Gerald Ford and the Challenges of the 1970s

Chapter 1. Hungering for Heroes

17 Hungering for Heroes Hungering for Heroes Chapter 1 In the mid-1970s, feeling betrayed by their president after Watergate, Americans hungered for new national heroes. They found Evel Knievel. The motorcycle stuntman wore a red, white, and blue jumpsuit; spoke openly of his love of country; denounced the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang; and urged his young fans to avoid drugs and wear helmets when motorcycling. Most important, Knievel performed stunts that demanded superhuman courage, leaping over cars, trucks, buses, and even the fountains at Las Vegas’s Caesars Palace. A legend grew around him; awestruck children claimed that he had broken every bone in his body (in reality, his crashes had caused around thirty-five fractures). On September 8, 1974, the daredevil performed what was supposed to be his greatest stunt. He tried to jump Idaho’s Snake River Canyon on his SkyCycle X-3, a rocket-motorcycle hybrid. The steam-powered machine was to shoot off a ramp and fly at 200 miles per hour across the 1,600-foot canyon. On that day, when Knievel pressed the ignition button, the Sky-Cycle roared up the ramp, but as it tried to sail across the enormous chasm, the safety parachute unfurled and the bike and rider floated slowly to the Snake River below. Rescuers plucked Knievel safely from the canyon floor. The daredevil received only scrapes and bruises; no broken bones this time. But he fractured his reputation. These were cynical times, and skeptics denounced the whole affair as a hoax, even accusing Knievel of intentionally deploying the parachute early.1 The charges were untrue, but Knievel’s hero status was tarnished for good. On the same day that Knievel made his notorious Snake River Canyon jump, more than 2,000 miles away in Washington, D.C., Gerald Ford took the most controversial action of his presidency by pardoning Richard Nixon. There were some parallels. Knievel crashed and enraged fans and detractors alike, who felt that they had been cheated; Ford’s public support crashed, and he, too, enraged supporters and opponents alike, who said that justice 18 Gerald Ford and the Challenges of the 1970s had been cheated, even accusing Ford of conspiratorial behavior. His presidency never fully recovered. Post-Watergate Cynicism On the morning of August 8, 1974, Vice President Ford had an appointment with the president. He walked into the Oval Office alone, unsure what Nixon would say. For months, the Nixon presidency had been hanging by a thread. On August 5, the thread snapped. The Supreme Court rejected Nixon’s claim of executive privilege, which he had used in refusing to turn over taped recordings of Oval Office conversations. Nixon was compelled to release transcripts of Oval Office conversations indicating that he had wanted the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to obstruct the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) inquiry into the 1972 break-in at the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate office-apartment-hotel complex. This evidence became the “smoking gun” implicating the president in an attempt to cover up the scandal. The release of the transcripts cost Nixon what little support he had left in Congress and with the public. Impeachment was a certainty. Yet rumors circulated that the battle-scarred president might hang on and fight for his political life. When Ford entered the room, Nixon was sitting behind his desk. After Ford sat down, the tired president spoke solemnly and slowly. “I have made the decision to resign,” he began. “It’s in the best interests of the country. I won’t go into the details pro and con. I have made my decision.” After a pause, Nixon added, “Jerry, I know you’ll do a good job.”2 Ford would become the thirty-eighth president of the United States, at the helm of a country in crisis. His most pressing goal was to reestablish trust in government, which had evaporated during Watergate. On August 9, 1974, as he assumed the presidency on a wave of goodwill, Ford offered words of reconciliation. Since the development of voice recording, a few presidential inaugural addresses have been powerful enough to be preserved almost as a historical archive that many citizens carry in their heads. Franklin Roosevelt’s and John Kennedy’s stand out, and Ford’s became a classic as well. After taking the oath of office in the White House East Room, the new president spoke earnestly to the nation, his voice occasionally cracking with emotion. He declared, “My fellow...