Running the World is Funnier Than You Think

"I have good news and bad news.

"The good news is that the Vietnam war is over. The bad news is, we lost."

A mildly amusing crack, nothing special, right?

Except the audience was President Gerald R. Ford, the wisecracker was White House photographer David Hume Kennerly and the scene was the headquarters of the National Security Council, where the loss of the Indochina war had finally been acknowledged.

Henry Kissinger, noting that Cambodia had fallen to the Communists only two weeks before, joked bleakly: "I have lost one country in my capacity as Secretary of State and I have lost one country in my capacity as National Security Advisor. Give me another title and I will lose you another country."

You may think the power to blow up the world is no laughing matter. Yet in my two and one third years among the men who had that power, there were plenty of chuckles. As White House press secretary, I heard most of them.

After the White House prematurely announced that the hasty evacuation of the U. S. Embassy had been completed, we received word that 156 Marines were still waiting for helicopters to pick them up. So Kissinger quipped: "We could say the evacuation is at hand," a bitter reference to his mistimed declaration three years before that peace was at hand.

"Maybe we should say the evacuation was so popular we decided to do an encore," I added.

There was a lot of leering speculation about why the Marines had missed the helicopters. Someone suggested they had gone over to Tu Do Street to help their old girlfriends escape. Or maybe they had just stopped off at a Saigon bar to have one last drink and got laid. The Marines were finally rescued. The day of the Saigon surrender ended incongruously, with Kissinger in his office changing hurriedly into his tuxedo for a state dinner. Kennerly flung open the door and snapped an unprecedented photo of the rotund Secretary of State with no shirt on.

Another international crisis that produced a crop of dark humor was the evacuation of Americans and other Westerners from Beirut during the murderous fighting there in June 1976.

Lieutenant General Brent Scowcroft, who replaced Kissinger as Ford's National Security Advisor, showed up at the White House about midnight to oversee the evacuation wearing a rough-textured leisure suit, sporty shirt, string tie and hand-painted Western tie ring.

Kennerly took one look at the clothes and cracked, "What's that, Brent, your après-war outfit?"

Scowcroft's deputy, William Hyland, was probably the best natural comedian in the White House. He was an impish man who had worked his way up from a minor post in the water department in Kansas City to the CIA to the White House. That progression can give you a pretty funny outlook on life.

When reporters wrote stories about some of the Beirut evacuees returning to the beleaguered city after a week of business or vacation in Europe, Hyland constructed an elaborate fantasy in which the Navy would offer refugees special cut-rate round-trip excursion fares.

Once, while Hyland was accompanying Ford on a speaking trip, I noticed him looking especially grim during a phone conversation.

"Anything the matter?" I asked after he had hung up.

"Well, you know that part of the President's speech where he says, 'Not one American boy is fighting or dying anywhere in the world tonight'?" Hyland asked.

"Yes," I replied.

"Well, maybe we should change it just a little to read, 'Very few American boys are fighting or dying anywhere in the world tonight.'"

A military aide with a briefcase containing the coded instructions needed to launch a nuclear attack was never far from President Ford. He also carried a small leather case containing the President's pipes, pipe cleaners, tobacco and matches.

The aide often was asked what was in the cases.

He explained that the big briefcase contained the codes for starting a big atomic war. The small case contained the codes for starting a small conventional war, he added with a straight face. A lot of people believed him.

The Ford White House was portrayed as stolid, dull Midwestern Republican.

Actually, it was alive with wisecracks, practical jokes and put-downs, often in the darkest shade of black. Kennerly wasn't the only court jester. There were two resident joke writers; the Secretary of State had the reputation of being one of the world's great wits; the press secretary--that was me--poked fun at my own boss on the satirical NBC's Saturday Night TV show; the White House staff once amused itself after a California campaign rally by untying the balloons and breathing in the helium so we could laugh at our resulting high-pitched Donald Duck voices.

It was all tolerated by President and Mrs. Ford, who loved a gag.

What other President would ask for an inflatable plastic duck to carry when he appeared before cameramen waiting to record his first swim in the new White House pool?

What other First Lady would parade around Air Force One wearing a fake black handlebar mustache?

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Some of the funniest moments of the Ford Administration occurred during overseas trips--often as elaborate practical jokes. Ford's military aide Major Robert Barrett was a master at pulling off a practical joke with a straight face.

While attending an economic summit meeting in France, Ford was assigned a duplex apartment in an old château at Rambouillet. During the night, the wind blew open the French windows on the lower floor of his apartment, knocking over lamps and other small pieces of furniture and decoration.

In the morning, Barrett showed Ford's Filipino stewards the disorderly scene and convinced them that someone had broken in during the night and kidnaped the President. Barrett really had them worried for 20 minutes, (continued on page 190)Running the World(continued from page 88) until Ford awoke and called from the upper level for his tea.

Once, in Peking, Ford was whisked away without his bodyguards by the Chinese for a private meeting with Mao. After he was returned, the chief of the White House Secret Service detail, Dick Kaiser, only half-jokingly proposed that the President strip down and let the White House doctor examine his moles and freckles to make sure the Chinese had sent back the real Ford.

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A few jokes that seemed funny at the time backfired. Two of them involved attractive women and Mrs. Ford.

When Ford went to Martinique for a conference with French president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing in December 1974, members of the American delegation, including the President and Kissinger, couldn't help noticing a stunning young woman named Nicole attached to the French press office.

At a photo session before the opening meeting, Kissinger waved her over and introduced her to Ford.

"This is Nicole," Kissinger announced. "We are going to trade her for Nessen."

Ford beamed and introduced her, in turn, to Giscard d'Estaing.

"We are going to trade my press secretary to you for Nicole."

Giscard d'Estaing looked bewildered and irritated. He did not know the woman; she was only a low-ranked employee in his press office. But at that moment, he was involved in a scandal at home concerning allegations that he had a mistress. He didn't need any stories about strange and beautiful girls attached to his official party.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Ford saw a photo of the episode on the front page of The New York Times. When the President got home, she wanted to know who the hell Nicole was.

Once, the attractive entertainer Vicki Carr was invited to sing at a White House state dinner. As Ford escorted her to the door at the end of the evening, she asked, "What's your favorite Mexican dish?"

"You are," he quipped.

Mrs. Ford overheard and directed, "That woman is never coming in this house again."

Another joke that backfired originated at a meeting of Ford's energy advisors at Camp David in late 1974. They were discussing how the United States could guarantee itself a supply of reasonably priced oil without depending on OPEC.

Frank Zarb, the energy czar with an exuberant sense of humor, scrawled a facetious note and slid it across the conference table to another participant.

The note read, "Let's go for the low-cost option--invade!"

Somehow, the note leaked out and was taken seriously by reporters. We spent weeks denying that the United States planned to invade the Arab oil countries.

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If you've ever been on a junior high school playground, you would understand that the roly-poly girth and the angelic countenance of Tom DeFrank, White House correspondent for Newsweek, just begged to be victimized by practical jokers.

On the flight home from one of Ford's foreign trips, a journalistic colleague passed a bogus note to the Navy nurse saying, "I have contracted an all-too-common social disease," and gave DeFrank's seat number. The nurse sat down and began a sympathetic discussion of the strait-laced Newsweek reporter's embarrassing problem before DeFrank's protestations of innocence drove her off.

Another time, DeFrank received a bogus telegram informing him that he'd been selected to be on the panel of questioners for one of the Presidential debates.

DeFrank is a graduate of Texas A&M, where detractors claim the students romance farm animals because of a shortage of coeds.

To test this thesis, some reporters, with the connivance of a few White House staff members, smuggled a live sheep into DeFrank's hotel room during one Presidential trip. The management may still be trying to get the sheepshit out of the carpet.

DeFrank's chief tormentor was Jim Naughton, White House correspondent for The New York Times.

A few weeks before the end of the Ford Administration, some of the President's aides decided to help DeFrank get revenge.

Chief of staff Dick Cheney phoned Naughton and notified him that his long-standing request for an interview with Ford had been granted. Naughton was instructed to report to the front gate of Camp David at eight o'clock on Saturday morning. He would be ushered in for the interview.

Naughton drove up early that morning and booked a room in a third-rate motel in Thurmont, Maryland, so he could write his story on the spot.

He appeared at the Camp David gate promptly at eight a.m. Of course, the guards had never heard of him. There was no interview scheduled. The President wasn't even at Camp David.

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Much of the humor of the Ford Presidency never got reported as humor, because the White House press corps, after Vietnam, Watergate and the Nixon pardon, didn't think very much was funny anymore.

Jokes and wisecracks were treated as serious news.

When Ford joked at a White House reception shortly after the election that he was considering a job as professor at the University of Michigan, but not in eastern European history, the reporters ignored the punch line, rushed to the phones and filed straight-faced stories about the President's "job offer."

Another time, as the President started down a steep gangplank from a tuna boat he had been inspecting in San Diego, I covered my eyes in mock dismay and moaned, "Oh, no, I can't look." The U.P.I. filed a straight story, quoting me as if I were genuinely concerned about the President's ability to descend safely.

During one trip, I jokingly announced to a press briefing that for one day only, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld would play the role of the "senior American official," the designation Kissinger normally used for his background briefings. Reporters wrote serious storiesabout Rumsfeld and me plotting against Kissinger.

As a result of such episodes, dozens of wisecracks that bubbled up in the throats of White House staffers got choked back, lest they be overheard and printed by the humorless reporters.

Thus, during one of our periodic bouts of suicidal staff infighting, I resisted the temptation to joke at my briefing that when the Ford White House pulled its wagons into a circle, the guns were all pointed in.

At one point, news stories began speculating that this or that White House aide might be a secret CIA agent. We briefly considered, but dropped, the idea of having T-shirts made for the staff reading, I am the secret CIA agent.

And we never told reporters about our sick repartee concerning the need for the photographers to use very fast film if they expected to get an unblurred shot of Ford posing with the 1977 Epilepsy Poster Child.

It really was a shame that the White House reporters were so grim during the Ford years, because the public missed many genuinely humorous moments:

• William Miller, the 1964 Republican Vice-Presidential candidate, was not allowed through the White House gates for a meeting with Ford, because the guards didn't know him. Miller at that time was doing a TV commercial for American Express based on the idea that he had to carry his credit card so people would recognize him.

• During a Cabinet Room meeting on trade with Russia, crusty A.F.L.-C.I.O. president George Meany exploded: "They may be Commie sons of bitches, but they are goddamn good capitalists."

• Ford cracked an unintentional pun on the Congressional investigation of Wilbur Mills's relationship with Fanne Foxe. That, the President deadpanned, was a "housekeeping matter."

• When Ford flew to San Juan, the wife of the Puerto Rican governor had a flat tire on the way to join the greeting party at the airport. So she tried to climb a fence to be there on time. But the Secret Service grabbed her and held her like a potential terrorist until she could be identified.

If you still don't believe the Ford White House echoed with laughter, remember: It was the first Administration to lose a Cabinet member because of a joke.

Good ole Earl Butz.

Earl is an incurable joke teller. During a breakfast meeting with reporters a couple of years ago, Butz commented on the Pope's edict against contraception by telling a joke he had recently heard to the effect that "If you no play-a the game, you no make-a the rules."

Somehow, he rode out the uproar over that one and kept his job in the Cabinet. But after last year's Republican Convention in Kansas City, Earl found himself on an airliner with Pat Boone, professional nice guy, and John Dean, professional snitch.

Why, asked Boone, didn't the Republican Party appeal to more black voters?

Blacks have come a long way in politics, Butz replied, since a Chicago alderman told him 30 years ago that the main things some colored people want are loose shoes, tight pussy and a warm place to shit.

Dean, who was playing reporter for Rolling Stone, quoted the joke in his article on the Republican Convention, without naming Earl as the source. He attributed the joke to an unidentified member of Ford's Cabinet.

But it wasn't long before Butz was named as the source. Within a few days, the Agriculture Secretary was forced to quit because of his barnyard sense of humor.

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You could always tell when Ford liked a joke. He has a high, hard, loud laugh you can hear a long way off.

A lot of the laughs came during the grueling Presidential election campaign and were provided by the bearded, irreverent Kennerly. He often slipped in his jokes at the grimmest moments of crisis.

Immediately after Ford escaped the assassination attempt by Sara Jane Moore in San Francisco, Kennerly came up with another of his good-news, bad-news jokes.

Let's put in a phone call to Vice-President Rockefeller, Kennerly suggested to Ford and his staff, all still shaken by the near miss.

"Mr. Vice-President, the good news is that somebody took a shot at the President," Kennerly proposed to say.

"The bad news is that she missed."

One of the wackiest ideas came in the last days of the election campaign, when we had all grown flaky from too little sleep and too much jet lag.

At almost every stop, Ford was led to a group of drum majorettes or local beauty-contest princesses waiting to be hugged and kissed for the cameras.

One member of our entourage proposed that each girl be required to send to the White House a sample of her pubic hair. These hairs, in a rich variety of colors, would then be woven into a handsome needlepoint of the Presidential seal.

Ford's own sense of humor was far more subtle and sophisticated. After the second Presidential debate, he resisted making a public acknowledgment that he misspoke himself on Russia's domination of eastern Europe. Finally, chief of staff Cheney persuaded him. He went over and over with Ford the wording of a statement correcting his remark in the debate that "eastern Europe is not dominated by Russia."

"Mr. President," asked Cheney, "are you all squared away with what you want to say about eastern Europe?"

"Yeah," the President joked. "I'm going to say Poland is not dominated by the Soviet Union."

Ford devised a humorous little routine he and I used during news interviews.

About five minutes before the interview was scheduled to end, I would cut in and announce, "That's all the time we have. Let's wrap it up."

"Oh, no!" Ford would exclaim. "I'm really enjoying this. Let's let it go on for another five minutes."

The interview would then end right on schedule, with the reporter grateful to the good-guy President for overruling the bad-guy press secretary.

At the end of 1975, it looked as if Congress were going to pass the President's popular 28-billion-dollar tax-cut proposal but ignore the unpopular 28-billion-dollar spending cut coupled to it and leave town for Christmas vacation. Ford was looking for a way to nudge the members into passing both parts of his plan. He decided to apply his sly sense of humor to the problem. So he had the parliamentarians of the House contacted and asked about the rules for calling members back from Christmas vacation, in case they passed the tax cut alone.

"Tell the parliamentarians the President wants them to keep the possibility of a special Christmas session to themselves," the President said with a grin. "That will get the message around faster than Western Union."

Congress got the message, passed a compromise and stayed home for Christmas.

Even the staid Secret Service agents could be funny in the Ford White House.

Once, while visiting a dairy farm in Illinois, Ford got his suit stained with cow dung.

"A cow just shit on the President!" someone exclaimed.

"Why not? Everyone else does," a Secret Service agent shot back.

On another trip, the President's son Jack led a rather active social life. One day, the schedule called for him to lay a wreath at a monument. A Secret Service agent, notified of the event, mumbled, "Well, he's laid everything else on this trip."

During a campaign trip to the South, several staff members played a practical joke on Ford by clipping from a magazine a full-page picture of two men in Ku Klux Klan outfits. We faked an inscription and signatures on the picture: "All the best from your President Ford Committee Chairmen in southern Alabama, Joe Don Skud and P. D. 'Billy' Cockburn." We sent the "autographed" photo to Ford with a memo reading, "We have finally outflanked Ronald Reagan on the right."

One practical joke played by the White House staff members on the reporters almost backfired and had to be aborted.

On the eve of the election, the White House press corps set up a betting pool to see who could come closest to forecasting the number of electoral votes and states Ford would win. Presidential staff members were invited to participate, at a dollar an entry.

Cheney turned in a fake entry under the name Bob Teeter, Ford's highly respected and usually accurate pollster. "Teeter's" entry predicted Ford would win 36 states and 371 electoral votes.

It didn't take long for news of this optimistic forecast to spread through the White House press corps. Soon the reporters were writing stories that Ford's chief political strategists were so confident of winning the election by a big margin they were betting money on it.

We chickened out and told them it was a fake.

In the last days of the Presidential election campaign, the staff members sometimes unwound aboard Air Force One by concocting fantastic newspaper accounts of make-believe events. Here's one we wrote:

Air Force F-4 Phantom jets, acting on orders from President Ford, today shot down Jimmy Carter's Presidential campaign plane.

Democrats immediately labeled the attack a "dirty trick."

On election night, NBC's display board showed Carter's states in red and Ford's states in blue. One White House wit proposed that Ford go West and become President of "The United Blue States of America."

Most of this humor, of course, was by insiders, for insiders. The few public laughs in the 1976 campaign capitalized on the supposed foibles of the candidates: Carter's lust and Ford's clumsiness.

Carter's celebrated Playboy Interview prompted lines such as the one on a bumper sticker: In his heart he knows your wife.

The false image of Ford as a klutz probably dates from Lyndon Johnson's ineradicable crack: "Jerry Ford is so dumb he can't walk and chew gum at the same time." (One writer claims aides cleaned up L.B.J.'s original crack: "Jerry Ford is so dumb he can't fart and chew gum at the same time.")

Although Ford is really well coordinated, even athletic, new jokes about his alleged clumsiness circulated almost every day, many of them born the night before in Johnny Carson's monolog.

• Did you hear that Ford bumped his head on the side of his swimming pool? Yeah, the Secret Service tackled the pool and wrestled it to the ground.

• Did you see the cartoon showing Ford skiing backward? Yeah, the caption says his ski instructor is the same guy who's running his campaign.

• Did you hear that Ford's hand is in a bandage? Yeah, he went in to vote and tore his fingernail off when he pulled the curtain closed.

• Did you see the cover of New York magazine? Yeah, they've got Ford's picture touched up to look like Bozo the Clown.

Tom Braden, the political columnist, once quoted a Carson joke: "Ford will not have any trouble getting a job after he leaves the White House. He can always go to work for Timex, strap a wrist watch to his forehead and walk down an airplane ramp."

Braden then declared, "Any President who is being ridiculed like that by comedians is through."

Braden was right.

Ford lost the election at least partly because of jokes about his clumsiness.

And that ain't funny.

"'What's your favorite Mexican dish?' she asked. 'You are,' Ford quipped."