[L]

MB17; Ford, ET 1-4, pal. 5-8

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 re-election, 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 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.

8

The Easton Press

THE LIBRARY

of The PRESIDENTS

A special introduction by Dr. Henry A. Kissinger

## *A Time To Heal*

The Autobiography of Gerald R. Ford, 1913-
38th President of the United States, 1974-1977

Few Presidents have done as much for their country as Gerald Ford. But paradoxically he is such a thoroughly decent and likeable man, so quintessentially 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 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

1

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 must have a position on almost every issue (since he can never be certain when he will be asked), but not necessarily a concept for it, much less an elaborate 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 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. 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 Presi-

2

dency — 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 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 in 1976. President Ford felt instinctively that his historic mission was to heal, a task impossible to fulfill 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

3

failure; he deserves to claim the ultimate credit. Inevitably any
Secretary of 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 decision-making.
And he insisted that all relevant members of his administration be
heard without ceding a veto to anyone. I was surely influential, but
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 authority in most principal NATO countries. By a strange coinci-
dence all the leaders of the larger NATO countries were either phy-
sically 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 Presi-
dent 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 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

4

that Watergate did. Hence they suspected some trick to lure them in-
to unforeseeable consequences and did not press their advantage. But
it was only a question of time until they realized the true state of af-
fairs 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 Congres-
sional majority to hold that budget at ransom for legislating a reduc-
tion of American commitments abroad.

From that basis President Ford moved to put Soviet-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 catas-
trophe. Thinking of peace as "normal", Americans look for conver-
sion rather than negotiation. Until the adversary changes his attitude
many are more comfortable with uncompromising hostility; after-
wards 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 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 Secre-
tary Brezhnev in Vladivostok ceilings were negotiated on the strate-
gic 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, Pres-
ident 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 Fed-

5

eral Republic of Germany: no attempt would be made to alter Euro-
pean frontiers by force. What was new and important was the estab-
lishment 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, however,
to point out a few key facts:

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

2. President Ford's immediate successor accused him of an ex-
cessive 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 agree-
ment on arms control along the lines negotiated five years earlier by
President Ford.

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 vindica-
tion 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 agree-
ment in the Sinai without which the Camp David Accord could
never have emerged.

5. President Ford showed an unprecedented concern for the de-
veloping nations. Despite the stringencies imposed by the quadru-
pling of oil prices, he authorized a proposal combining sweeping pro-
grams for economic development with leveling the fluctuation of

6

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 in a visit I had planned to the region just
before the Texas primary of May, 1976. Before I left I warned Presi-
dent 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 these which cause campaign managers to shudder; they make
students of history proud of their country.

President Ford's Presidency was not without major disappoint-
ments. One of the most painful was the collapse of non-Communist
Indochina. The argument on whether an independent South Viet-
nam, Cambodia and Laos could have been sustained against the im-
placable 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 cease-fire 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 oppo-
sition of the overwhelming majority of his advisors, to urge Con-
gress to continue economic and military aid to our beleaguered allies.
He turned a deaf ear to the arguments that he should not make Viet-
nam his war. He knew that Presidents are responsible for their na-
tion'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

7

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.

-2-

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.

-3-

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.

-4-

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."

-5-

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

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

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.

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

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.

-10-

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

-11-

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

-12-

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 all 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.

-13-

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

-14-

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

-15-

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

-16-

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.

-17-

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.

6-16-86

## 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 seemingly effortlessly that this historic accomplishment came to be taken for granted.

-2-

CYD

-3-

-4-

-5-

-6-

-8-

It was President Ford's Presidency which 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

-9-

-10-

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 agression, 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

-11-

-12-

-13-

-14-

CYD

-15-

-16-

-17-

YJ

6-10-86

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 Americans feel/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 seemingly 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 of them still speak of his Presidency as the golden period of their country's relationship with the United States.

One reason Americans have such difficulties in assessing Gerald Ford as a President rather than as a man is that he does not fit the stereotypes associated with

-3-

have a position on almost every issue but not necessarily a
~~philosophical~~ concept
rationale for it, much less an elaborated philosophy of
government. He has had to please so many constituencies
that it becomes increasingly difficult to define his own
identity.

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

So it happened that the man who succeeded to the
Presidency after the Watergate scandal in August 1974 was by
an act of Providence exactly what the country needed. A

-4-

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 assignment. 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. or that posterity will treat
him more kindly than his contemporaries. And indeed, President
Nixon has experienced a major restoration of his reputation in
his lifetime.

But that was not the mood when Gerald Ford took over.
The Presidency was in a shambles. The last Cabinet meeting
of the Nixon administration had ended in as close to open
rebellion as the American system of government can come.

The balance between the Executive and Legislative branches
was disintegrating and the authority of the Presidency was
questioned. For fifteen months the Presidency had been at a nadir.

consumed in a desperate struggle for survival. Those of us
concerned with foreign affairs, which after all depends
crucially on Presidential authority and national consensus,
be induced with against the permanent risk
had lived all that time with a premonition of catastrophe.

Now and why Gerald R. Ford was selected as Vice
President must await the memoirs of those closely involved
in the process. But it is not too early to affirm that
whatever the motives, Gerald Ford proved to be the salvation
of his country. America needed a restoration of faith in
its institutions, its values and its purposes. For this a
strong President was essential but not a self-willed one.
Deep convictions were imperative, but not a dominant egoism.
Gerald R. Ford possessed these qualities. He

-6-

commentaries + cartoons

At the time cartoonists were 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 still surrounding his
predecessor. At a remove of over ten years it is difficult
to reconstruct the then prevalent spirit of revenge and
so prevalent animosity I was not directly involved in the decision to
pardon President Nixon though I strongly favored the decision
in one brief conversation with the President. When the
night before he announced the decision President Ford
informed me of it, he neither referred to my previous advice,

-7-

It was without doubt the right decision though it
probably cost Gerald Ford the Presidency. President Ford felt
instinctively that his historic mission was to heal, a task
impossible of fulfillment while ~~legal~~ controversies raged over
the humiliating appearance in court of a former President.
It was characteristic of President Ford that he refused to
 delegate a decision involving the dignity of our country to a
 subordinate such as the Attorney General or the Special
 Prosecutor, ~~with so fateful a decision.~~

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~~ silly question: whether a particular Cabinet member is
~~dominant~~ is~~ measured by how often he is (allegedly) overruled~~
by the President. Certainly in foreign policy the answer is
~~really quite simple.~~ Foreign policy cannot emerge from a

-8-

> Let us consider the foreign policy of the United States. He will be blamed

of State have to be on the same wave length or national strategy

relevant members of his Administration be heard before a final

decision without ceding a veto to anyone. I was surely

It was a productive period. Gerald Ford's most

-9-

the nation

unnoticed achievement was to pull/back from the risk of

national ine coherence. The next was to usher in an unusually

creative period of diplomacy. N.D.

In fact most of the institu-
tions 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 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
in fact was dying; Health and Brandt were losing their political grip,
Chancellor
and in fact were obviely taken aback before
engulfed President Nixon.

President Nixon was engulfed by Watergate. As a result Allied
relations were in the hands of bureaucrats with a predictable
overemphasis on second-order issues and a neglect of long-
range strategy.

It was President Ford's Presidency which saw the high point of postwar American-European relationships-- seldom, if never, in the postwar period were personal relations more

-10-

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
since
principal industrial democracies and which have/evolved into an
indispensable annual forum. President Ford's 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.

-14-

In short, despite all controversies President Ford managed to combine a more rigorous defense policy with a more flexible arms control policy than any of his successors.

The Helsinki process too 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.

3. President Ford kept the peace process in the Middle East in high gear. 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.

President Ford showed an unprecedented concern for the developing nations. Despite the stringencies imposed by the quadrupling of oil prices, he authorized a proposal to put forward sweeping programs for economic development, leveling the fluctuation of commodity prices and 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.

President Ford I approved I left that all his political experts were warning against introducing the issue at that point. President Ford replied (a) said simply that he saw no reason to change his national strategy

-18-

This year, Vietnamese who had fought for freedom in reliance on our military forces. And so forlornly he kept plugging 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--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.

-19-

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.

6-10-86

# FORD INTRODUCTION

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 seemingly 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 of them still speak of his Presidency as the golden period of their country's relationship with the United States.

One reason Americans have such difficulty in assessing Gerald Ford as a President rather than as a man is that he does not fit the stereotypes generally identified with

CJD

-2-

our political leaders in the television age. He came to the
Presidency not as the result of decades of maneuvering but
through a series of/catastrophes. By contrast, the typical
modern candidate is obsessed with the pursuit of the office.
He must chase it for years with the pursuit increasingly
excluding any other consideration. Competing against multiple
opponents with often no obvious difference 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 national recognition. He is in quest less
of substance than of some slogan or cause that evokes passions,
however temporary. Thus the paradox that the more the modern
candidate seeks exposure, the more desperately he woos the
electorate, the more insecure he becomes. 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
(since he can never be certain when he will be asked) must

have a position on almost every issue but not necessarily a
rationale for it, much less an elaborated philosophy of
government. He has had to please so many constituencies
that it becomes increasingly difficult to define his own
identity.

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

So it happened that the man who succeeded to the
Presidency after the Watergate debacle in August 1974 was by
an act of Providence exactly what the country needed. A

Those qualities of quiet confidence and unostentatious
strength were desperately needed in that hysterical summer of
1974. I have never doubted that history would rate Richard M.
Nixon as an important President or that posterity would treat
him more kindly than his contemporaries. And indeed, President
Nixon has experienced a major restoration of his reputation in
his lifetime.

But that was not the mood when Gerald Ford took over.
The Presidency was in a shambles. The last Cabinet meeting
of the Nixon administration had ended in as close to open
rebellion as the American system of government can come.
The balance between the Executive and Legislative branches
was disintegrating and the authority of the Presidency was
at a nadir. For fifteen months the Presidency had been

consumed in a desperate struggle for survival. Those of us concerned with foreign affairs, which after all depends crucially on Presidential authority and rational consensus, had lived all that time with a premonition 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."

How and why Gerald R. Ford was selected as Vice President must await the memoirs of those closely involved in the process. But it is not too early to affirm that whatever the motives, Gerald Ford proved to be the salvation of his country. America needed a restoration of faith in its institutions, its values and its purposes. For this a strong President was essential but not a self-willed one. Deep convictions were imperative but not a dominant ego.

Gerald R. Ford possessed these qualities. He stepped into his responsibilities with assurance and with dignity; from the moment he assumed the office it was

The first major decision President Ford faced was
how to deal with the legal issues still surrounding his
predecessor. At a remove of over ten years it is difficult
to reconstruct the then prevalent spirit of revenge and
animosity. I was not directly involved in the decision to
pardon President Nixon though I strongly favored the decision
in one brief conversation with the President. When the
night before he announced the decision President Ford
informed me of it, he neither referred to my previous advice,

It was without doubt the right decision though it
probably cost Gerald Ford the Presidency. President Ford felt
instinctively that his historic mission was to heal, a task
impossible of fulfillment while legal controversies raged over
the humiliating appearance in court of a former President.
It was characteristic of President Ford that he refused to
delegate a decision involving the dignity of our country to a
subordinate such as the Attorney General or the Special
Prosecutor, with so fateful a decision.

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
silly question: whether a particular Cabinet member is
dominant measured by how often he is (allegedly) overruled
by the President. Certainly in foreign policy the answer is
really quite simple. Foreign policy cannot emerge from a

-8-

contest between the White House and the State Department; the
President always dominates foreign policy. He will be blamed
for any failure; he deserves to claim the ultimate credit.
Inevitably any Secretary of State who is frequently overruled
must sooner or later resign. The President and the Secretary
of State have to be on the same wave length 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 before a final
decision 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.

the nation

national incoherence. The next was to usher in an unusually

creative period of diplomacy. In fact most of the institu-
tions and policy directions of American national strategy

was dying; Heath and Brandt were losing their political grip;

range strategy.

never in the postwar period were personal relations more

-10-

-11-

Ford set about with great determination to restore respect for American will power. He pushed for an increase in the military budget and was the first President in six years to overcome the tendency of many in Congress to hold the military budget at ransom for legislating a reduction of American commitments abroad.

From that basis President Ford moved with determination to put Soviet-American relationships on a safer, less precarious basis. This is not an easy assignment in the American context. Americans tend to think of peace as the "normal" relationship. Hence they are uncomfortable with a relationship that is predicated on a kind of cooperation with a declared ideological adversary even if the purpose is to avoid catastrophe. Americans look for conversion. Until that point is reached many are more comfortable with uncompromising hostility; afterwards they consider practical arrangements as unnecessary.

President Ford understood that the real choices in the nuclear age were quite different. He was determined to resist Soviet expansionism. But he knew the American

-12-

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. He
began his term by showing his concern for human rights, asking
the Soviets quietly to release a Soviet national seaman who
had sought to defect and whom the US Coast Guard in an excess
of zeal had turned back to Soviet authorities. The Soviet
leaders did so though there was no remote legal basis for such
a request.

President Ford next turned to a negotiation of an
agreement to put a ceiling on the arms race. At a meeting
with General Secretary Brezhnev ceilings were negotiated on
the strategic systems of both sides. Subsequent negotiations
lowered that ceiling by another 250.

Having constrained the arms race President Ford
concluded the negotiations on European security which
culminated in the so-called Helsinki accord. These codified
what had already been expressed in innumerable bilateral
postwar agreements that no attempt would be made to alter

-13-

European frontiers by force. More importantly it established
a forum within which human rights issues could be raised with
respect to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

1. Every strategic weapons program of the Eighties
was started in his Administration and has been reduced by _all_
of his successors including the conservative Administrations.

2. President Ford's immediate successor accused
him of an excessive concern with Communism and setting too
high numbers for the arms control agreement. He would up
with a judgement on Soviet purposes very close to President
Ford's original one and with an agreement on arms control
along the lines negotiated five years earlier by President Ford.

3. The conservative Administration which took
office next rejected that agreement too as "flawed" but
nevertheless observed it. The failure to ratify had the
practical consequences of keeping Soviet strategic forces

-14-

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

4. The Helsinki process too 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.

President Ford showed an unprecedented concern for the
developing nations. Despite the stringencies imposed by
the quadrupling of oil prices, he authorized putting forward
sweeping programs for economic development, leveling the
fluctuation of commodity prices and 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 it needed to identify itself 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 him that all his political experts were warning
against introducing the issue at that point. President Ford
said simply that he saw no reason to change national strategy

-16-

developed before the Texas primary had become crucial simply
to protect his own political ambitions. It is statements
like this which make campaign managers shudder; they make
students of history proud of their country.

Once again events have vindicated him, despite vocal
opposition at the time. All subsequent administrations have
had to travel the road President Ford has charted often
having sacrificed the freedom of action that comes from
anticipating crises.

President Ford's presidency was not without major
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

-17-

CYJ

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. While North Vietnamese
armies were sweeping across the country, President Ford
decided against the importuning of the overwhelming majority
of his advisors to urge continued economic aid. He turned
a deaf ear to the arguments that he should not make Vietnam
his war. He knew that Presidents are responsible for their
nation's acts and cannot escape them by turning them into
personal issues. He therefore decided not to end the by now
inevitable tragedy by having America perceived to have
stabbed its allies in the back. Nor could he be unaware of the
danger that in its despair the South Vietnamese government
might turn on the several thousand Americans still left in
the country. Above all he wanted to save as many South

-18-

Vietnamese who had fought for freedom in reliance on our promises. And so forlornly he kept plugging 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.

-19-

influencing -2-

years with the pursuit of emulating

must chase it for a decade, with the last three to the

exclusion of any other consideration. Competing against

multiple opponents with no obvious difference

indeed there is almost no other route to recognition. But
less of substance than of

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

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

he was unlikely to present a threat to the incumbent and
that the Congress might hesitate to install as President
someone with so little experience in national affairs.
It is not to be surmised that he
affirms any personal connection with the office
But whatever the motives, Gerald Ford proved to be the
salvation of his country. There was nothing America needed
less than a melodramatic personalized Presidency. It required
a restoration of faith in its institutions, its values and
its purposes.

For this a strong President was essential but not a
self-willed one. Deep convictions were imperative but not
a dominant ego. Gerald R. Ford possessed these qualities. He
stepped into his responsibilities with assurance and with
dignity; but he made clear from the first minute that he
would seek his fulfillment in the judgement of posterity
not in the manipulation of public opinion. It was remarkable
and moving to observe this artless Midwesterner impose himself
by the integrity of his conduct and of his motives.

One of the penalties of his unprecedented ascension to
the White House was a marvelous time with the penitentiary
President Ford's manner of historic.

-14-

Vladivostok totals. Subsequent intelligence estimates have
sustained his view that it was a medium bomber.

As the former senior Republican on the Armed Services
Committee President Ford suffered greatly from the critics
in his own party who accused him of neglecting the nation's
defenses. His record speaks for itself. Every strategic
weapons program of the Eighties--excepting only strategic
defense--was started in his administration and has been
reduced by all of his successors including the conservative
Administrations.

President Ford kept the peace process in the Middle
East in high gear. He understood that President Sadat was
the key to it 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 Egyptian-Israeli peace could never have ensued.
In the process there were some painful interludes with our
Israeli friends and defacto allies which most of them now
realize were essential for the peace process to be concluded.

6-4-86

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. Not nearly enough Americans 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

-2-

must chase it for a decade, with the last three to the
exclusion of any other consideration. Competing against
sometimes half a dozen opponents with no obvious difference
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

-3-

does not necessarily have an elaborated philosophy of
government. He has had to please so many constituencies
that he will have to fight to define his own identity.

Gerald Ford was immune to these insecurities. He had
attained his highest goal, leader of his party in the House
of Representatives. He would clearly have loved to become
Speaker of the House. But that position is beyond the reach
of individual ambition. It would surely have been Gerald
Ford's whenever the Republican party achieved majority status
in the House of Representatives. But that depended on nationwide
trends beyond the power of any individual Congressman to
influence except in the most marginal way. He had no choice
except to serve his country by being a good Congressman.

So it happened that the man who succeeded to the
Presidency after the Watergate debacle was by an act of
Providence exactly what the country needed. He was not
ambitious in any personal sense. A deep sense of national
service was ingrained in him. He was a man of humility who

-4-

nevertheless knew his own worth which was considerable.

He never seemed awed by his awesome assignment. But neither
was he intoxicated by the trappings of power so unexpectedly
thrust upon him. He was in short exactly the right man to
restore balance, confidence and normalcy to his country.

And those were the qualities America desperately needed
in that hysterical summer of 1974. I have never doubted that
Richard M. Nixon would be considered by history as an important
President. On his last desperate night in office I told him
that posterity would treat him more kindly than his contemporaries.
The tempo of life--and of history--has since speeded up so
that President Nixon has been able to experience a major
restoration of his reputation in his lifetime. And those of
us who served in his administration can only be gratified
by this balancing of accounts.

But those emphatically were not the circumstances of
1974. The Presidency was in a shambles. The last Cabinet
meeting of the Nixon administration had ended in as close

to open rebellion as the American system of government
should ever hope to see. The preparations for the 1974
summit saw an inability to forge the consensus indispensable
for dealing with the Soviets. The balance between the
Executive and Legislative branches was in the process of
disintegrating. The credibility of the Presidency was at
a nadir, partly due to mistakes of President Nixon, partly
as the result of the implacable hostility of his opponents.
The Presidency had for fifteen months been consumed in a
struggle for naked survival. And it is a tribute to President
Nixon's tenacity and resiliency that he managed to obscure
that inherent weakness for so long. But anybody charged
with the conduct of even a portion of national affairs knew
that we were courting catastrophe--especially in the foreign
field.

Into this maelstrom stepped Gerald R. Ford. How and
why he was selected as Vice President must await the memoirs
of those closely involved in the process. I consider it
quite possible that one criterion was the conviction that

he was unlikely to present a threat to the incumbent and
that the Congress might hesitate to install as President
someone with so little experience in national affairs.
But whatever the motives, Gerald Ford proved to be the
salvation of his country. There was nothing America needed
less than a melodramatic personalized Presidency. It required
a restoration of faith in its institutions, its values and
its purposes.

-7-

the Presidency was that he lacked the glibness of those who
had cultivated national exposure all their political lives.
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 can 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.
He dominated his Administration without appearing to do so.

The first major decision President Ford faced was what
to do about his tragic predecessor. At a remove of over ten
years it is difficult to reconstruct the spirit of revenge
and animosity then abroad. I was not directly involved in
the decision so I do not know in detail the precise considera-
tions that led President Ford to pardon Richard Nixon. President
Ford in his customary calm, unruffled manner asked my view
once. I told him that the idea of submitting President Nixon
to a trial would be seen as a blot on America by future

-8-

generations, shame us in the rest of the world and impose
a new, probably unbearable, torment on a man who had already
suffered enough. President Ford did not reply and never
returned to the subject. Ten days later he called to tell me
that he would announce a pardon the next day; characteristically
he neither referred to my previous advice, nor did he invite
last minute counsel. His conduct exuded the conviction that
it was clearly his responsibility.

It was without doubt the right decision though it almost
certainly cost Gerald Ford the Presidency. Perhaps the public
could have been better prepared for it though this may be more
self-evident in retrospect than in the mood of the moment.
Historians will have to sort out this essentially tactical
side issue. What they will surely agree on is that there was
no possibility of healing the nation's wounds while a former
President was being humiliated and humanly destroyed in a
procedure certain to take many months. And it was unfair--
or so it would seem to a man of Gerald Ford's character--to
burden a subordinate such as the Attorney General or the

CJD

-9-

By the nature of my office I know most about President Ford's conduct of foreign policy. In the Washington pressure cooker there is an essentially silly question that preoccupies those who like to identify events with personalities. It is whether a particular Cabinet member is dominant and it is measured by how often he is (allegedly) overruled by the President. The answer is really quite simple: the President always dominates foreign policy. He will be blamed for any failure; he deserves to claim the ultimate credit. Secondly, any Secretary of State who is frequently overruled should resign. Foreign policy cannot emerge from a contest between the White House and the State Department. The President and the Secretary of State must be on the same wave length 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. When we were both in town we met every day for at least half an hour; and for much longer when major

-10-

decisions had to be made. We thought it necessary to work
out a national strategy even when no immediate decisions were
before the President. Gerald Ford was involved in great detail
at every stage of decisionmaking. And he insisted that all
relevant Cabinet members have their say 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.

And it turned into a productive period. Gerald Ford
inherited the legacy of the stilborn Year of Europe. During
the last year of the Nixon administration an attempt was made
to reinvigorate Atlantic relationships. It was based on the
conviction that as the generation which remembered the close
wartime collaborations passed from the scene and as the
challenge from the East took on dimensions vastly transcending
the purely military one, a new spirit of partnership had to
be created relevant to those who had grown to maturity in
different circumstances. It was a good idea which did not

-11-

come off for a variety of reasons. All the leaders of the
West were either physically for politically terminally ill.
President Pompidou was dying; Heath and Brandt were losing
their political grip; President Nixon was engulfed by Watergate.
As a result what was intended as a symbolic gesture was engulfed
in endless bureaucratic negotiations--a symptom of which was
that a project designed to strengthen consultation between
the two sides of the Atlantic was attacked in Europe because
we had put it forward without consultation.

In the end a formal, ritualistic declaration emerged
during President Nixon's last trip to Europe in June 1974.
But it was President Ford's Presidency which captured the
spirit of that endeavor. It can be safely stated that never
in the postwar period were personal relations more cordial,
consultation more intense and friction less apparent than
during President Ford's incumbency. His personal friendship
with his counterparts has survived to this day--a rare
occurrence among national leaders out of office. President

Ford left the Atlantic Alliance in excellent shape.

His road was more complex with respect to East-West relations. A mythology has developed since that there was something soft about his dealings with the Soviets and those of his predecessors--a mythology largely put forward by warriors not to be found in any of the barricades where the actual battles of the Seventies were being fought.

It is easy from the perspective of a resurgent America that President Ford's presidency made possible to call to arms for battles that allegedly should have been fought in the Seventies. Those critics conveniently forget the trauma of Vietnam; they/ignore the McGovern dominated Congress which cut every defense appropriation requested by/ three Administrations; they ignore the problem of how to sustain the confrontations they were demanding in a nation just emerging from Watergate.

And they forget that wherever there was an actual Soviet attempt to expand its dominance the Ford Administration resisted until it was stopped by a strange coalition of

-13-

liberals and conservatives as in Angola.

The focal point of the controversy was the so-called
arms control process. SALT I negotiated in the Nixon
Administration came under strenuous attack because it froze
the number of missiles at the levels of May 1972--never mind
that the Soviets were building 170 land-based missiles a
year to none for the United States; that the Joint Chiefs of
Staff had recommended no additional programs and above all
that the number of missiles was essentially irrelevant. If
any number mattered it was the total of warheads and even
more their accuracy. Nevertheless President Ford succeeded
in negotiating at Vladivostok in 1974 the equality in the
number of missiles his critics had demanded and when the
attack then shifted to the argument that the number was too
high he had an informal agreement with Brezhnev to reduce
the Vladivostok totals by another 250,a number yet to be
reached after 12 more years of negotiations. He was attacked
for allegedly not including the Soviet Backfire bomber in the

-14-

As the former senior Republican on the Armed Services
Committee President Ford suffered greatly from the critics
in his own party who accused him of neglecting the nation's
defenses. His record speaks for itself: Every strategic
weapons program of the Eighties--excepting only strategic
defense--was started in his administration and has been
reduced by all of his successors including the conservative
Administrations.

-15-

President Ford's most courageous moment came over the issue of majority rule in Rhodesia. He and I had agreed that the United States needed to identify itself with the demands for majority rule provided that the rights of minorities, racial or ethnic, were safeguarded by proper procedures. A complex diplomacy was initiated which by its own momentum was scheduled to culminate just before the Texas primary of May 1976. Before I left I warned him that all his political experts were warning against introducing the issue at that point. President Ford said simply that he saw no reason to change a game plan developed before the Texas primary had become crucial simply to save his own political ambitions. It is statements like this which make campaign managers shudder; they make students of history proud of their country.

Once again events have vindicated him. All subsequent administrations have had to travel the road President Ford has charted often having sacrificed the freedom of action that comes from anticipating crises.

cyd

-16-

I do not cover President Ford's democratic role only
because I feel less competent to do so. But we should
remember that inflation has never been lower than at that
period and that the veto was used courageously to restrain
governmental spending as the deficit figures make clear.

A foreword cannot do justice to a considerable
Presidency. It can point out that much was achieved and
even more was on the verge of achievement when President
Ford's term ended too soon after only thirty months in office.

an
President Ford was a good man and/effective President.

I do not pretend to be objective with respect to him. I
will always consider it one of the great gifts of my life
to have been permitted to serve Gerald R. Ford as President
and to call him a friend.

(date)

Dr. Henry Kissinger
c/o Dan Strone
William Morris Agency, Inc.
1350 Avenue of the Americas -33rd Fl.
New York, NY 10019
903-1159

Dear Dr. Kissinger:

This letter will confirm our understanding regarding
the 2,500-word appreciation of Gerald Ford and his presidency
(the "appreciation") which you have agreed to contribute for
use in connection with our leatherbound edition of his
memoirs, A TIME TO HEAL.

1. We have separately provided you with editorial
suggestions regarding the appreciation. The due date is
November 1, 1985.

2. Upon our acceptance of the appreciation we
will pay you a fee of $2,500 (two thousand five hundred
dollars).

3. We will have the perpetual right to use the
appreciation in connection with our marketing efforts for
our edition of A TIME TO HEAL by Gerald Ford. The initial
use will be a pamphlet provided to subscribers of THE LIBRARY
OF THE PRESIDENTS.

4. The appreciation will be copyright Henry Kissinger and we will run an appropriate copyright notice in any use we make of the appreciation.

5. You are free to make any other use of the appreciation you wish other than a use in connection with any other publication of A TIME TO HEAL. Any use of the appreciation you authorize for publication prior to one year after the initial publication of our leatherbound edition of

[L]

The Easton Press

THE LIBRARY

of The PRESIDENTS

*A Time To Heal*

1

[LC]

2

[L]

Gerald Ford proved to be the salvation of his country. America
needed a restoration of faith in its institutions, its values and its pur-
poses. 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 in-
tegrity of his conduct and of his motives.

At the time commentators and cartoonists were having a mar-
velous 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 thorough-
ness, 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 an-
nounced the pardon President Ford informed me of it, he neither
referred to my previous advice, nor did he invite last minute counsel.

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 (alleged-
ly) 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 domi-
nate foreign policy or risk paralysis. He will be blamed for any

3

[L.C]

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 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 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.

4

[LC]

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-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.

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 Fed-

5

[L.C]

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

6

7

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 re-election, after find-
ing himself at one point 33 percent behind in the polls.

Dr. Henry A. Kissinger

8