The American Vice Presidency

by Jules Witcover

  Questions were raised, however, whether under the Constitution a president or vice president could be indicted and removed by any measure other than impeachment—trial by the House and conviction by the Senate. The White House lawyers reasoned that if Agnew as vice president could avoid indictment, so could Nixon as president. By this time, however, the insurance policy theory had worn thin, and Nixon wanted Agnew out. He sent Haig and the political adviser Bryce Harlow to tell Agnew he wanted him to resign. Agnew later characterized them as having “brought the traditional suicide pistol to my office and laid it on my desk.”47 He refused without a chance to make his case directly to Nixon, to no avail.

  In the end, Attorney General Elliot Richardson agreed to remove a prospective felon from the line of presidential succession and to enter into plea bargaining with Agnew’s lawyers before the federal judge in the case. He recommended that Agnew not be imprisoned but did not stipulate it as a condition of the plea bargain. The judge sentenced Agnew to three years of unsupervised probation and a fine of ten thousand dollars. After resigning, Agnew read a summary statement of guilt, in which he admitted taking payments that he did not report on his income tax returns but insisted they had not influenced his official actions.48 Then he walked out of the courtroom a free but disgraced and bitter private citizen.

  Nixon wrote later of the resignation in terms of his own fight for political survival: “While some thought his stepping aside would take some of the pressure off the effort to get the president, all it did was open the way to put pressure on the president to resign as well.”49 Agnew had to borrow the $10,000 to pay his fine from his friend Frank Sinatra, who also loaned him $200,000 to pay bills, which included one from the Internal Revenue Service for $150,000 in unpaid back taxes, which, he wrote later, he repaid by 1978.50

  Upon his resignation Agnew launched a business career in part based on connections made during his overseas travel as vice president, particularly in the Middle East and South America. He was reported to be involved in a land deal in Kentucky, a coal mine in Oklahoma, and a mysterious relationship with a South Korean businessman known for lavishly entertaining American congressmen. In 1976 he formed a nonprofit educational foundation and was later accused by the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith of planning to use it “for the purpose of organizing a movement to reflect his anti-Israeli, pro-Arab views.”51

  Agnew also wrote a novel about a vice president who intends to run for president and clashes with the incumbent on foreign policy in ways suggesting his own experiences with Nixon. He never saw Nixon again but seventeen years later attended his funeral in Yorba Linda, California, where he was well received by old Nixon administration colleagues. A year later outside the Senate chamber over which he had presided, he attended a ceremony at which a bust of him was dedicated, observing, “I am not blind or deaf to the fact that some people feel that this is a ceremony that should not take place.”52

  The man who declared upon his surprise nomination for the vice presidency in 1968 that he was not a “household name” but vowed to become one had at least succeeded in that. Years later he told of walking down a street in Copenhagen and being stopped by an American stranger who declared, “You’re Spiro Agnew! Lay some rhetoric on me, man!”53 He became more famous, or notorious, for his manner of speaking than for any contribution he ever made as vice president, under a president who largely avoided and ignored him. Spiro Agnew died of leukemia on September 17, 1996, at age seventy-seven and was buried in Towson, Maryland, with little public notice.

  GERALD R. FORD JR.

  OF MICHIGAN

  On December 6, 1973, for the first time in American history, a man not elected to the vice presidency took the office. On the heels of the sudden resignation of the incumbent Spiro T. Agnew, who was facing indictment on charges of bribery, corruption, and income-tax evasion, President Richard M. Nixon chose House Minority Leader Gerald R. Ford to replace him. Nixon was the first in history to invoke the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, ratified only six years earlier to provide, for the first time, for filling a vacancy. Only twenty months later, Ford found himself the president of the United States as a result of Nixon’s own forced resignation in the White House cover-up of the 1972 break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex, in downtown Washington.

  Ford was an amiable man who had served a quarter of a century in the House of Representatives, with no greater ambition than someday to become its Speaker. He was the unwitting political beneficiary of the only back-to-back resignations of a duly elected presidential–vice presidential team in the nation’s history. Soon after, out of compassion or to try to put the whole episode behind him, Ford pardoned Nixon. At least in part because of that decision, Ford lost the presidency himself in the next election.

  Ford was chosen by Nixon for the vice presidency in large part because he was well liked by members of both parties in Congress and seemed certain to be confirmed. Nixon’s preference was for John Connally, the former Democratic governor of Texas, for whom the president had hoped to shove Agnew aside in order to make Connally his running mate in 1972. But Agnew had declined to step aside and was kept on the Republican ticket in the face of his great popularity within the Grand Old Party. Nixon knew now that as a converted Republican, Connally could not have been confirmed by the Democratic-controlled Congress, and so he turned to Ford, who could be. Ford’s confirmation came twenty-seven days after his nomination, with the office vacant until then.

  The brief vice presidency of Jerry Ford was as an extremely trying one. At the time he took over from Agnew, the man who had anointed him was in a desperate fight for his own political survival as more details of the Watergate scandal unraveled, imperiling the second Nixon term. Ford was ideally positioned to serve as Nixon’s liaison with Congress, but almost from the outset he was obliged to rally to his benefactor’s defense. He had to do so without knowing the truth or falsity of the suspicions that Nixon had somehow been involved in the fiasco or at least involved in an effort to cover up his own awareness of it. But Ford had always been a loyal Republican and in fact a friend of Nixon in their mutual service in the House, and they shared humble beginnings as small-town boys who served in the navy after the attack on Pearl Harbor, before going into politics.

  The man who became Nixon’s second vice president was born Leslie Lynch King Jr. in Omaha, Nebraska, on July 14, 1913, the namesake of a father who was physically abusive and threatening to the boy’s mother, Dorothy Gardner King, leading to a divorce when her son was still an infant. She took him to Grand Rapids, Michigan, where they lived with her parents. There she met and married a paint salesman, Gerald Rudolf Ford, who, although he never legally adopted the boy, renamed him after himself and provided mother and son a secure and loving home. “He was the father I grew up with, the father I loved and learned from and respected,” his stepson said later.1

  Tall and husky, Jerry Ford Jr., became an Eagle Boy Scout, a good student with a friendly disposition, and a star athlete, playing on his high school football team. He got a part-time job slinging hamburgers at a local diner, where one day in 1929, when Jerry was sixteen, a stranger came in and introduced himself as Jerry’s birth father. Leslie King Sr. took him to lunch at a nearby restaurant, telling him how well off he now was and how he had just come from Detroit, where he had bought a new Lincoln luxury car. King, inquiring whether he could help financially, handed the boy twenty dollars and asked him if he wanted to go with King to live in Wyoming, where he said he owned acres of ranch land. Young Ford, full of resentment, replied, “No, I like it here.”2

  Ford went on to be named all-state center on his high school team and won a scholarship to the University of Michigan, where he starred as a freshman but was a benchwarmer on the varsity behind an all-American center for two years before making the All-Big Ten team as a senior. He was picked for the East-West Shrine charity game and received offers from the Green Bay Packers and the Detro
it Lions to play professionally but elected to take a job as an assistant football and boxing coach at Yale, intending to go to law school there.

  At first Ford was turned down for law school admittance, so he took a summer job as an intern forest ranger at Yellowstone National Park. Upon returning to Yale he was admitted to the law school. Through a friend in Michigan, he met a beautiful and sophisticated young woman named Phyllis Brown, who became his first love. When she became a professional model, she recruited him to join in a Look magazine picture spread of a ski weekend in Vermont and to appear with her on a cover of Cosmopolitan.3 After working as a volunteer in the 1940 presidential campaign office of Wendell Willkie and graduating from Yale, he decided to return to Grand Rapids to practice law, but Phyllis remained in New York.

  Ford formed a new law practice with an old Michigan fraternity brother, Phil Buchen, but on the day after Pearl Harbor he enlisted in the navy. He was made an athletic training officer, first at the Naval Academy in Annapolis and then at a preflight school in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. In early 1943 he was assigned to the USS Monterey, a small aircraft carrier whose planes saw action against Japanese targets in the Gilbert Islands and later in support of amphibious invasions elsewhere in the Pacific. As a gunnery officer, he endured kamikaze attacks, and in thirteen months he and other crew members earned eleven battle stars. He also survived a huge typhoon that nearly washed him overboard and at war’s end was discharged as a lieutenant commander.4

  Back in Grand Rapids, Ford began dating a soon-to-be divorcée named Betty Warren, who was a local department-store fashion designer, and preparing for a primary run for Congress against the incumbent backed by the longtime local Republican boss. Influenced by his exposure to the internationally minded Willkie, he campaigned in 1948 in western Michigan, supporting the United Nations and the Marshall Plan for recovery of Europe, and won the election at age thirty-four. A month later he and Betty were married.

  As a freshman in the House, Ford became good friends with a fellow Republican, Richard Nixon. He ingratiated himself with Nixon by writing to commend him for his performance in the Alger Hiss case. When his reputation mounted as a loyal, steady, and industrious Republican, he turned down an opportunity to be the party nominee for the Senate in 1952 after the death of his political ideal, Arthur Vandenberg, preferring to remain where he was.5 He joined Nixon and others in forming the Chowder and Marching Society, a social club of House Republican World War II veterans. In 1959, he helped replace the likeable but aging Joe Martin of Massachusetts with the feisty Charlie Halleck of Indiana as the House minority leader. In 1960, some Michigan Republicans boosted him to be Nixon’s running mate, but Nixon had already made up his mind on Henry Cabot Lodge, even as he solicited recommendations from Ford and other rising Republicans.6

  In the 1960 campaign, Ford joined a Republican “truth squad” that trailed Democratic presidential nominee John Kennedy to rebut his claims at news conferences. In 1963 Ford was elected to the number-three post in the leadership as chairman of the House Republican Conference. After the death of JFK, President Lyndon Johnson appointed Ford to the blue-ribbon Warren Commission, which investigated the assassination, concluding that the assailant, Lee Harvey Oswald, had acted alone and that there was “no evidence of a conspiracy.”7

  After the shellacking the Republicans took in 1964 with Barry Goldwater as their presidential nominee, losing thirty-eight House seats, a group of Young Turks moved against Halleck with the easy-going Jerry Ford as their candidate. Ford became the House minority leader, only one step short in his ambition for the speakership. But once in office in 1965, Ford could do little to stop the avalanche of legislation that Johnson was to enact, with large Democratic majorities in both houses and the legacy of JFK behind him. Ford, however, was outspoken in his belief that Johnson was not committing enough power, short of nuclear weapons, to win in Vietnam and told him so, warning that if the war dragged on he would lose the public’s support.8

  Johnson was not happy with Halleck’s replacement by Ford, jibing that the Michigander had “played too much football without a helmet” and he was so dumb that he couldn’t “walk and chew gum at the same time.”9 In 1968, Ford as House minority leader gaveled open the Republican National Convention that nominated Nixon on the first ballot and was invited to a midnight conference of party leaders to consider the choice of a running mate. Sitting next to Ford, the presidential nominee turned to him and said, “I know that in the past, Jerry, you have thought about being vice president. Would you want it this year?” Ford told him thanks but no thanks.10 Once again as in 1960, Nixon was serenading the leaders, letting them think they had a say in the matter when he had already decided. The next morning Ford got a phone call from a Nixon aide telling him the candidate’s choice was Spiro T. Agnew of Maryland. “I shook my head in disbelief,” Ford wrote later.11

  Nixon won the election narrowly over the Democrat Hubert Humphrey, but the Republicans gained only five seats in the House, leaving Ford twenty-six short of what he would have needed to be promoted to Speaker. But as minority leader he looked forward to working with a Republican president, and he wrote, “I believed we would have a good chance to win to the House [in 1972] with his reelection.”12

  With both houses of Congress remaining in Democratic hands, Nixon embarked on his presidency determined to assert as much executive power as he could in dealing with the legislature. He put one of his chief aides, John Ehrlichman, in charge of dealing with Congress on domestic affairs, which put him on a collision course with Ford in the House. Ehrlichman referred to the leaders there as “that Congressional herd of mediocrities” and said of his first meeting with Ford, “I was not impressed. It was clear in our first conversation in 1969 that he wasn’t thrilled to be harnessed to the Nixon Administration. I came away from his office with the impression that Jerry Ford might have become a pretty good Grand Rapids insurance agent; he played a good game of golf, but he wasn’t excessively bright.”13

  In 1969 amid speculation that he was acting at the behest of the White House, Ford initiated a campaign to impeach Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas in a period during which two Nixon nominees for the court, Clement F. Haynsworth and W. Harrold Carswell, were rejected. Douglas’s lifestyle—multiple marriages and divorces, some to women forty years his junior, financial irregularities, and his liberal philosophy—was raised against him, leading to Senate committee hearings at which Ford testified. He denied he had ever been asked by Nixon or his White House to bring the impeachment charges, and the matter was dropped, but it left a shadow over Ford’s reputation.14

  The stormy political year of 1972 was highlighted by the foiled June break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters by burglars in the hire of the Nixon reelection committee. The Democratic chairman of the House Banking and Currency Committee, the seventy-nine-year-old Wright Patman of Texas, undertook an investigation of the money trail of payments to the burglars, whereupon Nixon’s right-hand man, Bob Haldeman, wrote in his diary that Nixon “wants to be sure we put the screws on Congress to turn off the Patman hearings.”15 At a taped meeting with Haldeman and the White House counsel John Dean, Nixon specifically mentioned some Republican committee members whom Ford should approach, including one ambitious member: “After all, if we ever win the House, Jerry will be the speaker and he could tell him if he did not get off—he will not be chairman, ever.”16 On the committee vote to hold hearings, all sixteen Republicans voted against, along with four opposing Democrats, and the hearings were abandoned, by a vote of twenty to fifteen.

  On Election Day, despite the unfolding Watergate scandal, Nixon and Agnew easily won reelection, and it appeared the matter would blow over. Ford continued in the House as a loyal Nixon ally through two political explosions that in a short time would rocket him first into the vice presidency and then the presidency. First, the forced resignation of Agnew in October 1973, described in chapter 39, and then Nixon’s own culpability in the Watergate c
over-up, which forced him to resign as well the next August, made Gerald Ford the fortieth vice president and then the thirty-eighth president without having been elected to either office.

  With Agnew on the way out, Nixon drew an assurance about the popular Ford from the Democratic House Speaker Carl Albert: “He would be the easiest man that I know of to confirm in the House of Representatives. There wouldn’t be any question in my mind but that he would be confirmed, and it would not be a long, drawn-out matter either.” Later, Albert claimed, “We gave Nixon no choice but Ford. Congress made Jerry Ford President.”17 So Nixon, having abandoned hopes of replacing Agnew with John Connally, turned to good old Jerry Ford, everybody’s friend on Capitol Hill, the safe bet to be confirmed by Congress under the new Twenty-Fifth Amendment.

  On October 12, Nixon called Ford in, told him he was his choice, and asked him what his political plans were. Ford told Nixon he had promised his wife, Betty, that he would retire from politics after finishing his vice presidential term and had no plans to run for president after that. “Well, that’s good,” Nixon replied, according to Ford, “because John Connally is my choice for 1976. He’d be excellent.”18 Ford knew where he stood from the start.

  Congressional hearings were held from November 7 through 26 on Ford’s confirmation. According to Alexander Haig, Nixon’s chief of staff at the time, both Democrats and Republicans in Congress let Nixon know that support of Ford would be contingent on release of the White House tapes. Haig wrote later he feared that a continued vacancy in the vice presidency as the Watergate inquiry grew closer to Nixon might yet put Carl Albert in the Oval Office.19