Gerald Ford and the Challenges of the 1970s

Chapter 18. Back from the Brink

325 Back from the Brink Back from the Brink Chapter 18 Ford, the 1976 Election, and the Republican Party During a campaign stop in 1976, when a hotel assigned President Ford its “Emperor Suite,” he told his staff that he disliked the snooty title on the door. A staff member covered it with a handwritten cardboard sign reading “Jerry Ford’s Room.”1 At another campaign swing through Paterson, New Jersey, Matilda Durget, a resident of nearby Franklin, came out to see the president despite the steady rain the day he visited. As Ford’s limousine motored down the street, he requested that the Secret Service open the vehicle’s roof. When the driver told him that it was raining, Ford replied, “It’s raining on all these people, too.” As Durget recounted, “The top opened, and the President stood waving in the pouring rain to all. I admire this humility in our leader and feel that the little things we do are the things that really count.”2 Such stories were legion. Throughout his presidency, Ford acted unpretentiously, and that came as a welcome sight to Americans disgusted with the imperial presidency. But as Ford prepared to face Jimmy Carter in the 1976 election, the question was whether his decency and warmth would be enough to help him win a full term. Or were the challenges of the 1970s so daunting that—despite the incumbent’s solid performance—Americans would want another leader to tackle them? Closing the Gap The summer of 1976 belonged to Carter. In early August, before the Republican National Convention, polls showed Carter ahead of Ford, 62 to 29 percent, a better than two-to-one margin. Even after the convention, which usually gave a lift to the GOP candidate, a Gallup poll showed that Carter enjoyed a 52 to 37 percent lead.3 Ford was determined to make the fall 326 Gerald Ford and the Challenges of the 1970s campaign belong to him. He had less than eighty days to do it and win the election. After the exhausting convention, Ford left for a working vacation in Vail, where he and aides gathered to plan a strategy. In June, White House aides had presented Ford with a road map for turning his campaign around. They referred to it as the “Planning Document,” and it included an assessment candid enough to make any reader wince: “If past is indeed prologue,” the document informed Ford, “you will lose on November 2nd—because to win you must do what has never been done: close a gap of about 20 points in 73 days from the base of a minority party while spending approximately the same amount of money as your opponent.” But the document concluded, “We firmly believe you can win.”4 The Ford camp ironed out a strategy to enable him to overcome his huge deficit in the polls. The campaign decided to build on a base in the heartland, in the industrial Midwest and farm states, and concentrate on swing states with a large number of electoral votes (California, Illinois, Michigan, New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas). Ford needed to win five of them.5 His campaign was to depend heavily on television, since only through the mass media could he convert millions of voters by Election Day. As Ford and his advisers huddled and talked tactics, he made one thing clear. He would not engage in fiscal pump priming, saying adamantly, “I’m not going to bankrupt the country to get reelected.”6 A controversial element of the campaign strategy concerned Ford’s role. Almost a year earlier, Robert Teeter suggested that Ford “remain as nonpolitical and as far above the battle as possible.”7 In the “Planning Document,” presidential aides Michael Duval and Foster Chanock outlined a “high-risk” plan that Ford could adopt to gain an edge on Carter, especially if he were trailing Carter by more than fifteen points in the polls, which he was. The Ford camp settled on a Rose Garden strategy—which Duval called the “nocampaign campaign”—where Ford would spend considerable time at the White House instead of on the campaign trail.8 For several reasons, this unconventional approach made sense. Emphasizing incumbency might help, since voters were averse to throwing out a sitting president, not having done so since 1932. Ford could concentrate on executive work and appear presidential, and the media would be forced to concentrate on his actions and campaign issues rather...