the last book I ever read (President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier by C. W. Goodyear, excerpt six)

from President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier by C. W. Goodyear:

Now finally glimpsing New Orleans for himself, however, Garfield was smitten. “The thing that strikes a northern man most forcibly is the wonderful vegetation which abounds everywhere,” he wrote. Ferns sprang from cracks in the pavement, while in the garden of his host (a veteran of the Forty-Second, who had evidently decided Sodom wasn’t so bad) Garfield beheld an unimaginable bounty of fruit and flowers: pear, plum, banana, and fig, alongside honeysuckle, jasmine, and twenty types of rose, all within a single acre of land. Manmade structures also drew his interest—the steam-powered waterwheels heaving water toward nearby Lake Pontchartrain, the “curious” French Quarter buzzing with an equally curious, foreign-sounding people.

Yet the scenery could not distract him from noticing and describing the nastier aspects of local society. “You would naturally think that people ought to be very good who live in such a place,” Garfield hinted to his kids. “But… it is unfortunate the people here are not so beautiful as their trees and flowers.” He was more explicit with Crete; Louisiana’s whites, Garfield wrote, “smile in the morning and commit murder at night.”

the last book I ever read (President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier by C. W. Goodyear, excerpt five)

from President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier by C. W. Goodyear:

Paunchy with a dense, dark, mustache, Sickles had already made himself infamous as a man unafraid (proud, even) of taking extreme measures if the moment demanded them. As a congressman in antebellum Washington, he had shot his wife’s lover (the district attorney) dead in the street before pleading temporary insanity. It was the first time such a defense had been pulled off in America. But, post hoc, Sickles did not stick to it. “Of course I intended to kill him,” Sickles admitted to friends. “He deserved it.” The murderer-cuckold later became a Union general. While galloping across Gettysburg, he was clipped in the leg by a Confederate cannonball, shredding the limb below the knee. Sickles had the bones collected in a tiny coffin and sent to museum curators. For years to come, he brought friends to pay respects to the shards on display.

the last book I ever read (President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier by C. W. Goodyear, excerpt four)

from President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier by C. W. Goodyear:

It hit the South especially hard. The region’s industrial base remained brittler than the North’s, and the Panic ensured this would remain the case for the foreseeable future. The Texas and Pacific Railway buckled before almost any track had been laid. Frederick Douglass’s Freedman’s Bank failed, causing millions of dollars in savings deposited by Black Americans to disappear. Nor was agriculture spared: cotton’s price folded in half, causing land values throughout the South to drop precipitously. Such a depression would have been difficult for any ruling party to survive. This was doubly true for the remaining Republican governments of the South; amid the prior year’s great scandals, Reconstruction had once again begun to sputter.

This was most evident in Louisiana. In April 1873 (as Garfield was writing his Salary Grab letter), the Supreme Court ruled against a coalition of New Orleans butchers who were suing the state for violating their Fourteenth Amendment privileges. In disagreeing, the court’s majority gelded the amendment—deciding its privileges and immunities clause only applied to a citizen’s federal rights (like access to waterways), not the more important ones vested by states. Such phrasing effectively ruined the amendment’s ability to provide full citizenship for Black Americans in the south, as the Radicals had drafted it to do.

Almost concurrently, Klansmen killed an assembly of more than one hundred Black and white Republicans, who claimed to represent the lawful government of the settlement of Colfax, Louisiana. The atrocity’s very site had a bleak significance: Colfax was the namesake of Vice President Schuyler Colfax, and it had been built in Grant Parish, named for the president. He reacted furiously. “The so-called conservative papers of the State not only justified the massacre,” Grant seethed in a Senate message, “but denounced as federal tyranny and despotism the attempt of the United States officers to bring them [the perpetrators] to justice.”

Marshals rounded up the killers for prosecution under a precursor to the old Ku Klux Klan Act, but the Supreme Court would again disappoint—ruling that only states, not individuals, could be prosecuted for violating Fourteenth Amendment rights. The murderers walked free, another disastrous legal precedent having been set, and another nail having been put in Reconstruction’s coffin.

the last book I ever read (President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier by C. W. Goodyear, excerpt three)

from President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier by C. W. Goodyear:

Options dwindling, and feeling “bound to do all in my power to save these noble Indians from the mistake they will make if they refuse,” Garfield deliberately circumvented the opposition of the third chief, Charlo. He concluded Charlo would eventually decide to relocate his followers as more whites continued reaching the Bitterroot, anyway, and so wrote a letter advising Secretary of the Interior Delano to have the government proceed as if “all is now in a fair way for satisfactory settlement [in the Bitterroot].”

Despite admiring his counterparts’ “aristocracy of personal prowess,” Garfield assumed by thus disregarding their will he was nudging the Salish toward their best possible destiny in America—one of industry, safe distance from whites, and even suffrage (which he predicted would be Indians’ “salvation”). In practice, however, he was making a crucial contribution to their genocide.

The Department of the Interior would act in accordance with Garfield’s guidance to ignore Charlo’s refusal—even forging the chief’s name on its articles of agreement with the Salish. The subsequent publication of this forgery, per one Montanan official, “created the impression that all trouble was over… and a large white emigration poured into the Bitterroot.” The remaining Salish suffered greatly in the following years; Chief Charlo would understandably refuse to ever trust federal promises again. (“For your Great Father Garfield put my name next to a paper I never signed.”) And yet, it did not matter; an army escort forcibly removed the Bitterroot’s last Salish in 1891.

By that point, Garfield was dead and American history had already cast him as a heroic martyr. The Salish, however, would rightly immortalize him as a great villain of theirs.

the last book I ever read (President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier by C. W. Goodyear, excerpt two)

from President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier by C. W. Goodyear:

Garfield and the draft took mutual possession of each other from that point onward. He practically ran to place it before the House. A bipartisan special committee, swiftly formed, mostly rubber-stamped the plan White sketched out in the Garfield home. One key change was made, however; the committee—headed by Garfield—decided the new authority should be named a “Department.”

This rang as a mighty title for what was, per the fine print, a modest proposal; if Congress went along with Garfield’s pet project, America’s first Department of Education would pop into being as little more than a few statisticians based in Washington—its purpose, to gather educational data from states for distribution among the country’s teachers, academics, and lawmakers. A lone commissioner (retained for a few thousand dollars a year) was to be entrusted with overseeing such work.

Yet Garfield’s speeches defending the measure showed he thought its potential return to be boundless. He made the novel argument that improving the education of citizens was the wisest expenditure a government could make. “A tenth of our national debt expended in public education fifty years ago would have saved us the blood and treasure of the late war,” Garfield told the House in June.

the last book I ever read (President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier by C. W. Goodyear, excerpt one)

from President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier by C. W. Goodyear:

Experienced soldiers had well-founded doubts about such officers; it was hard to put faith in a commander who had bought a uniform yesterday, and whose grasp of military strategy came mostly from borrowed library books. A stereotype soon formed of a small-town politician buckling on a sword, rushing to the frontlines, then hurrying home to trade their brief, dubious service for higher office—as a gambler might cash in a hastily won stack of chips. A name was attached to this caricature: “‘Political general’ became almost a synonym for incompetency, especially in the North,” a historian would judge.

Yet from the instant Garfield learned of the attack on Fort Sumter, he set himself on becoming just such an officer. Nor was Garfield the only politician in Columbus to do so; he and Jacob Cox had a confidential conversation “over the prospects of the country and the future of our own lives.” Recognizing that joining the army would benefit both causes, the pair then divvied up books on battlefield tactics and Napoleonic history—dabbing the finishing touches on an image of two would-be political generals getting to work.

the last book I ever read (Jimmy Carter: The American Presidents Series: The 39th President, 1977-1981, excerpt seven)

from Jimmy Carter: The American Presidents Series: The 39th President, 1977-1981 by Julian E. Zelizer:

Caddell called Jordan at 2:00 a.m. on the morning of the 1980 presidential election. Jordan, initially disoriented, soon realized that Caddell wanted to give him the final poll results. Caddell told Jordan that “it’s all over—it’s gone!” When Jordan asked him to explain what he meant, Caddell responded, “The sky has fallen in. We are getting murdered. All the people that have been waiting and holding out for some reason to vote Democratic have left us.” He somberly predicted, “It’s going to be a big Reagan victory, Ham, in the range of eight to ten points.” He said that it was the “hostage thing” that did them in with “all these last-minute developments about the hostages and all the anniversary stuff just served as a strong reminder that those people were still over there and Jimmy Carter hasn’t been able to do anything about it.”

Although the race had been close until the final week, Reagan won a larger Electoral College total than any other president except for Roosevelt in 1936 and Nixon in 1972. Reagan received 51 percent of the popular vote, with Anderson winning 7 percent and Carter 41 percent. A whopping 489 electoral votes went to the president-elect, as Carter received a meager 49. Carter did not perform well with the traditional Democratic constituencies, including blue-collar workers, Catholics, Jews, and southerners. On the night of the election, Carter admitted, “I spent a major portion of my time trying to recruit back the Democratic constituency that should have been naturally supportive—Jews, Hispanics, blacks, the poor, labor, and so forth.” Carter won only in the District of Columbia, Georgia, Maryland, Hawaii, Rhode Island, and Minnesota. Even New Jersey and Massachusetts went Republican.

the last book I ever read (Jimmy Carter: The American Presidents Series: The 39th President, 1977-1981, excerpt six)

from Jimmy Carter: The American Presidents Series: The 39th President, 1977-1981 by Julian E. Zelizer:

Reagan’s weakest point, immediately seized upon by the Carter campaign, was his proclivity to make embarrassing gaffes. Reagan, who would turn seventy in his first year in office, constaly raised the eyebrows of reporters. During the primaries, he answered “Who?” when Tom Brokaw asked him a question about Giscard d’Estaing, the president of France. He once dismissed questions about his record on environmental legislation by stating that trees were the cause of air pollution. One of Carter’s ads featured Californians telling the camera that they would hate to see Reagan in office, especially, as one person said, with his “ill-formed, shoot-from-the-hip types of comments.”

Carter’s team felt Reagan’s gaffes gave them a significant advantage. Caddell, looking through his most recent polls, sounded uncharacteristically optimistic when he proclaimed that “if Reagan keeps putting his foot in his mouth for another week or so, we can close down campaign headquarters, doubts about him are growing, his lead is shrinking, and more and more people are wondering whether he’s up to the job. If this impression hardens, he’ll be out of the race.”

the last book I ever read (Jimmy Carter: The American Presidents Series: The 39th President, 1977-1981, excerpt five)

from Jimmy Carter: The American Presidents Series: The 39th President, 1977-1981 by Julian E. Zelizer:

On November 4, Iranian students stormed the American embassy in Tehran. They captured over fifty soldiers and diplomats. A hostage crisis had begun. Upon telling the president the situation, Hamilton Jordan—who was struggling against accusations that he had used cocaine at a New York nightclub—predicted that this would be a defining issue for the administration and in the 1980 election.

the last book I ever read (Jimmy Carter: The American Presidents Series: The 39th President, 1977-1981, excerpt four)

from Jimmy Carter: The American Presidents Series: The 39th President, 1977-1981 by Julian E. Zelizer:

The euphoria over the accord faded quickly. By April, when Carter put forth another energy program, the general mood of the country was sour. Approximately 50 percent of the gas stations in the United States did not have fuel and the stations that had fuel were charging prices that were 50 percent more than the year before. Drivers were forced to line up for gas, frequently for over an hour, on specified days.

President Carter’s new energy plan included decontrolling prices and a windfull profits tax on oil companies to finance mass transportation and subsidize fuel for lower-income families. Carter also proposed the development of alternative energy sources and new mechanisms for energy conservation. The plan revolved around the theme of sacrifice: consumers would be forced to accept higher prices and use less energy.

While there was initial support for the plan, opponents quickly mobilized. New England Democrats opposed to higher heating prices in what was a very bitter winter allied with southern Democrats who rejected the windfall profits tax. Many Republicans joined in this coalition. With gas shortages spreading throughout the country, Carter’s proposal for more sacrifice did not sit well with his party.

the last book I ever read (Jimmy Carter: The American Presidents Series: The 39th President, 1977-1981, excerpt three)

from Jimmy Carter: The American Presidents Series: The 39th President, 1977-1981 by Julian E. Zelizer:

During the summer and fall, trouble was also brewing in Iran. The tense history of U.S.-Iranian relations dated back to 1953. The CIA had played a pivotal role in a coup against the democratically elected government of Mohammad Mossadegh, which had developed ties to the Soviet Union. The United States sought to install a regime that would be sympathetic to Western interested and helped put into place the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The shah’s strong ties to the United States were solidified in the early 1970s, when Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford relied on allies such as Iran to create a balance of power in the Persian Gulf region and Iranian oil was a much desired commodity. The shah, in turn, had come to depend on U.S. weapons like the F-16 and F-18 fighter planes. Many Iranians, however, despised the shah’s efforts to modernize the country in the 1960s, as well as his willingness to silence critics through the secret police (SAVAK) that harassed, abused, and injured citizens.

The Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, an Islamic cleric, emerged as the leader of the anti-shah forces. During the 1970s, when the ayatollah was in exile in Iraq, his supporters had smuggled cassette tapes of his speeches into Iran to spread his message. By September, middle-class Iranians, university students, and Islamic revolutionaries were in full revolt. U.S. commentators had missed the fact that millions of Iranians had become followers of the Islamic religion—and of the ayatollah. While some American policy makers saw the revolution as part of an explosion of Muslim influence in the region, most members of the Carter administration evaluated the crisis through the lens of the Cold War. Some believed that Khomeini had been directly supported by the Soviet Union; others feared that any instability opened opportunities for the Soviets to influence governments in the region.

the last book I ever read (Jimmy Carter: The American Presidents Series: The 39th President, 1977-1981, excerpt two)

from Jimmy Carter: The American Presidents Series: The 39th President, 1977-1981 by Julian E. Zelizer:

When Speaker O’Neill watched the debates over the complex five-volume proposal and the number of people handling the bill, he knew right away it spelled trouble. Despite his uneasy relationship with Carter, O’Neill decided to save the president’s bill by using the powers of the speakership that had been produced by congressional reform in the early 1970s. The Speaker assembled an ad hoc committee to handle the legislation and, as a resuilt of O’Neill’s efforts and leadership, the energy measure passed the House relatively intact in August 1977.

the last book I ever read (Jimmy Carter: The American Presidents Series: The 39th President, 1977-1981, excerpt one)

from Jimmy Carter: The American Presidents Series: The 39th President, 1977-1981 by Julian E. Zelizer:

Shortly after his defeat, Carter underwent a “born-again” experience, which motivated him to devote his life to Christianity. Carter was also inspired by the work of Reinhold Niebuhr, whose writing imparted to him the message that one of the goals of politics was to use government to create justice in a sinful world. His political vision was taking shape again. In 1967, Jimmy and Rosalynn had a daughter; they named her Amy.

the last book I ever read (Gerald R. Ford: The American Presidents Series: The 38th President, 1974-1977, excerpt twelve)

from Gerald R. Ford: The American Presidents Series: The 38th President, 1974-1977 by Douglas Brinkley:

A tragedy in the Middle East brought Ford back to center stage that autumn. On October 6, 1981, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat was killed, gunned down in a half of automatic gunfire at a military parade in Cairo that left eleven dead and forty wounded. In A Time to Heal Ford had written about Sadat in glowing terms, describing him as a combination of a “professional soldier’s erect posture with an aristocratic air of elegance.” Both men enjoyed lighting up a pipe while they spoke. As president, Ford learned three fundamental imperatives about negotiating with Sadat that all worked in America’s favor; he never lied, he desperately wanted to avoid a confrontation between Egypt and Israel in the Sinai Peninsula, and he disdained the bullying tactics of the Soviet Union. Without the diplomatic spade work conducted by Ford and Kissinger from 1974 to 1977, President Jimmy Carter would never have been successful at Camp David in brokering the historic peace accords between Egypt and Israel in 1979.

It was at Sadat’s funeral that Ford and Carter, old political adversaries, deepened their friendship. An easy camaraderie developed between the two ex-presidents, sustained in the coming years as their wives, Rosalyn and Betty, also grew close, lobbying together on such worthwhile causes as alcohol and drug prevention, the Equal Rights Amendment, and health care policies toward the mentally ill. “On foreign policy our views are similar,” Ford recalled in 1995, “so we can work together on joint projects very effectively.”

the last book I ever read (Gerald R. Ford: The American Presidents Series: The 38th President, 1974-1977, excerpt eleven)

from Gerald R. Ford: The American Presidents Series: The 38th President, 1974-1977 by Douglas Brinkley:

Decades later, Ford still bristled about Reagan’s decision to challenge him in 1976. To Ford, that action made a hypocrisy out of Reagan’s famous Eleventh Commandment. “A Republican should never criticize another Republican.” Even though Ford insisted he didn’t hold a grudge against Reagan, he clearly did. “I have never publicly criticized Reagan for what he did,” Ford recalled. “I can tell you I was shocked when he called me in November of ’75 and said he was going to run. I thought, ‘What a low-down stunt.’ Really burned the hell out of me. I thought I had done a good job and I thought a Reagan challenge would make it more difficult if I won [the nomination], to win the general election. What also irritated me, after I beat him in Kansas City—and I’m the only person who ever beat him in a political race, he never lost another—was that he snubbed me. Put his nose up in the air. After I had defeated him, he only made one appearance on my behalf. And that was at a Republican dinner in Los Angeles, I think. He endorsed me. But in a lukewarm way. There was no question in my mind that if he had campaigned for me in Mississippi, Wisconsin and Missouri, I could have beat Carter. Three or four states were lost by one or two percent. He just wasn’t a party player that year. It was all about himself.”

the last book I ever read (Gerald R. Ford: The American Presidents Series: The 38th President, 1974-1977, excerpt ten)

from Gerald R. Ford: The American Presidents Series: The 38th President, 1974-1977 by Douglas Brinkley:

However, just as Ford was firming up his plans to travel to Helsinki, the dissident Soviet writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was stirring up anti-Soviet feeling in the United States. Solzhenitsyn, whose terrifying novel The Gulag Archipelago had just been published in England, had been awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature for his works on the cruelties of the Soviet political system, none of which were then available in his native land. Dissident lines about the totalitarian Soviets’ “uniped jackboots of the unsleeping State Security operatives” grabbed the attention of the Kremlin. Arrested by the KGB and charged with treason for his revelations, Solzhenitsyn was deported to West Germany in February 1974, and he immigrated to the United States early the following year. Instantly sought after across American, Solzhenitsyn quickly tired of the spotlight and sought refuge on a farm in Vermont, where he resumed writing against the Soviet totalitarian state. On June 30, however, at the behest of the anti-Communist U.S. labor leader George Meany, Solzhenitsyn made a speech at an AFL-CIO dinner in Washington, excoriating not only the Soviet system but also any attempt at accommodation with it.

Coming less than a month before the Helsinki conference, Solzhenitsyn’s urgent call for U.S. action against Communist brutality was seized upon immediately by conservative Republican senators Jesse Helms of North Carolina and Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who on July 2 jointly requested that President Ford meet with Solzhenitsyn before the dissident left the nation’s capital three days later. Ford refused. Unfortunately, the White House failed to firmly enough cite the reason as the outrage against protocol of making demands on the president’s time with less than half a week’s notice. Instead, as Ford himself would admit in his memoir, “I decided to subordinate political gains to foreign policy considerations.”

the last book I ever read (Gerald R. Ford: The American Presidents Series: The 38th President, 1974-1977, excerpt nine)

from Gerald R. Ford: The American Presidents Series: The 38th President, 1974-1977 by Douglas Brinkley:

Official White House photographer David Hume Kennerly, who had accompanied the delegation to Saigon, returned with a more candid report to the president. “I don’t care what the generals tell you,” Kennerly blurted with the bluntness Ford valued him for. “They’ve bullshitting you if they say that Vietnam had got more than three or four weeks left. There’s no question about it. It’s just not gonna last.”

Ford no longer had any reason to believe otherwise. On April 21, President Thieu resigned his office, made a speech accusing the United States of selling South Vietnam out to the Communists, and fled to Switzerland. Ford duly requested the $722 million from Congress to protect Saigon’s new caretaker government, but he had already decided what to do regarding Vietnam. And once Gerald Ford made a decision, he acted on it. In an April 23 speech before six thousand Tulane University students jammed into the basketball field house, he declared: “Today, American can regain the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam. But it cannot be achieved by refighting a war that is finished as far as American is concerned.”

the last book I ever read (Gerald R. Ford: The American Presidents Series: The 38th President, 1974-1977, excerpt eight)

from Gerald R. Ford: The American Presidents Series: The 38th President, 1974-1977 by Douglas Brinkley:

As it turned out, Nixon already knew what Becker had come to tell him, just as he already knew what Ford was thinking at every step. Al Haig had been keeping his old boss informed of everything that was said in the supposedly confidential Oval Office discussions about a pardon for Nixon. Ford should have known better than to trust his predecessor’s take-charge chief of staff, but he couldn’t grasp the level of deviousness Nixon had provoked in his staff. Gerald Ford’s mistake lay in believing that his White House could operate according to his pledge of “candor and openness” when it remained packed with Nixon holdovers—a number of whom had at least as much reason to want Nixon pardoned immediately as the former president himself did.

For high-level Nixon associates such as Al Haig, Donald Rumsfeld, and Pat Buchanan—not to mention Henry Kissinger—a full-scale trial of the former chief executive posed many potential dangers. At best, such a proceeding would only further cement their ties to the nation’s most scandal-mired administration; worse, a trial might open up new avenues of investigation these aides preferred to remain unexplored.

the last book I ever read (Gerald R. Ford: The American Presidents Series: The 38th President, 1974-1977, excerpt seven)

from Gerald R. Ford: The American Presidents Series: The 38th President, 1974-1977 by Douglas Brinkley:

The matter appeared to have been put to rest by the end of August. Watergate special prosecutor Leon Jaworski resumed looking for ways to address the case against Nixon through judicial process. Jaworski later revealed that just before Nixon resigned, Haig had come to him to float the notion of terminating the case against the president once he forsook the nation’s highest office. Jaworski was quick to add that Haig’s gambit had failed, and no agreement concerning Nixon’s fate had been reached with him. What gave the story significance was its revelation that Ford wasn’t the only power broker Haig had approached to discern—or perhaps determine—Richard Nixon’s fate.

For his part, Ford continued to deny that he had made any deal regarding Nixon’s pardon, and a certain logic backed up his claims. By the time Haig called on Ford on August 1, Nixon’s resignation was virtually assured, leaving his vice president no reason to negotiate. Ford was going to be his replacement; the only question was whether it would happen through Nixon’s resignation or by his impeachment. If Ford promised him a pardon, the speculation went, Nixon would resign immediately; if not, the wounded president would drag the nations through a long and ugly impeachment process. The specter of such an arrangement came to haunt Ford from the moment he announced the pardon.

the last book I ever read (Gerald R. Ford: The American Presidents Series: The 38th President, 1974-1977, excerpt six)

from Gerald R. Ford: The American Presidents Series: The 38th President, 1974-1977 by Douglas Brinkley:

On Friday morning, Auigust 9, the president’s formal resignation was submitted to the secretary of state as Nixon flew off to his exile in San Clemente, California. At three minutes after noon, Chief Justice Warren E. Burger swore in Gerald R. Ford as the thirty-eighth president of the United States. With a notable lack of ceremony in the White House East Room, Ford delivered a short but pitch-perfect inaugural address, telling his scandal-weary nation, in part: “I assume the presidency under extraordinary circumstances never before experienced by Americans. . . . I am acutely aware that you have not elected me as your president by your ballots and so I ask you to confirm me as your president in your prayers. . . . I have not sought this enormous responsibility, but I will not shirk it. I believe that truth is the glue that holds government together, not only our government but civilization itself. That bond, though strained, is unbroken at home and abroad. In all my public and private acts as your president, I expect to follow my instincts of openness and candor with full confidence that honesty is the best policy in the end.

“My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.”

the last book I ever read (Gerald R. Ford: The American Presidents Series: The 38th President, 1974-1977, excerpt five)

from Gerald R. Ford: The American Presidents Series: The 38th President, 1974-1977 by Douglas Brinkley:

In truth, the vice president did not want to hear the tapes in Nixon’s possession, and scrupulously avoided every opportunity to do so. If he did hear the evidence, after all, he could hardly keep waging the campaign he had taken up, which he summarized in a remark at Harvard University in March 1974: “I don’t happen to believe on the basis of the evidence I am familiar with—and I think I’m familiar with most of it—that the President was involved in Watergate per se or involved in the cover-up, but time will tell.” As Nixon began to fall, Ford thus kept himself carefully positioned on the sidelines, where his view of Watergate looked not much closer than that of the American public. To many observers, the new vice president looked an outright fool for continuing to proclaim Nixon’s innocence.

the last book I ever read (Gerald R. Ford: The American Presidents Series: The 38th President, 1974-1977, excerpt four)

from Gerald R. Ford: The American Presidents Series: The 38th President, 1974-1977 by Douglas Brinkley:

Ford and some other congressional leaders happened to have an appointment that afternoon with John Mitchell. Ford managed to take Mitchell aside for a moment and asked him point-blank whether the White House had had any involvement with the Watergate burglary—and whether the president had known anything about it in advance. Mitchell adamantly replied that there was no connection. That was enough for Ford. “He looked me right in the eye,” Ford remembered, “and said he had nothing to do with it—had no knowledge of it. That was pretty strong language from somebody who had been attorney general.”

The next day, Mitchell looked the rest of the country just as straight in the eye and disavowed any CREEP involvement in the crime. His statement responded in particular to Democratic chairman Larry O’Brien’s charge that the Hunt connection between the burglars and Colson marked “a developing clear line to the White House.” O’Brien would be proved right in the end, but at the time his comments seemed only to politicize the debate over the Watergate affair. Two days later, on June 22, Nixon himself submitted to his first news conference in three months to assert that the Whie House had had nothing to do with the break-in, and that electronic surveillance “has no place whatever in our electoral process or in our governmental process.” Nixon loyalists quickly adopted White House press secretary Ronald Ziegler’s characterization of Watergate as a “third-rate burglary attempt.” To the astonishment of most Democrats and other Nixon opponents, the matter languished as a campaign issue through most of the summer.

the last book I ever read (Gerald R. Ford: The American Presidents Series: The 38th President, 1974-1977, excerpt three)

from Gerald R. Ford: The American Presidents Series: The 38th President, 1974-1977 by Douglas Brinkley:

The scventy-one-year-old Douglas had sat on the Court since Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed him in 1939. Douglas had a long and distinguished history on the bench, but his support for civil liberties and environmental conservation rankled many conservatives. The right wing also didn’t cotton to the justice’s bon-vivant lifestyle. Douglas was an obstreperous, hard-drinking womanizer who lived far beyond his salary. He made up for that in part by writing books, most of them about his travels to exotic spots around the globe. But Douglas’s 1969 book, Points of Rebellion, analyzed and for the most part defended the rising protest movement against the Vietnam War.

Gerald Ford had been incensed by the antiwar protests for years, seeing in them “the seeds of Communist activity.” In 1968, he strongly supported passage of the Campus Disorders Act, which aimed to withhold federal subsidies from any student who took part in campus protests. When Points of Rebellion came out in 1969, Ford was so outraged by it that he launched an investigation into its author. That November, Ford made the shocking announcement that he was drawing up plans to impeach Douglas. It was an unprecedented assault on a justice of the Supreme Court by a member of the congressional leadership.

the last book I ever read (Gerald R. Ford: The American Presidents Series: The 38th President, 1974-1977, excerpt two)

from Gerald R. Ford: The American Presidents Series: The 38th President, 1974-1977 by Douglas Brinkley:

Several of Ford’s fellow congressmen during his early years in the House openly coveted the White House. One of them, Massachusetts Democrat John F. Kennedy, occupied the suite across the corridor from Ford’s in the House Office Building. “The net result was, Jack Kennedy and I became good friends because we walked back and forth from our offices to the House chamber when the House bell rang,” Ford recalled decades later. “Our staffs became very close. We were pals. I was not familiar with his health problems, but I had many suspicions about his philandering. That was none of my business.” Another ambitious colleague made a point of introducing himself right after Ford had taken his first oath of office. “I’m Dick Nixon, from California,” he began with extended hand. “I heard about your big win in Michigan, and I wanted to say hello and welcome you to the House.” The two young Republican navy vets soon became friends, and—more significant—political allies. They would stay close for life. “Incidentally, if I had been a sportswriter during the time you played center for Michigan,” Nixon wrote Ford in 1994, just months before his death, “you would have been on my All-American football team.”

Years later, when discussing his early congressional career, Ford recalled two indelible visual memories: sitting in the House chamber hearing General Douglas MacArthur deliver his “Old Soldiers Never Die” valedictory and watching Richard Nixon zealously investigate Alger Hiss for treason on the House Un-American Activities Committee. “Both moments stayed with me in a very real sense for very real reason,” Ford recalled. “General MacArthur, after all, had led our efforts in the Pacific where I served during World War II. And Dick Nixon was my close friend and there he was creating a national ruckus by prosecuting Hiss. In MacArthur’s case I was impressed by the power of oratory. In Dick’s case it was more the power of dogged diligence.”

the last book I ever read (Gerald R. Ford: The American Presidents Series: The 38th President, 1974-1977, excerpt one)

from Gerald R. Ford: The American Presidents Series: The 38th President, 1974-1977 by Douglas Brinkley:

When Gerald Ford came into the world on July 14, 1913, in an ornate Victorian house on Woolworth Avenue in Omaha, Nebraska, he was named Leslie Lynch King Jr. His mother, the former Dorothy Ayer Gardner, had been a nineteen-year-old college student when she met and soon married the well-to-do Leslie King Sr. the previous year. Her infatuation faded fast: she later charged that King punched her at the least provocation. When he flew into another violent rage two weeks after she bore their son, brandishing a knife and threatening to kill both her and the baby, Dorothy packed up her belongings and her son and fled Omaha in the cold glare of an afternoon. That she did so in an era or more that favored spousal battery over divorce bespeaks the steel in the stock behind Jerry Ford.

the last book I ever read (Cal: A Novel by Bernard MacLeverty, excerpt eight)

from Cal: A Novel by Bernard MacLeverty:

Walking back to the cottage he heard the sounds of a thaw. The black lane showed through the centres of footsteps when the moon raced from one cloud to the next. The air had warmed and melted snow was running down the sides of the lane. Everywhere was the sound of dripping and clinking and gurgling.