Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [102]
I thought we might have something of an opportunity if we invited America’s most innovative thinkers to meet with Ford to discuss major issues that were sometimes lost in the day-to-day details of being president. Dr. Robert Goldwin, a former dean of St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, who had served with me when I was at NATO, agreed to come back to the White House to serve as a special consultant to the President. Dubbed the administration’s intellectual in residence, Goldwin arranged meetings for Ford with leaders from academia on topics ranging from welfare, unemployment, and crime to global hunger.*
The President engaged in the discussions Goldwin arranged with enthusiasm and insight. Ford’s open and friendly manner, combined with the fact that he did not have a conniving bone in his body, caused him to suffer unfairly from suggestions that he was dumb. Or, as Lyndon Johnson once put it, “That’s what happens when you play football too long without a helmet.”41 But that most certainly was not the case. Ford was a graduate of the University of Michigan and Yale Law School. He had served on the House Appropriations Committee for twenty-three years and had an encyclopedic knowledge of the federal budget.
In light of the caricatures of Ford that were gaining traction in the press, I thought Ford needed to give the American people a sense of the direction he wanted to take the country.42 What did he want his presidency to be about? What were his policies and priorities? If Ford didn’t seize the initiative to define his presidency, I feared that others were going to define it for him.
Cornelius Crane Chase was the son of a Manhattan book editor and a concert pianist. When he was a youngster he was expelled from two private schools, and he worked odd jobs, such as cab driver, motorcycle messenger, busboy, and produce manager. But it was as a television performer that Cornelius Chase, better known by his nickname Chevy, found his calling. Chase became a nationwide celebrity for his humorous caricature of President Ford as a well-meaning but clumsy oaf who couldn’t seem to get anything right. Chase’s popular parody on Saturday Night Live did damage to the President’s image throughout his presidency. Even though Ford and others on the staff tried to laugh it off, the attacks hurt politically.
The episode that cemented that aspect of the President’s image occurred when we were on a trip to Salzburg, Austria, in June 1975 to meet with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. As Air Force One arrived at the airport, it was raining. The mobile steps that had been wheeled up to aircraft’s door had not been fitted with nonskid safety strips. As the President and Mrs. Ford exited the plane, a crew member handed the President an umbrella. Ford took the umbrella with one hand and thoughtfully took Betty’s arm with his other. This, of course, meant Ford did not have a hand on a railing.
Joyce and I were exiting the same stairs behind them when I saw the President slip and fall down the last few steps. Ford bounced up quickly, but that hardly mattered. I knew the widely televised stumble was going to be a disaster. The picture of Ford’s fall appeared on page one of what seemed like every newspaper in the world and was replayed on television over and over again. In the face of this embarrassment, Ford could have blamed any number of people. But Ford, true to form, wasn’t mad at anyone but himself. The Salzburg stumble was, of course, a gift to Chevy Chase. “He [Ford] had never been elected…so I never felt that he deserved to be there to begin with,” Chase later said. “That was just the way I felt then as a young man and as a writer and a liberal.”43
The truth was that Ford was very likely the best athlete to serve in the modern presidency. As president, he swam regularly, played golf, and was an accomplished skier and an aggressive tennis player. He had a bad knee from his football days, and like all of us, he stumbled from time to time. Unfortunately when he stumbled, it was for all the