The Calm After the Storm

DAVID HUME KENNERLY -- THE WHITE HOUSE
APRIL 1975: AS VIETNAM WAS FALLING
He understood global business better than American politics

(5 of 5)

On one occasion, the arrangement went awry, and it was the vaunted NSC staff system, not Nixon, that misfired. As part of some U.N. celebration, the Prime Minister of Mauritius had been invited to Washington. Mauritius is a subtropical island located in the Indian Ocean. It enjoys plenty of rainfall and a verdant agriculture; its relations with the U.S. were excellent. Somehow my staff gained the impression that the visitor was from Mauritania, an arid desert state in West Africa which had broken diplomatic relations with us in 1967 as an act of solidarity with its Muslim brethren in the aftermath of the Middle East war.

This misconception produced an extraordinary dialogue. Coming straight to the point, Nixon suggested that the time had come to restore diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Mauritius. This, he noted, would permit resumption of American aid, and one of its benefits might be assistance in dry farming, in which Nixon maintained the U.S. had special capabilities. The stunned visitor, who had come on a goodwill mission from a country with, if anything, excessive rainfall, tried to shift to a more promising subject. He inquired whether Nixon was satisfied with the operation of the space tracking station the U.S. maintained on his island. Now it was Nixon's turn to be discomfited as he set about frantically writing on his yellow pad. Tearing off a page, he handed me a note that read: "Why the hell do we have a space-tracking station in a country with which we do not have diplomatic relations?"

The Changing of the Guard
After the so-called smoking-gun tape was released on Aug. 5, Vice President Gerald Rudolph Ford, at a Cabinet meeting the next day, took the unprecedented step of dissociating from the President. He would no longer defend the President's position on Watergate, he said, and, indeed, he would not have done so in the past had he known what was on the tape. Publicly he would maintain silence on the matter on the ground that he was a "party in interest"--pointedly reminding everyone that he was next in line for Nixon's office. But Ford stressed that even though he was dissociating from the President, he would continue to support Nixon's policies.

I did not speak with Ford at that meeting or, indeed, until Nixon had decided to resign. It was now certain that Ford would become President. In that turbulent week of Nixon's resignation, I had no time to speculate on how it would affect my own position. Before I could address the subject, Ford took the decision out of my hands by telephoning me on the morning of Aug. 8, after Nixon had informed him of his decision to resign. Ford asked me to come to see him and, in his unassuming way, left the time up to me. In the course of the same conversation, he asked me to stay on and in a way that made it sound as if I would be doing him a favor by agreeing.

Dramatic events are not always ushered in by dramatic dialogue. As I recall this conversation from the perspective of two decades, I am struck by its matter-of-fact tone and concerns. At the time, I was affected by the understated way in which Ford conveyed Nixon's decision, which would make him President, without rhetorical flourishes and without mentioning the emotional impact on himself. And I was moved by his tact in so swiftly putting an end to any personal uncertainty I might be experiencing.

The atmosphere of the conversation carried over into our meeting that afternoon. I sat on a sofa near the balcony overlooking the White House Lawn, Ford in an easy chair with his back to the window. He seemed casual and calm, neither grandiloquent nor pretentiously humble. He opened the conversation by saying he intended to announce even before he had taken the oath of office--in fact, that very evening--that I would be staying. Ford added that he had felt comfortable with me ever since our first meeting at Harvard some years before. Artlessly, he added that he felt confident we would "get along." I replied that it was my job to get along with him, not the other way around.

Perhaps the most lasting impression of that first conversation was its aftermath. For the first time since I came to the White House, I left the presidential presence without afterthoughts, confident that there was no more to the conversation than what I had heard. Starting with that first meeting, I never encountered a hidden agenda. He was sufficiently self-assured to disagree openly, and he did not engage in elaborate maneuvers about who should receive credit. Having been propelled so unexpectedly into an office he revered but never thought he would hold, he felt no need to manipulate his environment. Ford's inner peace was precisely what the nation needed for healing its divisions.

Gerald Ford was an uncomplicated man tapped by destiny for some of the most complicated tasks in the nation's history. The first nonelected President, he was called to heal the nation's wounds after a decade in which the Vietnam War and Watergate had produced the most severe divisions since the Civil War. As different as possible from the driven personalities who typically propel themselves into the highest office, Gerald Ford restored calm and confidence to a nation surfeited with upheavals, overcame a series of international crises and ushered in a period of renewal for American society.

From Years of Renewal by Henry Kissinger; (c)Henry Kissinger. To be published by Simon and Schuster, Inc.