Heel, Boy, Heel

GERALD FORD was nothing more or less than a good-natured lunk, the political equivalent of his friend Joe Garagiola. Lyndon Johnson ventured that Ford played football without a helmet; that jab came to sum up the former Michigan center, who actually played with his helmet, and very well, too--oddly enough, the notoriously clumsy Ford was probably the best athlete of any President of the 20th century. But still a big lunk: that Nixon would make Ford President, after all his yammering about respect for the office, serves as a good index of how far gone that old carpetbagger really was.

Ford's Kiwanis-style banality pervades his autobiography, A Time to Heal, one of the most relentlessly worthless volumes of this, or any other, year. Ford didn't actually write it--a Washington journalist named Trevor Armbrister transcribed taped conversations with Ford and edited them. For his complicitly, Armbrister got raked over the coals when the cash came rolling in: Jerry gave him a taste of Republican austerity. Armbrister deserved it. He captured the full vapidity of Ford's colloquial style--an historical achievement, but a narrative catastrophe. Ford's boring, flat, humorless prose drones on endlessly, like the Great Plains that spawned him:

There were "fringe benefits" to the agent's presence which took on humorous overtones. They kept a daily log tracing the arrival and departure times for every member of the family. As an attractive teenager, Susan had a busy social life. She knew that Betty and I didn't want her staying out after eleven on school nights, but she also eleven on school nights, but she also knew that we'd usually gone to bed by that time and weren't likely to keep close tabs on her. "What time did you get home last night?" I would ask her in the morning. "Oh, early," she'd reply, and normally, that would have been the end of it. But now, with the agent's logs at my disposal, I could say, "Well, I think I'll check on that." And Susan would respond, "Uh-oh, I guess I'm grounded for a week."

This sort of thing is the closest we get to an insiders anecdote, this or something about how much Betty enjoyed choosing the drapes for the East Room. Ford includes none of the inside dope that makes The Best and the Brightest enjoyable reading, nothing about the machinations and power struggles inside the government, or even Betty's boozing, or Jack's affair with Bianca Jagger. The whole book could've been written out of the New York Times. And no real insights into Ford himself, Ford the Man, except for the refrain "I was damn mad" and stories like this:

The Chinese (in June 1972)...had invited me and Democratic Majority Leader Hale Boggs to visit in June with our wives and several members of our staffs. As a youngster I used to dig in the sand on the beaches of Lake Michigan. If I dug deep enough, my mother told me, I'd wind up in China. Now I was actually going to make the trip.

Maybe there's nothing there to have insight into. There's a strong logical presumption that anyone with that much power must lead an interesting life. There's no definitive Nixon biography yet, but the books of Woodward and Bernstein hint at just how fascinating that book could be. There's no definitive LBJ biography yet either, mostly because Bill Moyers won't write it, but his, too, was a big life, a larger-than-life life. But Jerry Ford comes from a different mold--he fell into his job. He made it to the top the way officers advance in the Army: he got along by going along. And that meant being a cipher.

ANYONE WHO READ the news for the last four or five years already knows as much of the substance of Jerry Ford's Presidency as the reader of this book. Ford still defends the pardon of Nixon and the Mayaguez debacle, his acts of mercy and macho, his twin disaster--there is nothing new here. He explains the problems of inflation and the budget and energy, and excuses his lack of imaginative leadership in confronting these problems by calling his Presidency "a time to heal," borrowing from Ecclesiastes. If it actually were a time to heal, that healing called for active therapy, not indolence: Ford led a reign of atrophy. "A time to heal" cannot explain away the nonpareil frivolity of the WIN button (which Ford still defends as a "good idea"); in line with his Calvinistic youth, Ford is begging off his responsibility to a force, in this case history, beyond his control.

George Marshall, that giant of the inchoate American empire, once said. "Never underestimate the American people." In 1976, the American people bounced Gerald Ford on his ear and elected a Bert Lance subsidiary named Jimmy Carter, making Ford the first incumbent to get the Golden Toe since Herbert Hoover. Even they could see the shallowness and stupidity written on Ford's big Labrador face. But Carter? Nixon? Johnson? Kennedy? Maybe they weren't so shrewd. Maybe Gerald Ford, the one they hadn't picked, was the best President that generation ever had. Read 'em and weep.