FINAL

## FORD FOREWORD

Few Presidents have done as much for their country as Gerald Ford. But paradoxically he is such a thoroughly decent and likeable man, so quintesentially American in his steadiness and reliability, that the personal affection Americans feel for him tends to obscure his remarkable achievements. Americans have not needed to reflect on the abyss toward which they were heading when Gerald Ford took over the Presidency--in large part because he pulled the nation back so effortlessly that this historic accomplishment came to be taken for granted.

The foreign statesmen who worked with President Ford made no such mistake. They recall him with affection and admiration. Many still speak of his Presidency as a golden period of their country's relationship with the United States.

One reason Americans have found it difficult to gain perspective on Gerald Ford is that he does not fit the stereotypes associated with our political leaders in the television age. He came to the Presidency through a series

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of wholly unpredictable events while the typical modern
candidate pursues the office for many years to the exclusion
of almost any other consideration. Competing against many
opponents with no obvious difference in qualifications, he
seeks compulsively for attention in quest less of substance
than of some slogan or cause that evokes passions and attracts
the notice of television. This produces the paradox that the
more the modern candidate seeks exposure, the more desperately
he woos the electorate, the more insecure he becomes and the
less time he has to devote to what he will do with the office
once he attains it. Hence the phenomenon that the typical
candidate (since he can never be certain when he will be asked)
must have a position on almost every issue but not necessarily
a concept for it, much less an elaborated philosophy of
government.

Gerald Ford was never on this emotional roller
coaster; he was immune to the candidate's search for identity.
He had already attained his highest goal, leader of his party
in the House of Representatives. He would clearly have loved

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to become Speaker of the House. But that position is in large
measure beyond the reach of individual ambition. It would
surely have been his had the Republican party achieved
majority status in the House of Representatives. That, however,
depended on nationwide trends beyond the power of any individual
Congressman to influence. In short, Gerald Ford's vocation was
national service--not the pursuit of the media.

So it happened that the man who succeeded to the
Presidency after Watergate in August 1974 was by an act of
Providence exactly what the country needed. A deep sense of
national service was ingrained in him. He was a humble man
who nevertheless knew his own worth. He never seemed awed by
his enormous assignments; nor was he intoxicated by the
trappings of power so unexpectedly thrust upon him.

Those qualities of quiet confidence and unostentatious
strength were desperately needed in that hysterical summer of
1974. I have never doubted that history will rate Richard M.
Nixon as an important President. But that was not the mood
when Gerald Ford took over. The Presidency was in a shambles.

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The last Cabinet meeting of the Nixon administration had ended in as close to open rebellion as the American system of government can produce. The balance between the Executive and Legislative branches was shifting dramatically to a point where the basic authority of the Presidency was in question. Foreign policy, which depends crucially on Presidential authority and national consensus, had to be conducted against the permanent risk of catastrophe. President Ford spoke for all of us--however deeply we felt about the human tragedy of the Nixon Presidency--when he proclaimed in his inaugural address that the "long national nightmare is over."

Gerald Ford proved to be the salvation of his country. America needed a restoration of faith in its institutions, its values and its purposes. Gerald R. Ford stepped into his responsibilities with assurance and with dignity; from the moment he assumed the office it was moving to watch this artless Midwesterner impose himself by the integrity of his conduct and of his motives.

At the time commentators and cartoonists were

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having a marvelous time with President Ford's occasionally
ponderous rhetoric. But lack of articulateness is not the
same as absence of analytical skill; indeed a case could be
made for the proposition that these two qualities often
stand in inverse relationship to each other. Those of us in
daily contact with President Ford came to appreciate his
thoroughness, his good sense, but above all his no-nonsense
analytic ability.

The first major decision President Ford faced was
how to deal with the legal issues surrounding his predecessor.
At a remove of over ten years it is difficult to reconstruct
the spirit of revenge that was then so prevalent. I was not
directly involved in the decision to pardon President Nixon
though I strongly favored it in one brief conversation with
the new President. When the night before he announced the
pardon President Ford informed me of it, he neither referred
to my previous advice, nor did he invite last minute counsel.

It was without doubt the right decision though it
probably cost Gerald Ford the Presidency. President Ford

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felt instinctively that his historic mission was to heal, a
task impossible of fulfillment while controversies raged over
the humiliating appearance in court of a former President.

It was characteristic of President Ford that he refused to
delegate so fateful a decision involving the dignity of our
country to a subordinate such as the Attorney General or the
Special Prosecutor.

By the nature of my office I was of course most
familiar with President Ford's conduct of foreign policy.
The Washington pressure cooker likes to identify events with
personalities and therefore tends to produce an essentially
trivial equation: whether a particular Cabinet member is
influential is measured by how often he is (allegedly)
overruled by the President. Certainly in foreign policy the
answer is simple. Foreign policy cannot emerge from a
contest between the White House and the State Department;
the President has to dominate foreign policy or risk
paralysis. He will be blamed for any failure; he deserves
to claim the ultimate credit. Inevitably any Secretary of

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State who is frequently overruled must sooner or later resign.

The President and the Secretary of State have to be on the same wavelength or national strategy will dissolve into incoherence.

President Ford and I had a close and warm relationship which has survived over years out of office and of which I am immensely proud. It was our practice to meet every day for at least half an hour; and for much longer when major decisions had to be made. Gerald Ford was involved in great detail at every stage of decisionmaking. And he insisted that all relevant members of his Administration be heard without ceding a veto to anyone. I was surely influential; the final decision as well as its shaping throughout the process was emphatically Gerald Ford's.

It was a productive period. In fact most of the institutions and policy directions of American national strategy nearly a decade and a half later date from his Presidency. He inherited relationships with our European allies that had been weakened by a simultaneous crisis of

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authority in most principal NATO countries. By a strange coincidence all the leaders of the larger NATO countries were either physically or politically terminally ill during the year preceding President Ford's assumption of his office.

President Pompidou was in fact dying; Prime Minister Heath and Chancellor Brandt were losing their political grip and in fact were obliged to resign before Watergate engulfed President Nixon. As a result Allied relations were in the hands of subordinates with a predictable overemphasis on second-order issues and a neglect of long-range strategy.

President Ford's Presidency saw a high point of postwar American-European relationships-- seldom in the postwar period were personal relations more cordial, consultation more intense, long-range policy more coherent and friction less than during President Ford's incumbency. That period marked the inauguration of the so-called economic summits which bring together the leaders of the principal industrial democracies and which have since evolved into an indispensable annual forum. President Ford's

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personal friendship with his counterparts--Helmut Schmidt, Giscard d'Estaing, James Callaghan and Pierre Trudeau--has survived to this day--a rare occurrence among national leaders out of office.

The subject of East-West relations was even more complex. Fortunately for our country the Soviet leadership could not believe that a nation would deliberately weaken its Presidency to the extent that Watergate did. Hence they suspected some trick to lure them into unforeseeable consequences and did not press their advantage. But it was only a question of time until they realized the true state of affairs and began a geopolitical offensive. President Ford set about with great determination to restore respect for American will and power. He pushed for an increase in the military budget and was the first President in six years to overcome the attempts of the Congressional majority to hold that budget at ransom for legislating a reduction of American commitments abroad.

From that basis President Ford moved to put Soviet-

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American relationships on a safer, less precarious basis.

This is not an easy assignment in the American context.

Americans are uncomfortable with a relationship that is predicated on a degree of cooperation with a declared ideological adversary even if the purpose is to avoid catastrophe. Thinking of peace as "normal" Americans look for conversion rather than negotiation. Until the adversary changes his attitude many are more comfortable with uncompromising hostility; afterwards they consider practical negotiations as unnecessary.

President Ford understood what the real choices in the nuclear age were. He was determined to resist Soviet expansionism. But he knew the American people well enough to understand that he would have to demonstrate a dedication to peace if he were to be sustained in running the risks inherent in resisting aggression especially at the margins of the Soviet periphery. He began his term by showing his concern for human rights, asking the Soviets quietly to release a Soviet seaman who had sought to defect and whom

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the US Coast Guard in an excess of zeal had turned back to
Soviet authorities. The Soviet leaders did so though there
was not the remotest legal basis for such a request
demonstrating the wisdom in human rights issues of a quiet,
non-demonstrative diplomacy.

President Ford next turned to the negotiations of
an agreement to put a ceiling on the arms race. At a meeting
with General Secretary Brezhnev in Vladivostok ceilings were
negotiated on the strategic systems of both sides. Subsequent
negotiations during the Ford Presidency succeeded in further
lowering that ceiling.

Having taken the first steps in constraining the
arms race President Ford concluded the negotiations on
European security which had been going on for three years,
culminating in the so-called Helsinki accord. These
codified what had already been expressed in innumerable
bilateral postwar agreements especially with the Federal
Republic of Germany: no attempt would be made to alter
European frontiers by force. What was new and important

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was the establishment of a forum within which human rights
issues could be raised with respect to Eastern Europe and
the Soviet Union. Since then the Helsinki process has been
accepted and used by every succeeding Administration. It has
enabled the West to raise concerns for which previously no
forum existed without giving the Soviet Union any additional
leverage.

The foreword of President Ford's memoirs is not
the place to reargue the ensuing controversies. It may be
appropriate to point out a few key facts, however:

1. Every strategic weapons program of the Eighties
   Ford
   was started in the/Administration and has been reduced by <u>all</u>
   of his successors including the Reagan Administration.

2. President Ford's immediate successor accused
him of an excessive concern with communism and setting too
high numbers for the arms control agreement. But he ended
his term with a judgment on Soviet purposes very close to
President Ford's and with an agreement on arms control along
the lines negotiated five years earlier by President Ford.

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3. The Reagan Administration which took office next rejected that agreement too as "flawed" but nevertheless observed it for a full term. The failure to ratify it, however, had the practical consequence of keeping Soviet strategic forces at a higher level (about 300 delivery systems) than had been negotiated in the Ford Administration.

In short, despite all controversies President Ford managed to combine a more rigorous defense policy with a more flexible East-West policy than any of his successors. That seems as much vindication as one period is able to offer.

4. President Ford kept the peace process in the Middle East moving forward. He understood that President Sadat was the key on the Arab side, and in two meetings with him as well as in many meetings with Israeli leaders, he laid the basis for the interim agreement in the Sinai without which the Camp David accord could never have emerged.

5. President Ford showed an unprecedented concern for the developing nations. Despite the stringencies imposed by the quadrupling of oil prices, he authorized a proposal

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combining sweeping programs for economic development with
leveling the fluctuation of commodity prices and strengthening
world food security. One of his most courageous decisions
came over the issue of majority rule in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.

He and I had agreed that if the United States was to avoid
further radicalization of Africa we needed to identify
ourselves with the rights of the majority provided that the
minorities, racial or ethnic, were safeguarded by proper
procedures. A complex diplomacy was initiated which by its
own momentum was scheduled to culminate on a visit I had
planned to the region just before the Texas primary of May 1976.

Before I left I warned President Ford that all his political
experts opposed raising the issue at that point. President
Ford replied that he saw no reason to change a national strategy
developed before the primaries had turned into a contest
simply to protect his own political ambitions. It is
statements like this which cause campaign managers to shudder;
they make students of history proud of their country.

President Ford's presidency was not without major

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disappointments. One of the most painful was the collapse
of non-Communist IndoChina. The argument on whether an
independent South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos could have been
sustained against the implacable North Vietnamese will go on
for many years. In 1975 when the issue became a Presidential
one, it was not a matter of abstract argument. President Ford
was painfully aware that the Vietnamese collapse was
accelerated, if not caused, by the inadequacy of American help,
the Congressional reduction by over 50% of our aid while oil
prices were quadrupling, coupled with the Congressional
prohibition against any form of American military action to
sustain the ceasefire agreement which Americans had died to
achieve and which we had negotiated. While North Vietnamese
armies were sweeping across the country, President Ford
decided, over the opposition of the overwhelming majority
of his advisors, to urge Congress to continue economic and
military aid to our beleaguered allies. He turned a deaf
ear to the arguments that he should not make Vietnam *his*
war. He knew that Presidents are responsible for their

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nation's acts and cannot escape the consequences by turning them into personal issues. He therefore decided not to compound the by now inevitable tragedy by having America perceived to have stabbed its allies in the back. If he could not save the freedom of IndoChina, he wanted to gain time to save as many South Vietnamese who had fought for this freedom in reliance on our promises. And so forlornly he kept pressing the Congress for aid until in the end we could save about 150 thousand of our allies and extricate all Americans safely. It was a noble performance.

The last year of the Ford Presidency gave him the anguishing experience of being attacked by a wing of his own party for being soft on defense and the Panama Canal--after all the years of having fought the good fight on the Armed Services Committee. But he overcame this disappointment and nearly won reelection, after finding himself at one point 33 percent behind in the polls.

A foreword cannot do justice to a considerable Presidency. It can point out that much was achieved and

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even more was on the verge of achievement when President Ford's
term ended far too soon for the country, after only thirty
months in office.

I do not pretend to be objective with respect to
President Ford. To my way of thinking he was an effective
President and a good man. I shall always consider it one
of the great rewards of my life to have been permitted to
serve him for a while when he was President and to know him
as a permanent friend.

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FORD INTRODUCTION

Few Presidents have done as much for their country as Gerald Ford. But paradoxically he is such a thoroughly decent and likeable man, so quintesentially American in his steadiness and reliability, that the personal affection for him sometimes obscures his remarkable achievements. [Most Americans Most not fully realized have needed to think about the abyss towards which they were heading when Gerald Ford took over the Presidency--in large part because he pulled them back from it seemingly so effortlessly that it came to be taken for granted. And the foreign statesmen who worked with him recall him with affection and admiration trustworthy as/serious, decent, courageous and farsightly idealistic.]

Many of them still speak of it as the golden period of their country's relationship with the United States.

Part of the reason is that Gerald Ford, coming to the Presidency through a series of unpredictable catastrophes, did not fit the stereotypes generally identified with political leaders in the television age. The prototype of the modern candidate is obsessed with the pursuit of the office. He

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must chase it for a decade, with the last three to the
exclusion of any other consideration. Competing against
multiple
[sometimes half a dozen] opponents with no obvious differences
in qualifications, he seeks compulsively for attention which
is most easily attained by appearing on television shows;
indeed there is almost no other route to recognition. But
even there the typical candidate cannot escape the general
tendency towards standardization unless he identifies
himself with some slogan or cause that evokes passions,
however temporary. Thus the paradox that the more the
modern candidate seeks exposure, the more actively he
woos the electorate, the more insecure he becomes. He
becomes prey to political consultants and fluctuating
moods. He becomes obsessed with the pursuit of the office;
but he has next to no time to devote to what he will do with
the office once he attains it. Hence the phenomenon that
the typical candidate has a position on almost every issue
since he can never be certain when he will be asked but he