Gerald Ford and the Challenges of the 1970s

Acknowledgments

This work began in a grape vineyard overlooking Seneca Lake in Central New York. While attending graduate school in Manhattan, I returned to my hometown, Ithaca, for an early autumn weekend, along with a classmate, Mike Green. I was planning to begin my doctoral dissertation, and I knew that I wanted to study Gerald Ford’s presidency. Ford, I felt, was a thoughtful and steady leader who had never received enough credit for his stewardship— especially in economic matters—during difficult years in our country’s history. People familiar with the Finger Lakes region know that its beauty can act as a tonic, and it did for me that weekend. As Mike and I discussed Ford’s presidency—picking Niagara, Concord, and Catawba grapes, of all things— I felt a work begin to crystallize in my mind. Over the next few years, my dissertation adviser, Alan Brinkley, gave me enormous encouragement and guidance, helping to shape the thesis into a study of not only Ford’s presidency but America in the 1970s. The other members of my dissertation committee, David Farber, Joshua Freeman, Robert Shapiro, and James Shenton, gave valuable advice to prepare the work for publication. David Farber expressed interest in this project from the start, and three other graduate school professors, Mark Carnes, John Garraty, and Alden Vaughan, greatly influenced my training as a researcher and writer, as did several classmates, including Ed O’Donnell of Holy Cross College. The Gerald R. Ford Foundation awarded a generous grant to conduct research at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I have made numerous trips there and found the staff peerless in efficiency and helpfulness. Supervisory archivist David Horrocks has been wonderfully supportive; Geir Gundersen answered many questions by telephone and email over the years; audio-visual archivist Kenneth Hafeli fulfilled numerous video requests and gave generous assistance in selecting photographs for the picture section. I want to thank all other staff members as well: Director Acknowledgments ix Dennis Daellenbach, Stacy Davis, Donna Lehman, William McNitt, Nancy Mirshah, Helmi Raaska, recent retirees Dick and Karen Holtzhausen, and archives technicians Brooke Clement and Joshua Cochran. Donald Holloway of the Gerald R. Ford Museum in Grand Rapids proofread the manuscript and gave me access to museum holdings in storage, and Jamie Draper helped me to assemble them for photographs. Jennifer Sternaman, now at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, was very helpful during my early years of research at the Ford Library. I got to know many libraries well while researching this book. I want to pay homage to the libraries and librarians of Dowling College, Ithaca College, Columbia University, and Brevard Community College at Cocoa. Especially helpful have been those institutions that keep paper volumes of older periodicals; digging up 1970s articles on paper was much easier than on microfilm, and the portraits of this nation and individual Americans in the pages that follow came in part from my poring over the bound paper collections of a few libraries. A number of institutions offered financial assistance to mine their archival collections. I received grants from the Lilly Library of Indiana University at Bloomington, the Rockefeller Archive Center of Sleepy Hollow, New York, and the Carl Albert Congressional Research and Studies Center at the University of Oklahoma, where archivist Todd Kosmerick gave great assistance. Diane Windham Shaw of the David Bishop Skillman Library at Lafayette College helped me considerably during visits to review the William Simon papers. Faculty, staff, and administration colleagues at Dowling College have been extraordinarily supportive, and the college’s Long Range Planning and Development Committee has facilitated my research by granting course releases, for which I am deeply grateful. During the spring 2003 semester, I assigned an earlier draft of this work to my “America in the 1970s” class at Dowling. The students were very encouraging, and their reactions and insights informed my thinking not only on the Ford presidency but the entire decade. During 2003–2004, I was lucky to have two Dowling students working as research assistants, John Conroy and Darren Large, who helped to transcribe the interviews that I conducted from 2002–2004. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to members of Gerald Ford’s administration and the Ninety-forth Congress who granted interviews and patiently answered questions that probed their memories of decades-old events and emotions. A number of Ford administration and congressional alumni proofread chapters, offering valuable comments, and gave me access to their personal papers. I x...