The Calm After the Storm, part two

DIRCK HALSTEAD FOR TIME
A NEW BEGINNING
Gerald R. Ford takes the oath of office

The New President
The morning of Aug. 9, 1974, witnessed one of the most dramatic moments in American history. At 9:30 in the East Room of the White House, President Nixon bade farewell to his staff. At 12:03 that same day, in the same room, Gerald R. Ford was sworn in as the 38th President of the U.S. The seats had been rearranged so that when Ford spoke, he was facing in a different direction than Nixon had, symbolizing a new beginning.

Gerald Ford performed his task of overcoming America's divisions and redeeming its faith so undramatically and with such absence of histrionics that his achievements have so far been taken too much for granted. To a great extent, this neglect was because Ford bore so little resemblance to the prototype of the political leader of the Television Age. The media and many of his colleagues were at a loss when it came to fitting him into the familiar stereotypes. The modern presidential candidate ends up making a kind of Faustian bargain: a full-scale national primary campaign costs a minimum of $15 million for television and print-media advertising. But the money must be raised within strict limits defined by law. To remain credible, a candidate feels obliged to devote most of his energies for the better part of three years to accumulating a war chest from fragmented and disparate constituencies. In that process, his principal incentive--approaching an imperative--is to try to be all things to all people. What starts as a tactic turns over the course of the campaign into a defining characteristic. National recognition is achieved at the price of nearly compulsive personal insecurity.

A curious blend of brittleness and flamboyance thus defines the modern political persona: brittleness verging on obsequiousness in the quest for mass approval, flamboyance turning into panic when the public's mood shifts. Far more concerned with what to say than with what to think, the modern political leader too frequently fails to fulfill the role for which he is needed most: to provide the emotional ballast when experience is being challenged by ever-accelerating change. The inability to fulfill these emotional needs lies behind the curious paradox of contemporary democracy: never have political leaders been more abject in trying to determine the public's preferences, yet, in most democracies, respect for the political class has never been lower.

Gerald Ford was about as different as possible from what has become the familiar political persona. Having risen through the ranks of his party in the House of Representatives--a career dependent on day-to-day practical relations with his peers--Ford was immune to the modern politician's chameleon-like search for ever-new identities and to the emotional roller coaster this search exacts. Far too unassuming to think of himself as heroic, Ford would have been embarrassed had anyone suggested that Providence had imposed on him just such a role.

Cartoonists had great fun with Ford's occasionally fractured syntax. They forgot--if they were ever aware--that being articulate is not the same as having analytical skill, which Ford had in abundance. For a national leader, courage and devotion to principle are, in any case, the more important qualities.

Ford was well aware of his relative lack of suavity and, unlike the modern political leader, was not embarrassed to admit it. "I am not one of those oratorical geniuses," he said to me on the telephone on Jan. 15, 1975. "There is no point in my trying to be one. I just have to be myself." A week later, he returned to the subject after a press conference in which he thought he could have done better (a view I did not share). Unlike most political leaders of the Television Age, Ford blamed himself, not the media:

"I came away feeling myself it could have been a lot better... I get mad as hell, but I don't show it, when I don't do as well as I think I should... If you don't strive for the best, you never make it."

Ford was always himself, and he always did his best; in the process, he saved the cohesion and dignity of his country.