Gerald Ford Interview: His Greatest Achievement and Disappointment in Office

no rolling please thank you okay how do i call you hugh sure yeah make it as relaxed as we can we just have a good night straight that's one thing i am obsessed with mr president as you know this uh we talk here basically about how you came into the presidency in the background and what prepared you one of the things i noticed is that you never hungered for the white house you entered politics without a great ambition to go right to the white house why so my whole political ambition after a term or two in the house of representatives was to be the speaker and handle that gavel up there in front of all the 434 other members you didn't get potomac fever right off uh that idea that you wanted to go down the white house where the big ex no no no i had really never any ambition to get into the executive branch either as vice president or president my ambition was focused 99 percent on trying to be speaker of the house you know there's a picture in your book your memoirs of being president that shows a house session and there you are and richard nixon and lyndon johnson all three would become president did you have any inkling back there that any of those people were on the way none whatsoever uh you uh i first met dick nixon the day i was sworn in the first year january 1949 i had just taken the oath of office along with all the other freshmen and this man walked up to me and he said i'm dick nixon from california i welcome you here in the house chamber that was january of 49. that was a start that long relationship realistically when you'd been in congress for a while did you see a chance to be speaker did you think there would be a political change of that nature i must have subjectively thought that i was very lucky i got a superb committee assignment by pure happenstance my first year i was first put on the committee on public works and i was the most junior member of the minority and that's way down the line it was the committee on public works but it fortunately had jurisdiction over the white house and president truman moved out of the white house because it was falling down literally falling down and so our committee had to pass judgment on whether it should be torn down entirely and rebuilt whether the walls on the outside should be retained and this inside gutted so mr truman had our committee down to the white house in 1950 and i we got a personal tour i see and it was interesting he pointed out how the ceiling in the east room it was 18 inches fallen he showed us into the bathrooms and they were ancient he pointed out there wasn't a single built-in closet that was my first experience in the white house now you began to meet presidents of course in your congressional role uh what'd you think of truman well he was one of my favorites particularly in foreign policy i admired his strong action in meeting the communist aggression in south korea i favored his decision to proceed with the nuclear bomb program i applauded his action to end the war in the pacific with hiroshima nagasaki in and i strongly supported his marshall plan because it was important that we move ahead to rebuild western europe and not make the same mistake we did after world war one what'd you think of ike well i was among the republicans in the house who signed a letter to ike i think there were 20 of us so we urged him to come back and run for president and that was not very popular back in my michigan congressional district back with bob that was taft country i think ike did a fine job as president as a matter of fact when i became president a president has the prerogative of having three portraits in the cabinet room of former presidents i picked abraham lincoln dwight d eisenhower and harry truman i'd say you had a democrat right in there how about how about your feeling about kennedy now did you know him in the house or when he was in the senate i by pure happenstance you i got to know jack kennedy very well so when i was assigned an office i was over in what was then called the old house office building by luck my office was right across the corridor from jack kennedy's and right next to lloyd benson's so very often for the next four years i would walk back and forth to the house chamber when a vote came up with jack kennedy we'd walk into the house chamber and he'd go on the democratic side and i'd walk on the republican side but our friendship became i would say very warm and very enduring and that friendship made it very difficult when i was subsequently made a member of the warren commission and had to analyze the facts about his assassination in 1970 tell me a little bit about that because you weren't that enthusiastic about being on the commission were you at first no i was of course very saddened about his death because of my long-standing friendship but on a sunday night right after the assassination i got a call from lyndon johnson and he said congressman i want to appoint you as the house member representing the republicans to investigate the assassination but he said i want you as the republican i said mr president i've got all these duties on the committee on appropriations and so forth and so on and well you know lyndon i know he just twisted my arm and i said okay yeah well you're glad you did it there oh i'm very glad i did it and i feel very strongly that our decisions the two basic decisions hugh number one that lee harvey oswald committed the assassination and our committee or the warren commission found no evidence of a conspiracy foreign or domestic now oliver stone and all the people that are trying to make a buck out of the tragedy in my opinion have not come up with any new evidence they simply have distorted the facts they have come up with in my opinion unsound decisions the basic conclusions are the same oswald did it and there was no conspiracy what did you think of lyndon johnson as a legislator and as a president well as a legislator he was about one of the best he knew how to make coalitions he knew how to manipulate he knew the rules from a legislative point of view lyndon johnson was a very very skilled member of the he was tough personally he was very tough on me had some unkind statements but basically he was a good decent tough guy i'll never forget after all these unkind statements he made about me in the congress just before he left washington he called me down to the white house i didn't know why and he spent about an hour reminiscing about things that we had argued about and problems we had he couldn't quite come to saying he was sorry but he was certainly friendly and i admired him as a technician and certainly he was a dedicated patriotic american well as you know he had unkind things to say about almost everybody in the private you always figured that you were a bit of a rebel when you were in the house you uh you were the man that there were young bucks there that put you in charge and threw charlie helic the minority leader out why well after the goldwater debacle 16 1964 the republicans lost 45 house seats we went from 187 down to 140 and the younger members on the republican side said we have to make a change in our leadership charlie hallick was a fine person but he represented the old guard he was known as the gut fighter he was a hard-nosed gut fighter the younger members who survived the goldwater debacle said we need new leadership so they picked me to be their candidate and i won by the landslide margin of i think it was 83 to 77. that's all you need or 73 to 67 whatever let's see now we have the the rise of richard nixon your friend and finally in the white house and then the advent of watergate did you see at the start of that what might transpire the very fact that nixon might be trapped in this and be uh forced out of the white house i was dumbfounded by the stupidity of the watergate break-in and on the monday following that break-in i think it was saturday night i had a meeting with john mitchell who was then in charge of nixon's campaign he initially had been nixon's attorney general but he resigned to run nixon's campaign in 1972. well uh i said to john mitchell did the president did the white house did you know anything about this stupid break-in and john mitchell looked me right in the eye and said absolutely not so on that assurance from a former attorney general i took a firm stand that it was not a white house conceived or executed operation it of course as it turned out when the tapes were revealed nixon had some knowledge and he certainly by his comments and actions participated in the obstruction of justice you stayed pretty loyal to him and somebody at that in that times i remember quoted you as saying you don't uh you don't tackle your quarterback or you don't get rid of him you you stayed pretty close to the end well after all i was vice president yeah based on his nomination i was assured by him as well as by john mitchell that he nixon had no involvement so i felt i was being told true and it was a very narrow path hugh for nine months if i was critical of nixon the press and the public would have said well he's trying to undercut nixon so he'll get the job on the other hand if i stayed too loyal it might appear that i was supporting somebody who was involved in this very unwise action so i had to go down this narrow path of not supporting him too much or not criticizing him too frequently it was not a pleasant experience why did you get the first whiff that spiro agno was in trouble well uh that's an interesting story about two days maybe one day before the story broke nixon invited me to come down to his executive office in the old executive office building i had no reason to know why i was being called you were minority leader i was minority leader he asked me to come down there and for an hour and a half we sat there and talked very informally reminisced about our long friendship we it was a strange conversation i finally got a call to come to the floor of the house immediately there was a vote so i left i got on the floor and two or three of my colleagues on the republican side grabbed me and said agnew's resigning agnew's resigning that was the first real knowledge i had that he had taken that action but now you it was it wasn't there a little clue there that you might be in line here at least to be investigated there's a possibility well that meeting that i just described must have been a that was the planned affair by nixon he wanted to take a look at me wanted to talk to me about policy and so forth but i but you must have had a clue that perhaps you were in line well at least to be one to be considered that night i was home with betty and about 8 30 after dinner i got a call from mel laird and mel laird said i'm down at the white house would you accept the nomination for vice president if it was offered i said i guess i would did you have any doubts though oh no no if i knew if i was offered it i would accept it but why with all the stories about how worthless the job was and lyndon johnson was so unhappy in it well that's interesting because after five times trying to be speaker i see i had never gotten enough republican members to become speaker so betty and i in january of 1973 had decided i'd run for the house one more time and then retire that would have filled out 28 years so going to the vice presidency for two more years would have fulfilled 28 years and would have given me a little prestige as a retiring vice president i never thought being vice president would lead to being president i see you were however uh plowing new ground here you were you were you were still are the only vice president to be appointed mid-term by a president under the i was the first one under the 25th amendment but i later appointed nelson mandela that's right yeah so he was the second what was good about being vice president as you look back it was to a degree a training ground for president although having been the republican leader for 10 years or nine and a half years i had good exposure to presidents to presidential problems so the combination of minority leader and vice president made me highly qualified to assume the presidency when nixon resigned just after you became vice president archibald cox the special prosecutor was fired watergate became very heated there was impeachment talk of richard nixon it looked like you were really in the fire how did you feel about those days it was very very uncomfortable i disagreed privately with some of the actions that were taken by the nixon white house i never had good relations with haldik halderman and erlichmann and chuck colson my personality my background didn't fit with them so i felt that president nixon was getting some bad advice and therefore i was very uncomfortable say did you have an inkling at the start that this thing might go the full distance and nixon be forced out and you be president when did that thought first occur to you well number one i hoped it would not take place because president nixon was a long time friend of mine i had great respect for him i had been assured he wasn't involved in the watergate by him as well as by john mitchell so i never expected it to happen and even then even with the storm well as things unraveled it became more and more possible but i still relied on the assurances given me and i continued to hope that president nixon's decisions would be the ones that i knew he had made over the years and were good and would not be involved in the advice that he got from people like haldeman and erlichmann and chuck coulson then you got that fateful call from al haig that told you there was what we call a smoking gun there was evidence that nixon was involved that was a call that al haig made asking to come over and see me to tell me i think this was on a friday afternoon that there would be a new tape released on a monday and he said the evidence in there was devastating and that there would probably be either an impeachment or a resignation and he laid out five or six of the options that he said might take place and he said i'm just warning you that you've got to be prepared that things might change dramatically and you could become president did this bother you i mean what did you think inside well i was shocked and saddened because i had hoped that kind of development would not take place but according to al hay in his description of the evidence that was coming on that tape it was perfectly clear to me that nixon either was going to face impeachment in the house and probably conviction in the senate or he would be forced to resign so therefore you faced the prospect right then that you would be president united states a possibility there's an interesting story uh betty had uh planned to go to new york on the following monday to pick out some new interior things for the vice president's residence which we were to take over from the navy oh yes well when i came home that friday she was making plans to go to new york on monday and i said betty i think you better change your plans because the odds overwhelmingly are such i don't think we're ever going to live in the vice president's house so she had to make up some story that things had changed and she couldn't go but that was a dramatic night in our lives because for the first time we literally talked about what a significant change it would be in our lives to go from living out there and the house in alexandria to living in the white house but you weren't afraid of the presidency not in any way whatsoever you i figured my 25 and a half years in the house the committees i served on which gave me the highest access to foreign policy and defense decisions my nine and a half years as republican leader where i was involved in white house meetings over the years gave me unquestioned preparation to become president without any problems but a lot of people suggest you were dealt a pretty tough hand scandal the watergate of course the end of vietnam you could see the collapse coming inflation recession that's pretty tough time we had a full platter on my desk in the oval office you're right we had watergate we had the serious problems of what was happening in vietnam we inherited the worst economic recession in post-war period inflation was high interest rates were high unemployment was growing we had a prospective uh meeting with mr brezhnev in vladivostok to negotiate arms reductions in the nuclear area we had not only domestic problems which were very serious but we had challenges from abroad our allies weren't sure what a new president would do under these circumstances and we were apprehensive that maybe our enemies our adversaries would try to take advantage of this change in u.s leadership back up just a bit here and tell me about august 9th you have to you're told you're going to be president you have to go the nixon's going to resign you have to go see him and escort him out of the white house what do you think that was pretty sad you very sad because of our long personal friendship with dick and pat but what do you tell them we went down to the white house and tried to be cordial but what can you say in that kind of a circumstance except to thank them for their service to the country over a long period of time and wish them well it was a difficult 25 or 30 minutes that we had in the white house and walking out to the helicopter that's a sad situation when you see uh a couple that have been good friends going and uh leaving under those very tragic circumstances what's the first thing you did when you turned away and went back into the white house your white house now i squeezed my wife's hand and said we'll do our best i'll be dying where'd you go to go to the office well i think we went up to the oval office as i recall our children were there and i had of course almost immediately the responsibility of going into the east room i'm sure you remember that where i had to be sworn in and where i had to make an acceptance speech and i couldn't prepare my speech until 24 hours or less beforehand because up until the last minute you we weren't sure what president nixon was going to do and i had a wonderful speechwriter bob hartman who went home the night before and stayed up till three or four o'clock in the morning and wrote this speech and he came in to see me at eight o'clock in my office as vice president and he handed me the copy and i read it he had a knack of saying what i would say i came to one sentence and i said bob we ought to strike this and it was the sentence our long national nightmare is over and bob hartman said to me if you strike that i'm quitting so i left it in and it turned out to be the most memorable line in my remarks and it was a wonderful line i say okay you're president now uh probably the first thing that happened or a big thing that happened was the pardon the nixon pardon describe that to me a little bit because here is a country that's really crying for retribution against a president that they feel has violated the trust you're in the spot and yet one day you decide to do that well let me take just a minute to give you the background in the first roughly 28 days i was in the white house i spent at least 25 percent of my time listening to the lawyers from the white house or the lawyers from the department of justice taking my time on what i should do about mr nixon's papers mr nixon's tapes at the same time i was struggling with serious economic problems were plaguing the country high inflation high interest rates a growing unemployment a serious recession right over the brink we had international problems with the soviet union and our allies were apprehensive so i had a full platter of problems involving 230 million american people then i went to a press conference my first press conference and i thought i would be asked questions about the economy about international affairs 90 of those questions were from the white house press what are you going to do about mr nixon's tapes mr nixon's papers and as i walked back to the oval office i said to myself i got to get rid of that problem how can i do it as quickly as possible i talked to phil buchan my counsel and i said can i pardon him and he took a day or two to look at the options he came back and said yes and i decided that was the only way i could get rid of mr nixon's problems that were taking 25 percent of my daily time so i could spend a hundred percent of my time on the problems of 230 million americans you never felt manipulated enough time none whatsoever i made the sole decision and i have to say most of my staff disagreed with me but i was absolutely convinced it was the right thing to do and i'm even more convinced today hugh 20 years ago you told me a story about calling up tip o'neill speaker of the house to tell him about that he was playing golf on the burning tree and what did he tell you tell that story well i can't recall the precise words but he said it was a dumb mistake and it would hurt me politically but you'd lose the election as i remember yeah i said well tip i'm doing what i think is right and i felt strongly then and i feel equally strongly today now did you see nixon at all after this what was your relationship with him as he kind of went into seclusion i went to california about a month after nixon's left the white house and as you may remember he had a serious phlebitis problem was in a hospital in california and as a matter of courtesy i went to the hospital and saw him he almost died on that occasion he had all the tubes in his mouth and his nose i never saw anybody closer to death and still alive than dick nixon was at that time and you went to his funeral i went to his funeral along with others and your feelings yes he was a longtime friend who made a very stupid mistake so i have to look at the overall which i think was a good record and concede that everybody is human and you can make mistakes that are very unfortunate and regrettable did you feel uh at a disadvantage because you were really never elected you weren't elected vice president and you're never elected president uh did that weaken you at all i didn't think so after all i got a very strong vote by democrats in the house and senate when i was nominated it would have been helpful to have won in 1976 so any apprehension about a appointed person would have been wiped out but we lost that election very close and as i recall if we'd gotten 6 000 more votes in ohio and 2 000 more in hawaii we would have won how did you deal with the criticism when you got in the presidency because as you know any president is subject to just this horrendous criticism number one you'd come in in this in this unusual way uh you were viewed in various critical manner how did you deal with it well i had learned a long time ago when i competed in athletics sports writers are tougher than even the white house press corps so having played football and coach football i had developed an understanding of criticism by the news media you can't let criticism either by the public or the news media upset you mentally or otherwise if you are right and think you're right the criticism ought to roll off your shoulders without any bother now the only time i got upset is when there would be criticism i thought unfairly of our children and my wife betty now that really irritated me it didn't bother you when uh on your golf game or oh no no no when you hit us or something like that i i used to laugh at that and of course bob hope over the years has made a minute of money making jokes about my golf game chevy chase about your falling down yeah bob hope says i'm the only president that can play four golf courses simultaneously calls me the hitman of the pga i see we come up to vietnam and amnesty the partial amnesty that you granted now again very controversial what do you do with those kids why'd you do that well i felt that this whole group of our younger generation had made what they thought was a conscientious decision to either refuse to serve or to flee to get out of going in the military and in order to heal the land it was important with watergate and war in vietnam our country hue was torn apart people had lost faith in the government they had lost faith in the white house the american people were yelling and screaming at each other and if ike is president could in any way bring about a healing i thought it was a step in the right direction and as offering amnesty to this group i thought was a constructive step to bring them back into being a part of our society it was a good program it worked it gave those individuals an opportunity to earn the right uh having their record corrected now the the end of vietnam came on your watch mr president was there much you could do or did you just were you just an observer in that period i was not an observer i i thought we had an obligation to do our very best to carry out the negotiated settlement that secretary kissinger had achieved in january of 1943 the paris accord of course the north vietnamese never lived up to those agreements and because our congress refused to give adequate military aid our south vietnamese allies had inadequate military equipment to fight the north vietnamese and so north vietnamese overran south vietnam and we're right on the outskirts of saigon and that's where the crunch came yeah and at that point because congress lost its guts and wouldn't put the money up to help our allies we were faced with a critical situation how we could evacuate all of the americans from saigon and as many of our south vietnamese friends who had fought with us and stayed with us as possible we had some disputes secretary schlesinger uh was most anxious to get all the americans out but he delayed in some of the evacuation programs about getting some of the south vietnamese out at the same time i had an ambassador in saigon named martin who wanted to stay until the last and evacuate everybody including u.s people personnel as well as south vietnamese so i was pulled both ways and i felt to the very end we should evacuate as many of our allied south vietnamese as possible and the net result was we did a good job and we not only got all our americans out but we got a significant number of south vietnamese who would been staunch allies during the war in vietnam on the mayaguez affair the kidnapping of those americans released the expropriating of that ship over in the south china sea that's a kind of a classic case of decision making in which there wasn't enough information and tell me a little about that how you faced that well first i was awakened about 5 00 am by brent scowcroft who was the head of my national security council and telling me that there were radio reports that an american merchant ship had been seized in international waters i called an nsc meeting i think at 8 o'clock that morning and by that time we had some official confirmation it had been seized by the cambodians and was being taken to one of their harbors i decided we could not tolerate that obvious violation of international law so i ordered the department of defense to take necessary action to get more information on the first hand and to be prepared to recover the ship on the other and of course it involved sending some marines from another base unfortunately we had a helicopter accident was mechanical not involving the enemy but anyhow we ended up with u.s forces seizing the ship and recovering the merchant marine sailors now it was a decision that i had to make to make sure that the world knew we weren't going to be kicked around i couldn't help but remember the tragedy of the pueblo incident where about two years previous the north koreans had seized an american coast guard ship and held it for what 18 months i was not going to let that happen in this case and so i made the decision to involve our air force involve our marines and we got the ship as well as the crew back going on now you are facing jimmy carter in the election of 1976 what went wrong well in the first place you after our convention we were 34 points behind jimmy carter had a insurmountable lead and i demanded that we have debates i challenge them to debates and we had three of them the first one on domestic policy i think i did well i was not expected to second on national security foreign policy and military i said something about poland in retrospect i was 100 percent right but it's just a little ahead of your time yeah and the last one in williamsburg was about everything i think we ran a good campaign because when we ended up on the election day we lost by one percentage point was it a case of just being burdened with too much the scandal and of all the things that preceded you i think you're right you there there were some who never forgave the republicans for the war in vietnam even though president john f kennedy had made the first combat commitment in vietnam there were people that never forgave me for uh pardoning richard nixon there were people who didn't think our economic recovery was coming along quickly enough but when you lose by about 10 000 votes six thousand in ohio and two or three thousand in hawaii um the election could have changed very dramatically with a minor shift in how the voters how'd you feel how'd you cope with that sense of loss well i never like to lose anything i'm a competitive person but on the other hand again if i could reflect on athletics i played on winning teams and losing teams and when we lost a game i never sat around and groused about it i always thought there was another game the next week and you ought to start preparing for the next ball game and in politics i lost the presidential election but i had to start thinking about a new life what i was going to do what betty and i and the family would have for our future that's a much better attitude to have than to sit around and moan and groan about taking a beating we did the best we could and darn near one against tough odds mr president let's go back a little to your your boyhood uh and your family and that what really helped you in later life or being president family values boy scouts football war yale maybe a little of all of those well hugh i was very very lucky i had a wonderful mother and i was equally blessed to have a superb stepfather my mother divorced my real father when i was less than a year old and when i was about a month old she took me because my real father was abusing her physically and mentally and took me by train from omaha where i was born to grand rapids where her friend her parents were so i never knew that i was a an adopted son until i was about 15. my stepfather was a magnificent person and my mother equally wonderful so i was brought up in a very wonderful environment i had three younger brothers of my mother's second marriage actually my stepfather probably treated me as well if not better than his own children so i couldn't have written a better prescription for a superb family upbringing you were an excellent football player you got scholarships of course for it why didn't you become a professional well i in high school was all state i was captain of the allstate team i went to the university of michigan in those days you didn't have a scholarship but our head football coach got me a job over at the university hospital where i waited on table for the interns and cleaned up the meals in the nurses cafeteria for which i got paid 50 cents an hour and i worked four hours a day and with two dollars in 1931 i could buy all the food i needed and i rented a room for four dollars a week and i had earned that money in my stepfather's paint company we got no scholarship about every three months i'd go over at the university hospital and give blood for which i was paid 25 dollars for whatever a court or whatever that cash came in very handy so then i played at university of michigan and i played in the shrine east-west game in san francisco after i graduated in the all-star game against the chicago bears in chicago and then i got a job coaching football at yale as an assistant and my pay was 2 400 a year but single during the depression that was that was adequate eventually i worked up to earning 3 600 a year and going to law school simultaneously so i had a full schedule of trying to be a coach where i was earning thirty six hundred dollars a year and going to one of the best if not the best law school full time what did the war do to you it was a great experience i graduated from law school went back to grand rapids to practice law and had opened up our law firm of ford and buchan without a client and a year later the war came i was single and so i joined the navy i was very lucky again i spent nine months in the naval air training command in north carolina and i got bored and i applied for sea duty and i was assigned to a an aircraft carrier which was a great assignment and we went out to the pacific and i spent two and a half years in the pacific war on a ship that was involved in all of admiral halsey and admiral michener's island hopping operations it gave me a realization that you had to make a commitment to your country in a crisis i'd never thought much about going into the military as i grew up but when pearl harbor happened it made a difference people were eager and anxious to get in whatever service they were involved in i enjoyed the navy it was good training i was in the middle of combat for two years i had good captains i was the assistant navigator uh and i was the uh officer of the deck during combat so i had great experience what back to the presidency now what do you think is your greatest achievement as president i hope historians a few years from now will write that the ford administration healed the land that president ford restored public confidence in the white house and in the government what was your greatest disappointment my greatest disappointment was that i couldn't turn a switch and all of a sudden overnight go from an economic recession to economic prosperity that was the greatest disappointment domestically the greatest disappointment internationally was that i was not elected so i could have consummated a nuclear weapons arms reduction with mr brezhnev so that we could have significantly reduced the nuclear threshold in the cold war there were two attempts quote unquote on your life while you were president one an actual shot another one apparently there would have been a shot and they not discovered uh the woman with the gun what did that do to you as a leader did that change your feeling about the presidency well the first one was in sacramento when squeaky fromm a member of the manson gang stuck her hand toward me as though she was going to shake hands and it ended up she had a gun in her hand so her gun was about this far from my face when the secret service agent larry boondorf saw it and grabbed the gun and prevented her from pulling the trigger that was pretty close the second one was about a month later in san francisco when sarah jane moore as i came out of the saint francis hotel took a shot at me from across the street and she lost her aim because a marine standing next to her saw her and hit her hand and the shot missed me by three or four feet those were scary how do you live with that well once it's over you you say well it's nothing happened so forget it and you just have to say that's one of the perils of the profession what about being president just generally what would you change in the office is it is it satisfactory the way it's set up a person who's qualified who has the right character and the right motives can handle the job we don't need to change duties and responsibilities we have to make sure the person the american people elect has the qualifications that are essential for the circumstances that are presented to him as our chief executive mr president on bicentennial day in 1976 july 4th you toured from washington up to philadelphia i don't know that i've ever seen a more joyous sort of emotional event tell me about that a little bit well that was a busy busy day we went up to where washington crossed the delaware we went to philadelphia i made a speech in that historic building then we flew to new york where they had the tall ships and the new york harbor it was a very emotional day and ended up on the balcony at the white house with one of those magnificent fireworks displays one couldn't help but have joy and pride on the 200th anniversary of this great country you never thought a boy from grand rapids would travel that route huh i looked back and wondered how it ever happened to me and i think it's a great country that something like that could happen to somebody with that background and as we look at the lives of later presidents many of them came from humble backgrounds from plains georgia and hope arkansas you're still rather upbeat about the about the office and its ability to i get very irritated with people who make a profession about bashing america i detest the cynics the skeptics in my lifetime our country's got a pretty good track record we overcame the depression of the 1930s which was a terrible tragedy we overcame the challenge of hitler and our other adversaries in world war ii and beat back aggression and aggression in world war one we have overcome since the end of world war ii five recessions we ended up a few years ago winning the battle against communism and the soviet union and the warsaw pac nation that's a good track record and we ought to be proud of it instead of being cynical and skeptical america's great country you

Channel: Life Stories

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Keywords: The American President, Gerald Ford, 38th U.S. President, PBS, Gerald Ford Interview, united states, watergate, gerald r ford, gerald r. ford, gerald ford and richard nixon, gerald ford pardon, gerald ford politics, united states of america, ford and vietnam, ford and congress, ford and carter, ford and power, ford and the presidency, ford and the constitution, ford and nixon, ford and russia, watergate documentary, watergate 1972, watergate explained, Fbi watergate

Id: 7H4hgZOS-zU

Length: 56min 46sec (3406 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 07 2023