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269 thirty-four A Time of Transition I am a Ford, not a Lincoln. My addresses will never be as eloquent as Mr. Lincoln’s. But I will do my best to equal his brevity and plain speaking. —President Gerald R. Ford During my twenty-three months as secretary of transportation, my respect and admiration for President Ford grew immensely. His guileless style was the polar opposite of that of his two immediate predecessors. His calm, warm, engaging, self-assured personality was exactly what the nation needed. As a congressional leader, he was well versed in domestic and international affairs, an excellent judge of character, a good listener who sought many diverse points of view, decisive, and willing to delegate to persons in whom he had confidence. He was not particularly interested in, or good at, public relations . The media’s projection and public perception of President Ford (“can’t walk and chew gum at the same time”) were in stark contrast to the person we knew and worked with in the Oval Office. It is ironic that the most centered president of that era had not clawed his way to the White House. He had never run for public office outside his safe congressional district. This was about to change. President Ford announced his decision to run for election for a full term of the presidency in the Rose Garden in July 1975. I was fully committed to work hard for his election for the good of the nation and because I felt a personal stake in the outcome. In less than three years, President Ford had brought the nation out of the nightmare of Watergate as he worked to restore trust and confidence in government . His pardon of Richard Nixon had cost him dearly, but he knew it was essential to refocus the nation on the future and address the smoldering international and domestic crises that confronted us. When Vietnam and Cambodia fell, in part because the public would not support further U.S. intervention, he was able to put these divisive episodes behind us and begin the national healing process. He laid the groundwork for a new arms control agreement with the Soviets and a major peace agreement in the Middle East. He engineered the Helsinki Accords, reducing tensions in Eastern Europe 05-0488-1 part5.indd 269 9/9/10 8:26 PM 270 / serving in the ford cabinet and beginning a thaw in the cold war that eventually led to the disintegration of the Soviet bloc. He ended the recession he had inherited and cut the inflation rate in half. Unlike some other presidents, he had no enemies list and did not obsess about single issues, as did Johnson (Vietnam), Nixon (Watergate), or Bush 43 (Iraq). He used the cabinet more effectively than any modern president, and his scandal-free administration mirrored his own standards of integrity and accomplishment. Precisely because he was the only president in our history who’d never been elected to nationwide office, I fervently hoped that the American people would ratify his successful leadership.1 On a more personal level, I had gotten to know President Ford well over many years. I really liked him. I thought the administration was beginning to hit its stride and hoped that our policy initiatives would be implemented in a full term. I had reason to anticipate that Ford’s election would bring some exciting new opportunities for me. Ed Levi had told the president he planned to retire as attorney general at the end of the term. President Ford told me that I would be his choice for attorney general if he were elected president. This would have brought me back to my first love—the practice of law—at a most exalted level. For all of these reasons, I campaigned with the president in Michigan and for him in my home state of Pennsylvania and in Ohio, New York, and New Jersey. By March 1976 the pollsters told us that President Ford faced a tough election fight.Through the good offices of my special assistant, Michael Browne, I was named a member of the Pennsylvania delegation to the Republican National Convention. The Republican Party had planned a late convention in Kansas City from August 16 to 19 on the assumption that there would be no primary contest and the publicity surrounding the convention would launch the general election campaign after Labor Day. California governor Ronald Reagan, however, had different ideas. He mounted...

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