Gerald Ford

It's terribly difficult to make a case that Gerald Ford was anything other than an undistinguished President. I won't attempt it. Ford personally became known - despite being a highly athletic man - for physical clumsiness. Appropriately, his administration was hobbled by three early symbolic disasters. The first and earliest was the pardon granted Richard Nixon. The decision was not stupid - bizarrely, and of all newspapers, The Guardian argues that the "Nixon pardon now looks more like a brave decision that helped America to recover from Watergate" - but it was wrong. Nixon subverted the Constitution while head of state. The Watergate affair was not a partisan political disagreement, but an abuse of power, trust and legality. Ford's failure - born of a wish to bind political disagreements - to treat it as such ironically ensured that the divisions would fester in American public life. Watergate became bound to the Republican Party, and ensured that even with a feeble and feckless Presidential nominee in 1976, the Democrats were able to win a narrow victory.

The second was the economic programme submitted to Congress in October 1974. The measures were anodyne, but they were supplemented by an exhortation to the public for voluntary co-operation in fighting inflation. This would be symbolised by a badge declaring "WIN" - for "Whip Inflation Now" - and which members of the public would be encouraged to wear. As the departing chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisors, Herbert Stein, later wrote (Presidential Economics, 1994, p. 214): "The button immediately became an object of ridicule and a symbol of vacuity in economic policy."

The third was an anticipation in foreign affairs of Ford's immediate sucessor, Jimmy Carter, in projecting an image of weakness to America's adversaries and - more worrying - her friends. In May 1975, Cambodia seized an American trawler, the USS Mayaguez, that had inadvertently entered her waters. Ford ordered a rescue, which initial reports suggested had been successful. In fact there were heavy casualties - 38 marines died and more than 50 were wounded; in a terrible augury of the botched rescue mission of the hostages in Iran, 23 died in a helicopter crash in Thailand before the mission began. As one conservative writer, David Frum, later put it in his excellent thematic history How We Got Here: The 70s, 2000, p. 89: "If the US military could suffer such losses in an attack on Cambodians, it made you wonder how the country would fare in a fight against the Russians. And if it had not learned from Vietnam the imperative of confessing to bad news, when would it learn?"

But for all this, there are two abiding characteristics of President Ford that should be recalled with respect and gratitude. First, he was a committed Atlanticist and a friend of the United Kingdom when this country did not carry great weight in foreign affairs. Ford worked with two Prime Ministers, one of them appalling (Harold Wilson) and one, in my minority view, good and underrated (James Callaghan). Wilson - a man of colossal vanity who was convinced he was held in high regard in Washington - wrote to Ford in October 1974 in effect giving an ultimatum that Britain would make defence cuts regardless of the damage to Nato's capabilities. Ford responded with a measured statement of fact, worrying about the effect on US allies and expressing the hope that the US would not be the only power capable of international intervention. When Callaghan sought Ford's assistance in the sterling crisis of 1976 - a long story, much recounted, in which I consider that Callaghan and his Chancellor, Denis Healey, performed with credit and to the lasting benefit of the country - the President immediately offered to help. His precondition was only that the Labour government should not impose import controls, as two members of the Cabinet - Tony Crosland and, with much less intellectual weight, Tony Benn - were then proposing. Had Ford been in a stronger political position, relative both to the Federal Reserve and to the electoral challenge of Jimmy Carter, British policymaking might have been easier.

Secondly, the Ford administration did one important thing in foreign affairs. I am strongly critical of the realist premises that informed US policy in the 1970s, but in my book Anti-Totalitarianism I said this in favour:

It is easy to overstate the degree of realpolitik in American foreign policy in this period. The pursuit of a stable balance of power had some horrendous casualties, as when the Ford Administration acquiesced in Indonesia’s invasion (and subsequent annexation) of East Timor in 1975. But it was also consistent with, in the same year, the signing of the Helsinki Final Act, which served to undermine the legitimacy of Soviet Communism by focusing attention on human rights

What were then known as neoconservatives were generally hostile to the Helsinki Final Act, preferring to avoid rhetorical statements on human rights that they were certain the Soviets would violate. Much has changed in the ideological landscape since then, including the character of neoconservatism itself. The much maligned President Ford deserves credit for Helsinki, however. He was right and his domestic critics were wrong. As one senior British diplomat involved in the negotiations, Michael Alexander, said in his posthumous memoir Managing the Cold War (London: RUSI, 2005, p. 62):

These texts [the Helsinki Final Agreement] provided a crucial and perhaps decisive encouragement to the dissident movements in Eastern Europe. Leading Soviet dissidents, including the Sakharovs, Yuri Orlov and Anatoly Scharansky based their Helsinki monitoring activities on their duty to play their part in ensuring that the Soviet government complied with the obligations it had undertaken at Helsinki.

It is far from the worst of epitaphs, for a President who does not merit the best of them.