Alt-history: Ford chooses a different Veep in 1974

Per Jeff Toobin's solid "The Pardon," new President Gerald Ford had three people he was considering as vice president in late summer 1974. The first was Rocky, his actual choice, who was already supporting a Nixon pardon, Toobin notes. The second? Wiki says it was Howard Baker, not even mentioned by Toobin, who lists Rogers Morton, John Rhodes and Bill Brock as others in the top five along with ...

Poppy Bush.

Not a semi-wingnut like Reagan, Bush nonetheless was conservative enough, and had moved enough to the right in the previous half-dozen years, that he would have been "palatable" to the conservative wing of the GOP in a way Rockefeller was not. Hold on to that.

If Ford still loses in 1976, nonetheless, Bush is in a better position for 1980 than he was in reality.

That said, remember Ford dropped Rocky in 1976 and replaced him with Bob Dole to shore up relations with conservatives after Reagan's strong challenge. What if having Bush there all along lets Ford defeat Reagan earlier and not kowtow? Maybe he wins.

Relevant to Toobin's book, what if Bush cautions Ford to hold off? He was head of the RNC at the time, and could have offered Ford advice in that direction. Maybe that, too, eventually releasing a pardon shortly after the midterms, which helps Ford's 1975-76 agenda, helps him win.

With Ford in for a full term, maybe there's no Iranian hostage situation.

Bush holds off Reagan making another run in 1980 and Reaganism is dead.

I do not think Reagan would have accepted a Ford offer. That would have precluded his run in 1976, for all practical purposes, and would have left him in a different position in 1980, especially after a Ford win. 

That said, Wiki says Howard Baker was Ford's third option, not Reagan. 

Baker would have been problematic if his ex parte conversations with Nixon ever came to light. 

Alternative history: Nixon picks Rocky or Ronnie, not Jerry

In 1973, after Ted Agnew resigned as Nixon's Veep as part of his plea deal on his income tax evasion charges, Tricky Dick was the first president — and the only to date, of course — to exercise the portion of the 25th Amendment on filling a vice presidential vacancy.

We know he eventually picked Jerry Ford, of course.

But, he had two options besides that.

One was Nelson Rockefeller and the other was Ronald Reagan.

(Note: While my first counterfactual about Reagan running for the presidency was influenced by Bob Spitz's new Reagan bio, linked there, this one popped into mind several weeks ago when recently I read Evan Thomas' Nixon bio of a couple of years back.)

First, the actual history. How likely was Reagan to get it?

Not very.

Nixon still thought of him as an intellectual lightweight, just as he did at Bohemian Grove in 1967, when both were there and Nixon had the first inkling that California's new governor might run in 1968 for the presidency. Nixon retained that feeling into the 1980s, bombarding Reagan with Cabinet nomination and foreign policy suggestions. (Nixon strongly opposed George Schultz at State, which is part of why Reagan chose Al Haig for the spot originally; when Haig left, he smartly ignored Nixon the second time around.)

Ford was Nixon's favorite if nothing else for the reason that Nixon thought Congress would never think Ford capable of being president and thus wouldn't impeach him. WHY Nixon thought the man who had risen to be House Minority Leader would be thought incapable, Nixon never said, to the best of my knowledge.

Of the two who finished in the cold? Nixon personally liked Rocky, and thought better of him temperamentally, than Ronnie. But, he thought Congress would think Rocky could very much be president, and thus he would not be a counterweight, unlike what Nixon thought of Ford.

Anyway, to the counterfactual.

Nixon nominates Reagan. Congress knows he's an even more ardent Nixonite, if anything, than Ford. It knows his reputation as a hands-off governor. But it still hopes at this time that he won't be elevated to the top spot, and it knows he has no real ethics issues. He's confirmed no sweat.

Then, we get to Aug. 9, 1974, with actual history proceeding normally, and Ronald Wilson Reagan becomes the 38th, not the 40th, U.S. president. What happens?

First, at least as soon, if not sooner, than Ford did, he pardons Nixon. And does so with more unseemly language, claiming Nixon was victim of a witch-hunt, etc. This backfires with him even more than Ford's pardon did in reality.

Second, while not totally in the grip of voodoo economics, unlike 1980, he already is willing to listen to nutbar ideas in the dismal semi-science. He thinks a tax cut will help, which it might due to Keynesian reasons. He also thinks the budget needs to be balanced. He also also thinks that Nixon and Kissinger have been coddling the Russkies, that we need to stop SALT II, that we need to ramp up defense spending, and that we need to look at revising, or even jettisoning the ABM.

Reagan has no moderating James Baker as chief of staff. Nancy does get somebody better than Ed Meese to officially be in charge of day-to-day operations, but Meese, as in 1981 and beyond, is the eminence grise. In early 1975, Kissinger resigns, or is pushed.

This opens the floodgates to GOP challengers, who perceive Reagan as unbalanced, as having forfeited any honeymoon, and as politically vulnerable, as well as a possible boat anchor to Republican hopes. Bob Dole, Howard Baker and George H.W. Bush all jump in. So does the more moderate Charles Percy.

Reagan's old comments on making Social Security at least partially voluntary get dredged up in the media. Reagan "obligingly" doubles down on this shortly before the New Hampshire primary, served by a second-rate, and only quasi-official, campaign staff. (John Sears, having been given an advance tip to keep his powder dry and wait for official word, runs Percy's campaign when he announces.)

Reagan, though otherwise popular in New Hampshire, sees support crumble, with semi-next door Dole having already won (by plurality) the Iowa caucuses, followed by Percy, which has prompted other more moderate Republicans, like Charles Mathias, to either look at running or unifying behind Percy, the tacit candidate of the Rockefeller wing. Republican governors Bill Milliken and Jim Rhodes also make noises about favorite son candidacies.

Reagan can't get all the hardcore New Hampshire conservatives behind him. He does nail down Gov. Meldrim Thompson, but Dole, fresh off Iowa, convinces publisher-kingmaker William Loeb to, if not endorsing him, to at least offer no official endorsement.

Reagan wins by plurality in New Hampshire, but fails to break 30 percent. Dole and Percy both run strongly, followed by Baker. Bush, perceived as quasi-moderate at this time, can't break 10 percent, but vows to stay on until Texas.

Percy appears to have the Massachusetts primary wrapped up, and likely Vermont. Others won't contest his Illinois. So, focus goes to Florida, on March 9, and North Carolina, on March 23. Baker convinces Floridians he's the new moderate-conservative southern Republican that's needed, even as a counterweight to the surging Jimmy Carter. He wins there by plurality, with Dole and Percy in an essential draw for second. Reagan's Social Security comments have him finishing even behind Bush.

Reagan, with his Irish up, still hopes to pull out another win in North Carolina. But, despite Jesse Helms' backing, Baker does what he did in Florida. Dole is third and Bush fourth, with Percy focusing on April's Wisconsin race and beyond.

On March 31, 1976, eight years after LBJ did the same, Reagan withdraws.

Percy wins Wisconsin by majority and Pennsylvania by plurality. Bush finishes second to Baker in Texas, narrowly ahead of Dole. Dole pulls an upset in Indiana, edging both Percy and Baker. Baker wins Georgia.

Bush withdraws, and it's essentially a three-person race, outside of possible favorite sons.

With most primaries now leaving the South and going to the Midwest and West, Dole eyes making up ground, and he does.

However, Percy, with Dole and Baker splitting conservatives, takes winner-take-all California by plurality, enough to push him over the top for the nomination.

He names Baker his Veep choice.

Moderate to moderate-conservative Republicanism is rescued. Percy narrowly beats Carter in 1976, but winds up a one-term president. Presumably, the Shah's health, a Carter-like response by Percy, and the taking of hostages play out as they did in actuality.

Why did Ford pardon Nixon?

I reject ideas of any conspiracy between Jerry Ford and Dick Nixon in the last few days before Nixon's resignation, that Ford would someday pardon him as part of the step-down.

That said, I don't buy Ford's narrative about "national healing," and while accepting Jerry terHorst's line that "national healing" was bullshit when Ford wouldn't pardon Vietnam draft avoiders at the same time, I think that there's still a backstory that ter Hoorst may not have thought about.

It related to a new biography of Nino Scalia, who headed the Ford Administration Office of Legal Counsel. Specifically, it relates to his attempt to hide Nixon's presidential papers from outside purview.

Suppose there is no pardon, and Nixon goes on trial. And, some presidential papers — or White House tapes — somehow come out at trial. Or even without electromagnetic or paper trails available, it still comes out at trial.

What if we find out that Ford, pre-vice presidential nomination, had discussions with Nixon plotting House GOP strategy to spin Watergate? What if, as part of that, we find out that Ford knew more, pre-vice presidency, about Watergate than he told the public — or than he told Congress in his confirmation hearings?

And, what if this comes out before the 1976 general election?

So, without any "deal" with Nixon, Jerry Ford may still have had some "good" reasons to pardon Nixon.

We may never know. I half-read, half-skimmed — and generally disliked — John Dean's new book on the "complete" Nixon tapes. But, again, they don't cover every waking moment of Nixon's presidential life. And, Dean's book ends with July 16, 1973, other than a "summary" chapter beyond that. That's three months before Spiro Agnew resigned.

#Watergate: Jerry Ford proved his political ineptitude 40 years ago today

Lydon Johnson had a number of cracks about Gerald Ford, including that he had played football without a helmet too much.

Well, I am reminded of that today, as this is the 40th anniversary of Ford pardoning his predecessor, Richard Nixon, for crimes he may have committed in relation to Watergate. I'm old enough to remember the actual announcement, and the controversy, as well as both my parents somewhat believing, if not necessarily totally, that Nixon had done was no worse than anything of LBJ (possibly halfway true, on a state-level scale, with Landslide Lyndon of 1948 fame) or Jack Kennedy (probably not so true; both parties committed vote fraud in 1960). That said, neither JFK nor LBJ pulled an Anna Chennault out of their hats, and given that some aspects of Watergate are connected to what Tricky Dick thought LBJ knew, and had on the record, about his Logan Act violations in late October 1968, illegalities that would extend the Vietnam War by several years and kill an extra 20,000 US troops, no, mom and dad, Nixon was far worse.

That said, especially as an adult, with hindsight, I can't figure out why Jerry Ford couldn't at least wait two months until after the midterm elections were past. Even if (unlikely) Nixon was formally indicted before then, no legal proceedings would have started.

The GOP still would have taken a midterms bath, but maybe held 1 or 2 more Senate seats, and 5-7 House seats, than in reality.

And, how could he not think that the general public, and not just Democratic Party PR, would raise questions of Ford entering into a tradeoff with Nixon. Given that we know that resignation crossed Nixon's mind, if but briefly, before the resignation of Spiro Agnew as Veep — with Ford then of course replacing him — the question certainly wasn't illegitimate. In fact, in writing histories of Ford, of Nixon, and of Watergate today, it's still not illegitimate.

That said, this was one of a trifecta of gaffes that sank Ford's 1976 re-election chances.

The swiftness of the pardon kept alive rumors of such a bargain, which in turn helped fuel Jimmy Carter's "clean" campaign. Given the relatively closeness of the race, this magnified Carter's strengths and diminished his weaknesses in the Democratic primaries as well as the general election.

Then, there was Ford's famous "drop dead" to New York City in 1976. Combined with booting Rocky as his Veep, that guaranteed he'd lose New York State.

Add to that the claim that "there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe," in the second presidential debate, and East European "ethnics" in the Rust Belt loosened their allegiance. Ford added to that by stubbornly refusing to admit for several days that he had made a misstatement, offering up the traditional de jure US stance on Eastern European affairs instead of the de facto stance about reality on the ground.

Ford wound up losing Ohio and Pennsylvania as well as New York. Ohio was decided by one-third of one percentage point, and Pennsylvania by less than three percentage points. Ohio plus four other electoral votes (assuming the "faithless elector" from Washington State who voted for Reagan would have gone for Ford) would have given Ford the election. Given that Ford lost Wisconsin, which also has a lot of Eastern European "ethnics," by about 1.75 percentage points, there's the election right there.

Fortieth anniversaries of historic events usually have a few people alive from the original.

The Watergate 40th anniversary events take more life today, as only two principals remain alive.

John Dean, as I noted in my review of his new book, seems as much a liar as 40 years ago, and Gordon Liddy is, if anything, even more mentally unhinged today than then.

The hollowing out of the 'creative class' - including by new media

Working at a newspaper, I can of course attest to this personally. But, it's artists, musicians and others, too, as this excellent Salon column notes. I hadn't don't a blog post in my "dark side of the Internet" series recently, and this piece (h/t Leo Lincourt) makes a good foundation for that.

The reality of this hollowing out?

Some of these employees are young people killing time behind a counter; it’s hard for them, but they will live to fight again. But education, talent and experience — criteria that help define (Richard) Florida’s creative class, making these supposedly valued workers the equivalent of testosterone injections for cities — does not guarantee that a “knowledge worker” can make a real living these days.

“It’s sort of like job growth in Texas,” says Joe Donnelly, a former deputy editor at L.A. Weekly, laid off in 2008 and now pouring savings and the money he made from a home sale into a literary magazine. “Gov. Perry created thousands of jobs, but they’re all at McDonald’s. Now everyone has a chance to make 15 cents. People are just pecking, hunting, scratching the dirt for freelance work. Living week to week, month to month.”

Now, I don't think Florida, or New Urbanism, is/are the antichrist. But, I do think a fair amount of people who buy into his ideas are the same white, Volvo-driving, latte-sipping, Meyer-lemons-for-lemonade-squeezing white liberals who bought into Barack Obama, too.

Here's the nut grafs of this hollowing out:

Optimists like Florida are undoubtedly right about something: This country doesn’t make things anymore and never will. What the United States produces now is culture and ideas. Trouble is, making a living doing this has never been harder.

Wait a minute, says Allison Glock, a magazine journalist and writer who’s just returned to her native South because she and her novelist husband could no longer afford life in New York. “Wasn’t the Internet supposed to bring this class into being?”

Well, yes, theoretically. However, non-Chicago School non-Randian non-economics libertarians underestimated the power of big biz. AOL, though, should have been a wake-up call. But, because blogs offered us all a sliver of "idea space," and the hope of not working for the corporate media man, we "bit."

Problem with that? As Bill Gates notes when saying he thinks we need larger inheritance taxes, a lot of life, for both individuals and movements, is about luck. And timing. And ... per modern terminology ... about bandwidth. (More on that below.)


So, yes, we do need a new Dorothea Lange.


And, no, new media isn't the answer, contra the blogging PR chief for a certain science magazine. After all, Scientific American's parent, Nature Publishing is itself part of an international, monstrous conglomerate that owns Holt, Rinehart, Winston; McMillan; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; and major German publisher S. Fischer, among other things. So, sorry, Bora Zivkovic; working for a multinational corporation that is determined, like similar other multinationals, to use digital rights management laws and other things to extend its dominance from the $3 billion or more in annual sales worldwide isn't exactly "new" from the capitalism side.

More below the fold.

NYT gets dishonest on one-term presidents

In a column about how one-term presidents can still do good, Julian E. Zelizer, who is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton, stacks the deck. And, if he's a Princeton history prof, he knows better.

He focuses on semi-successful to successful one-term presidents to bolster the case that, crappy economy aside, Obama can still make his mark, or whatever.

The only really successful one-term president, whom Zelizer notes, is Polk. He also looks at LBJ, who was indeed successful, if we ignore what he called "that bitch of a war."

From there, third on his list is George H.W. Bush, who gets some credibility for starting to cut the budget deficit and being the last national Republican to care about that.

After that? If you're citing Jimmy Carter, whom these pages have compared to Obama before and vice versa, as an example of a semi-successful one-term president, er, you're flailing. Even more so if you feel compelled to mention Herbert Hoover, whom these pages have also compared to Obama before and vice versa, as another example for Dear Leader.

But, despite the column showing John Adams' pic as the first one-term president, Zelizer doesn't mention him, when his persecution of alien residents and breaking of civil liberties marks him as the first of many bad one-term presidents.

That list would also include Quincy Adams, somewhat Martin Van Buren, John Tyler (at least on political grounds), Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Rutherford Hayes and possibly Benjamin Harrison in the 19th century. In a pre-imperial presidency, mediocre or worse presidents found it harder to use the trappings of office to even get renominated, let alone re-elected.

The 20th century has a few clunkers, too. Harding, certainly. Hoover, despite creating the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, for showing a lack of larger vision. Gerald Ford, starting with his pardon of Dick Nixon.

So, just as Obama set history as the first black man elected president, he can set further history as the first one-term president of the 21st century. Or, if the anecdote MoJo Dowd reports about his work habits is correct, maybe his emulation of Ronald Reagan goes further than we thought.

And, her pick-up is worth noting:

He’s eternally the gifted and sometimes indolent student who has to be wooed and pressured into making the game-winning shot. As one aide joked, “We work 6 to 9 and he works 9 to 6.” 

With a habit like that, the Obama quote Zelizer uses to start his column becomes ... not quite ironic, but maybe zaftig?

“I’d rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president,” President Obama confessed to ABC News’ Diane Sawyer last year. Other than the “really good” part, Republicans would be happy to see this wish fulfilled.

Speaker of the House Thomas B. "Czar" Reed told one Representative who said, "I'd rather be right than be president" that he would be neither. I say the same about Obama's options.

On the coffee table – ‘God in the White House’

Randall Ballmer, though an editor at large at the evangelical “organ,” Christianity Today, is not your stereotypical “conservative knee-jerk Republican evangelical.” Far from it. He’s also a professor of religious history at both Barnard and Columbia, and a visiting professor at Yale.

In short, he knows his stuff. And, in this book, his “stuff” is exposing the hypocrisy and vacuousness of Presidential church-state mixing. While much of his dirt-turning is focused on the GOP presidential side, he doesn’t let Clinton’s religious claims versus some of his actual practices go unscathed, either.

Anyway, to the highlights of the book. Here it is at Amazon.

Jimmy Carter? Likely the most decent, moral and religiously active president of the last 50 years. Yet, ditched by the Religious Right.

And, not because of abortion. But, because the Religious Right wanted segregated Southern private schools to keep tax exempt status, even as they saw the handwriting on the wall for Bob Jones University.

That’s the biggest debunking of conventional wisdom you’ll find in this slim volume.

Normally, I don’t five-star books this size, but, this one is on the 4/5 star border and deserves the bump.

Randall Ballmer does an excellent, nonpartisan job of looking at how faith and presidential politics have mixed from the 1960 campaign, in which John Kennedy defended the right of a Catholic to run for the White House, up through George Bush’s talking about the immorality of abortion without doing anything about it, while claiming moral stature for torture.

That, then, leads to one of two highlights of this book.

Ballmer lists sample questions the mainstream media should have asked presidential candidates of the past, both liberal and conservative politically or religiously, both Democratic and Republican. Specifically, these are follow-up questions the MSM should have asked presidential candidates of the past after particular faith-based statements.

In these sample questions, Ballmer said the MSM should have asked Bush just how he squared abortion talk with lack of action, or how Clinton squared Baptist piety with Monica Lewinsky. That fact, right there, belies one current three-star rater, and others to come, who claim Ballmer doesn’t know what he is talking about just because his definition of “evangelical” isn’t limited to “conservative, Republican-voting evangelical.”

The second special area is major religion-related speeches of modern presidents, from Kennedy’s legendary talk to the Houston Ministerial Association, to LBJ’s “Great Society” speech, on to Ford’s defense — with his mentioning of the role of prayer and faith — in his pardon of Nixon, through Carter’s “crisis of confidence” (NOT “malaise”) speech, Reagan on the Statue of Liberty centennial, Clinton on presenting Billy Graham the Congressional Medal of Honor, and George W. Bush on 9/11.

That said, while I wish the MSM would do just the follow-up work Ballmer cries for, it doesn’t ask that depth of follow-up questions in fields in which it might theoretically have more knowledge, so I’m not holding my breath here.

Thoughts on the passing of Jerry Ford

A. Ford WAS a conservative, or considered so at the time. The goalposts have been moved a fair amount in 30 years, between neocons and the rise of the religious right.

That said, Ford was a decent man.

B. His pardon of Nixon was wrong. Ford started his admin with one foot ethically in the hole. Made it look like a “deal” had been cooked up even if it hadn’t. Made it even look like a deal had been cooked to get Ford the No. 2 job the year before. And, as some other bloggers have noted, it set a precedent for pardoning criminals from the late-Reagan Iran-Contra affair and more.

See the paragraph above. As someone decent, I think Ford really believed the pardon would help more than it hurt, and he miscalculated personally, professionally and politically. AND Nixon showed none of the contrition that Ford originally indicated was a precondition.

C. The Helsinki Accords on human rights in eastern Europe? Half wrong. Perhaps it was the best we could halfway expect out of the half-senile Brezhnev, but we didn’t have to publically tout them. Combine that with Ford's "no domination of Eastern Europe" statement and that probably cost him the election right there.

D. The election. 1976 may not only have marked the end of an era of older, sensible, Gerald Ford and Barry Goldwater-type conservatism, it also was the end of an era of presidential campaigning. You won’t find a race that civil, and that relatively low-dollar, today.