Latest Breaking News On - Bob hartman - Page 1 : vimarsana.com
>> thank you, hank. along with our audience here at the beautiful gerald r. ford presidential museum in grand rapids, i would also like to welcome our c-span audience to this event. my passion for this flowed from my understanding of archibald cox, who became a national hero who stood up to richard nixon i demanding secret white house tapes that would prove or disprove nixon's guilt in the watergate cover-up. after interviewing president ford in 1995, i was struck by his passion in explaining the reasons for his pardon. i think there are more compelling reasons even now to step back and look at the historical evidence and the perspective that comes with time. to begin today's program, we have a special filmed piece by tom brokaw who covered the events of the pardon. mr. brokaw could not be here today, but he filmed this especially for today's historic gathering. >> all i remember of the pardon was many things. it was a sunday morning, back then in washington it was very relaxed. you must remember all that we had been through back then in a city. only months before, spiro agnew had been forced to resign. then we had the supreme court decision that would force president nixon's resignation. there was goodwill for gerald r. ford, who seemed like a good man. i was at the brunch of housing secretary carla hills. we had just heard the information that former president nixon had been pardoned by president gerald r. ford, and it was like information from outer space. people knocked over tables and fled to their cars, and the phones were ringing off the hook. it was instantly and immediately and unpopular decision. i have always believed president ford was a decent man and had prepared the country in some fashion to ask president nixon in some way to acknowledge his wrongdoing and to admit how wrong he was. he would not do that. he wanted to put it behind him as quickly as possible. that was part of the gerald r. ford instincts. it served him well as a man and it served him well in the long run as a politician the kids he had no guile, he had no hidden agenda. -- as a politician, because he had no guile, he had no hidden agenda. the final analysis is how will history treat all of this? it is hard to know. my thought is that gerald ford will be unsullied by his decision to pardon richard nixon. history will find him is a very competent caretaker who found himself in the very highest office of the land in the very unenviable circumstances that he was in. richard nixon. he is the only president in american history, nick's and was forced to resign -- nixon was forced to resign. we should keep all of this in mind. what i remember most was that washington in those days, we often woke up in the morning and would have no idea what would happen next. there was nothing more stunning than to hear the president of the united states was about to pardon the former president of the united states. i am tom brokaw, nbc news, new york. >> we are honored to have with us today, steve afford, the youngest son of resident gerald r. ford -- president gerald r. ford and first lady betty ford. he is also the chairman of the gerald r. ford presidential foundation. i have had the pleasure to work with steve over the years, and nobody is more committed to preserving the history of the ford presidency, and he even inherited his dad's winning personality. mr. steve ford. it is always a pleasure to come back to grand rapids. dad learned so many great valuees hs he used later in lif. it is an honor to come back and be part of this program and to discuss this pardon. i want to thank the national constitution center, the ford foundation, they museum and the library staff here, all of these people who have this great program. dean gormley asked me to come up and give a few recollections from a family point of view of what those days were like 40 years ago and when dad made that historic decision. a lot of thoughts run through my mind. i was just an 18-year-old kid at the time, but i understood the gravity of what was going on. i think if i had to think of one moment that captured me, i think it was that moment that many of us remember. standing there on the south lawn of the white house as richard nixon climbed up onto that helicopter. i think we all remember him waving to his staff, family, and friends on the south lawn of the white house as he said goodbye. the helicopter took off and we were there and the next thing that dad, mom, and the family were going to do was to go into the east room of the white house where dad would be sworn in and mom would hold the bible as dad took the oaths of office. i think it is important to remember the feeling that was out there on the south lawn of the white house. you think about most presidents who come into the office, you have galas and parties and celebrations, but that is not what was going on on that day 40 years ago. there was a huge dark cloud that hung over the white house. there was mistrust because of watergate. dad was going to inherit a country that was in the middle of the vietnam war. there was a recession, you had inflation and that was about 12% or 14%, there was unemployment, there was a cold war with russia, and the country was nina ripped apart. and this man was going to walk in and put his hand on the bible and take the oaths of office and become the president of the united states and he had not been elected by the people. this was a constitutional crisis. i think this sets the tone for what you all are going to talk about here today. i know dad -- i talked to dad many times about the parting, and one of the most important things that he ever told me that kind of explains his thinking, not in legal terms, but in ways of his for -- but in way -- a way like a father, he said when you are president, you are like a father. when he was telling me this, i think he was really talking about me at the time. but there is discipline and punishment, and a father has a choice to give grace and mercy to that child for the betterment of the family. and if the father thinks that the punishment and consequences will rip the family apart, then the father will have the grace to forgive the child. and i think that concept worked into his reasoning into the pardon, and he thought that this country was being ripped apart. he was thinking in terms of long-term, not short turn -- short-term, in terms of healing the nation. i want to leave you with two thoughts before you lead this great panel. i was just looking at this news clip, and i was thinking that 40 years ago when dad was making a pardon on that sunday afternoon, i have no feeling that he ever thought that he would be invited to the john f. kennedy museum and library 20 years later by ted kennedy and caroline kennedy to receive the john f. kennedy award for profiles encourage because of the nixon pardon. but that is why he got the award. for leadership, and courage, and taking a stand in trying to heal the nation. the last thing that i want to heal -- leave you with is this. there is a statue out fronts of dad, and the original is in the rotunda in washington, d.c. there is a very powerful quote on it. it is not by dad, but it is by the democratic speaker of the house, tip o'neill. and it says, and i am roughly paraphrasing, "god has been very good to america. during the civil war, he said abraham lincoln, and during watergate, he sent gerald r. f ord, the right man for the right time. to heal a nation. thank you very much. [applause] >> thank you. thank you, steve, and thank you for your service through this great presidential foundation which means so much to the country. i would like to now introduce our distinguished panelists who played unique roles and different aspects of this. first, jill wine-banks, who was a member of the watergate special prosecution force. she was the only female. her group of prosecutors was gearing up to indict and prosecute richard nixon it when news of the pardon came out. second john logie, partner of a aominent law firm who played role in president ford's decision. third, i want to give a different sort of introduction. he was the on lawyer -- the who president ford sent to california to negotiate the pardon with president nixon. he was the last living person who played a key role inside the white house. mr. becker was planning on being here until a couple of days ago when a serious health issue affected him, so our thoughts and prayers are with him and his family. he wanted so much to be here, and he wanted me to help tell his story. you are going to hear directly from him by video in a little it , because i think his story is one that must be preserved. so let's begin with a little background because we have a lot of students here. in the summer of 1975, richard nixon is literally fighting for his life because of the watergate scandal. during the 1972 reelection campaign, white house operatives had been arrested in a burglary in the democratic national committee headquarters in washington. now that than is implicated -- now nixon is implicated in covering it up. let's begin with jill wine-banks , you are the special prosecutor, and among other things, you made history when you questioned richard nixon 's personal secretary when you asked her to explain this mysterious missing 18 and a half minute gap on one of his tapes. this is just before the resignation in august of 1974. is there any doubt that your prosecutors could convict nixon? >> in one word, no. there was no doubt. i was under strict orders to speak for only a few minutes on each subject, and my life is at stake if i exceed that, so i'm going to be careful. when president nixon had resigned, we already had compelling evidence of his guilt. he paid hush money, he accused the cia of trying to stop the investigation by false claims of national security, so they were trying to get the fbi to drop off, he also encouraged perjury, and notes of many of his staff who committed perjury, so there was a lot of evidence. he could have been indicted for all of those things, he could have been indicted for fraud in connection with his own nation of funds to the vice presidential papers, and then there was people on his enemies list. that included a list of politicians, government officials, democratic donors, and a lot of reporters, anybody who in any way crossed president nixon was on that list, and he was ordering that they be audited and otherwise abused by the irs. and although we had very strong testimony of that from john dean , that would not have been enough to convict him, so we held ourselves to a very high standard. more than any other defendant, we felt that we had to almost be assured that we could convict before we indicted. way beyond a reasonable doubt. we got that in july when the tapes were disclosed by butterfield. we subpoenaed nine carefully selected tapes, because we wanted to prove to the courts that it was to prove a crime, and as you heard in the first panel, that was what got the tapes. congress did not receive a response to their subpoenas, because it was not for the purpose of convicting a crime. we got the tapes, we had the march 21 tape, in which john dean made out the conspiracy, and then we got what we called the smoking gun, the june 23 tape. that had the president saying, oh, well, we better use the cia to stop the fbi. it was very clear that he was involved from the very beginning in all of the criminal acts of his colleagues and subordinates. but we did not get those tapes without a fight. we had a saturday night massacre in october of 1973, when i think somebody mentioned that he fired archibald cox, but that required that he fired his attorney general because they refused to firecox. so we had very breathtaking evidence, there was no question at that time that we knew the committee to reelect the president and the white house are directly involved in the cover-up. just as an aside because we are in the president ford museum, during the week prior to this, shortly before he became vice president, my trial colleague and i were at a gala, and the new vice president was there. richard and i discussed, should we tell him some of the evidence that we have, because he was vigorously defending the president. they we decided, well no, because a grand jury secrecy, it would be illegal for us and very inappropriate to share the information. but we did talk to him, and i did get to dance with the vice president. [laughter] >> incidentally, articles of impeachment were drafted by the house judiciary committee and approved in july of 1974. did you plan to indict president nixon while he was still president, or were you still waiting for him to be removed from office? >> planning might be too strong a word, but we were considering indicting the president. first, while he was still president, we had a discussion about it. in march of 1974, we returned indictments and reading tim as a -- reading him as an unindicted co-conspirator. the young lawyers on the team, which all of us were at the time, were very much in favor of indicting. we felt that that was the appropriate thing. we felt that his guilt was as clear as the colleagues that were being indicted. the special prosecutor that became the special prosecutor after cox was fired, received more mail and telegrams and phone calls than we could possibly handle. people were saying that this was an outrage, people knew that president nixon had to give us the tapes. so that was a very key episode. so leon jaworski was very opposed to indicting the president. he believed and equal justice under the law, which is the role of a prosecutor. he required that we go ahead and indict him. he said that no man was above the law, and therefore he should have been indicted, we argued. we were afraid that the jury might acquit him because it was unfair to convict the people who worked for him and carry out his orders without indicting him. but we did not get to do that, so we did the and indicted co-conspirator, which is actually a very good result, but we did a second step which made it even better, and in retrospect, probably the right way that it impeachment was the right process, not indictment. we used a little known tool known as presentment, how we got permission to reveal secret grand jury testimony to congress. we created, in effect, a roadmap to impeachment. we gave key pieces of evidence in the storyline to hollow the story. i think that was the right thing to do. we had a second discussion about indicting on the day he resigned. which, by the way, we had no advanced knowledge of, although leon jaworski did. when we heard about the parting, we were in the office for perry for the trial, which would be the same month. maureen dean, john dean's wife, called, because john dean was working with us, and she said, did you hear what happened? now we discussed indicting him now that he was a private citizen and no longer had the protection of the presidency. we heard a rumor that there might be a pardon and we had to act fast. while we were discussing whether we should or could, leon said that the indictment could possibly buy into a jury. if we waited until the publicity died down, it would take too long to try the case. although we all volunteered to come back from any life we were in, he refused and said we had to wait until after the trial started and the jury is sequestered. of course, very quickly, after that he was pardoned, which took away the ability to indict. we did investigate whether we could undo the pardon or challenge the party, and we concluded that the president's power to pardon is absolute and there was no way that we could challenge it. so the trial went ahead of the others. >> so that is a good place to stop and talk about the difficult situation that gerald ford was in once he was sworn in as president, because ford had, come out of relative obscurity to become vice president when nixon's vice presidents euro -- spiro agnew, if you remember, pleaded no contest to tax evasion charges. journalists were peppering ford with questions, are you thinking about pardoning your predecessor richard nixon ? one person advised ford categorically not to do it. he said if you decide to run for president during your own term in 1976, your chances will be shot to hell if you pardon nixon. ford grew up in very modest origins out here in the midwest, as you know, he was the adopted son of a paint salesman. he went to college on a football scholarship. he went to yale law school, he was known as an honest straight shooter of the entire time he was serving in the house, and then the pardon was considered the only solution during the nixon pardon situation. he figured that the country would be dragged through the muck for years more, and also, ford would never be able to initiate his own policies because the watergate scandal would be haunting him like a nightmare. so gerald ford takes over the white house with only one day's prior notice, as steve ford said, and he was surrounded by primarily nixon loyalists. ron zigler had become his handler. there were only a few people at this moment whom president ford can trust. his longtime friend and law partner from grand rapids, who is now counsel to the president, and denton becker, another trusted advisor -- benton becker, another trusted advisor. let me share a couple of key pieces of this story that benton becker would want you to know if he were able to sit here with us today. benton had been a young lawyer who had worked with then-congressman ford on a number of bills, and now during the first month in the white house, he becomes part of ford's inner circle. within 24 hours of nixon leaving office, nixon picked up the phone himself and called his former chief of staff alexander haig, and said to send those tapes out here. there were 900 reels of tape and hundreds of boxes, and the secret service was worried that the floor was going to collapse. ford aides learned of this request, and they said, this is an important question, who owns these boxes and tapes? they understood that these contained crucial evidence that the prosecution force would be engaging them. so they were very wary about letting this material get out of their sight. president ford said not to move any of it until they get the opinion of the attorney general. four days later, that group meets with william saxbe, nixon's fifth attorney general, and saxbe issues a notification that these papers belong to nixon. there was an interruption, and one person noted that if you send those records and tapes out to california, the only thing that people will remember is that jerry ford committed the last act of the watergate cover-up. becker said you might have heard a pin drop in the room. ford was dead silent, waved off saxbe, and said that those papers and tapes were staying here and the they belonged to the american people. that is when an animus began to develop between the ford people and the nixon team. it was only later that ford called benton becker into the white house and said that he was thinking about pardoning richard nixon, i need to know the legal ramifications. benton almost fell over. his job was to find out how to how broad presidential powers were. what becker discovered was that they were extremely broad, but one of the things that he understood, and this is key to the story, he only share this to his closest advisers, there was a case during the 1915 year during the woodrow wilson presidency which involved an effort by woodrow wilson to get a new york newspaper editor to testify, and newspaper editor to testify, and when he pleaded the fifth, he had a pardon waiting for him. the editor refused to take the pardon, and he said that if he took it, he would look guilty. they took it to the supreme court, and they said that acceptance of a pardon is an admittance of guilt, legally. the presidential white house met with the watergate special prosecutor leon jaworski, and wanted to kiev president ford was going to grant a pardon. they learned that jaworski was worried about going forward with prosecuting nixon. he was worried about the over-the-top media circus and he felt it would take a year or more for nixon to get a fair trial, if ever. and my own research confirms that jaworski signaled his approval of the pardon, even though i know that his own staff, including jill, would have been horrified at the time. so now we knows for the first time that there was some additional activity here in grand rapids. so john logie, you are called into a staff meeting shortly after ford becomes president. >> that was the same friday that the tape happened. >> you were given a confidential assignment. what was it -- confidential assignment. what was it? >> i have to interject that this was the rest of the story to use from grand rapids. phil buchanan -- he had congenital polio, just like roosevelt did, so he was not going to go to war, and when he ford, came back, they work together, jerry and him, and -- i still call him jerry because i asked him once when i should call him, and he said, call me jerry! anyway, i called to talk to her chairman, and i needed some research done over the weekend. i don't want anything in writing. i want answers to one question. the question is, what is the actual scope of the presidential pardon power? he said there are obvious reasons, i don't got to the vice presidential counsel when the first happened. he said that they were all leaky sins, and they were worried that if anything came out early, or do might -- leaky sivs, and they were worried that if anything came out early, president ford might be impeached. i had just been a partner of my law firm, so we chewed up that assignment. what we did after talking for a while, the answer was a scope question. if some really bad guy did some heinous crime and kill people or whatever -- killed people or whatever, and that was 80 years ago and he wanted to go home and die, and the president wanted to pardon him, you would say yes. but what about if he has been convicted but he has not been sentenced, can he be pardoned? the answer is yes. to shorten this down, we just cap moving it back, and back, and he said that next and at that point had never been accused officially of anything, partly because he was president and partly because things were moving so fast, and jill's team was at work, and all other kinds of stuff. so we moved all the way back to what if he has not even been indicted or a accused of a crime, can the president if he wishes to step in and foreclose that from ever from proceeding? that was what we did. we got back together on saturday -- no, sunday afternoon, each with our own research, talk to her weight through it -- talked our way through it, and then we found that the powers of the president were essentially unlimited. so jerry called monday morning, and part of this you have to understand is that phil buchanan was my godfather, grand rapids is very small. my father had only one sister, and she married a guy who was betty ford's older brother. so we became family. but not really. but you get the point. but there was a connection, and it was wonderful that we could get jerry to come back here, which i did as mayor, and phil filled in a lot of these blanks as to how they did things, and almost anything that anybody knew in the ford administration went out to california for accor evenly -- before becker even the left to make a deal. it was a stacked deck when becker went out there. the first thing that ziglar said as press secretary, is there will be no statement, no nothing, and we will not do anything about this pardon or say anything about it. he sent to his staff guy, he said, call the airport, we're leaving! >> becker is going to be on film and tell us that story, and john logie is going to do his own separate program for the library. we are going to come back in a few minutes for you john, but libby asked jill something, at this point, inside the special prosecution force, is there a suspicion that he may grant a pardon? we have not gotten to a part in yet. >> as -- a pardon yet. there were rumors the president pardon. just like everybody else in the country, we heard rumors that it might happen, and we learned when it was too late for us to do anything about it. >> now this relates to what john logie was charting to tell us -- was starting to tell us. he decides to send becker out to california with nixon's private lawyer, and his job was to hammer out a deal on the records and the tapes, and he carried with him a draft by which nixon would give the tapes to the government to hold and still allow him access to them to write his memoirs. becker was also supposed to explain the legal ramifications that if a pardon was granted and he accepted it, it would constitute a legal admission of guilt. so why would he take this young unknown lawyer to go to california to negotiate the most sensitive and dicey deal in american political history? number 1, 4 to him impeccably, and number two, the washington -- ford trusted him impeccably, and number two, the washington press corps have no idea who he was and would not follow him. he never even got to see nixon, it was a total bust. press secretary run ziglar would spend two hours with next and -- press secretary ron sigler would spend two hours with nixon and then say he would not like it, and that they would call him, and they would tell him the ford was going to pardon him. becker found a secure phone that evening and spoke with president ford who was extremely angry, and ford said give them one more day, and we are done. this is one of the most romantic and incredible parts of the story, and although decker could not be here, -- becker could not be here, i would like to show you that in becker himself telling the story in his own words, if we can have that now. >> before i went into the conference room, i called the colonel, and i told him that i will be leaving at about 10:30 tomorrow morning at california time. but i knew that that call would get back to is a color -- would get back to the glitter -- would get back to ziegler. [laughter] the letter would be written in the third party, and it would say the white house has suffered a huge problem. my staff has served me very well. when i walked through that door and i won't be here, all discussions on a pardon will leave with you here. don't come. don't come for the white house. don't come to the white house after richard nixon is convicted. you're wasting your time as long as gerald ford is in the white house. this is his opportunity and he won't accept it now. i was trying to [indiscernible] with that, i said let me call [indiscernible] and with another 30 or 40 minutes, we began to tinker with the resolutions and with alexander haig's agreement, and we talked about the culpability of nixon, and i found i acted very poorly. i was obligated [indiscernible] to personally advise ricard nixon, specifically, that position is a position of admission. richard nixon was informed that he had a right to refuse the pardon and richard nixon understood the law that accepting the pardon constituted acknowledgment of guilt. president ford would not have it any other way, and he said to me when i came back to washington, did he understand it? we went through that process, and what i found was he was somewhat depressed [indiscernible] on what he wanted and what he did not want to do. we got to the subject of pardons. it was very difficult and there were nine interviews with him, and he was constantly trying to change the subject and he would interrupt me in the middle of a sentence, and he would ask me, did you work in my administration? did you ever play football? [laughter] there are more important things to talk about, mr. president. i finally got him to come and to sign, and we got a statement that was acceptable and that he understood. i thanked him and i left. i literally had my hand on the back seat of the vehicle and i was being driven away, when i heard from ron sigler who was running out of the building. don't leave, don't leave mr. becker, the president wants to see you again! my first reaction was, oh no. he's changed his mind! so i went back there. and he kept saying, he wants to see you! he was to see you! -- he wants to see you! so i go into this very small room, and richard nixon is wearing a coat and tie during this whole discussion, and he was standing behind a desk when i came in through the door. he said, what i think about this while i talk about this, and he put his hand down to a drawer on the lower part of his desk, and pulled out something, a small white box. and he said, i wanted to thank you. we have a lot of bullies over the past year, and at least you were not a bully, and i appreciate that. and that he simply said, there are no more. i had to get this out of my jewelry box. thank you. and he said, i would like to do more, and he made a gesture, as if to say, look at this room. look at this room and how small it is. and he said, look at this -- but he was gesturing -- they took it all away from me. and i said to myself, i'm going to get the hell out of here. [applause] i think him for the box, -- i thanked him for the box, which i later found they can paint cufflinks with the presidential seal. -- they contained cufflinks with the presidential seal. >> neither of them got much sleep and it was not over yet, because at the next day at 8:30 in the morning, which was 5:30 california time, runs a color -- ron ziegler called becker and said that he changed his mind and that his staff had behaved poorly. but he later backed off and there were later no problems. president ford granted the pardon, and benton becker was on the other side of the camera watching, and as tom brokaw describes the scene as you saw, it was then hand ammonium in washington. jill, what was the reaction of cash it was then pandemonium in washington. chill, -- jill, what was the reaction in washington during this ? >> we were hoping that we could still bring out all of the facts and try the president so there would be no doubt about his guilt. that ability was taken away. we had done a lot of research and just as john concluded, we concluded that his power had been absolute and there was no way to challenge it. if you want me to go on and talk about our reaction to it, first i want to say that at the time we learned about it, what ever feelings i had were solely as a prosecutor, where our role is to do justice, and equal justice under law. four years had been passed, and i met benton becker outside of pittsburgh, and my opinion had been modified greatly, and i thanked benton for that and the perspective that they bring to this issue, having been there with the president. but if i look back at how i felt then as a prosecutor trying to do justice, i can see president ford thinking, and i truly believe, as has been made clear throughout history, no one ever questions his integrity. he clearly believed that the factors that he needed to consider where the factors that we -- were the factors that we needed to consider. his ability to a accomplish any agenda that he might have to implement law while he was president, and if there was an indictment or trial, it would hamper the presidency. those are very appropriate for the president to consider. i am sure that he believed that healing the nation was a very important outcome and the only way that it could be healed was for him to pardon nixon. but as a prosecutor, i had a different opinion, it is i believe that the truth heals. having evidence in a court, you have a rebuttal and cross examination, and everybody presents their own viewpoints, and that through that trial and dialogue, that would have been a better option. president ford could have pardoned him after the trial when all of the facts were known. although there was this implied admission of guilt through the pardon case, that is not the same as saying he would admit to guilt. he did not admit to his role. it is still not the same as a pleaded guilty or a trial in which he is found guilty. while i understand and admired president ford for what he did, i think a trial would have been just as healing, and i think that we could have gone through with that. if the law could not be implemented in an evenhanded way, i think that benton becker put it all into context and it made me believe that president ford acted to restore the integrity, which he did, to the presidency, which was in need of it at the time. >> and understand that he was trying to avoid sending the wrong message that politicians were of old -- were above the law. he told me repeatedly when i interviewed him back in 1995, and let me just say a word about the interview. i met president ford in a hotel in new york city, part of my work on the archibald cox book. and as we talked, he pulled out his wallet and pulled out a little piece of paper from a supreme court case. that was the case that said acceptance of the pardon is a legal admission of guilt. he felt that so strongly and it was overlooked by the media and it was very frustrating for him, but he felt that was a key component of his decision. incidentally, that is why he sent benton becker out to california, it was like reading him his miranda rights. i want to tell you that in 1995, there was a program at the quaint university -- at duquesne university discussion that's president nixon try to not accept the pardon and he had a fight with his lawyer because he did not want that implication of guilt. so president ford felt very strongly that the country had gotten the most important thing that it had wanted from nixon, which was an admission of guilt. it is also important to underscore, and benton becker would do this if he were here, that there was a strong desire to preserve those records and tapes, something that has been grossly underscored outside of these accounts. i think if they had been sent out to california, they would have gone up in a bonfire, there is no doubt about that. if president ford had refused to back down on negotiating on that point, and some of those records were used incidentally, to indict certain defendants in the trial, and finally, we talk about the idea that nixon could have even gotten a fair trial, so that also weighed heavily on president ford. jill has changed her view somewhat over the years, but john, what was your view of the pardon when you conducted a secret research in 1974, and is it the same today? >> fair enough, but i want to begin with another missing piece that has not come out. my godfather and his wife bunny were long-time members of a church, and some of the people in his room and in grand rapids don't even consider it a church. susie and i have been members for 45 years. at some point, ford was wavering , go-no-go, well, phil called duncan little fair, and -- duncan littlefaire, and said, can you come down? duncan was absolutely solidly behind the pardon, and some of the reasons that were actually used, he came back and suitable time and he preached a sermon on it, but i was still mad about the whole damn thing. but not with kennedy on going from 35 to 75. when i was mayor and we got together, he knew that doing that, he had made no decision. he had been a president for days or weeks. but he knew that if he did, he would probably decide the outcome, which, can and i talked to him after the fact, and -- benton and i talked to him after the fact, and he thought that if he had waited two weeks longer, it might not have made it. that profile of courage, i've got a tell you, someone might remember that lloyd made boots from scratch. remember, agnew when i was teaching at annapolis, agnew was a baltimore county executive. he was already taking bribes. he became governor. he kept on doing it. he became vice president. they would come right to the vice president's chambers and pay the bribe to him. the fbi finally caught up with him and said you have two choices. you either resign and we won't prosecute or we will get you for everything you have done. ford was in congress for 25 years. with that dirty background that had gone on out the side door, they were certain somebody was going to get bombed on. gerry had been there 25 years. they got up. lloyd was making his suits. they said we understand you make suits for vice president to be ford. he said yeah, i get that. that's how thorough. i got within of my partners, age group in here, i would not have to withstood that kind of a search, but he was so clean and so wholesome and so grand rapids that it's just amazing. second thing is we got paid. go to congress and he was detailed after all this time with a job to come home and take all of us that worked on this club.t to dinner at the i heard lloyd's story by that time, and the story was that ford paid for it. our dinner, with a personal check. that was our pay. >> yeah, and i want to just say as i mentioned that i was fortunate enough to interview president ford in 1999 as part of that program i organized at the university, and president ford as you know passed away in 2006 at the age of 93, so i thought it would be fitting to show that video today so that we can hear what president ford himself has to say about the ardon, if we could run that. >> good afternoon president ford, my name is professor ken gormly and it's an honor to join you in the beautiful museum here in grand rapids. as you know today is the 25th anniversary of your controversial decision to pardon your predecessor in the white house, president richard nixon. i have just a few questions as we look back on that event in history. the single issue that seemed to dwarf all others in the eyes of the american public after the pardon was did president ford cut a deal with richard nixon in advance to pardon him? can you answer that question directly mr. president? was there a deal of any sort? > i testified before the house commit that there was no deal period. i think those were my exact words. and i can assure you some 25 years later that there is absolutely no credibility to that allegation. the truth is i was going to be president without any question of a doubt because president xon was either going to be impeached and forced to resign or he was going to resign on his own as he did. so, i was going to become president period, regardless of any comments between him and myself. >> now that you're able to look back on your presidency with the benefit of 25 years hindsight, i ask you this simple question, would you pardon richard m. nixon again if you had to do it again over? >> based on some additional observations, testimony, et cetera, i think today if i had to go through the same process with more evidence, i would certainly have executed a pardon on his behalf. there was no doubt when i did it back in september of 1974 that i was doing the right thing regardless of what the press said, regardless of what many americans said. it was absolutely the right thing to do for the country. and you had to look at it from that point of view to understand why i took the action that i did. >> and did we learn anything more recently from the exhausting and divicive clinton scandal this past year. did it shed any light on what the nation might have endured back in 1974 if president nixon had not been partnered but rather subject to a full blown criminal prosecution? >> the clinton difficulties i think illustrate that the impeachment process is a very, very difficult one. you have to have action by the committees and the house. you have to have house action, which means full blown debate. you have to have a decision by the house of representatives, and then the case has to go before the united states senate on the actual question of conviction or otherwise. now, in the nixon case, if there had been an impeachment vote by judiciary followed by a vote in the house of representatives with all the debate, and then subsequent action in the senate as there was in the clinton case, it would have been a atmosphere in the united states that would have precluded the congress and my white house from trying to solve the basic problems we had at home, or internationally with the cold war. >> so you're as comfortable as we sit here today with the decision as when you sat in the oval office 25 years ago today and spoke into the television cameras and granted the pardon? >> no question about it. i'm even firmer in my conviction that i did the right thing for the country. and i'm pleased to see that recent polls have indicated that more and more people in america today are agreeing with me than they did 25 years ago. >> that's the benefit of history isn't it? >> right. >> well, thank you very much for sitting down with me today to discuss this historic event. >> thank you, thank you very much. >> thank you mr. president. >> so ladies and gentlemen, i think that gerald ford did what he thought was right given all the information he had, and in the process he made the single decision that would probably keep him from winning the presidential election in 1976. and one story that really hits home for me was that bob hartman, one of his closest advisors and president ford were sitting in a meeting when ford was weighing the pardon and hartman begged him, can't you at least wait until after the november elections. it's going to kill the republicans in the 197 h elections and do damage to you in 1976. and he said that ford shook his head and he said if i decide to give richard nixon a pardon, it won't have anything to do with politics. too many decisions were made in this office over the last five years based upon politics, if i do it, it's because i've decided it's the right thing to do. can you imagine someone saying that today? washington? and of course, ford did lose the 1976 election, we heard by a small margin to jimmy carter with the pardon of richard nixon being a key factor for many voters. so one can certainly debate the wisdom and the timing of president ford's decision to grant that pardon to his predecessor, but there is a lot more support today for the proposition that however awkwardly executed the pardon probably was the right thing to o in the end, and in fact as was mentioned, the fact that president ford received that profiles encourage award i know meant a lot to him because of all of the years of criticism. and i think that we can learn from this piece of american history, and i say this to all students too, that the essence of leadership involves making decisions even when they run counter to the prevailing winds of public opinion. even when they run counter to the advice of your own top advicors. the truth -- the true test of conscience comes when a true individual faces giving up his own job, career or political future based upon his or her own political compass. i think incidentally the only way you have the strength of character to do that is to spend one's whole life following a very detailed set of principles. in every instance of decision making. as john said, this man was so squeaky clean, every decision you make, otherwise when the spotlight of history is on you it's impossible to stand up and face this enormous political and public pressure and make tough calls when the time comes. gerald r. ford in my view left his mark as a leader and public servant because, and we heard this in the first excellent panel too, because he did have a strong internal compass to guide him, and he drew on that, even in lonely times like this. when nobody else could help him. and without that sort of moral grounding, i don't think he ever could have succeeded in that way. and i also want to take a moment to say that i think everyone in this country owes a debt to gratitude to beten becker as well because he too stood up under enormous pressure, think about it, to this world class politician and negotiater, richard nixon, and didn't back down until he got what president ford had asked him to accomplish for the good of the nation. i just want to end by telling you that last week when beten becker learned that he had this serious medical situation and couldn't be here, he called me very upset and he said this is the first time i've failed to honor a commitment to president ford. and i know that benton becker and his wife joanne will be watching this program on c-span so i just want to say you did honor your commitment, beten, and i'd like to ask our audience to show their appreciation for him. [applause] >> as we mark the 409 anniversary of the pardon, i think the story provides a lesson worth reflecting on for all of us who care about our system of laws and government in the united states, and especially for those in our law schools and our universities, those studying history and great presidential mow seems and library like this who are one day going to be the next generation of leaders. thanks to our panelists, thanks to all of you for joining us in h history event. [applause] >> you're watching
VietnamRepublic-ofNew-yorkUnited-statesCaliforniaAnnapolisRussiaWashingtonDistrict-of-columbiaKievUkraine-general-Ukraine first historian to perform the first scholarly study of the fort administration. he first edition of his book was published some 19 years ago by the university press of kansas. it is still in print. report, on its fourth printing. of course, being a pioneer has its disadvantages. in the earlyhat days, he was often asked if his interest in the ford presidency was a function of the fact that all the more interesting presidents had been taken. thoughts of this nature do a disservice to bob's scholarship. while ford is generally remembered as a genuinely honest man who did his best to heal the country after the travails of watergate, bob argues there's a lot more to the 38th president than a likable guy who performed a credible job as a national .aretaker locally, we should also recall that he was here in kansas city in 1976. somehow, i have a feeling we'll be commemorating that in about tito years. the library's good friend, who was in the audience tonight with a young city then councilmember, and he was at the white house with the fords to of kc asannouncement the convention city. he was accompanied by another defendant of the library and also a city councilmember at the time, who sported the most perfect afro ever worn by anyone in the history of hairstyling. bob, who also has a pretty good head of hair -- makes me very -- he has taught there for the past 35 years. he also serves as the college archivist. he is a serious scholar of the american presidency and set is written or edited 17 books. three have been the basis of talks here at the kansas city public library. the book sale counter, you may have noticed a young man who --d of sort of a legally vaguely possesses a passing was a blitz to me. don't do a double take. it's for real. that would be my first born son, soon to be a senior at the university of kansas and majoring in history, of all things. he is working his way through ofool, so by as many copies the presidency of gerald r ford as you can. bob will be happy to sign each and every one of them. ladies and gentlemen, please welcome bob greene. >> extra having me. don't buy the book to put his kids through school. by the book to put my kid through school. i have to tell you, i speak all over the country. never have i been introduced to any audience that -- as having a good head of hair. [laughter] to coming back here in each summer. i tell people around the country that this is one of the nicest venues this auditorium and the people here at the kansas city public library that i speak at all year long. i want to thank before i begin the kauffman foundation, i want to thank the harry s truman library in the jude, my runs there. i want to thank the kansas city public library. i am from cazenovia college. i usually begin these talks by making fun of the snow record that we have. it's the snowiest place in the country, or so i'm told, but then i was watching your weather this past winter, and i was getting some bulletins about how bad the snow was. no longer have to feel sorry for me. apparently i have to feel sorry for you. you didn't think i was going to start with them, did you? on august 8, 1974, the day before richard nixon resigned as president of the united states, after he had made his decision after he had spoken to the american people, he went out and as wasse garden, usually the case in those days, hisas followed closely by secretary of state and director of national security, henry kissinger. and was, by all accounts, and bleed drained of all energy. physically and emotionally propping him up, as nixon was going to go back to to relax before the next day's trip back to california. kissinger, according to his memoirs and nixon's, was struggling for something to say that would buck the president up . kissinger said, "mr. president, historians will be kind to you in the future." this was nixon's answer -- i've been fortunate to write histories of nexen, bush, and tonight of gerald ford. the series of the presidency is one of the prestigious places to place a menu script on the presidency. i am proud to be with them, and proud to have those books here for you. if when you read them, you have anything to say to me about them, by all means, e-mail me, and i will have an undergraduate didn't respond. -- an undergraduate student respond. [laughter] withi wanted to do tonight president forward is i guess a little bit unorthodox. when i did president bush here with you, i try to do a tour de force of everything that happened with president bush from the time that he took office until the time that he left after the defeat by bill clinton. i want to kind of compact that tonight and talk with you about what is the most often asked about geralde ford. i have the opportunity to interview president toward -- president ford on a number of occasions. i worked with him on several occasions, and i want to try to answer that question for you tonight, but before we get to let's get to this audience of literate, thoughtful experts who are well read. during the 40 years? the recession that began as a result of the vietnam war ending and as a result of problems. domestic policy during the ford years was what i call in the book a series of brushfires. around the country that ford and his staff would putting out almost in the crisis motif all through the administration. nomination ofe nelson rockefeller as vice president of the united states -- there are many scholars who believe it was that nomination the cost ford the election in 1976 because he had to change from nelson rockefeller to bob roll. the crisis in boston, the explosion over busing after the swan decision in north carolina saying that busing was not only constitutional but could be mandated highly state and the blood in the streets of south boston, and a little bit closer to home, ford's decision not to financial bailout of new york city, which led hugh carey to give this wonderful interview that led to this particular headline, one of the most famous of the ford presidency. lesser-known but no more important, the explosion at the cia. the leak of a document called the family jewel, which led to public announcement that the cia had spied mystically that kennedy administration had tried to assassinate castro and led to the complete overhaul of to presidenth led ford bringing george bush in as the cia director. that's a hat. i know the story of why it is on president ford's head, but i'm not going to say it for c-span. president ford did not want to wear that hat at that time, but this is at the moscow summit, and this is indicative of the detente.motif of ford had inherited from richard nixon, but he had trouble with human rights. he had trouble with alexander solzhenitsyn, and when ford left office, jimmy carter was foreign policy a with the soviet union that may very well step back a few steps. world events did not help that relationship any. again, these are inherited problems. many of the problems gerald ford had to deal with were given to him by richard nixon, not the least of which was the need to evacuate saigon in the spring of 1975. and in another famous and unfortunate photograph, making ambassadorialthe staff from saigon was literally .ushing people out of the way it was a difficult situation that the vietnamese themselves called the running. taking of a boat outside of a harbor in cambodia, where ford decided only weeks after the fall of saigon to send in marines to retrieve the failures -- the sailors. while for did that and did retrieve them, there was a loss of marine life that exceeded the number of sailors who were on the boat, and some critics said that ford was doing it simply to look tough, but then there was this other side. this is the first day of the presidency of gerald ford. as he leaves his home in alexandria, virginia, saying goodbye to the mrs., wearing a ball cap -- i never saw president ford without a ball cap -- leaving for the white house. he is the everyday guy. the fact that this was contrasted in the press to the rather stiff and stayed nixon family, but the flip side of this was what saturday night live did to him, and the perception, and president ford did say this was the most fun thing he ever got to do, getting to trip chevy chase at the gerald ford library, the perception that there was something less than intellectually strong about gerald ford, that he was a bit of a klutz. he could not have been anything other than the truth. george played this up. the staff kind of liked this, because it made ford looked ordinary, but then chevy chase came out with his devastating parody of ford, and it became a bit of a problem as ford moved into the 1976 election. that, i am sure that mayor berkley was at the 1976 convention, in the upper right-hand corner, and i chose the picture specifically, not president ford accepting the nomination, but ronald reagan, brought down from this stance, commenting on gerald ford's nomination. the torch was literally passed there. i firmly believe that gerald ford lost the 1976 election here in kansas city, because it was so close in that race with ronald reagan. and whether he allowed him to do it, jimmy carter was given the opportunity to beat gerald ford over the morality and the nixon and ford administrations, and ford lost a very close election. so we can all go home now, that is the entirety of the gerald ford ford administration, except for one thing. what did i leave out? that is what i want to spend the rest of our time. the two most often asked questions of me of gerald ford, was there a deal, and why did he do it? why did he pardon richard nixon? because henry, in his gracious opening, reminds us that the ford administration celebrating its 40th anniversary in just a few days, here as we are recording this in the summer of 2014, one month to the day after ford takes office, he pardons richard nixon. maybe an even more important anniversary to remember. let's look at these two questions, and i want to first talk about the question of whether or not there was a deal between richard nixon and gerald ford or anybody on ford's staff to give richard nixon a pardon after ford took office. to do this, we have to go back to the first of august, 1974. it is days after the supreme court has made its decision that nixon must release all of the tapes, not his transcripts of the tapes, not his edited versions of the tapes, but must give all of the tapes over to the special prosecutor and two federal judge johnson rick -- john sirica, and ford goes over, and hague is surprised that ford brings a hartman, a good friend of vice president ford's. he was brought into this meeting, not just because bob went to every meeting, he did, with vice president ford, but because ford knew that something was up, and he needed a witness. hague tells ford in this visit, though he did not want hartman there, hague tells ford that what is going to happen in the next 24 hours could possibly be the tipping point in the nixon presidency. he doesn't give his hands out. hagan knows that they are going to come to the white house. hate absolutely knows that the tapes are going to come to the white house. but ford thought that hague was holding something back, and he talked to hartman on the way out, and he said, well, i have kind of heard this before. no great comment. i'm going to keep my speeches today, and hartman goes to his office. ford then gets another phone call from alexander haig, and he said, mr. ford, i need to see you, and you cannot bring bob hartman with you. ford goes back to hague's office, and hague shares with gerald ford the contents of the smoking gun conversation, from 1972, where richard nixon tells bob haldeman on the tape, another story, tells bob haldeman on tape that he is to stop the cia investigation of watergate. it is an obstruction of justice, and nixon was guilty of it. end of that story. ford sees the transcript and knows that nixon has to resign. both hague and ford, mr. vice president, are you willing and able to take over the office of presidency of the united states at a moments notice, and ford said, yes, i am, and then hague said, but wait a minute. i am prepared to talk to you about a list of options. these options can take place if you choose to add president. one of them is, as hague says to ford, the option of pardoning the president. ford does nothing. in fact, he leaves hague with the feeling that perhaps he is considering it. he leaves the meeting and goes to see bob hartman again, and hartman goes ballistic. he says you should have grabbed hague and thrown him out of the office. who told you? and he says i got this from a white house lawyer that that option is there, and that there was a lawyer in the white house, and then they remembered that richard nixon was a lawyer, and ford says, yes, maybe i left him with the wrong impression, and hartman says what you have to do is call jack marsh, a former congressman, and he would become secretary of the army. ford meets with march, marsh here's the story, and marsh in ely understands the gravity of the situation. he has left richard nixon believing that there could be a pardon, and they wanted to get the troops together. i want you to talk to hartman again and one of nixon's loosest advisors who is still working in the white house, and they both tell ford, you can't leave this this way. this becomes important. they are all three in the room. ford picks up the phone and called alexander haig and says, and i am paraphrasing here, i am under no obligation to consider a pardon, and hague said i understand. that is going right back to the overall office -- oval office. this is what gerald ford told me. this is what gerald ford said to an investigating committee. when ford becomes the first president since abraham lincoln to allow himself to go to congress to testify. the evidence shows that this is absolutely true, that there was no deal. but he did pardon richard nixon. he pardon him on september 9, 1974. the pardon was full. the pardon was absolute, and as you will see in a moment, the real story of the pardon was that it was before indictment, he for richard nixon had actually been indicted of a crime. richard nixon was pardoned for crimes he had not been charged with yet, so the question is why, and to get to that question, it is even more difficult to explain than the deal with the pardon. you have to look back to president ford's inaugural address, one of the shortest inaugural addresses on record, and i am of the opinion that the shorter the inaugural address, the better, and i believe that the shorter the address from an academic, the better. there was only one problem. it wasn't true. the long national nightmare was far from over, and gerald ford knew it. there wasn't anything that was going to happen magically, just simply by the fact that he moved into the white house and richard nixon moved out, because it wasn't just watergate. it was vietnam, and it was two decades of lying on the part of the federal government to the american people. it was just beginning to come out. how do you fix that? from the first moment of the ford presidency, ford is besieged by his advisers, particularly henry kissinger, who for almost a month takes every opportunity with the president to bring it up. he is the siege to with requests to pardon richard nixon. ford endures these because what he has done is he has kept almost intact richard nixon's cabinet and richard nixon's close staff. he said to me at one point in time, why did you fire henry kissinger, just a name that came to me from nowhere, and you said, you know, when you are flying a plane, it doesn't really make much sense to shoot the pilot. they were just getting their feet on the ground, and here were all of these nixon loyalist saying to him, you have to pardon the president. their original logic was let's put the nightmare behind us, but then it started getting personal. towards the middle of august, ford started getting reports from san clemente that richard nixon was ill. nixon, as i am sure many of you know, at almost debilitating phlebitis, and this is a photograph of him later on. i think probably judging from the photograph it is probably the late 1970's, early 1980's, going for one of his many operations for phlebitis, and one of the people who went out to see nixon at san clemente right after the resignation comes back and reports to ford, and he says, you know, this president is going to be dead before the election. and ford says 1976 is a long way off, and he is saying, 1976 is a long way off, and he says, i am not talking 1976. i am talking 1974. so ford is having these conversations. having written about gerald ford, having read material at the ford library, i can say that -- having met him on a number of occasions, i can say with absolute certainty that he was a good guy, that it was not for show. that he truly cared, that he was what you saw, but that is not why he pardoned richard nixon. he did not pardon richard nixon because he felt sorry for him. he was putting these people off. he pardoned richard nixon because a something that happened on august 28, 1974. ford had been putting off having a full press conference. he did not want to meet the press until he had gotten his feet on the ground a little bit more and until he had had an opportunity to talk with all of his close advisers, etc., so he goes out in front of the press, and the first question is about whether he is going to pardon richard nixon. if you watch this tape back, forward it looks genuinely stunned, like what? and he goes through sort of a prepared answer, and then he turns to tom brokaw, and it is clear in ford's mind that he thinks he is going to a safe reporter. brokaw's question is on the pardon, and ford now looks genuinely angry. 32 questions were asked in that press conference, and 28 of them were on the pardon, and the last one was from linda wertheimer, and she just cuts through everything and says, do you intend to leave the option open to pardon richard nixon, and ford stepped right in it, and he said, i am president. i have that option. it is true, the constitution gives them the option, and is the headline the next day? gerald ford is probably going to pardon richard nixon. he is leaving the option open. ford is steaming. like how can i possibly get rid of this albatross? what can i do -- do you like this? what can i do to get rid of the ghost of richard nixon, the ghost of richard nixon past question mark what can i do to get rid of this? the people around ford were genuinely caught off guard by the press. they saw it as an attack. ford calls in that afternoon his absolute closest advisor, phil buchanan. >> phil bukin. they were in law practice. probably ford' is closest professional and personal friend. phil andy lee came into the white house as white house counsel. -- immediately came into the white house. he says, you have got to pardon him. you have got to figure this out, and he charges bukin with looking into the nuts and bolts of how i pardon might happen. buikikin says, we have got to talk to everyone, and in august, 40 found out his then closest aides, bob hartman, henry kissinger, al haig, philip ukui n, and jack marsh. on august 29 in the morning, ford says, i am thinking about it. go home and tell me tomorrow what your recommendations are. the next day on the 30th, they reconvened. kissinger and alexander haig, not surprisingly, said, do it now. hartman and bukin, why now? he hasn't been charged with a crime. how can you constitutionally pardon someone who has not been charged with anything? and jack marsh says, do you really think this is the right thing to do? and ford said a thousand angels dancing on the head of it pin could not convince me it was right as long as i thought it was right. and they all shook their heads. he had his consensus. he was going to pardon richard nixon. and then the question was how and when. one of the key players in what was going to happen for the next 48 hours was benson backer. backer did some work for ford when he was majority leader, was close to fill buinkin. bukin says you have to look to see if it is legal for president of the united states to pardon before indictment. becker did not need to be told what this was all about. he goes home for the weekend, and then he writes the thickest memo i have ever read in a presidential library. he gets to the and and essentially says, you can do it. there is no limit to the presidential pardoning power. you can wait until they are convicted, you can do it in mid-trial, you can do it before indictment, you can do it whenever you want. but there is a small matter that needed to be negotiated with richard nixon before nixon would accept a pardon, because that is the next stage of this. ford has now been told he can pardon him. his aides are saying, yes, ok. but will nixon accept it? nixon would not accept a pardon from gerald ford without a deal that took care of his papers and tapes. now, i have heard stories from people in the white house, both the ford and the nixon white house, that relate to this physical nightmare that gerald ford inherited, the papers and tapes of richard nixon, which were stored in closets, under stairwells. the famous white house tapes were apparently kept under a series of white house house, both the ford and the nixon white staircases and were in the very real process of deteriorating, plus they are a nightmare of legal nonsense. suppose richard nixon is charged with some sort of a crime, and suppose that leon jaworski decides he is going to subpoena some of these tapes from the white house? then it is gerald ford's decision whether the spiral -- special prosecutor gets the tapes. this nightmare is just not going to go away. ford's inclination is to put it all in a truck and said it out to san clemente. at that point in time, it was the legal understanding that the papers were the president's personal property. that is no longer the case. post ronald reagan, the papers of the american president is the property of the american people, stored in archives, and those of the harry truman were his physical property to do with as he wished, and the same with richard nixon, but then there is the legal issues, and so what was negotiated between bukin, becker, and jack miller, one of nixon's lawyers, was a very complex deal. the deal would give richard nixon, if he accepts the pardon -- a lot of people do not understand this, getting richard nixon to accept it, and then the federal government will keep one set of keys on the papers, and nixon will keep one set of keys on the papers, and i would have to go back to my book and look at all of the details, but it was very, very complex, but they come to ford and say, ok, we have got a deal, and then ford dropped a bombshell. no deal. i want him to say he is sorry. kissinger looks at him and says, you will never get it. ford says to becker, that is part of the deal. and backer, who i interviewed, said, he was going on this plane, i have to go tell the president nine states he has to apologize for watergate, and he gets out to san clemente, and jack miller and backer are met at the door by ron ziegler, and ziegler, who just recently passed away, was nixon's press secretary for the entirety of the nixon administration, a very young man, passed away at a young age. he meets them at the door and opens the door, and before they say anything, he says, this president will not say he is sorry for anything. there is only one way that ziegler knows this. someone in the white house has told them. i have some suspicions -- suspicions, but they are just as good as yours. we do not know who tipped that hand, but it through becker and miller for a loop. by the time they were done negotiating, by the time they were done talking with ziegler, who represented nixon there, nixon did not sit down and physically negotiate the acceptance of the pardon. nixon had gotten everything that he wanted. he got virtually complete control of the papers, and he was not being required to say anything even close to an act of contrition to the american people. when nixon finally does meet with becker and miller, he comes into the office at san clemente, and becker says, mr. president, and nixon fumbles in his top desk drawer and finally comes up with a set of presidential cufflinks, and i think you said to becker, i think these are probably the last ones of these, and backer leaves, inking one of two things. one, within 24 hours, the man was going to be pardoned, and two, richard nixon had gotten it the way he wanted to get it. there was one last thing before ford was going to announce the pardon. ford wanted to make absolutely certain that in the next 48 hours leon jaworski was not going to charge richard nixon with a crime. the special prosecutor, which had been set up to investigate watergate, and you may remember archibald cox, nixon firing the special prosecutor, then the appointment of bob, and a friend of george bush, leon troicki, and sharansky at the time of nixon's resignation was this close to indicting richard nixon for obstruction of justice. the house of representatives and the senate had already voted articles of impeachment. had nixon not resign within the space of a week, there would have been a set up for an impeachment trial, and jaworski was going to throw the hail mary pass and charge the president of the united states with obstruction of justice. now, there would be no more impeachment hearings, of course, but richard nixon is a citizen of the united states. there is nothing to stop to roar from charging him with that crime. he has a physical piece of evidence, a tape recording, that shows that nixon was clearly guilty of that crime. ford did not want him to be charged with that crime. if there was a deal in the pardon, and i submit to you there was, it wasn't between nixon and ford. it was between phil bukin, acting for ford,if there was a deal in the and leon jaworski. jaworski was, and somehow, and he was very vague about this, he agreed not to indict richard nixon. one month to the day after richard nixon resigned from the presidency and gerald ford takes over, gerald ford gives a very short, taped address. it was not delivered live from the oval office. it was taped. on a sunday morning, where they thought that the news cycle would not pick it up. a full pardon for crimes that were committed or may have been committed between a specific period of time, a full presidential pardon. nixon responds to that pardon without any act of contrition. it becomes almost too easy to say that the ford presidency went downhill from there. that is just simply not true. it is debatable whether or not the ford presidency cost for the election in 1976. i argue in this very good book that is for sale out here in the hall to put henry's and my kids through school, this outstanding book argued that it was only one part of the 1976 election. but not a lot of people felt like this kid in 1974. they weren't willing to give for the benefit of the doubt. to say that all hell broke loose is an understatement. ford was immediately excoriated for the deal. of course, there had to be a deal. at that point in time until just the past couple of months, the american presidency was polling at its lowest point ever. not next in, not for -- ford, but the american presidency was polling at its lowest ever. vietnam was dragging it down. watergate was dragging it down. of course, there had to be a deal, and the democrats were just sitting there going, let me at him. within the space of two months, 12 democrats had announced for the presidency, including a warmer governor of georgia who appeared on what's my line, the tv show, and nobody knew who he was. and he is the guy who is going to win. the explosion of anger after. he went from being an average guy to being an average president overnight. also something that needs to be remembered, it wasn't ford's only pardon. immediately after the pardon of richard nixon, overnight ford is faced with another set of pardons that blends together with the issue of the pardon of nixon, and that was the issue of clemency for draft dodgers and draft evaders. ford sets up a clemency board under his good friend charlie did dell from new york to hear every single case one at a time. some went to prison, some were given amnesty, some were given a work related release. it was not as it was portrayed by that wonderfully unbiased paper in the east, the new york times as freedom for all draft evaders, but it mixed toth iss'y of nixon, and they both kind of played off against each other. it is not surprising to me that the times and other papers blended the two together. but then, fast-forward. fast-forward to 2001. we see the pardon completely differently. if this is not an odd couple, i do not know what is. when ford gets the profile of current joel ward from the john f. kennedy foundation for his pardon of richard nixon. now, i submit to you that while ford deserved as a man of honor and a man who was almost killed in world war ii, almost blown off by a tycoon of his aircraft carrier, a man who served his country honorably deserves to be courageous, but that is not what the pardon was all about. the pardon was to clean his desk so he could have the ford administration that he wanted. he wanted to get rid of that, and he is being honored something here that i think is true to his character but not true to the incident. gerald ford said to me when i asked him what was the most important thing you want to be remembered for as president of the united states. he did not even bat an eye. he said if i am remembered for anything, i want to be remembered for healing this land. depending on how you view the pardon, i will leave it up to you as to whether or not president ford did what he wanted to do. i thank you, and -- [applause] thank you. >> that was great, bob, and you can come to the microphone, and bob will answer questions in the back and forth. >> good evening. >> surrounded by all of these aids that they were that tone deaf to the response to the pardon? how could they not have anticipated that? >> because you have to remember that the people who were around ford at the time were a mix of his aides and nixon aides, and he was getting a blizzard, if you will, almost in a blender of advice, and the nixon aides were saying don't worry about it, or the nixon aides were saying go ahead and do it, and the ford aides were saying, you got to hold back, so it happened to those soon. i mean, i might be well served by saying this, i think you should have waited. he should have waited a year. let nixon be charged and then pardoned, and he would not have given reagan anywhere near the information -- ammunition that he did. >> can i change gears here? >> by all means. it is your library. two of the things i remember ford four, and people do, in terms of gaffes, the statement in the debate, not being nominated by the soviet union, and not to say it is on the same level, but the buttons that they used to wear. did you ever talk to him about that? >> absently. first of all, i saw a tape at the ford library where he practiced the line, and he knew he was going to get a question on poland, and he knew he was going to get a question on the occupation of eastern europe, and what ford wanted to say but mangled it was we do not believe that the presence of the soviet union in poland is legitimate. what he said was exactly what you said. they aren't there, and max frankel of the times just does one of these. what? and he turns to pauline frederick, who is the moderator, and says, can i follow up? and that was not in the deal. they were not supposed to follow up. and carter says, wait a minute. they think they are pulling a fast one, but what ford does in the follow-up hands caught her a gift for you and he says it again, the same thing, and carter comes back, he says, i would like to see you tell the polish people that they are not there. with inflation now and the wind buttons, ford wanted to try something like the nra, the blue eagle. this is the literature that is around this and the memos he was getting. do something so people can feel they are participating, because, mr. president, the economy stinks, and we do not know how to fix it, so let's let everyone believed that it has happened, and it was ill-conceived. the big moment, of course, was when george harrison of the beatles goes to white house and poses with ford and billy preston, who was like the fifth beatle, and they are wearing wind buttons, and ford is standing there, i have got to get away from this picture, i have got to get away from this picture, and both of those moments were foolish, and you are right to bring them up. yes, sir. >> one was in the newspaper, september 10, after the pardon, there is a reference to alexander haig, and then after that, alexander haig with nato, and then the other one you mentioned was that george bush and leon jaworski had a relationship, and i wonder how those things played out. >> i do not know, but because of texas politics and houston politics, they knew each other, and i have seen correspondence, most of it not germane, at the bush library. as far as alexander haig being farmed out to nato, ford, too late, decides he has to have his own administration and starts moving out the members of the nixon administration. who do we get in? we get in as chief of staff the former congressman from illinois, donald rumsfeld, who brings in with him a completely unknown kid from wyoming as his assistant chief of staff, dick cheney. you have got ford being brought in at the cia. by the way, they call it the ford foundation, because so many of these people are going to go and work in some shape or form for ronald reagan or george bush, and they learned their craft under president ford. but i appreciate that. >> thank you. yes. >> spiro agnew has to resign. >> indeed, he did. >> who championed jerry ford to be vice president? >> excellent question, because the list is actually very long. the first person who championed him was melvin laird, who was a congressman from michigan and nixon's secretary of defense. he knew jerry ford very well, and, by the way, this entire list, everything they say to nixon is the same thing. he will be confirmed, because nixon does not want ford. he wants john conley. nixon wants john conley, who is the secretary of the treasury, and who had split from the democratic party. nixon feels a kinship with conley, and he wants conley to run in 1976. everyone is coming to him and his saying, john conley because of the scandal, because he is john conley cannot be confirmed. jerry ford is liked by everyone. he will stay through. charles did dell says so. i also saw literature where nixon told, i believe, nelson rockefeller and some other people who you would not think to be supporters of richard nixon, but the net was cast widely. everyone comes back with jerry ford, but who is number two? george bush. it wasn't his time yet. thank you. >> final question, bob. not part of the ford administration, but part of the ford story, that sort of weird moment at the 1980 republican convention where the was a brief moment when ford might have become reagan's vice presidential running mate, but he rented to -- wanted to run half of the cabinet or something. what was that about? >> ronald reagan had gone through was a very bruising primary, and the second -- the runner-up was george bush. that nancy reagan did not like george bush. nancy reagan did not like the fact that he had coined the term voodoo economics. bush had gotten out of the race at time -- in time. he had gotten out of the race, so he was not holding on like pat buchanan and some other people, but there was a bad taste in the reagan people's mouths about george bush. they thought he was too moderate and that he would not be a good match. reagan himself comes up with the idea, along with kissinger, who is in reagan's ear, about bringing ford in. there is nothing that prohibits gerald ford from coming in. he can be elected vice president as many times as he wants. the constitution does not say, so the negotiations go through between henry kissinger, brent scowcroft, i believe, and the reagan team, and they are this close. reagan is about to drop this bombshell, and ford goes on up into the skybox in detroit, and he talks to walter cronkite. cronkite has got pieces of the story, and he says, are you a candidate for the vice presidency, and ford goes on for about two minutes without saying the word no. reagan is looking at this on television and goes crazy. he feels he has been betrayed. when he really says is this just shows that a co-presidency will not work, that jerry ford is not going to be that kind of a team player, and reagan turns to another and says to bush. >> now, someone who was close to those people in those days said to me that ford actually knew what he was doing, that, in fact, i do not want to say committed suicide, but that he did that so that reagan would, in fact, choose bush. >> i don't know that for a fact. one thing that would argue against that, henry, is that there is plenty of evidence to show that ford wanted to run for president again in 1980, particularly if you is going to run against carter, because come are a member, harder is almost mortally wounded because of the iran-contra crisis. whatever democrats thought they could eat jimmy carter in 1980, and ford figures, let me have these guys beat each other up, have him bloody ronald reagan up, and i have taken on ronnie reagan before, i can do this, but instead of getting him at the primaries, where he is so good on the stump, i am going to go right to the primary and take it from him there. that is where my knowledge of the story falls off, when he decided not to do it, whether reagan and bush did, taking it off by offering him the vice presidency, but ford walked away from that, and that is the end of his public career. >> bob, thank you again. their time is a charm. thank you. >> thank you all, very, very much. [applause] >> i do want to remind you that bob's books on president ford and betty ford are available for sale, and both of us would appreciate the tuition assistance programs. >> 150 bucks apiece. [laughter] >> would live coverage of the u.s. house on c-span and the senate on c-span2, we complement that coverage by showing you the most relevant congressional hearings and public affairs events. on weekends, c-span3 is home to american history tv with programs that tell our nations our nation'sing -- story, including six unique series. "american artifacts" touring museums and historic sites to determine what artifacts reveal about america's past. ."istory bookshelf history" with top college professors delving into america's past," and our new series "reel america." created by the cable industry and funded by your local tv and satellite provider. this month is the 10th anniversary of our sunday primetime program "q&a" and we feature an encore presentation of one q&a from each year, highlighting authors, historians, journalists, film makers, and leading policy thinkers. from 2005, kenneth feinberg's interview on the victim compensation fund. and the importance of the african american experience to u.s. history. from 2007, robert novak on his .0 years of reporting and from 2009, conservative commentator at the cup. a decade of compelling conversation. >> damien shields talks about andlife of patrick cleburne his role during the battle of franklin. he enlisted in the confederate army where he rose through the rank of major general, voting to emancipate slaves to enlist them in the army. this is part of a series organized by the tennessee sesquicentennial commission. >> i will use my big boys to get everyone rounded back up for the next part of the program here today. about then, talking battle of franklin, the battle of nashville, and what this final campaign that we have talked about has meant to tennessee, southern history and american history. thanks everyone for coming out. like introducing a rock star. you have had the well-known acts, and the front acts. now you get to have the special event with our next speaker. isien shields
VietnamRepublic-ofNew-yorkUnited-statesMoscowMoskvaRussiaNorth-carolinaAlexandriaAl-iskandariyahEgyptTexas i'm harry fortanado drk tore of public affairs. i want to thank you for joining us in the latest it ration of the hail to the chief's lecture series co-presented by our partners a the trueman library institute the foundation arm of the harry s. truman library museum and independence. here at the library, we just love to do programs commemorating anniversaries. and such as the case tonight, 40 years ago. well technically, 39 years and 363 days ago. but work with me on this -- gerald ford became the first and to date the only unelected president of the united states. an outcome that would have been beyond conception just two years earlier when richard nixon was cruising to his landslide victory over george mcgovern. to tell us more about that in the administration that ensued we've brought back for the third time dr. john robert green. but you can call him bob. who among many claims to fame ranks as the first historian to perform a serious scholarly study on the administration. the first edition of his book was published some 19 years ago by the university press of kansas, it's still in print, i'm happy to report on its fourth printing. of course being a pioneer has its disadvantages. the report that in the early days he was often asked if his interest in the ford presidency was a function of the fact that all of the more interesting presidents have been taken. thoughts of this nature do a disservice to bob's scholarship let alone the subject of his inquiry. ford is generally remembered as a genuinely honest man who did his best to heal the country after the betrayals of watergate, bob argues there's a lot more to the 38th president than a likable guy who performed a credible job as a national caretaker. it was here in kansas city in 1976 -- 1976 i have a feeling we'll be commemorating that anniversary in about two years. when gerald ford received the gop nomination for president after a hard fought and close run primary campaign against ronald reagan. so the library of good friend dick berkeley in the audience with his wife sandy, was then a young city council member and he was at the white house with the fords to mark the announcement as k.c. as the convention city. he was a city council member at the time who sported the most perfect afro ever worn by anyone in the history of hair styling. bob green who has a good head of hair makes me very jealous is at casanovia college. he taught there for the past 35 years. he serves as the college archivist. he's the serious scholar of the american presidency and has written 17 books, three of them have been the basis for talks here in the kansas city public library. george h.w. bush in 2012 betty ford in 2013. and gerald ford tonight. gerald r. ford available for sale courtesy of the bookstores so is the biography of betty ford. a young man sort of vague lyly possesses add resemblance to me. don't do a double take. that's the first born son soon to be a senior and majoring in history of all things. he's working his way through school so buy many copies of "the presidency of gerald r. ford" as you can. bob will be happy to sign each and every one of them. ladies and gentlemen please welcome bob green. [ applause ] >> don't buy the book to put his kid through you didn't think i was going start with them, did you? on august 8 1974 the day before richard nixon resigned as president of the united states after he had made his decision, after he had spoken to the american people, he went out to the rose garden and as was usually the case in those days, he was followed closely by his secretary of state and director of national security henry kissinger nixon was by all accounts just simply drained of all energy. kissinger was physically and emotionally profrp propping him up as nixon was going to go back to the residence to relax before the next day's trip back to california kissinger according to his memoirs and nixons was struggling for something to say to butter the president up he said, mr. president, historians will be kind to you in the future. this was nixon's answer -- i've been fortunate to write histories of nixon and bush and tonight of gerald ford for the university of press of kansas the series on the presidency is one of the prestige places to place a manuscript on the presidency. i'm proud to be with them. and i'm proud to have those books here for you when you read them. you have anything to say to me about them please by all means, e-mail me and i'll have an undergraduate student rep respond. what i want to do tonight with president ford is a little bit unorthodox. i did president bush here with you, i tried to do a tour deforce of everything that had happened with president bush from the time he took office until the time he left after the defeat by bill clinton. i want to kind of compact that tonight and then talk with you about what is the most often asked question of me about gerald ford. i had the opportunity to interview president ford on a number of occasions. i worked with him on several occasions. and i want to try and answer that question for you tonight. but before we get to that question let's kind of remind ourselves with this audience of literate, thoughtful experts here who are well read what happens in the ford years. the recession. the recession that began as a result of the vietnam war ending and the result of problems with richard nixon's wage and price control policy. green span's hawks ford along with other people into cutting taxes. domestic policy in the ford years was what i call in the book a series of brush fires. that ford and his staff were putting out all through the administration. the troublesome nomination of rockefeller as vice president of the united states many scholars who believe that nomination cost ford the election in 1976. because he had to bussing was not only constitutional but could be mandated in the united states and in the streets of south boston. a little closer to home ford's decision not to support financial bailouts of new york city which led hugh carrie to give this wonderful interview that led to this particular headline, one of the best headlines of the ford presidency. lesser known no more important is the explosion of the cia. the leak of the document called the family jewels which led to the -- which led to the public announce thamt the cia spied domestically. that the kennedy administration tried to assassinate castro? leads to the complete overhaul of the cia which led to george bush coming in of george bush as the cia director. that's a hack. i know the story of why it's on president ford's head but i won't say it for c-span. president ford did not want to wear that hat at that time, but this is the moscow summit. this is indicative of the changing motif of detente. ford inherented detente from richard nixon. he had trouble with human rights, he had trouble with alexander. and when ford left office jimmy carter was bequest with a foreign policy with the soviet union that may very well have stepped back a few steps. world events didn't help that then. these are inherited problems. many of the problems gerald ford had to deal with were given to richard nixon not the least of which was the need to evacuate saigon in the spring of 1975 and another famous and unfortunate photograph making it look as if the ambassador staff from saigon was literally pushing people out of the way and it was a difficult situation. the vietnamese themselves called the running. and the -- the taking of a -- of a boat outside of the arbor in cambodia where ford decided only weeks after the fall of saigon to send in marines to retrieve the sailors of the myagua. he retrieved them a loss of marine life who exceeded the number of sailers and some said ford was doing it simply to look tough. but then there was this other side. this is the first day of the presidency of gerald ford. he leaves his home in alexandria virginia saying good-bye to the misses wearing a baseball -- a golf cap. i never saw president ford on colorado without a golf cap on carrying his work and leaving for the white house. the everyday guy the force of grand rapids the fact that this was contrasted in the press to the rather stiff and stayed nixon family. but the flip side of this was what "saturday night live" did to him. and the perception -- and president ford did tell me it's one of the most pleasant things in his entire life was getting to trip chevy chase out at the gerald ford library. the perception that there was something less than intellectually strong about gerald ford, that he was a bit of a klutz. it couldn't have been anything further from the truth. he played this up. the staff kind of liked this because it made ford look ordinary. and chevy chase comes out and with his devastating parodies reports it became a bit of a problem as ford eased into the 1976 election. now i'm sure that berkeley was at the 1976 convention in the upper right-hand corner. i chose the picture specifically, not president ford accepting the nomination. but ronald reagan who ford has brought down from the stands comment ing commenting on gerald ford. he lost the 1976 election here in kansas city because it was so close in that race with ronald reagan. and what he allowed him to do with jimmy carter was give him the opportunity to beat gerald ford over the head with the morality call, beat him senseless with it and ford lost a very close election. we can all go home now that the entirety of the gerald ford administration, except for one thing, what did i leave out? that's what i want to spend the rest of our time together talking about. the two most often asked questions of me about gerald ford. was there a deal? and why did he do it? when i had did he pardon richard nixon? because henry in his gracious opening reminds us that the ford administration celebrating the 40th anniversary in a few days here as we are recording this in the summer of 2014 one month to the day after ford takes office he pardons richard nixon. maybe an even more important anniversary to remember. let's look at the two questions. i want to first talk about question of whether or not there was a deal between richard nixon, gerald ford, or anybody in ford's staff to give richard nixon a pardon after ford took office? to do this we have to go back to the first of august, 1974. days after the supreme court has made its decision that nixon must release all of the tapes, not just transcripts of the tapes, not his edited versions of the tapes, but must give all of the tapes turnover the special prosecutor to leon jaworski and to john shrinka. on the morning that was to happen nixon's chief of staff, alexander haig calls vice president ford and says i need to speak with you. ford goes over. haig is surprised that ford brings with him bob hartman. hartman, a former newspaper reporter and good friend of vice president ford's was brought in to this meeting not just because bob hartman went to every meter, he did with vice president ford. but ford knew something was up and he needed a witness. haig tells ford in this meeting, he could hardly get rid of them haig tells ford that what is going to happen in the next 24 hours could possibly be the tipping point in the nixon presidency. he doesn't give a handout. haig knows that the tapes are going to come to the white house. haig absolutely knows that the tapes are going to come to the white house. ford thought that haig was holding something back. in a moment you'll see what haig was holding back. and he talks to hartman on the way out and he says well i kind of heard this before you know, no great problem. i'm going to keep my speeches today. and hartman goes to his office. ford then gets another phone call from al haig. he says mr. vice president, i need so see you and you can't bring bob hartman with you. ford goes back to haig's office and haig shares with gerald ford the contents of the smoking gun conversation from june 1972 where richard nixon tells bob haldeman on tape that's another story, tells haldeman on tape that haldeman is to stop the cia investigation of watergate. it was an obstruction of justice, nixon was guilty. end of that story. ford sees the transcript knows nixon has to resign. famous sentences that haig and ford say mr. president, are you willing and able to take over the office of the presidency of the united states at any given moment? and ford says yes i am. he says wait a minute, i'm authorized to give you a list of options. these options can take place if you choose to as president. one of them was as haig says to ford, the option of pardoning the president. ford does nothing. in fact he leaves haig with the feeling that perhaps he's considering it. he leaves the meeting and goes and meets with hartman again. congress to testify. the evidence shows this is absolutely true, there was no deal. but he did pardon richard nixon. he pardoned him on september 9 1974. the pardon was full. the pardon was absolute. and as you'll see in a moment, the real story of the pardon is it was before indictment. before richard nixon had actually been indicted of a crime. richard nixon was pardoned for crimes that he hasn't been charged with yet. so the question is, why? and to get to that question that's even more difficult to explain than the deal of the pardon, you have to look back to president ford's inaugural address. one of the shortest inaugural address that's on record and i'm of the opinion the shorter the inaugural address, the better i'm of the opinion the shorter the address from an academic the better. this was the operative line. there's only one problem, it wasn't true. a long national nightmare was far from over. and gerald ford knew it. it wasn't anything that was going to happen magical. just simply by the fact that he moved into the white house and richard nixon moved out. because it wasn't just watergate. it was vietnam and it was two decades of lying on the part of the federal government to the american people just beginning to come out. how do you fix that? from the first moment of the ford presidency, ford is besiegeled by his advisors particularly henry kissinger who for almost a month takes every opportunity with the presidency to bring it up. he's besieged with requests to pardon richard nixon. ford endures these because what he's done is he's kept almost intact richard nixon's cabinet and richard nixon's close staff. he said at one point in time why didn't you fire henry kissinger, a name that came from nowhere. he said when you're flying a plane, doesn't make much sense to shoot the pilot. they were just getting their feet on the ground. and here all of the nixon loyalists saying to him, you have to pardon the president. the original logic was let's put the nightmare behind us. it started to get personal. in the middle of august ford started to get reports that richard nixon was ill. nixon as you know had almost debilitating phlebitis. this is probably the late 1970s early 1980s that he's going on to one of his many operations for phlebitis. one of the people who went out to see nixon right after the resignation comes back and reports to ford and he says you know, this president is going to be dead before the election. and ford says you know 1976 is a long way off. he says i'm not talking 1976 i'm talking 1974 in three months. so ford is getting these reports back. having written about gerald ford having the material at the library, having met him on a number of occasions, i can say with absolute concernty that he was a good guy. that it wasn't for show. he did not pardon nixon because he felt sorry for him. he feels putting these people off. he pardoned richard nixon because of something that happened on august 28 1974. ford had been putting off having a full press conference. it did not want to meet the press until he had gotten his feet on the ground a little bit more. and until he had had an opportunity to talk with all of his close advisors. so he goes out in front of the press. the first question is about whether he's going to pardon richard nixon. if you watch this tape back ford looks genuinely stunned. like what? and then he goes through sort of a prepared answer. then he turns to tom brokaw. it's clear in ford's mind when he does this that he thinks he's going to a safe reporter. brokaw's question is on the pardon. and ford now looks genuinely angry. 32 questions were asked in that press conference, 28 of them were on the pardon. and the last one of them was from linda wortheimer. she cuts through everything and do you intend to leave the option open to pardon nixon. ford steps right in it. i'm president, i have that option. true, the constitution gives him the option. but what's the headline the next day? gerald ford is probably going to pardon richard nixon. he's leaving the option open. ford is steaming. like how can i possibly get rid of this albatross? what can i do to -- do you like this? what can i do to get rid of the -- yeah, the ghost of richard nixon. the ghost of richard nixon past. somebody got it. what can i do to get rid of this? the people around ford were genuinely caught offguard by the press. they saw it as an attack. ford calls in that afternoon his absolute closest advisor phil buken. phil buken was ford's law partner. in grand rapids. they formed their partnership immediately after ford got out of -- got out of the navy. probably ford's closest and professional friend phil buicken comes to the white house as white house counsel. he said to him, we've got to pardon him. we've got to figure this out. he charged buken to look into the nuts and bolts as to how a pardon might happen. buken says we've got to talk to everyone. and in two meetings on the 29th and 30th of august ford finds out his then closest aids henry kissinger, al haig phil buken and jack marsh. on the meeting of august 29 ford says i'm thinking about it. go home and tell me tomorrow what your recommendations are. the next day on the 30th, they reconvene. i caning her and haig not surprisingly say, do it now. hartman and buken, why now? he hasn't been charged with a crime. how can you constitutionally pardon someone who has not been charged with anything? and jack marsh says do you really think this is the right thing do? and ford says, 1,000 angels dancing on the head of a pin couldn't convince me it was right as long as i think it's right. they all shook their head. he had his consensus. he was going to pardon richard nixon. now the question was how and when. one of the key players in what was going to happen for the next 48 hours was benson becker. he was a lawyer who had done some work for ford when he was a majority leader. close to phil buken. you need to constitutionally check president of the united states to pardon an indictment. buken -- becker didn't need to be told what this was all about. he goes home for the weekend and writes, the thickest memo i think i've read in a presidential library gets to the end, essentially says you can do it. there's no limit to the presidential pardoning power. for them to be convicted, do it mid trial, do it before an indictment, when ever you want. but there's a small matter that needed to be negotiated with richard nixon. before nixon would accept a pardon because that's the next stage of this. ford's now been told he can pardon him. his closest aides were saying yeah, okay. will nixon accept it? nixon would not accept a pardon from gerald ford without a deal that had to -- that took care of his papers and tapes. now, had stories from people in the white house, both the ford and nixon white house that relate to the physical nightmare that gerald ford inherited the papers and tapes of richard nixon stored in closets, under stairwells. the famous white house tapes were apparently kept under a series of white house staircases. and were in the very real process of deteriorating. plus they're a nightmare of legal nonsense. suppose richard nixon is charged with some sort of a crime. and suppose that leon jaworski decides he's going to subpoena some of these tapes from the white house. then it's gerald ford's decision. as to whether the special prosecutor gets these tapes, this nightmare just isn't going to go away. ford's inclination is put it all on the truck and send it out to san clemente. at that point in time it was the league understanding that the papers were the president's personal property. that's no longer the case. postronald reagan the papers of the american presidents are the property of the american people. and stored in archives. these papers nearby of harry truman were his physical property to do with as he wished. same with richard nixon, but then there's these legal issues. and so what was negotiated between buken becker and jack miller, one of nixon's lawyers, was a very complex deal. the deal would give richard nixon. he accepts a pardon. there's a lot of people understanding richard nixon should accept it. if he accepts it the federal government keeps one set of keys on the paper. nixon keeps another set of keys on the papers. he can get to it when ever he wants. he's the ownership. i have to go back to the book to look at the details. it was very very complex. but they come to ford and say, okay, we've got a deal. and then ford drops the bombshell. no deal -- i want him to say he's sorry. kissinger looks at him and says, you will never get it. ford says to becker that's part of the deal. you've got to go out there. and becker must -- who i interview says he's going on this plane thinking i've got to face the president of the united states and come to apologize for watergate. they get out to san clemente and jack miller and becker go out to talk and they're met at the door by ron ziegler. ziegler who just recently passed away, was ford's -- sorry, nixon's press secretary for the entirety of the nixon administration. very young man. passed away at a young age. he meets him at the door opens the door and before they say anything, says, this president will not say he's sorry for anything. there's only one way that ziegler knows this. somebody in the white house told him. i have my suspicions. but they're just as good as yours. we don't know who tipped that hand. but it's through -- but it threw becker and miller for a loop. by the time they were done negotiating, by the time they were done talking with ziegler, who represented nixon there, nixon did not sit down and physically negotiate the acceptance of the pardon. nixon had gotten everything that he wanted. he had gotten virtually complete control of the papers. and he was not being required to say anything even close to an act of contrition to the american people. when nixon finally does meet w in the senate had already voted articles of impeachment. had nixon not resigned within the space of pa week there would have been the setup for an impeachment trial and jaworski was going to throw the hail mary pass and charge the president of the united states with objection of justice. there would be no more impeachment hearings of course. but richard nixon is a citizen of the united states. there was nothing to stop jaworski with charging him with that crime. he has a physical piece of evidence, a tape recording, showing that nixon was clearly guilty of that crime. ford did not want him to be charged with that crime. if there was a deal in the pardon, and i submit to you there was, it wasn't between nixon and ford. it was between phil buken acting for ford and leon jaworski. jaworski was somehow -- vague about this in his memoirs, somehow talked back from the brink and agrees not to indict richard nixon. one month to the day after richard nixon resigned from the presidency and gerald ford takes over, gerald ford gives a very short taped address. not from the oval office. delivered taped. sunday morning when they thought that the news cycle wouldn't pick it up. a full pardon for crimes that were committed or may have been committed between a specific period of time. a full presidential pardon. nixon responds to that pardon without any act of contrition. it becomes almost too easy to say to the president -- to the core presidency went downhill from there. that's simply not true. it's debatable whether or not the ford presidency cost ford the election in 1976. i argue in this very good book that is for sale out here in the hall to put henry's and my kids through school -- this outstanding book argues that it was only one part of the 1976 election. but not a lot of people felt like this kid in 1974. they weren't willing to give ford the benefit of the doubt. to say that all hell broke loose is an understatement. ford was immediately kpor shated for the deal. ford -- because, of course there had to be a deal. at that point in time until just the past couple of months the american presidency was polling at its lowest point ever. not nixon, not ford but the american presidency polling at the lowest point ever. vietnam dragging it down watergate was dragging it down. there was no trust left. of course there had to be a deal. the democrats are saying, let me at him. the former governor of georgia who appeared on what's my line the tv show and nobody knew who he was. immediately after the pardon of richard nixon ford is faced with another set of pardons that blends together with the issue of the pardon of nixon. that's the issue of clemency for draft dodgers. and for draft evaders. ford sets up a clemency board from his good friend from new york to hear every single case one at a time -- some went to prison, some were given amnesty. some were given work-related lease. it wasn't as it was portrayed by that wonderfully unbiassed paper in the east the"the new york times" as freedom from all draft evaders. it made it together and both then kind of played off against each other. they blended together the two days after the pardon. fast forward to 2001. we see the pardon completely differently. if this isn't an odd couple i don't know what is. when ford gets it profile of courage award from the john f. kennedy library and the john f. kennedy foundation for his pardon of richard nixon. now i submit to you that while ford deserved as a man of honor. and as a -- and who was almost killed in world war ii almost blown off in the typhoon of blown off in his aircraft carrier, a man who served his country honorably deserved to be called courageous. that wasn't what the pardon was all about. the pardon is trying to clean his desk so he can have the ford administration as he wants it. he wanted to get rid of that ghost. he's being honored something here that i think is true to his character but not true to the incident. gerald ford said to me when i asked him what is the most important thing that you want to be remembered for as president of the united states that night. he said i want to be -- if i'm remembered for anything i want to be remembered for healing this land. depending on how you view the pardon, i leave it up to you as to whether or not president ford did what he wanted to do. i thank you and -- thank you. >> good evening. >> you're surrounded with all of these aides. they were that tone death to the response to the pardon. how could they not have anticipated that? >> because you have to remember that the people who were around ford at the time were a mix of his aides and nixon's aides. and he was getting a blizzard if you will almost like in a blender of advice. the nixon aides were saying don't worry about it. the ford aides theish the nixon aides were saying go ahead and do it. the ford aides said you have to hold back. it happened too soon. i mean i might be well served by saying this. i think he should have waited. he should have waited a year let nixon be charged and then pardon him. and then he wouldn't have given reagan anywhere near the ammunition that he did. >> yes, sir? >> can i change gears a little bit here? >> by all means, it's your library? >> all right. two of the things i remember ford for and a lot of people do in terms of gaps. the statement in debate about europe. not being nominated by the soviet union. and not to say it's on the same level. but the wind buttons that we used to wear did you ever talk to him about that? >> oh absolutely. first of all, i saw a tape at the ford library where he practiced the lie -- he knew he was going to get a question on poland and he knew he was going to get a question on the occupation of eastern europe. what ford wanted to say but mangled it was we do not believe that the presence of the soviet union in poland is legitimate. what he said was exactly what you said -- they aren't there. and frankel of the times does one of these. will goes what? he turns to pauline frederick, the moderator, says can i follow up. this is not in the deal. not supposed to follow up. you see carter say wait a minute. carter is pulling a fast one on it. he hands carter a gift. he says it again. the same thing. and carter comes back from the line that he says i would like for you to see the polish americans in buffalo that the soviet union are not in there. and virtually every polish vote goes with inflation now, ford wanted to try something with the nra, the blue eagle. this is the literature that surrounds this. the memos that he was getting. do something that people feel they're participating because mr. president, the economy stinks and we don't know how to fix it. so let everybody believe we were happy. it was ill conceived. the big moment is when george harrison of the beatles goes to the white house. jack ford and poses with ford and billy preston who was like the fifth beatle and they're wearing buttons and ford is standing there going, i got to get away from that picture. both of those votes are foolish. you're right to bring them on. >> a couple of points that were raised. curious. one was in the newspaper page that you showed from i guess september 10 after the pardon there's a reference to alexander haig. and directly next to that alexander haig reporting -- >> bye-bye alexander. >> and the other one you mentioned that george bush and jaworski had a connection. i wanted your take on how those two things might have played out the. >> i don't know the details. i know because of texas politics and houston politics they knew each other. i've seen some correspondence, most of it not germane at the bush library. in terms of a being farmed out to nato. that's part of a systematic part that gets back to this gentleman's question here. ford, too late decides he has to have his own administration and starts to move out is the members of the nixon administration. who does he get in? chief hoff staff, congressman from illinois, don rumsfeld who brings him with him a completely unknown kid from wyoming as his assistant chief of staff, dick cheney. you have ford being brought in at the cia. they call it the ford foul ball dagues. so many will go to work for ronald reagan or george bush and they say they really learned their craft under president ford. >> i appreciate that. >> thank you. >> yes, sir. >> spiro agnew has to resign. >> he did. >> who championed jerry ford to be vice president? >> very good question. the list is long. the first question who championed him was mel laird. melvin laird who was a congressman from michigan and nixon's secretary of defense knew gerry ford very well. and he said -- by the way, this entire list everything they say to nixon is the same thing -- he will be confirmed. because nixon doesn't b want ford. ford. nixon wants john connolly. he wants john connolly the secretary of the treasury and would split with the democratic party. nixon feels a kinship with connolly. he wants connolly to run in 1976. everybody comes to him and says john connolly because of the milk scandal, john connolly because he's john connolly can't be confirmed. gerry ford is liked by everybody. he'll sail through. now laird says through, charles goodell says so. i also saw literature where nix on polled i believe it was nelson rockefeller and other people who you wouldn't think would be supporters of richard nixon. but the net was cast widely. everybody comes back with gerry ford. but who's number two? george bush. it wasn't his time yet. >> thank you. >> thank you. >> final question, bob. not part of the ford administration, but part of the ford story that sort of weird moment at the 1980 republican convention where there was a brief moment when ford might have become reagan's vice presidential running mate? but he wanted to run half of the cabinet or something? what was that all about? >> ronald reagan had gone through the -- what was a very bruising primary. and the second run -- the runner up was george bush. but nancy reagan didn't like george bush. nancy reagan did not like the fact that he had coined the term voodoo economics. bush had gotten out of talks to walter cronkite. cronkite interviews him and cronkite's got pieces of the story. he says are you a candidate for the vice presidency? and ford goes on for two minutes without saying the word, "no." reagan is looking at this on television and goes crazy. he feels he's been betrayed. he feels you know, this -- and what he really says is this just shows that the co-presidency won't work. that jerry ford is not going to be that kind of a team player. and reagan turns to i think it was len and he says to him, bush. now, this -- someone who was close to those people in those days said to me that ford actually knew what he was doing. that in fact he -- he -- i don't want to say committed suicide, but he did that so that reagan would, in fact choose bush. do you think -- >> i don't know that for a fact. the one thing that would argue against that henry, is that ford there is plenty of evidence that ford wanted to run for president again in 1980 particularly if he was going to run against carter. because, remember carter is almost mortally wounded because of the iranian hostage crisis. where every democrat thought they could be jerry ford in 1976, every republican thinks they can be jimmy carter in 1980. and ford figures, you know, let me have these guys beat eechl other up for a little bit. let him bloody reagan up a little bit. i've taken on ronald reagan before. i can do this instead of getting in the primaries, he was so good on the stump, i'll go right to the convention and steal it from them. i'll take it from the delegates. that's where the knowledge falls off, and there's rumor. whether betty talked him out of it. hedy sided not to do it whether reagan ambushed it took him out of it by offering the vice presidency? nobody knowles. ford walks away from it and that's the end of his public career. >> bob, thank you again. third time is the charm. >> thank you. [ applause ] >> thank you all very, very much. i do want to remind you that bob's book on president ford and betty ford are available for sale and both of us would appreciate the tuition assistance programs. >> $150 apiece. . . .
VietnamRepublic-ofNew-yorkUnited-statesMoscowMoskvaRussiaAlexandriaAl-iskandariyahEgyptTexasIran libraryand the truman institute. following the program, here gerald ford's 10-minute speech here on american history tv. >> hello, and welcome to the kansas city public library. i am director of public affairs. i want to thank you in joining us for the latest iteration of our hail to the chief lecture series, cochaired by our partners at the truman library institute, the foundation arm of the harry s truman presidential inrary and museum independence. as many of you know, we here at the library just love to do programs commemorating anniversaries, and such is the case tonight. 40 years ago, well, technically, , butars and 363 days ago work with me on this, gerald ford became the first and to date the only unelected president of the united states. at outcome that would have been beyond conception just two years earlier, when richard nixon was cruising to his landslide victory over george mcgovern. to tell us more about that and the administration that ensued, we have brought back for the dr. john robert green, but you can call him bob, who, among many claims to fame, ranks as the first historian to perform a serious scholarly study of the ford administration. the first edition of his book was published some 19 years ago by the university press of kansas. it is still in print, i am happy its fourthin printing. of course, being a pioneer has its disadvantages. that in the early days, he was often asked if his interest in the ford presidency was a function of the fact that all of the more interesting president had been taken. [laughter] this nature do a disservice to bob's scholarship, let alone the subject of his inquiry. while ford is generally remembered as a man who helped to heal the nation after watergate, bob argues there is a presidento the 38th than a likable guy who did a credible job as a caretaker. locally, we should also recall it was here in kansas city in 1976 -- 1976. i have a feeling we will be commemorating that anniversary in about two years -- when gerald ford received the gop primaryon in a close campaign against ronald reagan, so in the audience tonight with his wife sandy, a young city council member then, and he was at the white house with the ford mark the commemoration of kansas city at the convention city, and another good friend of the library and also a city councilmember at the time who sported the most perfect afro ever worn by anyone in the history of hairstyles. green, who also had a pretty good head of hair and makes me very jealous, is the professor of history and humanities at a college in new york. pasts taught there for the 35 years. he also serves as the college archivist, and he has written or edited 17 books, three of them the basis for talks here at the kansas city public library. george h.w. bush in 2012, betty ford in 2013, and gerald ford tonight. book, the presidency of gerald r ford, will be on sale following tonight's talk u. bookstores, and so is his book of betty ford. you may notice a young man who kind of sort of has a passing resemblance to me. don't do a double take. it is for real. that would be my first born son, soon to be a senior at the university of kansas and majoring in history, of all things. he is working his way through school, so by as many copies of the presidency of gerald r ford as you can. bob will be happy to sign each and every one of them. ladies and gentlemen, please welcome bob green. [laughter] >> thanks for having me. put hisy the book to kids through school. by the book to put my kids through school. [laughter] henry, you are your usual gracious self with the introduction, but never have i been introduced to any audience as having a good head of hair, so -- [laughter] backk forward to coming here each summer. i tell people around the country that this is one of the nicest venues, this auditorium and the at kansas city public library, that i speak at all year long. i want to thank before i began the foundation, and i want to thank the harry s truman library, the institute, and i want to thank you, kansas city public library, and i have had a few laps this morning. i am from an upstate new york college, about 20 miles from and i usually begin these talks by making fun of the snow record that we have. it is the snowiest place in the country, of course, i am told, and then i was watching your and ir this past winter, was getting some bulletins about you no the snow was, and longer have to feel sorry for me. i apparently have to feel sorry for you. you did not think of is going to start with them, did you? 8, 1974, the day before richard nixon resigned as president of the united states, after he had made his decision, after he had spoken to the american people, he went out into the rose garden, and as was usually the case in those days, he was followed closely by his secretary of state and director of national security, henry kissinger. accounts, justll simply drained of all energy. andinger was physically emotionally propping him up, because nixon was going to go back to the residence to relax before the next day's trip that the california, and kissinger, according to his memoirs and struggling for something to say that would block the president up, and president,aid, mr. historians will be kind to you in the future. this was nixon's answer. i have been fortunate enough to write histories of nixon and bush, and tonight, of ford. their series on the presidency is one of the most vestiges i am proud to be with them, and i am proud to have these books here for you. haveyou read them, if you anything to say about them, please, by all means, e-mail me, and i will have an undergraduate student respond. [laughter] what i want to do tonight on president ford is, i guess, a little bit unorthodox. when i did president bush with you, what i try to do was to do a tour de force of everything that happened to president bush from the time he took office to the time that he left after bill contrastand i want to that tonight and then talk with you about what is the most often asked question of me about gerald ford. i have had the opportunity to interview president ford on a number of occasions. on severalth him occasions, and i want to try to answer that question for you tonight, but before we get to that question, let's kind of remind ourselves with this audience of literate, thoughtful experts, what happened during the ford years? the recession, the recession that began as a result of the vietnam war ending and the result of problems with richard nixon's raging price control policy, and gerald ford brings in alan greenspan as his head of his economic advisor panel, and greenspan talks ford along with other people into cutting taxes. domestic policy during the ford years was what i call in the book a series of brush fire's around the country that ford and his staff were putting out almost in a crisis mode all through the administration. some nomination of nelson rockefeller as vice president of the united states. there are many people who believe that it was that nomination that cost for the election in 1976 because he had to change from nelson rockefeller to bob dole. the crisis in boston, the explosion after the decision in north carolina saying bussing was not only constitutional but could be mandated by the state, and the blood in the streets, and a little bit closer to home, to go out of new york city, which led hugh carey to give this wonderful interview that led to this particular headlines, one of the most famous headlines of the ford presidency. no morenown but important, the explosion at the cia, the leak of a document called the family jewels, which led to the public announcement that the cia had spy domestically, that the kennedy administration had tried to assassinate castro, and it went through the complete overhaul of the cia, which led to president ford bringing george bush and as the c.i.a. director. that is a hat. i know this tori about why it is head, butnt ford' s president for did not want to wear it. --s was not the mask i'll moscow summit, and it was the changing motif of detente. fromhad inherited detente richard nixon, but he had trouble with human rights and others, and when ford left office, jimmy carter was bequeathed with a foreign-policy with the soviet union that made us take back a few steps. world events did not help that relationship any. and, again, these are inherited problems. many of the problems that gerald ford had to deal with was given to him by richard nixon, not the least of which was the need to evacuate saigon in the spring of 1975, and in another famous and unfortunate photograph, making it look as if the ambassadorial staff from saigon is literally pushing people out of the way, and it was a difficult situation. the vietnamese themselves cost , and the taking of a boat outside of a harbor in decided, where ford only weeks after the fall of saigon to send in marines to -- thee the failures sailors. while for did that and did retrieve them, there was a loss of marine life that exceeded the number of sailors who were on the boat, and some critics said that ford was doing it simply to look tough, but then there was this other side. this is the first day of the presidency of gerald ford. he leaves his home in alexandria, virginia, saying aodbye to the mrs., wearing ball cap -- i never saw president ford without a ball cap -- leaving for the white house. he is the everyday guy. the fact that this was contrasted in the press to the rather stiff and stayed nixon family, but the flip side of was what saturday night live did to him, and the perception, and president ford did say this was the most fun thing he ever got to do, getting to trip chevy chase at the gerald ford library, the perception that there was something less than intellectually strong about gerald ford, that he was a bit of a klutz. he could not have been anything other than the truth. this up.ayed the staff kind of liked this, because it made ford looked ordinary, but then chevy chase came out with his devastating parody of ford, and it became a bit of a problem as ford moved into the 1976 election. that, i am sure that mayor berkley was at the 1976 convention, in the upper right-hand corner, and i chose the picture specifically, not president ford accepting the nomination, but ronald reagan, brought down from this stance, commenting on gerald ford's nomination. passedch was literally there. i firmly believe that gerald ford lost the 1976 election here in kansas city, because it was so close in that race with ronald reagan. and whether he allowed him to do it, jimmy carter was given the fordtunity to beat gerald over the morality and the nixon and ford administrations, and ford lost a very close election. that can all go home now, is the entirety of the gerald ford ford administration, except for one thing. what did i leave out? that is what i want to spend the rest of our time. askedo most often questions of me of gerald ford, was there a deal, and why did he do it? why did he pardon richard nixon? because henry, in his gracious opening, reminds us that the ford administration celebrating its 40th anniversary in just a here as we are recording this in the summer of afterone month to the day ford takes office, he pardons richard nixon. maybe an even more important anniversary to remember. look at these two questions, and i want to first talk about the question of whether or not there was a deal between richard nixon and gerald staffr anybody on ford's to give richard nixon a pardon after ford took office. to do this, we have to go back to the first of august, 1974. it is days after the supreme that has made its decision nixon must release all of the tapes, not his transcripts of the tapes, not his edited versions of the tapes, but must give all of the tapes over to the special prosecutor and two federal judge johnson rick -- ford goes over, hague is surprised that ford brings a hartman, a good friend of vice president ford's. he was brought into this meeting, not just because bob went to every meeting, he did, ford, butpresident because ford knew that something was up, and he needed a witness. tells ford in this visit, though he did not want hartman there, hague tells ford that what is going to happen in the bet 24 hours could possibly the tipping point in the nixon presidency. he doesn't give his hands out. hagan knows that they are going to come to the white house. hate absolutely knows that the tapes are going to come to the white house. ford thought that hague was holding something back, and he talked to hartman on the way out, and he said, well, i have kind of heard this before. no great comment. i'm going to keep my speeches goes to hisartman office. ford then gets another phone call from alexander haig, and he said, mr. ford, i need to see you, and you cannot bring bob hartman with you. ford goes back to hague's office, and hague shares with gerald ford the contents of the smoking gun conversation, from 1972, where richard nixon tells bob haldeman on the tape, another story, tells bob haldeman on tape that he is to stop the cia investigation of watergate. of justice,truction and nixon was guilty of it. end of that story. transcript and knows that nixon has to resign. , mr. vice and ford president, are you willing and able to take over the office of presidency of the united states at a moments notice, and ford and then hague, said, but wait a minute. i am prepared to talk to you about a list of options. these options can take place if you choose to add president. one of them is, as hague says to ford, the option of pardoning the president. ford does nothing. fact, he leaves hague with the feeling that perhaps he is considering it. he leaves the meeting and goes to see bob hartman again, and hartman goes ballistic. he says you should have grabbed hague and thrown him out of the office. who told you? and he says i got this from a white house lawyer that that and that there, was a lawyer in the white house, and then they remembered that lawyer, andn was a ford says, yes, maybe i left him with the wrong impression, and hartman says what you have to do is call jack marsh, a former congressman, and he would become secretary of the army. ford meets with march, marsh here's the story, and marsh in ely understands the gravity of the situation. he has left richard nixon believing that there could be a pardon, and they wanted to get the troops together. i want you to talk to hartman again and one of nixon's loosest advisors who is still working in and they bothe, tell ford, you can't leave this this way. this becomes important. they are all three in the room. ford picks up the phone and called alexander haig and says, i am am paraphrasing here, considerobligation to a pardon, and hague said i understand. that is going right back to the overall office -- oval office. this is what gerald ford told me. this is what gerald ford said to an investigating committee. when ford becomes the first president since abraham lincoln to allow himself to go to congress to testify. the evidence shows that this is absolutely true, that there was no deal. but he did pardon richard nixon. he pardon him on september 9, 1974. the pardon was full. the pardon was absolute, and as you will see in a moment, the real story of the pardon was that it was before indictment, he for richard nixon had actually been indicted of a crime. nixon was pardoned for crimes he had not been charged with yet, so the question is why, and to get to that question, it is even more difficult to explain than the deal with the pardon. you have to look back to president ford's inaugural address, one of the shortest inaugural addresses on record, and i am of the opinion that the shorter the inaugural address, the better, and i believe that the shorter the address from an academic, the better. there was only one problem. it wasn't true. the long national nightmare was far from over, and gerald ford knew it. there wasn't anything that was going to happen magically, just simply by the fact that he moved into the white house and richard nixon moved out, because it wasn't just watergate. it was vietnam, and it was two decades of lying on the part of the federal government to the american people. it was just beginning to come out. how do you fix that? from the first moment of the isd presidency, ford besieged by his advisers, particularly henry kissinger, who for almost a month takes every opportunity with the president to bring it up. he is the siege to with requests to pardon richard nixon. because whatthese he has done is he has kept almost intact richard nixon's cabinet and richard nixon's close staff. he said to me at one point in time, why did you fire henry kissinger, just a name that came to me from nowhere, and you said, you know, when you are flying a plane, it doesn't really make much sense to shoot the pilot. they were just getting their feet on the ground, and here were all of these nixon loyalist saying to him, you have to pardon the president. original logic was let's put the nightmare behind us, but then it started getting personal. towards the middle of august, ford started getting reports from san clemente that richard nixon was ill. nixon, as i am sure many of you know, at almost debilitating phlebitis, and this is a photograph of him later on. i think probably judging from the photograph it is probably the late 1970's, early 1980's, going for one of his many operations for phlebitis, and one of the people who went out to see nixon at san clemente right after the resignation comes back and reports to ford, and he says, you know, this president is going to be dead before the election. and ford says 1976 is a long way , 1976 is a is saying long way off, and he says, i am not talking 1976. i am talking 1974. so ford is having these conversations. having written about gerald ford, having read material at the ford library, i can say that -- having met him on a number of occasions, i can say with absolute certainty that he was a good guy, that it was not for show. cared, that he was what you saw, but that is not why he pardoned richard nixon. he did not pardon richard nixon because he felt sorry for him. he was putting these people off. he pardoned richard nixon because a something that happened on august 28, 1974. ford had been putting off having a full press conference. he did not want to meet the press until he had gotten his feet on the ground a little bit more and until he had had an opportunity to talk with all of his close advisers, etc., so he goes out in front of the press, and the first question is about whether he is going to pardon richard nixon. back, watch this tape forward it looks genuinely stunned, like what? and he goes through sort of a prepared answer, and then he , and it ism brokaw clear in ford's mind that he thinks he is going to a safe reporter. 's question is on the pardon, and ford now looks genuinely angry. 32 questions were asked in that press conference, and 28 of them were on the pardon, and the last one was from linda wertheimer, and she just cuts through everything and says, do you intend to leave the option open to pardon richard nixon, and ford stepped right in it, and he said, i am president. i have that option. it is true, the constitution gives them the option, and is the headline the next day? gerald ford is probably going to pardon richard nixon. he is leaving the option open. ford is steaming. like how can i possibly get rid of this albatross? what can i do -- do you like this? what can i do to get rid of the ghost of richard nixon, the ghost of richard nixon past question mark what can i do to get rid of this? the people around ford were genuinely caught off guard by the press. they saw it as an attack. afternoon histhat absolute closest advisor, phil buchanan. phil bukin. they were in law practice. probably ford' is closest professional and personal friend. phil andy lee came into the white house as white house counsel. came into the white house. he says, you have got to pardon him. you have got to figure this out, withe charges bukin looking into the nuts and bolts of how i pardon might happen. says, we have got to talk to everyone, and in august, 40 found out his then closest aides, bob hartman, henry haig, philip ukui n, and jack marsh. on august 29 in the morning, ford says, i am thinking about it. me tomorrowtell what your recommendations are. the next day on the 30th, they reconvened. alexander haig, not surprisingly, said, do it now. now?an and bukin, why he hasn't been charged with a crime. how can you constitutionally pardon someone who has not been charged with anything? , do you marsh says really think this is the right thing to do? said a thousand angels dancing on the head of it pin could not convince me it was right as long as i thought it was right. their heads.shook he had his consensus. he was going to pardon richard nixon. and then the question was how and when. one of the key players in what was going to happen for the next 48 hours was benson backer. did some work for ford when he was majority leader, was close to fill buikin. bukin says you have to look to see if it is legal for president of the united states to pardon before indictment. becker did not need to be told what this was all about. he goes home for the weekend, and then he writes the thickest memo i have ever read in a presidential library. and andto the essentially says, you can do it. there is no limit to the presidential pardoning power. you can wait until they are convicted, you can do it in mid-trial, you can do it before indictment, you can do it whenever you want. but there is a small matter that needed to be negotiated with richard nixon before nixon would accept a pardon, because that is the next stage of this. ford has now been told he can pardon him. his aides are saying, yes, ok. but will nixon accept it? not accept a pardon from gerald ford without a deal that took care of his papers and tapes. now, i have heard stories from house, bothe white the ford and the nixon white house, that relate to this physical nightmare that gerald ford inherited, the papers and tapes of richard nixon, which were stored in closets, under stairwells. the famous white house tapes were apparently kept under a series of white house house, boh the ford and the nixon white staircases and were in the very real process of deteriorating, plus they are a nightmare of legal nonsense. suppose richard nixon is charged , andsome sort of a crime suppose that leon jaworski decides he is going to subpoena some of these tapes from the white house? then it is gerald ford's decision whether the spiral -- special prosecutor gets the tapes. this nightmare is just not going to go away. ford's inclination is to put it all in a truck and said it out to san clemente. at that point in time, it was the legal understanding that the papers were the president's personal property. that is no longer the case. papersnald reagan, the of the american president is the property of the american people, stored in archives, and those of the harry truman were his physical property to do with as he wished, and the same with richard nixon, but then there is the legal issues, and so what was negotiated between bukin, miller, one ofk nixon's lawyers, was a very complex deal. the deal would give richard nixon, if he accepts the pardon -- a lot of people do not understand this, getting richard nixon to accept it, and then the federal government will keep one set of keys on the papers, and keys will keep one set of on the papers, and i would have to go back to my book and look at all of the details, but it was very, very complex, but they come to ford and say, ok, we have got a deal, and then ford dropped a bombshell. no deal. i want him to say he is sorry. and says,looks at him you will never get it. ford says to becker, that is part of the deal. backer, who i interviewed, said, he was going on this plane, i have to go tell the president nine states he has to apologize for watergate, and he gets out to san clemente, and jack miller and backer are met , ande door by ron ziegler ziegler, who just recently 's pressway, was nixon secretary for the entirety of the nixon administration, a very young man, passed away at a young age. he meets them at the door and opens the door, and before they say anything, he says, this president will not say he is sorry for anything. there is only one way that ziegler knows this. someone in the white house has told them. i have some suspicions -- suspicions, but they are just as good as yours. we do not know who tipped that hand, but it through becker and miller for a loop. by the time they were done negotiating, by the time they were done talking with ziegler, who represented nixon there, nixon did not sit down and physically negotiate the acceptance of the pardon. nixon had gotten everything that he wanted. he got virtually complete control of the papers, and he was not being required to say anything even close to an act of contrition to the american people. when nixon finally does meet with becker and miller, he comes into the office at san clemente, and becker says, mr. president, and nixon fumbles in his top desk drawer and finally comes up with a set of presidential cufflinks, and i think you said to becker, i think these are probably the last ones of these, and backer leaves, inking one of two things. one, within 24 hours, the man was going to be pardoned, and two, richard nixon had gotten it the way he wanted to get it. there was one last thing before ford was going to announce the pardon. ford wanted to make absolutely certain that in the next 48 hours leon jaworski was not going to charge richard nixon with a crime. the special prosecutor, which had been set up to investigate watergate, and you may remember archibald cox, nixon firing the special prosecutor, then the appointment of bob, and a friend bush, leon troicki, and sharansky at the time of nixon's resignation was this close to indicting richard nixon for obstruction of justice. the house of representatives and the senate had already voted articles of impeachment. thenixon not resign within space of a week, there would have been a set up for an impeachment trial, and jaworski was going to throw the hail mary pass and charge the president of the united states with obstruction of justice. now, there would be no more impeachment hearings, of course, but richard nixon is a citizen of the united states. there is nothing to stop to roar from charging him with that crime. he has a physical piece of evidence, a tape recording, that shows that nixon was clearly guilty of that crime. ford did not want him to be charged with that crime. if there was a deal in the pardon, and i submit to you there was, it wasn't between nixon and ford. it was between phil bukin, acting for ford,if there was a e and leon jaworski. jaworski was, and somehow, and he was very vague about this, he agreed not to indict richard nixon. one month to the day after richard nixon resigned from the presidency and gerald ford takes ford gives a very short, taped address. it was not delivered live from the oval office. it was taped. on a sunday morning, where they thought that the news cycle would not pick it up. for crimes that were committed or may have been committed between a specific , a fullf time presidential pardon. nixon responds to that pardon without any act of contrition. it becomes almost too easy to say that the ford presidency went downhill from there. that is just simply not true. debatable whether or not the ford presidency cost for the election in 1976. i argue in this very good book that is for sale out here in the hall to put henry's and my kids through school, this outstanding book argued that it was only one part of the 1976 election. but not a lot of people felt like this kid in 1974. they weren't willing to give for the benefit of the doubt. to say that all hell broke loose is an understatement. ford was immediately excruciating for the deal -- excoriated for the deal. of course, there had to be a deal. at that point in time until just the past couple of months, the american presidency was polling at its lowest point ever. for -- ford,not but the american presidency was ever.g at its lowest vietnam was dragging it down. watergate was dragging it down. of course, there had to be a deal, and the democrats were just sitting there going, let me at him. of two months,e 12 democrats had announced for the presidency, including a of georgia who appeared on what's my line, the tv show, and nobody knew who he was. and he is the guy who is going to win. the explosion of anger after. he went from being an average guy to being an average overnight. also something that needs to be remembered, it wasn't ford's only pardon. pardon ofy after the richard nixon, overnight ford id with another set of pardons that blends together with the issue of the pardon of nixon, and that was the issue of clemency for draft dodgers and draft evaders. ford sets up a clemency board under his good friend charlie did dell from new york to hear every single case one at a time. some went to prison, some were given amnesty, some were given a work related release. it was not as it was portrayed by that wonderfully unbiased paper in the east, the new york times as freedom for all draft evaders, but it mixed together with the issue of ford's party of nixon, and they both kind of played off against each other. it is not surprising to me that the times and other papers together.e two but then, fast-forward. fast-forward to 2001. we see the pardon completely differently. is not an odd couple, i do not know what is. when ford gets the profile of current joel ward from the john f. kennedy foundation for his pardon of richard nixon. now, i submit to you that while as a man of honor and a man who was almost killed in world war ii, almost blown aircrafttycoon of his carrier, a man who served his country honorably deserves to be courageous, but that is not what the pardon was all about. the pardon was to clean his desk so he could have the ford administration that he wanted. he wanted to get rid of that, and he is being honored something here that i think is true to his character but not true to the incident. gerald ford said to me when i asked him what was the most important thing you want to be remembered for as president of the united states. he did not even bat an eye. he said if i am remembered for anything, i want to be remembered for healing this land. depending on how you view the pardon, i will leave it up to you as to whether or not president ford did what he wanted to do. i thank you, and -- [applause] thank you. >> that was great, bob, and you can come to the microphone, and bob will answer questions in the back and forth. >> good evening. surrounded by all of these aids that they were that tone deaf to the response to the pardon? how could they not have anticipated that? >> because you have to remember that the people who were around ford at the time were a mix of his aides and nixon aides, and he was getting a blizzard, if you will, almost in a blender of advice, and the nixon aides were saying don't worry about it, or the nixon aides were saying go ahead and do it, and the ford aides were saying, you got to happened too it those soon. i mean, i might be well served by saying this, i think you should have waited. he should have waited a year. let nixon be charged and then pardoned, and he would not have given reagan anywhere near the thatmation -- ammunition he did. >> can i change gears here? >> by all means. it is your library. two of the things i remember ford four, and people do, in terms of gaffes, the statement in the debate, not being nominated by the soviet union, and not to say it is on the same level, but the buttons that they used to wear. did you ever talk to him about that? >> absently. first of all, i saw a tape at the ford library where he practiced the line, and he knew he was going to get a question on poland, and he knew he was going to get a question on the occupation of eastern europe, and what ford wanted to say but mangled it was we do not believe that the presence of the soviet union in poland is legitimate. what he said was exactly what you said. they aren't there, and max frankel of the times just does one of these. what? and he turns to pauline frederick, who is the moderator, and says, can i follow up? and that was not in the deal. they were not supposed to follow up. and carter says, wait a minute. they think they are pulling a fast one, but what ford does in the follow-up hands caught her a gift for you and he says it again, the same thing, and says, iomes back, he would like to see you tell the polish people that they are not there. now and the wind buttons, ford wanted to try something like the nra, the blue eagle. this is the literature that is around this and the memos he was getting. do something so people can feel they are participating, because, mr. president, the economy stinks, and we do not know how to fix it, so let's let everyone believed that it has happened, and it was ill-conceived. the big moment, of course, was when george harrison of the beatles goes to white house and poses with ford and billy preston, who was like the fifth beatle, and they are wearing wind buttons, and ford is standing there, i have got to get away from this picture, i have got to get away from this picture, and both of those moments were foolish, and you are right to bring them up. yes, sir. newspaper,in the september 10, after the pardon, there is a reference to alexander haig, and then after with nato,nder haig and then the other one you mentioned was that george bush and leon jaworski had a relationship, and i wonder how those things played out. ofi do not know, but because texas politics and houston politics, they knew each other, and i have seen correspondence, most of it not germane, at the bush library. as far as alexander haig being farmed out to nato, ford, too late, decides he has to have his own administration and starts moving out the members of the nixon administration. who do we get in? we get in as chief of staff the former congressman from illinois, donald rumsfeld, who brings in with him a completely unknown kid from wyoming as his assistant chief of staff, dick cheney. you have got ford being brought in at the cia. by the way, they call it the ford foundation, because so many of these people are going to go formork in some shape or for ronald reagan or george bush, and they learned their craft under president ford. but i appreciate that. >> thank you. yes. >> spiro agnew has to resign. >> indeed, he did. >> who championed jerry ford to be vice president? >> excellent question, because the list is actually very long. the first person who championed him was melvin laird, who was a andressman from michigan nixon's secretary of defense. he knew jerry ford very well, and, by the way, this entire list, everything they say to nixon is the same thing. he will be confirmed, because nixon does not want ford. he wants john conley. nixon wants john conley, who is the secretary of the treasury, and who had split from the democratic party. nixon feels a kinship with conley, and he wants conley to run in 1976. everyone is coming to him and his saying, john conley because of the scandal, because he is john conley cannot be confirmed. jerry ford is liked by everyone. he will stay through. charles did dell says so. i also saw literature where nixon told, i believe, nelson rockefeller and some other people who you would not think to be supporters of richard nixon, but the net was cast widely. everyone comes back with jerry ford, but who is number two? george bush. it wasn't his time yet. thank you. >> final question, bob. not part of the ford administration, but part of the ford story, that sort of weird moment at the 1980 republican the was a brief moment when ford might have become reagan's vice presidential running mate, but to runed to -- wanted half of the cabinet or something. what was that about? >> ronald reagan had gone through was a very bruising primary, and the second -- the runner-up was george bush. did not likeagan george bush. nancy reagan did not like the fact that he had coined the term voodoo economics. bush had gotten out of the race at time -- in time. he had gotten out of the race, so he was not holding on like pat buchanan and some other people, but there was a bad taste in the reagan people's mouths about george bush. they thought he was too moderate and that he would not be a good match. up with thelf comes idea, along with kissinger, who , abouteagan's ear bringing ford in. there is nothing that prohibits gerald ford from coming in. he can be elected vice president as many times as he wants. the constitution does not say, so the negotiations go through between henry kissinger, brent scowcroft, i believe, and the reagan team, and they are this close. reagan is about to drop this bombshell, and ford goes on up into the skybox in detroit, and he talks to walter cronkite. thekite has got pieces of story, and he says, are you a candidate for the vice goes on forand ford about two minutes without saying the word no. reagan is looking at this on television and goes crazy. he feels he has been betrayed. when he really says is this just shows that a co-presidency will not work, that jerry ford is not going to be that kind of a team player, and reagan turns to another and says to bush. >> now, someone who was close to those people in those days said to me that ford actually knew what he was doing, that, in fact, i do not want to say committed suicide, but that he would,t so that reagan in fact, choose bush. >> i don't know that for a fact. one thing that would argue against that, henry, is that there is plenty of evidence to show that ford wanted to run for president again in 1980, particularly if you is going to run against carter, because come are a member, harder is almost mortally wounded because of the iran-contra crisis. whatever democrats thought they 1980,eat jimmy carter in and ford figures, let me have these guys beat each other up, have him bloody ronald reagan up, and i have taken on ronnie reagan before, i can do this, but instead of getting him at the primaries, where he is so good on the stump, i am going to go right to the primary and take it from him there. that is where my knowledge of the story falls off, when he decided not to do it, whether reagan and bush did, taking it off by offering him the vice presidency, but ford walked away from that, and that is the end of his public career. >> bob, thank you again. their time is a charm. thank you. >> thank you all, very, very much. [applause] >> these are for sale, and we
VietnamRepublic-ofNew-yorkUnited-statesMoscowMoskvaRussiaNorth-carolinaAlexandriaAl-iskandariyahEgyptTexas hyannisport with the kennedy compound, it seemed like a summer camp. compared to what other presidents have done on their vacations, what sort of activities did john f. kennedy do? >> "time" magazine in august, 1962, said that not since the days of theodore roosevelt had the nation witnessed what the magazine called such a hard pounding, muscle-aching round of activities. and hyannisport, which was besieged by tourists, the president, his children, his nephews, his nieces scrambled on the lawn, splashed in the water. at times, when i read about it, i thought it resembled the olympics. "time" described it this way -- "sitting down is somehow considered that form. touch football has rest periods. between tennis, swimming, water skiing, sailing and -- dragging. dragging as an attempt to avoid drowning while being towed by a life preserver tied to the president's schooner." >> "look" magazine put a picture of the president on a golf cart loaded down with nieces and nephews. what did this image say? >> it certainly was appealing. it was an image that played all over the country. there is one in this book. a dozen or more laughing children clinging to the golf cart. as it spun around the lawns of the compound. the honor of local candy store said it didn't take 15 minutes after his helicopter landed for kennedy to appear on the golf cart with a band of children for licorice, chocolates, or lollipops. >> before we wrap up, could you give us a couple of your notable, a quick look at the notable other presidential vacations you write about. >> there have been many. washington, of course, set the standard, and the standard being that the job follows the present wherever he goes. in washington's case, that meant supervision of the building of a new capital city, one this named for him. there are many others, and you can pick of images. kennedy sailing. eisenhower golfing. jerry ford skiing. jimmy carter on the softball field. any number of things. presidents fishing. often early 20th century presidents like coolidge and hoover fishing in three-piece suits. >> are there any of those images that are in any way controversial? you write about teddy roosevelt liking to chop down trees on his property just to hear the trees fall. we knew george w. bush was always clearing brush on his ranch. outside of golf, have president's been criticized by the activities they pursue on their vacations? >> sure. sometimes with a little bit of tongue-in-cheek. president theodore roosevelt, who won the nobel peace prize for, in the summer of 1905, for monitoring the hand of the russo-japanese war on vacation, had a newspaper scolding from the "new york times." the reason? he needed a break. the break appeared on the waters of oyster bay. and it was an early u.s. navy submarine, called "the plunger." roosevelt went down on it for 55 minutes. "the new york times" said he needlessly risked a valuable life and a collapsible and otherwise dangerous device. >> the book is "away from the white house: presidential escapes, retreats, and vacations." we've been speaking with lawrence knutson, the author. thanks for being with us on american history tv. >> thank you. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2014] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] >> president ford pardoned former president nixon on september 8, 1970 4, 1 month after the only presidential resignation in american history. up next, on the presidency, author and history professor john robert green considers two questions. why did gerald ford pardoned richard nixon, and was there a deal between the two man? he discusses the days leading up to the pardon. mr. green is the author of the presidency of gerald ford. this hour-long event was hosted by the kansas city public library and the truman library institute. following the program, here gerald ford's 10-minute speech here on american history tv. >> hello, and welcome to the kansas city public library. i am director of public affairs. i want to thank you in joining us for the latest iteration of our hail to the chief lecture series, cochaired by our partners at the truman library institute, the foundation arm of the harry s truman presidential library and museum in independence. as many of you know, we here at the library just love to do programs commemorating anniversaries, and such is the case tonight. 40 years ago, well, technically, 39 years and 363 days ago, but work with me on this, gerald ford became the first and to date the only unelected president of the united states. at outcome that would have been beyond conception just two years earlier, when richard nixon was cruising to his landslide victory over george mcgovern. to tell us more about that and the administration that ensued, we have brought back for the third time dr. john robert green, but you can call him bob, who, among many claims to fame, ranks as the first historian to perform a serious scholarly study of the ford administration. the first edition of his book was published some 19 years ago by the university press of kansas. it is still in print, i am happy to report, in its fourth printing. of course, being a pioneer has its disadvantages. bob reports that in the early days, he was often asked if his interest in the ford presidency was a function of the fact that all of the more interesting president had been taken. [laughter] thoughts of this nature do a disservice to bob's scholarship, let alone the subject of his inquiry. while ford is generally remembered as a man who helped to heal the nation after watergate, bob argues there is a lot more to the 38th president than a likable guy who did a credible job as a caretaker. locally, we should also recall it was here in kansas city in 1976 -- 1976. i have a feeling we will be commemorating that anniversary in about two years -- when gerald ford received the gop nomination in a close primary campaign against ronald reagan, so in the audience tonight with his wife sandy, a young city council member then, and he was at the white house with the ford s to mark the commemoration of kansas city at the convention city, and another good friend of the library and also a city councilmember at the time who sported the most perfect afro ever worn by anyone in the history of hairstyles. bob green, who also had a pretty good head of hair and makes me very jealous, is the professor of history and humanities at a college in new york. he has taught there for the past 35 years. he also serves as the college archivist, and he has written or edited 17 books, three of them the basis for talks here at the kansas city public library. george h.w. bush in 2012, betty ford in 2013, and gerald ford tonight. bob's book, the presidency of gerald r ford, will be on sale following tonight's talk courtesy of k.u. bookstores, and so is his book of betty ford. you may notice a young man who kind of sort of has a passing resemblance to me. don't do a double take. it is for real. that would be my first born son, soon to be a senior at the university of kansas and majoring in history, of all things. he is working his way through school, so by as many copies of the presidency of gerald r ford as you can. bob will be happy to sign each and every one of them. ladies and gentlemen, please welcome bob green. [laughter] >> thanks for having me. don't buy the book to put his kids through school. by the book to put my kids through school. [laughter] henry, you are your usual gracious self with the introduction, but never have i been introduced to any audience as having a good head of hair, so -- [laughter] i look forward to coming back here each summer. i tell people around the country that this is one of the nicest venues, this auditorium and the people here, at kansas city public library, that i speak at all year long. i want to thank before i began the foundation, and i want to thank the harry s truman library, the institute, and i want to thank you, kansas city public library, and i have had a few laps this morning. i am from an upstate new york college, about 20 miles from syracuse, and i usually begin these talks by making fun of the snow record that we have. it is the snowiest place in the country, of course, i am told, and then i was watching your weather this past winter, and i was getting some bulletins about how bad the snow was, and you no longer have to feel sorry for me. i apparently have to feel sorry for you. you did not think of is going to start with them, did you? on august 8, 1974, the day before richard nixon resigned as president of the united states, after he had made his decision, after he had spoken to the american people, he went out into the rose garden, and as was usually the case in those days, he was followed closely by his secretary of state and director of national security, henry kissinger. nixon was, by all accounts, just simply drained of all energy. kissinger was physically and emotionally propping him up, because nixon was going to go back to the residence to relax before the next day's trip that the california, and kissinger, according to his memoirs and nixon's, was struggling for something to say that would block the president up, and kissinger said, mr. president, historians will be kind to you in the future. this was nixon's answer. i have been fortunate enough to write histories of nixon and bush, and tonight, of ford. their series on the presidency is one of the most vestiges places, and i am proud to be with them, and i am proud to have these books here for you. when you read them, if you have anything to say about them, please, by all means, e-mail me, and i will have an undergraduate student respond. [laughter] what i want to do tonight on president ford is, i guess, a little bit unorthodox. when i did president bush with you, what i try to do was to do a tour de force of everything that happened to president bush from the time he took office to the time that he left after bill clinton, and i want to contrast that tonight and then talk with you about what is the most often asked question of me about gerald ford. i have had the opportunity to interview president ford on a number of occasions. i worked with him on several occasions, and i want to try to answer that question for you tonight, but before we get to that question, let's kind of remind ourselves with this audience of literate, thoughtful experts, what happened during the ford years? the recession, the recession that began as a result of the vietnam war ending and the result of problems with richard nixon's raging price control policy, and gerald ford brings in alan greenspan as his head of his economic advisor panel, and greenspan talks ford along with other people into cutting taxes. domestic policy during the ford years was what i call in the book a series of brush fire's around the country that ford and his staff were putting out almost in a crisis mode all through the administration. the trouble some nomination of nelson rockefeller as vice president of the united states. there are many people who believe that it was that nomination that cost for the election in 1976 because he had to change from nelson rockefeller to bob dole. the crisis in boston, the explosion after the decision in north carolina saying bussing was not only constitutional but could be mandated by the state, and the blood in the streets, and a little bit closer to home, ford's decision to go out of new york city, which led hugh carey to give this wonderful interview that led to this particular headlines, one of the most famous headlines of the ford presidency. lesser-known but no more important, the explosion at the cia, the leak of a document called the family jewels, which led to the public announcement that the cia had spy domestically, that the kennedy administration had tried to assassinate castro, and it went through the complete overhaul of the cia, which led to president ford bringing george bush and as the c.i.a. director. that is a hat. i know this tori about why it is on president ford' s head, but president for did not want to wear it. this was not the mask i'll -- moscow summit, and it was the changing motif of detente. ford had inherited detente from richard nixon, but he had trouble with human rights and others, and when ford left office, jimmy carter was bequeathed with a foreign-policy with the soviet union that made us take back a few steps. world events did not help that relationship any. and, again, these are inherited problems. many of the problems that gerald ford had to deal with was given to him by richard nixon, not the least of which was the need to evacuate saigon in the spring of 1975, and in another famous and unfortunate photograph, making it look as if the ambassadorial staff from saigon is literally pushing people out of the way, and it was a difficult situation. the vietnamese themselves cost the running, and the taking of a boat outside of a harbor in cambodia, where ford decided only weeks after the fall of saigon to send in marines to retrieve the failures -- the sailors. while for did that and did retrieve them, there was a loss of marine life that exceeded the number of sailors who were on the boat, and some critics said that ford was doing it simply to look tough, but then there was this other side. this is the first day of the presidency of gerald ford. as he leaves his home in alexandria, virginia, saying goodbye to the mrs., wearing a ball cap -- i never saw president ford without a ball cap -- leaving for the white house. he is the everyday guy. the fact that this was contrasted in the press to the rather stiff and stayed nixon family, but the flip side of this was what saturday night live did to him, and the perception, and president ford did say this was the most fun thing he ever got to do, getting to trip chevy chase at the gerald ford library, the perception that there was something less than intellectually strong about gerald ford, that he was a bit of a klutz. he could not have been anything other than the truth. george played this up. the staff kind of liked this, because it made ford looked ordinary, but then chevy chase came out with his devastating parody of ford, and it became a bit of a problem as ford moved into the 1976 election. that, i am sure that mayor berkley was at the 1976 convention, in the upper right-hand corner, and i chose the picture specifically, not president ford accepting the nomination, but ronald reagan, brought down from this stance, commenting on gerald ford's nomination. the torch was literally passed there. i firmly believe that gerald ford lost the 1976 election here in kansas city, because it was so close in that race with ronald reagan. and whether he allowed him to do it, jimmy carter was given the opportunity to beat gerald ford over the morality and the nixon and ford administrations, and ford lost a very close election. so we can all go home now, that is the entirety of the gerald ford ford administration, except for one thing. what did i leave out? that is what i want to spend the rest of our time. the two most often asked questions of me of gerald ford, was there a deal, and why did he do it? why did he pardon richard nixon? because henry, in his gracious opening, reminds us that the ford administration celebrating its 40th anniversary in just a few days, here as we are recording this in the summer of 2014, one month to the day after ford takes office, he pardons richard nixon. maybe an even more important anniversary to remember. let's look at these two questions, and i want to first talk about the question of whether or not there was a deal between richard nixon and gerald ford or anybody on ford's staff to give richard nixon a pardon after ford took office. to do this, we have to go back to the first of august, 1974. it is days after the supreme court has made its decision that nixon must release all of the tapes, not his transcripts of the tapes, not his edited versions of the tapes, but must give all of the tapes over to the special prosecutor and two federal judge johnson rick -- john sirica, and ford goes over, and hague is surprised that ford brings a hartman, a good friend of vice president ford's. he was brought into this meeting, not just because bob went to every meeting, he did, with vice president ford, but because ford knew that something was up, and he needed a witness. hague tells ford in this visit, though he did not want hartman there, hague tells ford that what is going to happen in the next 24 hours could possibly be the tipping point in the nixon presidency. he doesn't give his hands out. hagan knows that they are going to come to the white house. hate absolutely knows that the tapes are going to come to the white house. but ford thought that hague was holding something back, and he talked to hartman on the way out, and he said, well, i have kind of heard this before. no great comment. i'm going to keep my speeches today, and hartman goes to his office. ford then gets another phone call from alexander haig, and he said, mr. ford, i need to see you, and you cannot bring bob hartman with you. ford goes back to hague's office, and hague shares with gerald ford the contents of the smoking gun conversation, from 1972, where richard nixon tells bob haldeman on the tape, another story, tells bob haldeman on tape that he is to stop the cia investigation of watergate. it is an obstruction of justice, and nixon was guilty of it. end of that story. ford sees the transcript and knows that nixon has to resign. both hague and ford, mr. vice president, are you willing and able to take over the office of presidency of the united states at a moments notice, and ford said, yes, i am, and then hague said, but wait a minute. i am prepared to talk to you about a list of options. these options can take place if you choose to add president. one of them is, as hague says to ford, the option of pardoning the president. ford does nothing. in fact, he leaves hague with the feeling that perhaps he is considering it. he leaves the meeting and goes to see bob hartman again, and hartman goes ballistic. he says you should have grabbed hague and thrown him out of the office. who told you? and he says i got this from a white house lawyer that that option is there, and that there was a lawyer in the white house, and then they remembered that richard nixon was a lawyer, and ford says, yes, maybe i left him with the wrong impression, and hartman says what you have to do is call jack marsh, a former congressman, and he would become secretary of the army. ford meets with march, marsh here's the story, and marsh in ely understands the gravity of the situation. he has left richard nixon believing that there could be a pardon, and they wanted to get the troops together. i want you to talk to hartman again and one of nixon's loosest advisors who is still working in the white house, and they both tell ford, you can't leave this this way. this becomes important. they are all three in the room. ford picks up the phone and called alexander haig and says, and i am paraphrasing here, i am under no obligation to consider a pardon, and hague said i understand. that is going right back to the overall office -- oval office. this is what gerald ford told me. this is what gerald ford said to an investigating committee. when ford becomes the first president since abraham lincoln to allow himself to go to congress to testify. the evidence shows that this is absolutely true, that there was no deal. but he did pardon richard nixon. he pardon him on september 9, 1974. the pardon was full. the pardon was absolute, and as you will see in a moment, the real story of the pardon was that it was before indictment, he for richard nixon had actually been indicted of a crime. richard nixon was pardoned for crimes he had not been charged with yet, so the question is why, and to get to that question, it is even more difficult to explain than the deal with the pardon. you have to look back to president ford's inaugural address, one of the shortest inaugural addresses on record, and i am of the opinion that the shorter the inaugural address, the better, and i believe that the shorter the address from an academic, the better. there was only one problem. it wasn't true. the long national nightmare was far from over, and gerald ford knew it. there wasn't anything that was going to happen magically, just simply by the fact that he moved into the white house and richard nixon moved out, because it wasn't just watergate. it was vietnam, and it was two decades of lying on the part of the federal government to the american people. it was just beginning to come out. how do you fix that? from the first moment of the ford presidency, ford is besieged by his advisers, particularly henry kissinger, who for almost a month takes every opportunity with the president to bring it up. he is the siege to with requests to pardon richard nixon. ford endures these because what he has done is he has kept almost intact richard nixon's cabinet and richard nixon's close staff. he said to me at one point in time, why did you fire henry kissinger, just a name that came to me from nowhere, and you said, you know, when you are flying a plane, it doesn't really make much sense to shoot the pilot. they were just getting their feet on the ground, and here were all of these nixon loyalist saying to him, you have to pardon the president. their original logic was let's put the nightmare behind us, but then it started getting personal. towards the middle of august, ford started getting reports from san clemente that richard nixon was ill. nixon, as i am sure many of you know, at almost debilitating phlebitis, and this is a photograph of him later on. i think probably judging from the photograph it is probably the late 1970's, early 1980's, going for one of his many operations for phlebitis, and one of the people who went out to see nixon at san clemente right after the resignation comes back and reports to ford, and he says, you know, this president is going to be dead before the election. and ford says 1976 is a long way off, and he is saying, 1976 is a long way off, and he says, i am not talking 1976. i am talking 1974. so ford is having these conversations. having written about gerald ford, having read material at the ford library, i can say that -- having met him on a number of occasions, i can say with absolute certainty that he was a good guy, that it was not for show. that he truly cared, that he was what you saw, but that is not why he pardoned richard nixon. he did not pardon richard nixon because he felt sorry for him. he was putting these people off. he pardoned richard nixon because a something that happened on august 28, 1974. ford had been putting off having a full press conference. he did not want to meet the press until he had gotten his feet on the ground a little bit more and until he had had an opportunity to talk with all of his close advisers, etc., so he goes out in front of the press, and the first question is about whether he is going to pardon richard nixon. if you watch this tape back, forward it looks genuinely stunned, like what? and he goes through sort of a prepared answer, and then he turns to tom brokaw, and it is clear in ford's mind that he thinks he is going to a safe reporter. brokaw's question is on the pardon, and ford now looks genuinely angry. 32 questions were asked in that press conference, and 28 of them were on the pardon, and the last one was from linda wertheimer, and she just cuts through everything and says, do you intend to leave the option open to pardon richard nixon, and ford stepped right in it, and he said, i am president. i have that option. it is true, the constitution gives them the option, and is the headline the next day? gerald ford is probably going to pardon richard nixon. he is leaving the option open. ford is steaming. like how can i possibly get rid of this albatross? what can i do -- do you like this? what can i do to get rid of the ghost of richard nixon, the ghost of richard nixon past what can i do to get rid of this? the people around ford were genuinely caught off guard by the press. they saw it as an attack. ford calls in that afternoon his absolute closest advisor, phil buchanan. >> phil bukin. they were in law practice. probably ford' is closest professional and personal friend. phil andy lee came into the white house as white house counsel. -- immediately came into the white house. he says, you have got to pardon him. you have got to figure this out, and he charges bukin with looking into the nuts and bolts of how i pardon might happen. bukin says, we have got to talk to everyone, and in august, 40 found out his then closest aides, bob hartman, henry kissinger, al haig, philip ukui n, and jack marsh. on august 29 in the morning, ford says, i am thinking about it. go home and tell me tomorrow what your recommendations are. the next day on the 30th, they reconvened. kissinger and alexander haig, not surprisingly, said, do it now. hartman and bukin, why now? he hasn't been charged with a crime. how can you constitutionally pardon someone who has not been charged with anything? and jack marsh says, do you really think this is the right thing to do? and ford said a thousand angels dancing on the head of it pin could not convince me it was right as long as i thought it was right. and they all shook their heads. he had his consensus. he was going to pardon richard nixon. and then the question was how and when. one of the key players in what was going to happen for the next 48 hours was benson backer. backer did some work for ford when he was majority leader, was close to fill bukin. bukin says you have to look to see if it is legal for president of the united states to pardon before indictment. becker did not need to be told what this was all about. he goes home for the weekend, and then he writes the thickest memo i have ever read in a presidential library. he gets to the and and essentially says, you can do it. there is no limit to the presidential pardoning power. you can wait until they are convicted, you can do it in mid-trial, you can do it before indictment, you can do it whenever you want. but there is a small matter that needed to be negotiated with richard nixon before nixon would accept a pardon, because that is the next stage of this. ford has now been told he can pardon him. his aides are saying, yes, ok. but will nixon accept it? nixon would not accept a pardon from gerald ford without a deal that took care of his papers and tapes. now, i have heard stories from people in the white house, both the ford and the nixon white house, that relate to this physical nightmare that gerald ford inherited, the papers and tapes of richard nixon, which were stored in closets, under stairwells. the famous white house tapes were apparently kept under a series of white house staircases and were in the very real process of deteriorating, plus they are a nightmare of legal nonsense. suppose richard nixon is charged with some sort of a crime, and suppose that leon jaworski decides he is going to subpoena some of these tapes from the white house? then it is gerald ford's decision whether the spiral -- special prosecutor gets the tapes. this nightmare is just not going to go away. ford's inclination is to put it all in a truck and said it out to san clemente. at that point in time, it was the legal understanding that the papers were the president's personal property. that is no longer the case. post ronald reagan, the papers of the american president is the property of the american people, stored in archives, and those of the harry truman were his physical property to do with as he wished, and the same with richard nixon, but then there is the legal issues, and so what was negotiated between bukin, becker, and jack miller, one of nixon's lawyers, was a very complex deal. the deal would give richard nixon, if he accepts the pardon -- a lot of people do not understand this, getting richard nixon to accept it, and then the federal government will keep one set of keys on the papers, and nixon will keep one set of keys on the papers, and i would have to go back to my book and look at all of the details, but it was very, very complex, but they come to ford and say, ok, we have got a deal, and then ford dropped a bombshell. no deal. i want him to say he is sorry. kissinger looks at him and says, you will never get it. ford says to becker, that is part of the deal. and backer, who i interviewed, said, he was going on this plane, i have to go tell the president nine states he has to apologize for watergate, and he gets out to san clemente, and jack miller and backer are met at the door by ron ziegler, and ziegler, who just recently passed away, was nixon's press secretary for the entirety of the nixon administration, a very young man, passed away at a young age. he meets them at the door and opens the door, and before they say anything, he says, this president will not say he is sorry for anything. there is only one way that ziegler knows this. someone in the white house has told them. i have some suspicions -- suspicions, but they are just as good as yours. we do not know who tipped that hand, but it through becker and miller for a loop. by the time they were done negotiating, by the time they were done talking with ziegler, who represented nixon there, nixon did not sit down and physically negotiate the acceptance of the pardon. nixon had gotten everything that he wanted. he got virtually complete control of the papers, and he was not being required to say anything even close to an act of contrition to the american people. when nixon finally does meet with becker and miller, he comes into the office at san clemente, and becker says, mr. president, and nixon fumbles in his top desk drawer and finally comes up with a set of presidential cufflinks, and i think you said to becker, i think these are probably the last ones of these, and backer leaves, inking one of two things. one, within 24 hours, the man was going to be pardoned, and two, richard nixon had gotten it the way he wanted to get it. there was one last thing before ford was going to announce the pardon. ford wanted to make absolutely certain that in the next 48 hours leon jaworski was not going to charge richard nixon with a crime. the special prosecutor, which had been set up to investigate watergate, and you may remember archibald cox, nixon firing the special prosecutor, then the appointment of bob, and a friend of george bush, leon troicki, and sharansky at the time of nixon's resignation was this close to indicting richard nixon for obstruction of justice. the house of representatives and the senate had already voted articles of impeachment. had nixon not resign within the space of a week, there would have been a set up for an impeachment trial, and jaworski was going to throw the hail mary pass and charge the president of the united states with obstruction of justice. now, there would be no more impeachment hearings, of course, but richard nixon is a citizen of the united states. there is nothing to stop to roar from charging him with that crime. he has a physical piece of evidence, a tape recording, that shows that nixon was clearly guilty of that crime. ford did not want him to be charged with that crime. if there was a deal in the pardon, and i submit to you there was, it wasn't between nixon and ford. it was between phil bukin, acting for ford, and leon jaworski. jaworski was, and somehow, and he was very vague about this, he agreed not to indict richard nixon. one month to the day after richard nixon resigned from the presidency and gerald ford takes over, gerald ford gives a very short, taped address. it was not delivered live from the oval office. it was taped. on a sunday morning, where they thought that the news cycle would not pick it up. a full pardon for crimes that were committed or may have been committed between a specific period of time, a full presidential pardon. nixon responds to that pardon without any act of contrition. it becomes almost too easy to say that the ford presidency went downhill from there. that is just simply not true. it is debatable whether or not the ford presidency cost for the election in 1976. i argue in this very good book that is for sale out here in the hall to put henry's and my kids through school, this outstanding book argued that it was only one part of the 1976 election. but not a lot of people felt like this kid in 1974. they weren't willing to give for the benefit of the doubt. to say that all hell broke loose is an understatement. ford was immediately excruciating for the deal -- excoriated for the deal. of course, there had to be a deal. at that point in time until just the past couple of months, the american presidency was polling at its lowest point ever. not next in, not for -- ford, but the american presidency was polling at its lowest ever. vietnam was dragging it down. watergate was dragging it down. of course, there had to be a deal, and the democrats were just sitting there going, let me at him. within the space of two months, 12 democrats had announced for the presidency, including a warmer governor of georgia who appeared on what's my line, the tv show, and nobody knew who he was. and he is the guy who is going to win. the explosion of anger after. he went from being an average guy to being an average president overnight. also something that needs to be remembered, it wasn't ford's only pardon. immediately after the pardon of richard nixon, ford is faced with another set of pardons that blends together with the issue of the pardon of nixon, and that was the issue of clemency for draft dodgers and draft evaders. ford sets up a clemency board under his good friend charlie did dell from new york to hear every single case one at a time. some went to prison, some were given amnesty, some were given a work related release. it was not as it was portrayed by that wonderfully unbiased paper in the east, the new york times as freedom for all draft evaders, but it mixed together with the issue of ford's party of nixon, and they both kind of played off against each other. it is not surprising to me that the times and other papers blended the two together. but then, fast-forward. fast-forward to 2001. we see the pardon completely differently. if this is not an odd couple, i do not know what is. when ford gets the profile of current joel ward from the john f. kennedy foundation for his pardon of richard nixon. now, i submit to you that while ford deserved as a man of honor and a man who was almost killed in world war ii, almost blown off by a tycoon of his aircraft carrier, a man who served his country honorably deserves to be courageous, but that is not what the pardon was all about. the pardon was to clean his desk so he could have the ford administration that he wanted. he wanted to get rid of that, and he is being honored something here that i think is true to his character but not true to the incident. gerald ford said to me when i asked him what was the most important thing you want to be remembered for as president of the united states. he did not even bat an eye. he said if i am remembered for anything, i want to be remembered for healing this land. depending on how you view the pardon, i will leave it up to you as to whether or not president ford did what he wanted to do. i thank you, and -- [applause] thank you. >> that was great, bob, and you can come to the microphone, and bob will answer questions in the back and forth. >> good evening. >> surrounded by all of these aids that they were that tone deaf to the response to the pardon? how could they not have anticipated that? >> because you have to remember that the people who were around ford at the time were a mix of his aides and nixon aides, and he was getting a blizzard, if you will, almost in a blender of advice, and the nixon aides were saying don't worry about it, or the nixon aides were saying go ahead and do it, and the ford aides were saying, you got to hold back, so it happened to those soon. i mean, i might be well served by saying this, i think you should have waited. he should have waited a year. let nixon be charged and then pardoned, and he would not have given reagan anywhere near the information -- ammunition that he did. >> can i change gears here? >> by all means. it is your library. two of the things i remember ford four, and people do, in terms of gaffes, the statement in the debate, not being nominated by the soviet union, and not to say it is on the same level, but the buttons that they used to wear. did you ever talk to him about that? >> absently. first of all, i saw a tape at the ford library where he practiced the line, and he knew he was going to get a question on poland, and he knew he was going to get a question on the occupation of eastern europe, and what ford wanted to say but mangled it was we do not believe that the presence of the soviet union in poland is legitimate. what he said was exactly what you said. they aren't there, and max frankel of the times just does one of these. what? and he turns to pauline frederick, who is the moderator, and says, can i follow up? and that was not in the deal. they were not supposed to follow up. and carter says, wait a minute. they think they are pulling a fast one, but what ford does in the follow-up hands caught her a gift for you and he says it again, the same thing, and carter comes back, he says, i would like to see you tell the polish people that they are not there. with inflation now and the wind buttons, ford wanted to try something like the nra, the blue eagle. this is the literature that is around this and the memos he was getting. do something so people can feel they are participating, because, mr. president, the economy stinks, and we do not know how to fix it, so let's let everyone believed that it has happened, and it was ill-conceived. the big moment, of course, was when george harrison of the beatles goes to white house and poses with ford and billy preston, who was like the fifth beatle, and they are wearing wind buttons, and ford is standing there, i have got to get away from this picture, i have got to get away from this picture, and both of those moments were foolish, and you are right to bring them up. yes, sir. >> one was in the newspaper, september 10, after the pardon, there is a reference to alexander haig, and then after that, alexander haig with nato, and then the other one you mentioned was that george bush and leon jaworski had a relationship, and i wonder how those things played out. >> i do not know, but because of texas politics and houston politics, they knew each other, and i have seen correspondence, most of it not germane, at the bush library. as far as alexander haig being farmed out to nato, ford, too late, decides he has to have his own administration and starts moving out the members of the nixon administration. who do we get in? we get in as chief of staff the former congressman from illinois, donald rumsfeld, who brings in with him a completely unknown kid from wyoming as his assistant chief of staff, dick cheney. you have got ford being brought in at the cia. by the way, they call it the ford foundation, because so many of these people are going to go and work in some shape or form for ronald reagan or george bush, and they learned their craft under president ford. but i appreciate that. >> thank you. yes. >> spiro agnew has to resign. >> indeed, he did. >> who championed jerry ford to be vice president?
VietnamRepublic-ofNew-yorkUnited-statesMoscowMoskvaRussiaJapanNorth-carolinaAlexandriaAl-iskandariyahEgypt