Campaign biographies - 23 August 1974

Whenever a man runs for the presidency or thinks about it, and if there's a realistic chance that he might possibly make it, he usually finds some boyhood friend who has gone into journalism and he gets him to come along and produce a staple form of American literature known as the campaign biography.

I once knew a man of slightly cynical bent who collected campaign biographies. And it's a peculiar thing that down through, oh I should think nearly a century and through all the violent history of that time and the overwhelming technological revolution, these campaign biographies strike an almost pastoral note. They like to imagine the new national saviour as a simple, rural, all American farm boy, football player, shrewd perhaps but no city slicker, as unsubtle and honest as a ripe apple.

Now there are obviously some presidents who are a little difficult to fit into this formula. Theodore Roosevelt was one. A comparative patrician as presidents go, a wealthy man from an old social Dutch family, so they stressed his muscular Christianity and the fact that he used to like to rough it in the canyons of the West and shoot tigers in India.

Franklin Roosevelt was even more of a problem. He was a handsome, superior young New York city dude with a family mansion on the Hudson. He was no whiz at football, he was the adored pet of a regal mother. He was never known to have churned milk or kissed a horse, so they had to stress his passion for fishing. Later on the news photographers felt like miners striking gold when they could show him serving hot dogs outdoors to the King and Queen of England.

But in spite of such oddities, it's surprising how many presidents in the past fifty years or so, could be easily made to conform in their campaign biographies, to the Horatio Alger prototype of the humble boy, born on a farm, or born near a farm, who played on the local high school team, swam in the old swimming hole, married his boyhood sweetheart, and was astounded at about the age of fifteen to hear some local toothless gaffer say: "You mark my words, that young fellow'll be president of the United States some day".

Well with only minor variations in the given plot and in the local colour, it was possible to write more or less standard biographies along these lines of Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon. And as each of them achieved the White House, the newspapers got hold of their forgotten campaign biographies and began to instruct their readers in the folksy virtues of the regions that cradled them: Harding's Ohio, Coolidge's Vermont, Truman's Jackson County Missouri, the rough goat country of Lyndon Johnson's part of Texas, the simple Quaker values of Nixon's Whittier, California – a town actually named after the Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier.

We're all praying just now that Gerald Ford is safe in his health and his security, because if anything happened to him, it would be more than usually difficult to fit Nelson Rockefeller into the folksy mould. For as a rueful senator said the other day, a man who is on one of the two congressional committees that are now examining the sources of Rockefeller's worldly goods: "We don't know if his net worth is 500 million dollars or five billions. It could take a year just to go through the books of all the corporation's and the family's international holdings". Well in Rockfeller's case, the campaign biographer had to stress that both in school and college, young Rockefeller was kept, at his grandfather's insistence, on a tiny, tiny allowance.

Well in the meantime the papers are having a field day letting us know something they didn't know themselves till about ten days ago – namely what manner of man is Gerald Ford, the new man in the White House? We learned for the first time that he was christened Leslie King Junior after his father, but that when he was two, his mother divorced her husband – a new note that – and married the president of a paint and varnish company, a prosperous business in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which is a famous furniture manufacturing town. The stepfather's name was Gerald Ford and he adopted the boy and gave him his own name.

From thereon, the story reverts almost dreamily to the standard romance. In high school he asked for, and got, a double lunch hour, so that he could pick up some pin money by washing dishes for an hour a day in a small Greek restaurant. The young Ford was no bent backed bookish type, which is always a reassuring item. His passion was football and his biographer can truthfully say not only that he was a very good footballer, he was the best. First he made his high school team and then his state football team, and then he went to the University of Michigan and became its star centre, and in 1934 he was named the most valuable college player.

He had offers from the Green Bay Packers – which is to say Liverpool or West Germany – but he was now at the age, twenty-one, when it's not only allowed for a small town football hero to break the All American boy mould, it is curiously expected of him. I mean it's now alright for him to decide on a profession and take to the books and the midnight oil. He turned down the football offers, but he was so mad for the game that he stayed at the university to be football coach for part of the year. During alternate terms, he went off to Yale and entered the law school.

One of his teachers then, was the young and brilliant Professor Eugene Rostow who was the brother of Walt, Lyndon Johnson's Kissinger, and was himself subsequently Under Secretary of State. This old teacher says of Ford: "He was a B student, a very solid, straightforward, decent sort of bird of moderate ability. He worked hard and he did reasonably well".

Under Secretary of State Rostow renewed his acquaintance in Washington with the man who was now the Republican leader of the house, and his comment on the political Ford is: "He was sensible, very sensible, and he held his own and was well liked".

Ford graduated from Yale Law School after six years – those alternate stretches of football coaching naturally expanded his time as a law student – and he set up a law practice back in Grand Rapids. But not for long. It was 1941 and after Pearl Harbour he enlisted in the navy. He served just four years and for eighteen months of that time was on an aircraft carrier. He went in as an ensign, the lowest commissioned officer and he came out as a lieutenant commander, and then back to Grand Rapids and took up his fledgling law practice.

He probably would never have thought of politics if he hadn't got to know Michigan's famous Senator Arthur Vandenberg, a man who made something of an international name during the founding of the United Nations. He'd been the most eloquent isolationist in the Senate, but at Franklin Roosevelt's persuasion he turned into just the internationalist Roosevelt needed to get the Republicans to vote for the United Nations Charter. And Vandenberg convinced young Ford that America had a decisive part to play in restoring devastated Europe, and the young man beat an isolationist veteran for a seat in Congress.

Now that was in 1949, so he's been in and around congress for twenty-five years, long enough for a sensible man who holds his own to know his way through the corridors of power.

Apart from his internationalism, he has been a stiff, inflexible feather in the conservative wing of the party. His voting record on such things as social welfare bills, minimum wages, forced bussing of schoolchildren, civil rights legislation and his unrepentant hawkishness on Vietnam, this record is enough to give his liberal adversaries – and quite possibly even Nelson Rockefeller – a steady attack of the creeps.

But following the party line as a congressman and trying to dictate it as a president are two different careers and he has already pained the conservative veterans of foreign wars by telling them that the time has come to give amnesty to the dodgers, deserters and conscientious objectors of the Vietnamese war provided they earn their way by some public work back into respectable citizenship. And the other day, a powerful and very liberal black congresswoman, who distinguished herself by her learning in the recent impeachment hearings of the House Judiciary Committee, she noticed that the black caucus in Congress had begged President Nixon for a private meeting for two years, with no luck, but that one week after Ford was in office, he brought them all together on his own initiative. I imagine there'll be more surprises of that kind ahead.

We shall have to wait to fill in the colour and personal detail of the Midwestern type which is now being so folksily celebrated. He comes from a region, and therefore originally from a constituency, that has its minorities, of Italians, Russians, Latvians, Czechs, and about 12 per cent of blacks. But the solid core of the town he grew up in is the one hundred thousand people of Dutch extraction, the downright Calvinists of the Dutch Reformed Church. Not surprisingly, the name of the president's campaign biographer and now his press secretary is terHorst. The first "t" is small and the middle "H" is capital. A shirt-sleeved old resident, a man named Oudersluys was asked what was Ford's best qualification for the presidency, and without pausing to breathe, he rolled his cigar over in his mouth and snapped, "His trust in God".

On a secular note, we might remark that when there were disastrous floods in Holland, Congressman Ford got a 50,000 dollar appropriation out of Congress to help the homeless relatives of his constituents. Well congressmen are bred to think of such things. But Mr Ford undoubtedly knows, as well as Kennedy came to know and Nixon came to rue, that once you are president, your constituency is not the hometown or the party, but is the whole Congress, seen as a microcosm of the people they represent. The people that is, of the United States.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC. Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.