Gerald Ford at Rancho Mirage

The motel was close to Los Angeles Airport and under an inbound flight path. Every thirty seconds a big jet came across, its scream transformed seconds later into the roar of reverse thrust followed by the howl of the next one coming in, ad infinitum it seemed. The room was overheated, its thermostat stuck on seventy-four degrees Fahrenheit, and the windows were fixed shut. There was no bar-fridge or service. It wasn’t late but the diner was closed despite its neon light flashing “open”. I had no ear-plugs and the noise kept me awake, but by 1 a.m., when the planes finally stopped, I was no longer sleepy. Rain was hitting at the window. With nothing worth watching on television I turned on a radio station playing old songs—one I recall was Nat King Cole’s “I’d Rather Have the Blues”.

After breakfast I walked the cold street till I found a newsagency where I bought the January 15, 1986, Times and an issue of Cycle for an article about the fastest production bike to that time, the Kawasaki GPz1000RX (159 mph it said). I preferred Ducatis for their engines and their looks, and I had one at home, a 1975 750 Super Sport, but I was considering a companion piece. Back in the room I took the address book from the inside pocket of my jacket and called a number in Rancho Mirage. The appointment for tomorrow was still on—“Drive into the compound,” she said, “the guards will let you on through.” Then I found a specialist rental agency and selected a suitable vehicle.

Later I read the paper. Donna Reed had just died at sixty-four. I liked her in It’s a Wonderful Life and I liked the James Stewart character with the guts to stand on the bridge and contemplate the divide. In Alabama, George Wallace was contemplating a record fifth term as governor. Nuclear tests were down by half. California’s wild condors were practically extinct. Some local legislators had failed to ban “all you can drink” contests with liquor prizes for winners, offered by bars to attract patrons. I still recall a small headline deep inside, “Organic Grass Fed Meat”, and wondering, only half awake, why they were feeding meat to organic grass. Some police officer in Colorado had just shot his wife’s divorce lawyer twice at close range. He probably had it coming.

From Los Angeles east to Palm Springs is 107 miles on Interstate 10. From East Los Angeles Interchange it’s known as the San Bernardino Freeway as far as that city, running through Monterey Park, San Gabriel, Pomona and Claremont before entering Riverside County, where it crosses the San Gorgonio Pass between the San Bernardino Mountains to the north and the San Jacinto Mountains to the south. Some distance further on it passes by Palm Springs, Rancho Mirage and Palm Desert and keeps going all the way to Jacksonville in Florida.

Just east of White Water I noticed the wind turbines coming into view up on the left side as I drove through the long and windy pass. You couldn’t miss them, there seemed to be thousands, installed over the previous few years, with thousands more to come. I’d never seen anything like it before, though I understood their scientific function. Their principal function, the President later explained to me, was to make money in the form of subsidies for the people who’d bought ownership in them. The net result was that the state made a substantial loss. To left and right the mountains rise to 10,000 feet.

I stopped off the highway at a drive-in joint for a drink. No Australian, to the best of my knowledge, had conducted a face-to-face, one-on-one interview with an American President or ex-President in his own home. Gerald Ford had agreed to it as a friend of Malcolm Fraser, the subject about whom I was carrying out far-flung inquiries. I admired much of what I’d gleaned about Ford, thirty-eighth President of the United States (1974–77), a moderate Republican whose political roots lay deep in the American isolationist tradition, though the Second World War converted him to a constructive form of internationalism. He never created or exacerbated an international conflict. I admired his pardoning of Richard Nixon because the alternative would have been too reminiscent of countries like Pakistan where they put their ex-Presidents on trial and even hang them.

When Ford was House Minority Leader Lyndon Johnson said of him, “Jerry Ford’s so dumb he can’t fart and chew gum at the same time” (the press changed it to “walk and chew gum”), and on another occasion quipped that Ford had spent too much time playing football without a helmet. These comments were prompted by Ford’s opposition to Johnson’s policies in Vietnam where, as he liked to point out, there was no clearly conceived end-game. Big problem, that. Although he slipped and stumbled once or twice during his presidency, Ford had been a star football player in his college days so he couldn’t have been inherently clumsy. He had a reputation for honesty and kindliness. 

Ford’s parents split up two weeks after his birth (July 14, 1913) when his father walked out. This trumps Sir Ninian Stephen, whose father didn’t walk out until three weeks after his birth. In both cases, to this apparently cruel blow of fate all that followed was fortunately owed, for change one major thing and everything changes. With his mother Ford moved to Michigan, growing up in Grand Rapids. Through the early 1930s he was at the University of Michigan, working nights to put himself through. In 1938 he was accepted into the Yale University Law School from which he graduated LLB in 1941. Meanwhile he had been working as part of Wendell Willkie’s 1940 Republican presidential campaign.

On September 4, 1940, Gerald Ford was one of the four foundation signatories to a petition designed to enforce the Roosevelt Administration’s 1939 Neutrality Act. Along with fellow Yale law students Sargent Shriver (who later married John F. Kennedy’s sister Eunice, served in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and ran for Vice-President in the 1972 campaign of George McGovern), Potter Stewart (later on the Supreme Court), and R. Douglas Stuart Jr (Quaker Oats heir), Gerald Ford founded the America First Committee which at its peak had close to a million paid-up members. This was the pre-eminent anti-interventionist, anti-war movement in America, and it enjoyed wide support far beyond its impressive membership size. Charles Lindbergh was their chief spokesman; other prominent supporters, who came from both right and left, included the novelist Sinclair Lewis, the poet E.E. Cummings, Gore Vidal and Walt Disney.

When the bombing of Pearl Harbor forced FDR’s declaration of war on Japan, followed by Germany’s declaration of war on the United States, Ford enlisted in the Navy and saw active service in the Western Pacific on board the light aircraft carrier USS Monterey (CVL-26). On December 18–19, 1944, this ship along with others in the Third Fleet under Admiral Halsey was hit by a typhoon that sank three destroyers and caused a fire on board the Monterey when aircraft tore free from their cables and collided with one another. As the carrier tossed in the storm Ford lost his footing, slid towards the edge of the deck and was saved only by a two-inch-high perimeter ridge, enough to stop his slide.

He entered Congress in 1949 and sat in the House of Representatives for twenty-five years, becoming its Minority Leader at the beginning of 1965. When Spiro Agnew resigned as Vice-President in 1973, Nixon chose Ford to replace him, and when Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974, Ford succeeded him, the only man ever to have become President without having been elected to either that office or the Vice-Presidency. A month later he granted the Nixon pardon, and in the view of most observers time has vindicated that action. Ford also opened the way to pardons for draft dodgers who had fled abroad during the Vietnam War, and he granted a full pardon to Tokyo Rose (Iva Toguri D’Aquino), whose postwar conviction for treason had been shown to be based on false evidence. Though over two-thirds of the House was Democratic and opposed to some of his key foreign policy measures, he successfully pushed ahead with a balanced Middle East policy that produced the Sinai Interim Agreement.

Ford married Elizabeth Bloomer Warren, divorcée, former model and professional dancer, in 1948 during his first run for the House, and they remained very close until his death. She told a reporter that the one question no newspaperman had ever asked her was, “How often do you have sex?” and that the answer would have been, “As often as possible”. One of the impressive things about her was how she turned her problems around, in the process helping others face the same issues—she enormously increased awareness of breast cancer in the United States following her mastectomy, and part of her way of dealing with her alcoholism and drug dependency was to establish the Betty Ford Clinic in Rancho Mirage to treat people for substance abuse. She campaigned for the Equal Rights Amendment and publicly backed a range of women’s issues from within the Republican White House, her liberal attitudes (which her husband shared) upsetting many of the Party’s social conservatives. At the time of my visit she was working on an account of her own treatment, which was published in 1987.

From the pass it’s a long downhill run into the Coachella Valley, past Palm Springs, and then you take an exit right to Rancho Mirage. Strange name. All this area was desert and sand up to the 1930s. What would later become a desirable resort grew out of the Annenberg or Sunnylands Estate after the Second World War when the place was known as “the eleven-mile spot” and attracted the kind of names that drew ever-increasing numbers: Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers. These and other prominent personalities made their homes out here, or rather one of their homes, partly to escape the smog of Los Angeles, at least on weekends. For some reason Clark Gable and Jean Harlow liked the place before it had become so much as a village. Summers are hot, up to 120 degrees, but this was winter so it was mildly warm. There were around 8000 inhabitants when I was there in 1986. The Cahuilla Indians had lived out here in the open desert for hundreds of years, and one of the attractions for them was the hot springs. The Spanish called it Agua Caliente.

After turning off I-10 I made for the Thunder­bird Country Club, the first eighteen-hole golf course in the Coachella Valley (1951), where the thirteenth hole is overlooked by the 1970s single-storey, ranch-style Ford house at 40471 Sand Dune Road, modest by Presidential standards (just sixty-three squares) and in that respect reflecting the Fords themselves. They had moved here following his defeat in the 1976 election, but he had played golf in Rancho Mirage since the 1960s. I turned off the street and into the compound, got out and was shown into his office, where we shook hands and he invited me to sit down beside his desk. He wore an open-necked shirt under his jacket, and cord trousers if I rightly recall. Resuming his seat behind the desk, he leaned back and in the process swung his feet up and onto it. “Excuse me having my feet up here, but I have arthritic knees,” he explained, “and if I don’t give them a rest they don’t operate.” He said he’d been playing golf with Bob Hope, and that a few days later he’d be playing in the pro-am section of the Bob Hope Classic, so he had to go easy on his knees—too many swings had almost done for them.

I had envisaged that my conversation with Ford would revolve around his impressions of Fraser’s foreign policy, but it quickly developed into an exposition of Ford’s own policies on China and the Soviet Union combined with polite criticism of Fraser’s attitudes. In the process I learned something about the difference between global and merely regional responsibility. A kind of moral animus against the Soviet Union was something Fraser could afford to indulge, within his responsibility-light geopolitical thinking (he was free of any moral animus against China on the other hand). To Ford that kind of animus was counter-productive, just a hindrance to realistic agreements. Realpolitik was the only credible approach to great-power relations in a world packed with the obscenity of nuclear weapons—realpolitik à la Henry Kissinger, whom Nixon had had the genius to choose as his chief foreign-policy adviser, and whom Ford had the sense to keep on. Since 1983 Fraser has himself become increasingly cold-blooded on international issues (aside from “refugees”).

We didn’t spend much time on the Dismissal and its consequences. Ford told me:

My recollection is that we were favourably inclined, not that we had bad relations with the Whitlam government, but our feeling was that the economic policies, the defence policies, the foreign policy of the new government would be more compatible with my administration in Washington.

I mentioned Fraser’s view that the Soviets had never been serious about détente, and his strong belief, particularly during the Carter years, that the West should have been building up its force levels in the face of increasing Soviet levels.

It was more complicated than that, Ford told me, though he agreed with the criticism of Carter’s policy. The USSR had been serious about détente during Nixon’s and Ford’s administrations and real progress could have been achieved had he been given a second term.

“Let me go back a bit,” he said.

When Nixon was President that was sort of a peak of détente. We signed a number of agreements with the Soviet Union that included SALT I [Strategic Arms Limitation Talks I] and an anti-satellite program. Then of course the problem expanded with the deterioration of the situation in Vietnam and allegations that the Soviet Union was in violation of SALT I, etc, and there was growing unrest in the United States as to our relations with the Soviet Union—the more conservative element in the United States in particular. In my administration I finally stopped using the word “détente”. I thought it was misunderstood. As a word it didn’t mean anything to the vast majority of the American people.

     So I stopped using it even though I personally believed that the United States and the Soviet Union ought to have a continuous dialogue with the full recognition that there are issues which are more or less unsolvable but there are other issues on a global or regional level where there can be progress made, and that you ought to seek, through dialogue, to exploit any breakthroughs that might take place. And I happen to believe that my Administration could have achieved a SALT II agreement with the Soviet Union following my Vladivostok negotiations with Brezhnev if I had been elected.

This was in reference to their talks of November 1974, detailed in Ford’s book A Time to Heal (1979). The first Strategic Arms Limitation Agreement, reached in May 1972, was due to expire in 1977, and the Vladivostok talks were intended to secure a more permanent and wide-ranging accord—“to put a cap on the arms race and further the chances for a lasting peace”, as Ford put it. Ford and Brezhnev struck up a particularly warm relationship and an agreement on the most substantial issue was indeed reached: 2400 ballistic missiles for each country, with no more than 1320 on each side MIRVed; this meant the USSR would reduce its missiles by around 300. Some issues remained unresolved, including the B1 bomber then in development and production of the Trident submarine.

“We had achieved about a 95 per cent agreement at Vladivostok,” Ford told me,

and if I had been elected, through negotiations with the Soviet Union and through dialogue we could have accomplished a SALT II agreement that Congress would have ratified in 1977. Now, when Mr Carter came in he abandoned the negotiating posture that I had taken on the SALT II and threw a new proposal to the Soviet Union which was totally different, and when you shift gears on the Soviets 180 degrees it upsets them, they don’t understand it. That really created a roadblock in Soviet–United States relations.

So in Ford’s view the Soviet Union was not responsible here, it was the Carter administration that had derailed the train. Ford’s perspective, informed by his own negotiating experience and subsequent close observation of things, was diametrically opposed to Fraser’s anti-Soviet, Cold-War reflex on the matter: 

Well, then the Carter administration, after seeing the mistake they’d made, went back to almost the proposal that I had suggested, but unfortunately in the meantime they had cut back on certain strategic weapons, cancelled the B1 bomber, and so they were negotiating more or less the same deal I tried to promote but had cut back our military capabilities.

     Now Malcolm, I guess, was upset with, or certainly non-supportive of détente as he understood it. I never really knew whether he objected to it on the surface or really objected to the process. The process of negotiation I think is sound, and if I were president today I would still pursue the process of trying to resolve regional or global problems with the Soviet Union. The difference is, I would insist on having a fully adequate military capability in case we weren’t able to make progress. That’s the distinction between Carter and Ford. We insisted that our military capability be sufficient to meet any contingency while at the same time you’re proceeding with diplomatic initiatives.

I raised another point of geopolitical interest, again one where Ford’s views turned out to be very different from Fraser’s, that emerged out of the first overseas trip Fraser made as Prime Minister, to China in mid-1976, shortly before he visited the United States for discussions with Ford’s administration. In China, Fraser had been regaled in a manner Whitlam never had been, because Fraser made no secret of his animosity towards the Soviet Union (Whitlam, by contrast, had gone so far in his positive approach to the USSR as to formally recognise its 1940 annexation of the Baltic states). In China, Fraser was outspokenly supportive of the Chinese in their arguments with Moscow, was shown around strategic military installations, and witnessed a demonstration of firepower put on by the Peking military garrison’s division outside the capital. He was reported to be toying with the idea of a four-power agreement (“pact” the newspapers called it), including some military element, which would tie together the United States, Japan, China and Australia.

I asked Ford whether Fraser had ever discussed this idea with him, and what he thought of it. Did he think it originated as a Chinese idea they wanted Fraser to raise in Washington, or was it just Fraser’s idea?

“I do not feel that the Chinese were using Malcolm,” Ford replied. 

I say that because we—my administration—had developed very good relations with the Deng Xiaoping regime in China. When I visited Deng Xiaoping in 1975 I was greatly impressed with him. Almost immediately thereafter he was dumped, put out to pasture so to speak, but he came back, and I was and still am a great admirer of Deng Xiaoping. I think he’s done a fantastic job with China. And our relations vis-à-vis China at that time were excellent. We agreed that we didn’t have to have a military alliance, it was better just to have excellent relations without becoming too closely tied in a military sense. If China and the United States had become that closely tied it might, in a strange way, have been counter-productive in both countries’ dealings with the Soviet Union. It’s better for us both to have similar views vis-à-vis the Soviet Union but not necessarily to be tied together in the expression of those views or the execution of those views.

So we understood what Malcolm was trying to promote, but from our point of view a four-power arrangement, number one, would have been most difficult to achieve bearing in mind the Chinese attitudes, bearing in mind the military problems that exist in Japan, with their limitation of one per cent of GNP on what they can expend on the army, navy and air force etc, I don’t think that would ever have been practical to achieve; but secondly, I’m not sure it would have been in the best interests in carrying out what we believed was a good relationship with China on the one hand and a good relationship with the Soviet Union on the other.

We discussed a wide range of other issues including trade negotiations, but the discussion on strategic issues was the most revealing, and what it revealed was the problems inherent in the attitudes being articulated by Fraser.

Ford liked Fraser and knew him well through the meetings of the American Enterprise Institute World Forum that Ford established in 1982 that brought together, at Vail in Colorado, a range of former and current world leaders and prominent business figures for discussions on political and economic issues. Ford hosted these meetings and Fraser attended a number of them, each one lasting a week or so.  

We enjoy [Fraser’s] company. We have a lot of things in common. I’ve heard some people say at the World Forum that he talks a little too long. He gets started on something and he’ll take ten minutes for what he could say in five. I think that’s unfortunately a habit that too many politicians have. But he’s knowledgeable, he’s articulate, he’ll fight hard on a point. He’s very concerned about the world monetary system, the free market in currencies etc. He has a sound view on world trade, strong views on GATT. Good broad perspectives.

At the time, Fraser was a member of an Eminent Persons’ Group trying to bring the African National Congress and other outlawed opposition forces in South Africa into a dialogue with the government. Ford disagreed with Fraser’s hard-line support of international sanctions. 

Yes, he told me he was going to be spending some time on that project. My only comment on South Africa would be, and I say it sadly, you have an immovable object faced with a train that’s coming down the track. Immovable object, irresistible force. No solution. It’s sad. I think we’re all opposed to apartheid, I am, but I honestly don’t see how total divestiture of American interests in South Africa is going to help one black person get a better education, a better house and a better job. We’ve got to find some way to convince the government there to find a better solution than the existing circumstances. I’m not an expert, but I don’t see how sanctions are producing affirmative results.

In this instance Ford’s perspective proved flawed, as it turned out to be external pressure more than anything else that forced the immovable object to move.

That night on a midnight flight to Jacksonville I played the hour-long recording back through my earphones, thinking how Ford kept things in perspective, and how important that has to be in such an office. He had remained true to the best within the early heritage of his political journey, and back in 1986 it would not have surprised me to know that eighteen years into the future he would criticise George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, an action heavily influenced by ideologues, some with theoretical roots in Trotsky of all people, who thought the world could be remade in America’s image. “Well, I can understand the theory of wanting to free people,” Ford would say in 2004 in reference to a statement by Bush that the United States had a “duty to free people”. But it was another matter entirely, in Ford’s view, “whether you can detach that from obligation number one, of what’s in our national interest. And I just don’t think we should go hellfire damnation around the globe ‘freeing people’ unless it is directly related to our national security.” (Washington Post, December 28, 2006, embargoed interview of 2004 reported by Bob Woodward following Ford’s death.)

Today Ford’s long-held anti-interventionist views find their counterparts not only within the Obama administration but also among the Republican Party’s grass-roots “Tea Party” section, where Bush-era ideologues and their latter-day holdouts like John McCain have little persuasive force. There are still predictable pressures in an interventionist direction from elements within two or three of the big think-tanks, but the priority to “rebuild America first” has such wide support now on both sides of the party divide that it’s hard to see it changing, especially when the economy is taken into account.