Unpub­lished tapes, doc­u­ments shed light on the deep rela­tion­ship between them

Bob Wood­ward
WASHINGTON POST

Wash­ing­ton — Months before Richard Nixon set Michi­gan con­gress­man Ger­ald Ford on the path to the White House, Nixon turned to Ford, who called him­self the embat­tled president’s “only real friend,” to get him out of trouble.

Dur­ing one of the dark­est days of the Water­gate scan­dal, Nixon secretly con­fided in Ford, at the time the House minor­ity leader. He begged for help. He com­plained about fair-weather friends and swore at per­ceived rivals in his own party. “Tell the guys, god­damn it, to get off their ass and start fight­ing back,” Nixon pleaded with Ford in one call recorded by the president’s secret tap­ing system.

And Ford did. “Any­time you want me to do any­thing, under any cir­cum­stances, you give me a call, Mr. Pres­i­dent,” he told Nixon dur­ing that May 1, 1973, con­ver­sa­tion. “We’ll stand by you morn­ing, noon and night.”

This and other pre­vi­ously unpub­lished tran­scripts of their calls, doc­u­ments and per­sonal let­ters pro­vide a por­trait of an intensely per­sonal friend­ship dat­ing to the late 1940s but so hid­den that few oth­ers were even aware of it. Until now, the rela­tion­ship between the two pres­i­dents has been por­trayed largely as a mat­ter of polit­i­cal neces­sity, with Nixon tap­ping Ford for the vice pres­i­dency in late 1973 because he was a con­firmable choice on Capi­tol Hill.

But the tapes, doc­u­ments and two lengthy recent inter­views with Ford before his death this week, con­ducted for a future book and unpub­lished until after his death, show that the close polit­i­cal alliance between the two men seri­ously influ­enced Ford’s even­tual deci­sion to par­don Nixon, the most momen­tous deci­sion of his short pres­i­dency and almost cer­tainly the one that cost him any chance of win­ning the White House in his own right two years later. Ford became pres­i­dent on Aug. 9, 1974; he par­doned Nixon just a month later.

“I think that Nixon felt I was about the only per­son he could really trust on the Hill,” Ford said dur­ing the 2005 interview.

Ford returned the feeling.

“I looked upon him as my per­sonal friend. And I always trea­sured our rela­tion­ship. And I had no hes­i­tancy about grant­ing the par­don, because I felt that we had this rela­tion­ship and that I didn’t want to see my real friend have the stigma,” Ford said in the interview.

That acknowl­edg­ment rep­re­sents a sig­nif­i­cant shift from Ford’s pre­vi­ous por­tray­als of the par­don that absolved Nixon of any Watergate-related crimes. In ear­lier state­ments, Ford had empha­sized the deci­sion as an effort to move the coun­try beyond the par­ti­san divi­sions of the Water­gate era, play­ing down the per­sonal dimension.

A key win­dow into their close friend­ship and polit­i­cal alliance was that May 1973 call. It was the day after Nixon had gone on tele­vi­sion to announce the res­ig­na­tions of his two top aides, H.R. “Bob” Halde­man and John Ehrlich­man, and the Water­gate cover-up was unrav­el­ing. The pres­i­dent knew it and was eager for Ford’s reas­sur­ance that his polit­i­cal sit­u­a­tion on Capi­tol Hill was not as grave as it seemed.

“You’ve got a hell of a lot of friends up here,” Ford told him, “both Repub­li­can and Demo­c­rat, and don’t worry about any­body being sun­shine sol­diers or sum­mer patriots.”

“Well, never Jerry Ford,” Nixon replied. “But if you could get a few con­gress­men and sen­a­tors to speak up and say a word, for Christ’s sakes.”

Ford was played a copy of that tape in 2005. Although the exis­tence of Nixon’s secret tap­ing sys­tem had been pub­licly dis­closed in 1973, no such tapes of Ford had come to pub­lic atten­tion, and the for­mer pres­i­dent seemed stunned. “I remem­ber vividly that,” he said, recall­ing how Nixon often turned to him to get things done on the Hill. He added that he con­sid­ered him­self to be Nixon’s “only real friend.”

At times, their friend­ship was the gos­sipy sort, as two long­time politi­cians sorted through the Wash­ing­ton rumor mill. They were so com­fort­able with each other that they openly traded nasty per­sonal assess­ments of others.

On April 6, 1971, for exam­ple, Nixon called Ford to find out what was going on with House Major­ity Leader Hale Boggs, D-La. Boggs had just taken to the House floor say­ing that FBI Direc­tor J. Edgar Hoover was reg­u­larly wire­tap­ping mem­bers of Con­gress, and Nixon wanted to know why Boggs was going public.

“He’s nuts,” Ford told Nixon in the call picked up by Nixon’s secret taping.

“He’s on the sauce,” Nixon said, sug­gest­ing the major­ity leader was drink­ing. “Isn’t that it?”

In their per­sonal cor­re­spon­dence, extend­ing over decades, the two men con­veyed a sense of per­sonal bond that went beyond pub­lic niceties, demon­strated in dozens of let­ters in Ford’s con­fi­den­tial files that he allowed a reporter to review and copy.

Their friendly notes to each other con­tin­ued until not long before Nixon’s death in 1994. In 1978, for exam­ple, Nixon wrote to buck up Ford after Ford’s for­mer press sec­re­tary wrote a tell-all mem­oir, “It Sure Looks Dif­fer­ent From the Inside,” in which he gave details of Betty Ford’s addic­tion to alco­hol and var­i­ous med­ica­tions. “Dear Jerry, I thought Ron Nessen’s com­ments on Betty were con­temptible. Tell Betty her many friends won’t believe him and for her few ene­mies — The hell with them. Sin­cerely, Dick.”