day and the team made the old man run his laps, too, all heart-pounding ten of them, and guess who chalked up each lap as he ran?

Wearing a coat and tie when his high school classmates wore sweaters, remembered as serious and shy and entirely without interest in girls, Junie played football like a maniac, played center in an era when to center the ball was to throw a difficult, upside-down, ass-backward pass. "I must have centered the ball 500,000 times in high school and college," he recounts. He was a roving linebacker on defense, a 60-minute man. He made All-City three years in a row. He played hard. He played to win. He learned to be a team player, a man among equals--a lesson he never forgot.

He was nevertheless a local hero, and it is not an exaggeration to say that his first sweet taste of local success determined his career. In the autumn of 1930, during his sparkling senior year, a Grand Rapids theater held a contest, part of a promotional scheme in 50 Midwestern cities, to identify the most popular high school seniors. Kids sauntered down to the old Majestic in droves and filled out their ballots and dropped them into the ballot box. All-City center Junie Ford won. The prize was a trip to Washington, D.C. To get to Washington, all you have to do is please the folks back home.

But 1930 brought another event, an event that preceded the popularity contest and must have confirmed its message beyond inner debate: The former Leslie Lynch King, Jr., met his real father for the first (remembered) time.

Ford tells the story to all his biographers, repeating it like the Ancient Mariner to drive its homiletic tragedy home. He told it best to Hersey:

"I was, I think, a junior in high school in the spring, 1930. I worked at a restaurant across from South High called Skougis'. It was a 1929, 1930 hamburger stand with counters--a dilapidated place. Bill Skougis was a shrewd Greek businessman and he hired as waiters the outstanding football players. He paid me two dollars plus my lunch--up to 50 cents a meal--and I worked from 11:30 to one, through the noon-hour class periods, and one night a week from seven to ten. [Ford makes much of his modest, even impoverished, childhood, but notice that his take for part-time work, counting the lunches, was four-fifty a week at a time--the empty belly of the Depression--when Dad Ford had been forced to reduce the wages he paid the family men at his factory to five dollars a week. Dad Ford himself took home no more.] ... I was standing there taking money, washing dishes and ... this man came in and stood against the candy counter for ten minutes. Finally, he walked over to where I was working. 'Leslie,' he said. I didn't answer. He said, 'I'm Leslie King, and you're Leslie King, Jr.' Well, it was kind of shocking. He said, 'I would like to take you to lunch.' My father took me out to his car, which was parked in the front--a brand-new Cadillac or Lincoln--and he introduced me to his wife. So we went to lunch. He was then living in Wyoming with his wife and they had come out to buy a new Cadillac or Lincoln, which was a beautiful car for those days, and they had picked it up in Detroit and were driving back to Wyoming, and they wanted to stop in and see me. [Hadn't come to see him, the long-lost son, had come all the way from Wyoming to pick up a car and on the way home stopped by for lunch.] Which he did. And after we had finished lunch, he took me back to the school. I said goodbye. He said, 'Will you come out and see me in Wyoming?' I said I'd think about it."

But not think too hard. At lunch, Ford told biographer Jerald terHorst, "I thought, here I was, earning two dollars a week [sic] and trying to get through school, my stepfather was having difficult times, yet here was my real father, obviously doing quite well if he could pick up a new Lincoln...."

That's one of two Leslie King stories the President tells, and perhaps before we consider it you should hear the other one as well. It's briefer but even more to the point. "My junior year at Ann Arbor [Ford went to the University of Michigan after South High], which would be '33--'34, when my stepfather's business had long gone to pot, he was hanging on by his fingernails, my father--my real father--had been ordered at the time of the divorce to pay my mother child maintenance, and he never paid any. I was having a terrible time. [But consider this terrible time.] Sure, I was earning my board and I saved some money working for my stepfather in the summer. But it wasn't enough. I wasn't able to pay my bills--the fraternity [Delta Kappa Epsilon, Deke, the jock fraternity], the room where I lived. And I wrote my father and asked him if he could help. And, as I recall, I either got no answer or, if I got an answer, he said he couldn't do it. I felt that, from what I understood, his economic circumstances were such that he could have been helpful. I had that impression. From that Lincoln or Cadillac I'd seen that he'd bought. And then after I graduated from Michigan, I went to Yale, of course. And then one time, out of the blue, I got a letter, a phone call or something, saying that he was coming with his wife, the woman I had met, with his son by the second marriage--he was really my stepbrother. And they were trying to find a school in the East for him, and could they stop by and maybe I could give them some advice. So they stopped. I did meet the son. And I went to dinner with them and gave them some thoughts about schools in the East and never saw them again."

Do still, angry waters run deep? The antagonists of these tales are wealth, fine cars, a second, younger wife, a second, cherished son and Cinderella in the food-stained sweater of a letterman, but their secret agony is unrequited love. Part of Jerry wanted to be a King. Or at least a prince: 20 or 21 years old, he asks for child support. "Had King arrived now," TerHorst asks melodramatically, paraphrasing Ford, "so he could go back to Wyoming and brag about seeing his son, the football star?" The crowds loved Junie; why didn't his father, the Cadillac man? And why didn't he prove it by bailing him out?

Obsessed with success, Gerald Ford has never loved money, which must seem paradoxical in a man who picks his friends (and his Vice-President) from among men of wealth, until you consider that the dad who loved him never made much of it and the father who abandoned him had it--in Ford's imagination, at least--to burn. So Ford the Congressman, in the first moments after his public nomination to the Vice-Presidency, expressed awe over the increased pension benefits his elevation would bring. And so Ford the President chose Nelson Rockefeller as his side-kick, followed the revelations of Rockefeller's enormous wealth with unabashed glee and later, the tables turned, left the archetypal rich man turning slowly, slowly in the wind until he removed himself from the ticket. Money, Rocky, money don't buy love.

To a greater extent than most of us like to admit, parents make us what we are. Presidents in particular have been mother-driven men, driven by mothers so intensely curbed in achievement themselves that they inculcate a psychohistorical hunger for fame in their sons. The Presidency is ultimately Oedipal, almost literally so. A man born from the vast continental land and nurtured there returns as husband to honor and enlarge its great affairs. Ford was an only child for five long years and in that Eden might have nourished a huge and healthy egotism, but the conflicts of his paternity, conflicts his mother inadvertently introduced, embedded anger, vanity and insecurity instead.

It took him years to piece together the reasons for that confusion, the double paternity, the double juniors, the father who abandoned him, the stepfather who took him in. He matured correspondingly late. In the curious, half-literate book that Ford co-authored with his Grand Rapids friend John R. Stiles, Portrait of the Assassin, a book about Lee Harvey Oswald that Stiles and the Warren Commission largely wrote, occasional sentences and paragraphs appear that clearly came from Ford's hand. One of them propounds a hypothesis so contrary to the traditional assumptions of psychology that it fairly shivers on the page. Apologizing for Marguerite Oswald's insistence that her son was a normal child, Ford writes: "As intimately as a mother feels she knows a son, what happens to a young man in the critical years 17 to 21 can obscure everything in the past." One to five, certainly; 12 to 15, possibly; but 17 to 21? Seventeen to 21: from the year Leslie King announced himself to the year he refused to acknowledge and aid his son.

The approbation Ford couldn't find in Wyoming he found on the football field, where crowds cheered his plays. It proved to him that he should seek vindication in public life. He sought that vindication with silent bitterness. Instead of a lover, he became an absentee husband; instead of a man of compassion, he became a man hard of heart; instead of a potential statesman, he became, in Lyndon Johnson's brilliant phrase, "one of the wooden soldiers of the status quo." He was always, would always be, a diligent worker, but he worked in the wrong direction, to the easier and more immediate end. He was a handsome, naïve football star and, like too many stars, he became an unwitting victim, missing the slow but solid passes that came his way because he thought he already had the ball and was running down the field.

The captain of Michigan's winning 1933 team remembers Ford as "a player who had no fear," but off the field fear clocked its hour. One of Ford's Michigan teammates was a black named Willis Ward. Ford liked Ward and sometimes roomed with him when the team traveled, which you must understand to have been an act of some bravery in the overtly racist America of the Thirties. Early in the 1934 season, Michigan was scheduled to play Georgia Tech when the word came up from Dixie that there'd be no game if Ward appeared on the field. The Michigan administration capitulated despite the efforts of the school's more liberal football coach. Jerry was agonized and considered protest: What if he refused to play? The night before the game he called Dad Ford, but his stepfather declined the privilege of making up his 20-year-old son's mind. Ford balanced the weakness of the team against the strength of his conscience; the team won. He was still stinging when a Georgia Tech lineman jeered "Nigger" over the centered ball, and Ford and a guard blocked the lineman so viciously he had to be carried off the field. The story is cited in Ford's biographies as proof of his early dedication to liberalism. It's not. It's proof of his early dedication to scapegoating. "Thanks to my football experience," he would tell an audience years later, "I know the value of team play. It is, I believe, one of the most important lessons to be learned and practiced in our lives." The Georgia Tech game was not the last time Ford's loyalty to a team took precedence over his moral judgment.

Ford's intelligence has long been a matter of dispute. When he was nominated for the Vice-Presidency, there were those who recalled Lyndon Johnson's famous remark about Jerry and his missing helmet, and others who remembered Johnson's scoffing, "Jerry's so dumb he can't fart and chew gum at the same time." Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Washington's aging resident wit, worked up her Ford material to nothing better than "poor, dull Jerry"; John Ehrlichman cracked, "What a jerk Jerry is," which, considering the source, must be counted an expert opinion; and the leader Ford most idolized and deferred to, Richard Nixon, is said to have laughed hysterically at the notion that Congress would depose him in favor of Ford. "Can you see Jerry occupying this chair?" are the words usually attributed to the man who nominated him for office a heartbeat away. Ford's defenders hastened to point out that Jerry earned a good B average at every school he attended--at South High, at Michigan, at Yale Law. The curiosity of these grades--if B's at Yale Law, why not A's at Michigan or South High?--has even engaged the attention of Ford himself. He performed respectably against one of the most distinguished Yale Law classes ever graduated. Ninety-nine of that class of 125 were Phi Beta Kappas on admission, and among them moved such future notables as Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, Sargent Shriver, Congressman Peter Frelinghuysen and Governor Raymond P. Shafer. "I seem to have had a capability of competing with whatever competition there was at each level," Ford told Hersey, after which he added a sly little turn of the screw: "And yet I could have enough outside activities to enjoy a broader spectrum of day-to-day living than some of them."

Women were among the "outside activities" that Jerry enjoyed, though not many of them. He applied his universal solvent of caution to women, too, and his rakish friend Stiles once injudiciously blurted to an interviewer, "I think I know every girl Jerry ever slept with," implying that there have been no more than five and possibly as few as three in all Ford's 63 years. The President whose voice breaks when he speaks of his close and devoted family is also the Congressman who regularly averaged 200 out-of-town trips a year and left his wife at home to raise the kids, skirting alcoholism and incipient nervous breakdown along the way. Ford fell head over heels for a woman only once in his life, and her name wasn't Betty Bloomer, and for all her charms, her hard credentials were precisely suited to his ambitions in the days when he was a fledgling golden boy.

Phyllis Brown was a student at Connecticut College in New London when Ford turned up at Yale. Everyone who knew her in those early days remembers her as a raving beauty with a sparkling personality and a mischievous wit (she "seemed to have the kind of personality that Ford admired and missed in himself," TerHorst writes with unintentional cruelty). Ford pursued her eagerly, and after Connecticut, when she went to the Big Apple and became a Powers model, she even persuaded him to invest $1000 of his savings from his Yale coaching salary of $2400 a year in a modeling agency her friend Harry Conover was opening in New York. The $1000 made him a silent partner; it also bought him a flash of limelight that his sensitized vanity could well have done without. The public learned of the Phyllis Brown--Jerry Ford courtship in a 21-picture spread in Look magazine in March 1940, a spread Conover and Brown probably placed, a spread displaying the Beautiful People cavorting through a skiing weekend at Stowe, Phyllis and Jerry schussing down the 400-yard slope, Jerry rubbing Phyllis' back on a flowered couch in the lounge at the inn, Phyllis and Jerry falling asleep on the couch afterward discreetly head to foot, Jerry kissing a blanket-wrapped Phyllis goodbye as the train pulled into New Haven on Monday morning. With the coyness that in 1940 passed for titillation, the photos and captions imply that Phyllis and Jerry spent their nights together as well as their days, and no doubt they did. Later, they turned up on the cover of Cosmopolitan, Jerry in his Naval uniform, to signify that Beautiful People also go off to war.

Phyllis and Jerry went steady for four years, and he was obviously keen to marry her, because he took her back to Grand Rapids and up to the Ford cottage on Lake Michigan to check her out with the folks; but something soured the match along the way and, unhappy with its profits, Jerry withdrew from the agency and presumably from Phyllis as well. "I only had one serious romance," he told Hersey, "other than the one I had with Betty"--the phrasing of the statement awards Betty a qualified second place--"but it didn't work out. So I just forgot about being too much interested in marriage." Which recalls Mark Twain's story about the cat that learned its lesson too well. It got up on a hot stove one time, Twain said, and got burned, and scatted right down, and so it learned not to get up on hot stoves--but after that it wouldn't get up on cold stoves neither.

Ford spent the summer of 1940 working in New York for Wendell Willkie's Presidential campaign. Like Jerry, Willkie was an isolationist in those cautious prewar years, but his campaign seems to have attracted Jerry for reasons of strategy more than philosophy; Willkie was a Midwestern Republican with boyish good looks and a hearty, energetic style who was taking on no less formidable an opponent than Franklin Delano Roosevelt, an entrenched behemoth whom all good Republicans despised who was seeking an unprecedented third term. Ford claims he wasn't seriously interested in politics until after the war, but his experience with the Willkie campaign probably confirmed his political ambitions and precipitated the split with Phyllis. Ambitious for her modeling career, she wouldn't have wanted to give up New York for Grand Rapids, Jerry's logical political base; and confronted with a choice of politics or love, Jerry chose politics hands down. He watched Willkie beat Roosevelt in Michigan by 7000 votes of more than 2,000,000 cast, and in 1941 he packed up and went home to open a Grand Rapids law office with his old friend Philip Buchen, and Phyllis lost the chance she might have had, assuming she was equipped to survive the 33 leaden intervening years, to become the First Lady of the land. What Jerry thought of New York, and New York ambitions, and people who take his investment money but fail to return him unqualified love, the nation found out later, when the city slickers went down to Washington crying imminent default and the President coldly offered them bankruptcy in return and would have given them no aid at all but for more reasonable counsel from his advisors. The primary fuel of his indignation was probably conservative prejudice, but who can say what influence his memories of Phyllis and his distaste for Rockefeller's wealthy authority may have had?

Back from the war, Jerry moved immediately to enter politics. By 1947, he was ready to challenge isolationist Republican Bartel J. Jonkman for Michigan's Fifth Congressional District seat. The primary results proved Jonkman's vulnerability: Ford won the Republican nomination 23,632 to 14,341. He went on to win the general election by more than 27,000 votes.

So Jerry Ford became a Congressman, matriculating with the freshman class of 1948. There are 435 Congressmen in the House of Representatives, and on a national scale theirs are no more than the outer slums of elective and appointive office, but the House was the culmination of Jerry's ambition--he dreamed of becoming Speaker one day--and secure within its crowd, a team player first and last, he took no risks whatever with his seat or his seniority.

Ford's strategy for keeping his job was a masterwork of pure defense. Like Gaul, it was divided into three parts:

1. Please the folks back home.

2. Please fellow Congressmen.

3. Vote the party line.

To please the folks back home, Ford set up one of the most efficient district-serving systems Washington had ever seen. It kept him in office through decades of political tumult and national cataclysm, even after the grateful citizens of Grand Rapids and its environs had moved far to their Pre-Cambrian Congressman's political left. "The conservative record is Grand Rapids," Ford told reporters when he became Vice-President. "Forget Grand Rapids." Not so. As soon as he unglued himself from the Fifth District, its voters elected a Democrat.

Ford was the resident House expert on the fine print of Defense budgets, a useful assistance but hardly an example of states-manlike watchdogging, because Jerry was, and is, so bloodthirsty a champion of national defense that he is the last person likely to have led a movement to cut the budgets he so assiduously studied, and never did. In 25 years in the House, in fact, he introduced not one piece of major legislation of any kind, a record with double and doubly dreary significance: that he never felt the necessity or the conviction to do so and that he let other legislators take the credit, earning for himself the resulting favor chits.

When Congress studied confirming him for the Vice-Presidency, Ford produced gentle reminders of his virtues tailored to the tastes of each body. "I said over in the Senate that truth is the glue that holds governments together," he told the House Judiciary Committee. For the House's benefit, he added, "Compromise is the oil that makes governments go."

So in addition to compromise, Ford campaigned. He stumped tirelessly, helping party and fellow Congressmen and himself, speaking wherever and whenever anyone asked him to. His record was 238 trips in one season, but he averaged hundreds every year. Ford biographer Bud Vestal reports his typical schedule:

Rise early, go to the Capitol at seven a.m. or so and do office work, receive visitors, confer with Republican associates, attend committee hearings. Noon: Attend convening of the House, stay awake during debate or confer with cronies in the hall on upcoming major business. At 2:30 or 3 p.m., grab a briefcase with work papers and a speech text, a plastic garment bag with a change of suit and shirt, and rush to Washington National Airport to fly to the speaking engagement. Make speech. Fly home, arrive at one a.m. Take a relaxing swim in the pool. Sleep five or six hours, then repeat.

Loyalty and good fellowship had their slow rewards, extending finally to the Presidency itself. Richard Nixon alone didn't put Jerry Ford in the White House, his confirmation required the complicity of the Congress in which he served. Some of us laughed when Jerry Ford sat down at the piano, but was any man better placed to receive the first Presidential appointment in the history of the United States? His "lifestyle of deference," as Representative Michael Harrington described it to the House committee, paid off slowly, but ultimately it paid off big

He was elected chairman of the House Republican Conference because Republicans thought him a deserving, harmless nice guy; he became House Minority Leader by the same default. "The pragmatic reason was that Ford was electable," said Representative Robert Griffin of the first occasion; "Jerry got along with all segments of the party."

"It wasn't as though everybody was wildly enthusiastic about Jerry," said Representative Charles Goodell of the second; "it was just that most Republicans liked him and respected him. He didn't have enemies."

"I had nothing to lose," Ford told biographer Richard Reeves. "I could have kept my House seat, and I was careful not to get anyone mad at me." Nixon nominated Ford for the Vice-Presidency to a more nefarious purpose, knowing a nasty joke when he saw one, but his estimate of Congress' sense of humor was for once set too high. And even Congress had its doubts. Consistently, in testimony before its committees, Congressional leaders expressed their embarrassed hopes that Jerry would somehow grow in office. Which implies that in their experienced opinions the man had a lot of growing to do.

"Oh, I am sure I made some mistakes," Ford told the House committee touchily near the conclusion of his testimony, when Democrat Don Edwards pushed. "I said [to the Senate] I was no saint and I will repeat it here." Meaning push me only so far. "But no serious major mistakes." Meaning push me no farther.

A new text for civics classes, then: no serious major mistakes. Cover your sweet ass and lie low.

•

If Gerald Ford were no more than a mediocre, calculating politician in a field of similarly disfigured men, we would still have reason for revulsion. Because, good football player and eagle scout that he is, he has run his scrimmages from first to last dutifully by the playbook our officialdom prescribes. He believes himself to be, and thousands of pages of raw FBI files got up for his Vice-Presidential confirmation attest him, a completely honest man within the limitations of the rules. He never fudged his campaign receipts, never bought or sold inordinate influence, never took bribes, never called the plumbers, never cheated on his taxes, never even screwed the secretaries and the political groupies whom crowds of Congressmen and lines of Presidents have augered to their fill. His conservatism, in its origins at least, is as philosophically respectable as the conservatism of many more rational men.

Like many other men in American history, Thomas Jefferson included, Ford professes his faith in the natural man and his suspicion of government. He believes in the untrammeled virtues of the profit motive. He believes success rewards hard work. He believes that men are everywhere better than they should be. More coldly, he believes that poverty is a mark of laziness and race a disadvantage any ambitious man can overcome. It is a philosophy that congealed in America in the years before 1920, about the same time that the nation was viciously disenfranchising the American Negro and shutting off immigration of the less than lily-white populations of southern Europe and Asia, and it has changed hardly at all in the cataclysmic years since. Specifically, and despite his subsequent education and experience, Ford has changed hardly at all since childhood; the only one of his childhood canons he has given up is isolationism, and even today he favors a cautious internationalism at best, coaxed to that by his war experience and by the tutoring of Henry Kissinger.

He is, as Congressman Donald Riegle gently labels him, an "ideologue." A fanatic, to be less gentle than Riegle can afford to be and more precise. A true believer. Ford believes furiously and his reflex of belief is automatic. "Nixon," Riegle says, "was in many respects an evil man. Ford is a kind man. But Ford is an ideologue, and Nixon was flexible. Ford's not a problem solver. He's more of a traffic cop. He has a boxed-vision problem. He's not in touch with that huge part of American life different from what he's known."

No, the President is in touch, but the route of his contact runs down through the psychic basement, where the contraries crawl. Much as he craves its honor, its love, its obedience, its troops of friends, Gerald Ford thinks America an evil place and, to his bewilderment and frantic inner turmoil, it terrifies him.

These are painful regions to enter, deserving more of pity than of contempt. Let's descend slowly, putting the personal evidence before the general.

The high office that I hold is not the most important thing in my life.

This is a great responsibility and a glorious privilege. And I love the political life. But the most important accomplishment of my life, as I see it, is being the husband of my wife and the father of my children.

What should we make of such confession? Knowing that Jerry Ford does believe his high office to be the most important thing in his life? Knowing that he sacrificed his wife's health and his children's well-being to it for 25 years? The words are unaccountably turned around. "Love" Ford applies to "the political life"; "accomplishment" he applies to marriage and fatherhood, which are hardly accomplishments, which almost any poor mortal can arrange. Is he expressing guilty gratitude that his family stayed the long and unrewarding course or merely politically acceptable bushwa, or is there subtler stuff here?

There is. Imagine the statement to be a dream that asks interpretation. In his dream, this ordinary man is transported without announcement or campaign to the Presidency, and appearing before the cameras on the White House lawn, in the surreal Washington dream light, he proclaims to the world that he's glad to be President, love won him that, but his greatest achievement is to have been a husband and a father. We'll have to run that through the decoder, turn it back around. It means, among other things, that Ford can't believe he's man enough to be President and fears we can't, either. He proposes to display the credentials of his manhood, and since propriety won't allow him to flash the crowd, he moves on to credentials more socially acceptable: An adult woman once consented to marry him and upon her he has fathered children. There, you disbelievers (and there, you soprano voice of disbelief within the dreamer, you child forlorn), how's that for proof?

Elizabeth Bloomer was born in Chicago on April 8, 1918, making her not quite five years younger than her future husband Gerald Ford. Her father was a traveling salesman who moved his family to Grand Rapids when Betty was two. Nothing about her childhood survives in the record except the signal notice that she began studying dance when she was eight and gave it her undivided attention until she was at least 25. Her father died when she was 16. During her adolescence, she spent two summers studying dance at Bennington, met Martha Graham there and so idolized her that she wanted to go directly to her New York dance group from high school. Martha Graham at one extreme, Betty's mother, Hortense Bloomer, at the other, were the two poles of her youth. Martha Graham meant dance, a career in New York, possible fame--at the cost, the great dancer told Betty, of giving up marriage and family. Hortense Bloomer meant the values of marriage and family, Grand Rapids security but no professional dance, no career and no apparent fame.

Hortense convinced her daughter to detour through two years at Bennington. Betty did, but after that, she went to New York and the Martha Graham Concert Group and work as a Powers model and friends in Greenwich Village and performance at Carnegie Hall. The time came to make up her mind. Her mother suggested she return to Grand Rapids for six months and think it over. Betty did and chose, at what cost only she knows, to forgo her career. She married a man named William Warren, a traveling salesman as her father had been. She went to work as a fashion coordinator for a department store and did her dancing on the side. The marriage failed, the divorce becoming final in the autumn of 1947. She decided never to marry again. Not more than a month or two later, Jerry Ford asked her out. She liked his positive attitude and his reassurance, she said later, which might indicate that she was depressed. People usually are after a divorce. She liked his "drive to perfection," a drive she compared to Martha Graham's, "only for him it was first football, then his work." Impulsively, she changed her mind about marriage. "So far as I was concerned, that first date was it." Jerry, in turn, certainly saw her as another Powers model and accomplished beauty, a replacement for Phyllis Brown who had already made the decision Phyllis Brown refused: who had gone back to Grand Rapids and given up New York. Betty and Jerry were married a year later, on October 15, 1948, between Jerry's primary and general Congressional elections. He waited until after the primary because he was afraid Betty's past would become a campaign issue: She was a dancer and divorced.

What did Betty Ford expect of her second marriage? She seems to have expected a marriage of convenience--not celibate but not passionate, either--that might lead to position and acclaim. She didn't know, when Jerry proposed to her, that he was planning to run for Congress, but she knew he had financial promise and political ambitions, might possibly become famous someday, and she knew she was the smarter of the two. She must have noticed his reticence about women, sensed she wouldn't be dominated by him. She was "provoked" when she found out he'd kept his Congressional ambitions from her but delighted at the prospect, nonetheless. "You won't ever have to worry about other women," brother Tom Ford's wife told her, "because Jerry is married to his work."

Jack Stiles put it more bluntly: "If you can accept the idea that politics will come first and your marriage second, if you can live with that, then I think you'll have a good marriage; you'll make a good team in Washington." The advice was redundant: She already knew. Those were the terms of the emotional contract they signed. Jerry and Betty were married on a Friday afternoon. The next day, Jerry took her to a University of Michigan football game. Then they drove 75 miles to a Republican reception and another 75 miles to a Detroit hotel. On Sunday, they drove all the way back to Grand Rapids, 150 miles on 1947 highways, so Jerry could resume campaigning on Monday morning. Such were their honeymoon days.

She became a loyal and dutiful wife, but as the years ground on without fame or fortune, the arrangement rankled. The man was never home, the children were hard to handle, the Fords were unknown. She drank too much, popped tranquilizers, developed a psychosomatic pain in her neck. Too tough to collapse, she went to see a psychiatrist. What her husband couldn't win by diligence he then won by default, but the Vice-Presidency still left her stuck at home. "I want him to retire from one office to another," she told an interviewer during the Vice-Presidential days, "not even come home for lunch and bother the household." And again: "I can't see the two of us going off alone. We'd probably kill each other. We'd get so bored with each other. I wouldn't know how to act."

Finally, the Presidency brought reward. She turned it to good use in the historic and important cause of feminism, speaking out at last for her lost career. She also turned it to advantage with her husband, using calculated indiscretion to bend him to her views. "Clearly intrigued with a plus she never knew before," wrote Myra MacPherson in McCall's, "she mentions the word 'power' more than once."

"If he doesn't get [the message] in the office in the day," Betty said, "he gets it in the ribs at night." She claimed credit for Carla Hills's promotion to the Cabinet; she worked on a female appointment to the Supreme Court. Knowing she is finally in a position to do him great political mischief, the First Lady flicks at the President in public interviews as a confident trainer might flick at a reluctant bear, though lately, during the Presidential campaign, she has kept her opinions to herself. They sleep together, she told McCall's, shivering her husband's toes, "as often as possible." If her daughter didn't save her virginity for marriage, she would understand. Ford said that one could cost him 20,000,000 votes. She has campaigned, to his great discomfort, for the ERA and abortion on demand. She made a point of moving their bed into the White House and insisting that they share the same bedroom, but it isn't the king-sized bed the press reported. It's two twins pushed side by side. Separate sheets and blankets, separate estates. In photographs, we see her jumping onto his lap and aggressively mussing his hair, pushing him fully clothed into the family pool, stepping in front of him when he stands to speak. She's not engaged in blackmail. She's collecting reparations for the atrocities of neglect he committed along the way.

She and Martha Graham finally got together again. It's refreshing; it's also a measure of Jerry's vulnerability to any open discussion of sexuality, an indication that he is an inhibited man. "Eating and sleeping," he likes to repeat manfully, referring to two of the most important rituals around that men and women share with intimacy, "are a waste of time." Which is a position even a missionary might find dull.

If there is comedy in the spectacle of a President so skillfully manipulated by his wife, there's no comedy at all in Ford's iron self-control.

Only once in that long career did Jerry's anger come out publicly, and the caldron thus uncovered was witch's brew. The occasion was a speech delivered from the floor of the House of Representatives on April 15, 1970, calling for the impeachment of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. Ford has claimed since that he was primarily offended by Douglas' moonlighting as director of a Las Vegas--based organization called the Parvin Foundation, but his real motives he explained to Hersey last year. "Bill Douglas," he told Hersey, "had made some decisions, and his married life was different than most.... And then this famous Evergreen publication came out, a very ill-advised article by the Justice in a magazine that I think is pornographic by any standards. And that upset me.... I suspect it was the one thing that was a bit out of character." Ford meant attacking a public figure directly and being upset were out of character. His hostility toward Douglas, and what Douglas represented, was not out of character. It was consistent with his record.

The Douglas attack has been overreported and understudied. Ford is usually charged with playing patsy or clever hod carrier for the Nixon Administration, which was seeking revenge because the Senate refused to confirm two of its Supreme Court nominations, Judges Clement Haynsworth and Harold Carswell, and the charge is partly true. The Justice Department under John Mitchell fed Ford raw FBI files that implicated Douglas, through paranoid, thrice-removed connections, with the gambling world of Las Vegas godfathers, files that were incorporated almost verbatim into the House speech, implications that were later thoroughly discredited. But Ford's own memory demonstrates what really bothered him about Justice Douglas: Douglas' liberal Supreme Court decisions, his habit of marrying women decades younger than he and his appearance as an author in Avant Garde and Evergreen Review.

If these are crimes, they are crimes of a remarkably personal nature, and surely they are adequately covered by the Bill of Rights, which William O. Douglas as much as any man in the history of the Court had labored to defend. Yet they incensed Jerry to the point of throwing off, for the first and so far the only time in his long career, his mask of bonhomie The three foundations for his attack were sex, money and corruption in the West. Do those themes recall to you something in Jerry's past? What other angry stories of a man from the West who prefers younger women and who seems to have money from mysterious transactions does Jerry tell? Liberalism, sexual or civil, enrages Jerry Ford; the Douglas attack in all its clumsy viciousness registers outwardly the inner violence of his response.

So now at last, knowing as much as we have come to know of this cleverly dull, seemingly ordinary man from Grand Rapids, this sharp undercover politician, Gerald Rudolph Ford, the President of the United States, we are ready to ask the central question: What does Jerry fear?

He says he fears Big Government. "A government big enough to give us everything we want would be big enough to take from us everything we have"--Jerry's favorite aphorism. But his votes as a Congressman and his positions as President belie his concern, revealing instead a carefully divided commitment. He's not against Big Government. He's vehemently in favor of Big Government in its police and military garb. He's opposed only to Government beneficence. He doesn't think Government should help people out.

Ford is cautious when he speaks of the poor. He no more desires to offend them than he desires to offend anybody. "I happen to think," he told Hersey, "that we should have great opportunity for people in this country to get ahead. Hard work should be rewarded. I don't think people who have had bad breaks should be penalized, but I don't think you can reward people who don't try." Which is mild enough censure, though simpleminded. More interesting was his response at his confirmation hearing when asked how he would eradicate poverty. With the exception of "those people who are mentally and physically handicapped," he said in so many words, there are only two excuses for poverty: not enough jobs and not enough education. That some are poor because they are black or yellow or brown or female, because they are victims of discrimination, because in poverty they are deprived even of the ability to learn, because they live in a despair so pervasive that whatever ambition they may once have had has withered to bitter fatalism, the man who was about to become President of all the people was unwilling to admit.

What Ford has refused to say, his record says for him. He has not only voted to weaken the weak; he has also voted further to strengthen the strong. The record of this man carries an ugly load of hatred: hatred of the poor, hatred of the weak, hatred of the disadvantaged, hatred of races other than his own.

That hatred, in turn, is a product of fear Sustained, lifelong fear, because to despise the poor and the weak, who hardly need despising, is secretly to despise what is poor and weak in oneself, which, in Jerry's case, is the forlorn and lonely and angry child he once was. The child is the very model of weakness, with Big Government in parental form bending over his head; parents may give the child everything he wants, but they may also take away from him everything he has; and his release from their benevolence and their domination comes through growth and independence, by standing on his own two feet, getting an education and getting a job. So in the child within himself, Jerry found his metaphor for Government: in the struggles waged between his desire to be adult and his unresolved resentment, founded more on fantasy than on fact, that he was inadequately nurtured and inadequately loved as a child. Without this hidden catalyst, his vision otherwise makes no sense, because as even he knows, Government isn't a parent and the poor aren't children. The welfare system that Jerry coldly works to sabotage pays the lowest 8.4 percent of our population a grand total of $35 per person per week. Disarming our defense budget by even one third would do wonders to improve that bare subsistence.

But the poor crowd Jerry's fences like a threatening mob. As he attributes to them the dependency of the child he once was, so also does he attribute to them the anger he once felt and still feels, and thus he conceives the need for protection. Once he kept a child from his cherry tree by brutally standing on her hand; once he found support at the center of a football team; in Congress he fussed with the minutiae of the Defense budget, as if he feared to find there one last gate left open, one last decisive weapon overlooked; always he has championed defense, violent response, overkill, and no mere firing of the uncongenial Schlesinger signals that he has defused more than to the slight degree necessary to ease further détente and make himself appear a Nixonian peacemaker. When even Lyndon Johnson tired of Vietnam, Jerry called for holy cause to Americanize and win that war, and he was the last man to give up when it failed. Today he warily performs détente, but woe unto the nation that touches an American merchant ship: He'll trade two of our guys for one of theirs.

Since he despises a considerable portion of the American population, it isn't surprising that he is perpetually uncertain of our love. Thus his devotion to campaigning--devotion dampened hardly at all by the continuing threat of assassination--as if only by almost daily excursions to the hustings can he restore his flagging self-esteem. If an otherwise normal man broke off work to run and wash his hands 50 times a day, we would understand him to be peculiar; Jerry Ford's campaigning is peculiar, too. Garry Wills has called him a campaign junkie, and he is, and his fix is the smiling, cheering crowd, the same crowd that loved him back when family and father and fraternity dues were lost. Except for sports, which absorb his anger, campaigning is apparently the only thing he enjoys. He hates to be alone; he hates to sit at a desk and work; conflict burdens him, opposition burdens him, disagreement burdens him, decisions burden him; and his idea of a meaningful dialog with America is moving at a sharp clip down an endless line of proffered hands. He can't bear to eat, he can't bear to sleep, he can't bear to read and apparently he can't even bear to think. When he took office as President, he ordered the action memos to be simplified. In Nixon's time, they arrived with brief lists of options. Ford requested a different scheme, two slots on the bottom line. "Approve--," he could then check, quickly passing through, or "Disapprove--."

Bearing such hardships, braving such internal foes, he is easily cowed and easily duped. During his Congressional years, Ford was the unwitting victim of a two-bit slicker out of New York named Robert Winter-Berger, who borrowed Ford's good name to decorate various acts of slapdash chicanery and later rewarded his mark by publicly announcing that Ford took bribes, which he doesn't, except when the bribe is the Presidency and the payoff is a pardon for his criminal predecessor. The House committee found the relationship between Ford and Winter-Berger disturbing, and Representative Jerome Waldie asked Ford: "If a fellow with such modest abilities as Winter-Berger can persuade you and compel you to do that which you did not want to do, what assurances can you give us that we can be comfortable that that seeming weakness won't display itself when you are representing this nation in foreign affairs with people from other countries?"

Since he had no assurances to give, Ford's answer was lame, a general appeal to the record. "Well, you know, Mr. Waldie," he said, "if that is the only mistake I have made in 25 years, it is not a very serious one."

There are far slicker men in the White House now than Winter-Berger, and to the extent that they are also competent we may be grateful. Nixon's economic advisors hang on, determined to prove that the proper life of American man is poor, nasty, brutish and short; Rockefeller runs domestic affairs, Rumsfeld runs defense, Kissinger runs the world; while in the stillness of the Oval Office, one on each shoulder, bathed in unearthly light, Philip Buchen whispers angelics and Robert Hartmann whispers diabolics into the sturdy Presidential ears.

He sleeps little, but sometimes while sleeping he dreams. When he was Vice-President, he dreamed and cried out, and by his side Betty heard him and reported, as for reasons of her own she is wont to do. "One night I woke up," she said, "and Jerry was talking in his sleep. He kept saying 'Thank you, thank you, thank you.' He was in a receiving line." Eternally grateful, eternally unsure, numb without and angry within, Ford blows along that perpetual line in sleep and waking, stormed by childhood cares.

"I didn't vote for him," people laugh these days at parties. We took him for little enough--for a gift horse--and he is not even that. Haven't you sometimes seen a cloud, asked scandalous Aristophanes, that looked like a centaur?