The only President in the history of the United States not elected by American voters was born Leslie Lynch King, Jr., in Omaha, Nebraska, on July 14, 1913. His mother, Dorothy Ayer Gardner, soon divorced the boy's father—a wife-beating alcoholic—and moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan. There she met Gerald Rudolph Ford, the owner of a paint store, and married him in 1916. Dorothy called her son "Junie," which soon became "Jerry" out of affection for the boy's new father-figure. Leslie King, Jr., did not learn of his biological father until he was a teenager, and after graduating from college he officially changed his name to Gerald Rudolph Ford, Jr. He often recalled his mother and her second husband with much affection, admiration, and love.

Sports, Studies, and Law School

The young Ford graduated in 1931 from South High School, where he excelled in history and government. He finished in the top 5 percent of his class and was named the most popular senior by his classmates. As a teenager, Ford worked at a local restaurant and took up the game of football. Playing center, he became one of the best in the state; his football talent helped him win admission to the University of Michigan.

At college, Ford majored in economics, held a series of jobs that helped him pay for school, and continued to play football. He was a solid student in the classroom and also excelled on the playing field. In his senior year, Ford started at center and was named the team's most valuable player. After graduation, both the Detroit Lions and the Green Bay Packers offered Ford a contract. He turned them down, however, to enter law school. Football, ironically, made that dream a reality. Yale University needed an assistant football coach and, hoping to repay various debts and find a way into Yale's prestigious law school, Ford took the $2,400-a-year job in 1935. He quickly proved himself an excellent coach; among his football charges were future senators Robert Taft, Jr., of Ohio and William Proxmire of Wisconsin. He also coached boxing—a sport with which he absolutely no familiarity. Winning admission to Yale Law School proved more difficult but Ford persisted and eventually was accepted on a trial basis in 1938. He did well in his studies, graduating in the top third of his class in January 1941.

At Yale, Ford rubbed shoulders with the sons of America's elite. His law school classmates included several future public officials, including Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, and Peace Corps director Sargent Shriver. While at Yale, Ford also met Phyllis Brown, a blonde, beautiful student attending Connecticut College for Women. The two shared a zest for life and fell in love, beginning what Ford later described as a "torrid four-year affair." The romance ended, however, when Ford decided to return to Grand Rapids to practice law and Brown stayed in New York to continue her modeling career.

Navy, Marriage, and Politics

Back in Michigan, Ford opened a successful law practice in 1941 with his friend (and future White House counsel) Philip Buchen. At the same time, he became increasingly interested in politics. A Republican, Ford had supported Wendell Willkie's unsuccessful run against President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election. Ford became active politically in Grand Rapids, joining a group of Republican reformers called the "Home Front," who opposed the local Republican machine headed by the arrogant and imperious boss Frank McKay.

Pearl Harbor put Ford's legal career and political interests on hold. Ford enlisted in the U.S. Navy and was called to duty in April 1942. He served four years, some as an officer aboard the Monterey, a light aircraft carrier stationed in the South Pacific. Ford took part in several major battles with the Japanese, winning ten battle stars and proving himself a good leader and a dependable officer. (During a typhoon, Ensign Ford came perilously close to being swept off the deck of the Monterey to his death.) Just as important, Ford came away from the war a committed internationalist, completely convinced that the United States had a significant role to play in world affairs.

Following his discharge from the Navy, Ford joined the law firm of Butterfield, Keeney, and Amberg in Grand Rapids and continued to cultivate an interest in politics. He also met and began courting Elizabeth (Betty) Ann Bloomer. A thirty-year-old woman known for her beauty and talent as a dancer, Betty worked as the fashion coordinator for a department store in Grand Rapids. She was going through an amicable divorce from her first husband when the thirty-five-year-old Ford called to ask for a date. Within months, Ford proposed and Betty accepted (although not wishing to incur the ire of the conservative Calvinists who populated his district, Ford required that they wait until his primary campaign was over before they wed). They married on October 15, 1948, in the midst of Ford's campaign for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Early Years in Congress

Ford launched his congressional bid quietly in 1948. Running in Michigan's heavily Republican Fifth Congressional District, his biggest challenge was winning the Republican primary over five-term incumbent Bartel (Barney) Jonkman, who was allied with party boss Frank McKay. A combination of dogged campaigning and an internationalist platform propelled Ford to victory. He then easily outpolled his Democratic opponent, Fred J. Barr, Jr., in the November election.

Ford's constituents sent him back to the House for an additional twelve successive terms. During that time, Representative Ford earned a seat on the powerful Appropriations Committee, which oversaw all government spending and which provided the young politician with an education in how the government (and its programs) actually worked. Ford consistently advocated for a muscular anti-Communist foreign policy, supporting both Democratic and Republican Presidents who looked to contain Soviet and Chinese power.

During his first few terms in Congress, Ford demonstrated an ability to work with members of both parties, won a reputation among his colleagues for hard work and integrity, and earned the trust of his fellow Republicans on the Hill, including a young California legislator named Richard Nixon. Ford supported General Dwight D. Eisenhower's bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 1952—largely because he agreed with Eisenhower's foreign policy views—and was pleased that Nixon won the second spot on the ticket. Indeed, Ford emerged as one of Nixon's greatest defenders when, after both the nomination and the election, Nixon found himself embroiled in controversy.

Key Republican Party Player

Ford rose rapidly through the ranks of House Republicans during the 1960s. Significant party losses in the 1962 congressional races and the 1964 presidential election opened the doors to a new generation of party leaders, and Ford made the most of this development. Supported by a group of younger Republicans known as the "Young Turks," Ford became chairman of the House Republican Conference in 1963. In January 1965, he successfully challenged House Minority Leader Charles A. Halleck of Indiana for the leadership post, making Ford the highest ranking Republican in the House.

Ford staked out an interesting place in the rapidly changing Republican Party of the 1960s. The GOP had both left and right wings, the former headed by the relatively liberal New Yorker Nelson Rockefeller and the latter commanded by the very conservative Arizona senator Barry Goldwater. Ford occupied the ideological ground between these two extremes, although his political and policy views had more in common with the Goldwater faction. At the 1964 Republican national convention, Ford nominated his fellow Michigander—and anti-Goldwater candidate—Governor George Romney for President. When Goldwater won the nomination, Ford fully supported the Arizona senator even though he correctly surmised that Goldwater would lose to President Lyndon B. Johnson.

Ford quickly emerged as one of the Johnson administration's chief Republican adversaries. He opposed almost all of Johnson's domestic legislation, including the Great Society programs. Ford also attacked Johnson's handling of the Vietnam War, encouraging the President to prosecute the war more vigorously. His persistent criticism of the Johnson White House led the President to lash out at the Republican Minority Leader, a marked contrast from earlier days when Johnson named Ford as one of the two House members on the Warren Commission investigating the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Ford, it should be noted, agreed with the Warren Commission's conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing Kennedy.

Ford was an ardent supporter of Richard Nixon's successful run for the presidency in 1968. Nixon's victory opened the possibility of closer ties between Republicans in Congress and the new Republican administration, but such cooperation never came to pass; Nixon's White House largely neglected the Republican minority in Congress, and they treated Ford with disdain, believing him to be an intellectual lightweight. Despite such shoddy treatment, Ford emerged as one of Nixon's most loyal allies. He supported much of the President's domestic legislation, including Nixon's innovative proposals for welfare reform. Likewise, Ford backed Nixon's foreign policy initiatives promoting détente with the Soviet Union and U.S. relations with the People's Republic of China.

Nixon easily won re-election as President in 1972, and Ford, too, was re-elected to Congress. Republicans, however, failed again to take control of the House of Representatives—a fact that Ford would later blame on Nixon's refusal to campaign wholeheartedly for the party's congressional candidates. In the aftermath of the 1972 election, Ford told his family and friends that he likely would stand for election in 1974, hopefully win, and then retire from Congress in 1977.

Nixon, however, would bask in his re-election victory only for a short time. By 1973, his presidency was beginning to collapse under the weight of the Watergate scandal. In June 1972, police caught several men burglarizing the Democratic National Committee's headquarters at Washington's Watergate Hotel. Nixon and his staff knew that a number of the burglars were political operatives working on the President's re-election campaign. The White House, under direct orders from Nixon, worked furiously to cover up this connection, going so far as to pay the burglars hush-money and to order the CIA to ask the FBI to back off its investigation. The subterfuge held through the 1972 campaign but investigators in the press and in Congress learned more about the administration's illegal activities the following year.

As details about Watergate slowly came to light, another Nixon administration scandal briefly took center stage—and brought Gerald Ford to even greater national prominence. In October 1973, Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned as part of a plea bargain with the Justice Department resulting from its investigation into Agnew's acceptance of bribes while serving as vice president and as governor of Maryland. Nixon asked Ford to be the next vice president, largely because Nixon's advisers and political allies told him that Ford was the only man on the President's short list whom the Senate and the House would support. With the Watergate scandal looming, Nixon could not afford a confrontation with Congress. The Senate confirmed Ford by a vote of 92 to 3; the House did the same by a tally of 387 to 35. Ford took the oath of office on December 6, 1973, not in the White House, as Nixon requested, but in the well of the House of Representatives.

Vice President and Watergate's Conclusion

Ford served as vice president for eight months. He was able to isolate himself from the Watergate vortex that was swallowing the Nixon presidency, although he vigorously defended the Nixon administration during his first month in office. He changed his stance somewhat in January 1974, criticizing Nixon's advisers, whom he described as "an arrogant, elite guard of political adolescents." Ford, though, never publicly criticized the President himself, even though his doubts about Nixon's innocence grew during the first six months of 1974. Nixon's days as President were numbered. In 1973, it had become known that Nixon had an elaborate taping system in the White House. Investigators subpoenaed the tapes but Nixon claimed "executive privilege" and refused to relinquish them; Ford, in fact, urged Nixon to turn over the tapes. In late July 1974, the Supreme Court ordered Nixon to give up the tapes, which he did. They revealed that President Nixon had orchestrated the Watergate cover-up and had grossly abused the powers of his office. Congress moved quickly to impeach the President. Nixon, in turn, pondered his fate and possible resignation.

Ford broke with Nixon publicly on August 5, 1974, stating that the tapes made it impossible for the President to continue to claim that he was "not guilty of an impeachable offense." As Nixon planned his next move, Ford met with his advisers and prepared to assume the presidency. On August 8, 1974, Nixon announced his resignation in a televised address to the American people. The next day, Gerald Ford became President of the United States, the first person ever to occupy that office who had not been sent there by the electorate.

The 1976 Republican Primary:

Before President Gerald Ford could take on a Democrat in the 1976 presidential election, he first needed to secure the Republican nomination. This task proved surprisingly difficult because of the primary challenge launched by former governor of California, Ronald Reagan. The ideological heir to ultra-conservative senator of Arizona (and 1964 Republican presidential nominee), Barry Goldwater, Reagan was a strong candidate for two reasons. First, conservative Republicans—Reagan's key constituency—disliked Ford's economic policies and detested the Ford-Kissinger policy of détente toward the Soviet Union. These disaffected Republicans found in Reagan a vehicle for their discontent. Second, Reagan's sunny and genial optimism made him a likable candidate. In December 1975, a national poll ranked Reagan ahead of Ford among Republican voters.

Ford and Reagan engaged in a bitter and close fight for the nomination during the first eight months of 1976, trading victories in a series of state Republican primaries. Ford entered the Republican National Convention in Kansas City with a slight lead in delegates over Reagan.

As the incumbent, Ford had courted wavering Republican delegates in key states by inviting them to the White House, by offering to speak in their states, and by rewarding delegates with patronage positions. Ford won the nomination on the first ballot but only by a mere sixty delegate votes. Since Ford had removed Vice President Nelson Rockefeller from the ticket in November 1975, he was now free to nominate Senator Robert Dole of Kansas for the second spot on the Republican ticket, a choice that Reagan had vetted and approved.

The Campaign and Election of 1976

James Earl Carter, Jr., a one-term governor of Georgia who commanded only modest national attention, captured the Democratic presidential nomination in 1976. "Jimmy" (as he liked to be known) Carter was a successful peanut farmer, nuclear engineer, and retired officer of the U.S. Navy. Campaigning early and hard in the Democratic primaries, Carter sold himself as a "Washington outsider" who promised to bring morality, decency, and trust back to American politics, claiming "I will never lie to you." It was a powerful message in the wake of the American defeat in Vietnam and the Nixon administration's criminal wrongdoings associated with Watergate. Carter won the Democratic nomination on the first ballot. He chose the more liberal Senator Walter F. Mondale of Minnesota as his running mate, hoping to balance the ticket ideologically and geographically.

Ford left the Republican convention trailing Carter by thirty-four points in the polls. He tried valiantly to play catch-up during the fall campaign and did manage to close the gap. The Ford campaign stressed the President's honesty and experience—all the while questioning whether Carter possessed those same attributes—and reassured Americans that an economic recovery was underway. Carter's lead in the polls slipped after Playboy magazine published an interview in which the candidate confessed to having lusted in his heart after many women. Ford, though, committed the biggest gaffe of the campaign in a nationally televised debate between the candidates. Answering a question about Eastern Europe, Ford botched a rehearsed line in his briefing book and declared that "There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford administration." (At the time, all the countries in Eastern Europe had Communist governments and were under the Soviet sphere of influence; some were even occupied by Soviet troops.) Despite the fact that this was not what Ford meant to say, he then compounded his mistake by refusing to admit it, and the media's treatment of this episode made his handling of the initial blunder even worse.

Only 54 percent of eligible voters cast ballots in 1976, the lowest turnout since World War II. Carter won the 1976 presidential election by a narrow margin of 57 Electoral College votes with 297 to Ford's 240. He won the South and the industrial Northeast, reassembling the old New Deal coalition of organized labor, minorities, urban liberals, and southerners, eventually winning 23 states and the District of Columbia. Ford carried 27 states: the entire West—except Hawaii—plus a number of states in New England and the Upper Midwest.

After taking the oath of office to become the thirty-eighth President of the United States, Gerald Ford forthrightly declared, "Our long national nightmare is over." With this simple statement, the new President both recognized the anguish caused by Watergate and indicated that he intended to lead the country forward.

The future, however, held many challenges and uncertainties. The American economy was sputtering, with both inflation and unemployment on the rise. Fiscal problems were hampering a number of state and city governments, and divisive social issues—such as busing, abortion, and women's rights—were splintering the American polity. Just as important, the Watergate scandal had profoundly altered the political environment. The public, by all accounts, was demanding honesty and accountability from its political leaders. And Congress was determined to take back some of the power it had ceded to the President over the previous four decades.

Ford had risen through the Republican ranks in Congress in large part because of his reputation for decency, integrity, and fairness, and his willingness to compromise. He thus was uniquely situated to lead the country in the aftermath of Watergate. Ford attempted to cultivate this image with the public by inviting the press to see his common-man, next-door-neighbor lifestyle. He toasted his own English muffins in the morning, opened doors for himself, and talked casually to White House security guards.

Ford was not entirely successful in maintaining this image, however. Within months of taking office, he had become something of a comic figure. Comedian Chevy Chase impersonated Ford every week on the popular television show "Saturday Night Live," stumbling and falling down stairs, saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, and accidentally injuring himself and innocent bystanders. Journalists often joined in the ridicule, circulating Lyndon Johnson's remark that Ford had played too much football without his helmet. In fact, Ford had, indeed, fallen upon exiting Air Force One in Austria, but Chase's act—which Ford later admitted was funny—was unfair. An all-Big Ten football player, Ford was certainly one of the most athletic Presidents in history. These negative portrayals, however, tarnished Ford's image and standing with the American public.

Pardoning Richard Nixon

Ford's ascent to the presidency implicitly promised the end of the Watergate scandal. The new President, however, re-opened old wounds when, exactly one month into his tenure, he granted Richard Nixon a "full, free, and absolute pardon . . . for all offenses" Nixon committed, or "may have committed," while President. Ford told Americans on September 8, 1974, that he had granted the pardon because Nixon had suffered enough, because the threat of prosecution was damaging Nixon's health, and because a trial of the ex-President would reignite bitter and divisive passions and prevent the country from moving forward. Privately, Ford worried that a trial would seriously harm his ability to govern, and he yearned for a presidency free from daily questions about the fate of Richard Nixon. Ford clearly hoped that the pardon would bring a sense of closure to the whole sordid affair.

Instead Ford's pardon of Nixon touched off a firestorm of protest. Polls showed that most Americans wanted Nixon punished. Observers also questioned Ford's judgment in pardoning Nixon so soon after taking office, with one Republican senator asking a presidential aide, "doesn't he have any sense of timing?" Indeed, his first press secretary, Jerald terHorst, resigned in protest over Ford's decision. Ford's popularity plummeted in public opinion polls, dropping from the high sixties into the high thirties.

Just as important, members of Congress from both parties reacted angrily to the pardon. A group of liberal Democrats, in particular, wanted to learn more about the pardon—and especially whether Ford had discussed Nixon's pardon with the ex-President or his staff. The specter of a deal between Nixon and Ford hung in the background as a special subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee ("The Hungate Committee") sent Ford a set of questions about the pardon. Attempting to answer his critics, Ford agreed to appear before the committee, a decision his White House aides did not support. Ford thus became the first President since Abraham Lincoln to testify before a congressional committee of inquiry. In a nationally televised appearance on October 17, 1974, Ford admitted that a pardon was one of the many options presented for discussion by Nixon's chief of staff, Alexander Haig. But Ford denied having promised a pardon or having made any commitment at all regarding Nixon's resignation, declaring "There was no deal, period, under no circumstances." The committee voted to close the investigation shortly thereafter. While historians have generally discounted the likelihood of any "deal," the episode damaged Ford nonetheless. The presidential honeymoon—with the American public, the press, and with Congress—was over.

The Ford Administrative Team

Early in his administration, President Ford faced another challenge which threatened to burden him with the sins of his predecessor: what to do with Nixon's cabinet and staff, whose assistance he needed in the near term to run the White House effectively. Ford's closest advisers counseled that key members of Nixon's team be kept in office for a period of time after Nixon's resignation and then eventually be replaced by Ford's own appointees. Ford essentially followed this advice.

In the modern White House, the most important position was that of "chief of staff," a post that Alexander Haig held for the last eighteen months of the Nixon presidency. Haig remained in that position for the first six weeks of the new administration until Ford appointed him commander of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) in Europe. Ambassador to NATO Donald Rumsfeld, an old colleague of Ford's from the House of Representatives and a veteran of the Nixon White House, became Ford's "staff coordinator," essentially the new chief of staff. Ford kept other Nixon appointees in key positions as well, including Roy Ash as head of the Office of Management and Budget and Kenneth Cole as head of the Domestic Council. At the same time, Ford named several trusted aides to important staff positions. Unfortunately for the new President, his appointees and the Nixon holdovers (or those with ties to Nixon such as Rumsfeld) often clashed.

Ford also nominated Nelson Rockefeller, the former governor of New York and leader of the moderate wing of the Republican Party, to fill the vacant office of vice president. Rockefeller's selection alienated many conservative Republicans who would later back Ronald Reagan (then a second-term governor of California) as a Republican presidential candidate in 1976. Rockefeller assumed leadership of the Domestic Council, a position from which he often tried to play a major role in formulating the administration's domestic policies. His suggestions, for the most part, went unheeded. In addition, Rockefeller and Rumsfeld despised each other, making life difficult in the Executive Office.

During the first months of his tenure, Ford kept much of Nixon's cabinet in place as well. But throughout 1975, Ford slowly replaced his predecessor's selections with his own appointees. Indeed, on the domestic policy side, only Secretary of the Treasury William Simon and Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz remained in office into 1976—and Butz was dismissed in October of that year. Likewise, Richard Cheney, Rumsfeld's assistant, became White House chief of staff in late 1975 after Rumsfeld left to head the Department of Defense. Ford also had his share of difficulties in working with Congress. He hoped that his long years in the House of Representatives would produce good relations between the government's executive and the legislative branches, but he was sorely disappointed. The pardon of Nixon, of course, had gotten that relationship off to a bad start. The 1974 midterm congressional elections, coming just a few months after the pardon, compounded the problem as Democrats gained 43 seats in the House, for a 291 to 144 advantage, and four seats in the Senate, for a 61 to 39 lead.

Ford not only faced significant Democratic majorities in Congress, he confronted a Democratic opposition—as well as some Republican factions—that, in the wake of Watergate and Vietnam, were determined to reassert themselves in the policymaking process. The legislature as a whole wanted to reclaim powers it had ceded to the President over the previous forty years. The newcomers to Congress who triumphed in the 1974 elections were called the "Watergate Babies" in recognition of these goals and their self-proclaimed mission to clean up Washington politics.

Stagflation and the Energy Crisis

The deteriorating American economy, however, was the key domestic issue Ford had to address. The nation's economic decline could be traced to the end of American predominance in the international economy and the rise of a low-paying service sector in the American economy. These structural factors contributed to three additional problems Ford had to confront: inflation, unemployment, and the energy crisis.During Ford's presidency, both inflation and unemployment rose to heights not seen in the post-World War II years. The rapid growth of inflation, attributable to the aforementioned macro-economic issues as well as to the escalation in federal outlays since 1965, was exacerbated by the rising price of oil. American consumption of oil grew rapidly in the 1960s and 1970s—a need the country met by importing oil from the Middle East. By 1974, 35 percent of the oil Americans consumed came from overseas. But in 1973, the consortium of oil-exporting nations called OPEC embargoed its shipments of oil to the United States in protest of the Nixon administration's decision to support Israel in the Yom Kippur War. The embargo ended before Ford took office but the price of foreign petrol remained high. Crude oil prices skyrocketed to ten times their pre-1973 levels and gas prices doubled at the pump—conditions which, combined with severe oil shortages, made for a gloomy economic environment.Conventional thinking about the economy held that high prices meant a growing economy, a healthy business environment, and low unemployment. America's economy in the 1970s confounded these expectations, however, as both unemployment soared and inflation grew. The rise in unemployment resulted largely from increased foreign competition that slowed economic growth and job creation, and from a larger American workforce—replete with baby-boomers—looking for work. Economists coined a new term, "stagflation," to describe this unprecedented situation.

At first, Ford's economic team advised him to attack the inflation problem. Whereas Nixon had implemented wage and price controls in an attempt to manage inflation, Ford, in October 1974, proposed a tax hike and asked for a reduction in federal spending. To build public support for his economic program, Ford asked Americans to join the fight by wearing buttons festooned with the acronym "WIN," for "Whip Inflation Now." More than twelve million buttons were produced, but only 100,000 requests for these pins came into the White House. The media, moreover, portrayed the "WIN" campaign as a silly public relations gimmick.Additional roadblocks thwarted Ford's plans for economic recovery. First, with congressional midterm elections fast approaching, politicians had little use for higher taxes and cuts in federal government services. Second, Ford's critics accused him of ignoring the problems of the unemployed as he focused on inflation. Indeed, unemployment had grown from 5.4 percent in August to 6.5 percent by November—and White House economists soon expected that number to top 7 percent. The economy, Ford finally admitted in December 1974, was in recession with economic production falling and unemployment rising.The President offered a new plan to deal with the nation's economic woes in January 1975. He now called for a tax cut of $16 billion to jump-start the economy. Additionally, Ford asked Congress to hold the line on government spending. Democrats responded by decrying Ford's flip-flop on taxes and by criticizing his efforts to stimulate the economy as too little, too late. In March, Congress passed a tax cut of more than $22 billion but raised spending on government programs. Ford regarded this mix of tax cuts and federal spending as irresponsible. Politically, however, he had little choice but to sign the bill, for a veto would only play into Democratic critiques that he had done too little to help the economy. Thereafter, Ford insisted that he would not accede to any more hikes in government spending. The Democratic Congress, however, believed that economic recovery necessitated additional government expenditures; it kept sending spending proposals to the White House, most of which Ford vetoed. For the rest of his term, Ford waged a war with Congress over the appropriate balance between tax cuts and government expenditures. He won a small victory when Congress passed the Revenue Adjustment Act of 1975, which featured another modest tax cut of $9 billion and assurances that Congress would limit future spending.

Ford's travails with Congress over energy policy were no less difficult. In his January 1975 proposal, Ford asked for a tariff on imported oil, the end of price controls on domestic oil, and a new tax on domestic oil producers. His goal was to stimulate domestic oil production, which he believed would cause prices to drop in the long term as supply increased. The tax on American oil companies was a political necessity, a sop to a public that viewed oil companies as greedy profit-mongers. The political reaction was predictable: conservative Republicans were not happy with the tax on American oil companies, while Democrats believed that the tariff, the tax, and the end of price controls would only increase prices.Ford and the Democrats argued about his energy proposal throughout 1975 before reaching a deal in December. In an Omnibus Energy bill, Ford accepted a 12-percent reduction in domestic oil prices in return for authority to end price controls on oil over a forty-month period. Ford and his advisers knew they had compromised but feared that Congress would not only override a veto, but that the political damage to the President would be too great if he did not go before the electorate in 1976 with some success in energy policy. Just as important, Ford believed that ending price controls was a worthwhile victory, one that harmonized with his small-government, free-market philosophy. Unfortunately for the President, the Democrats could also claim victory, at least in the short term, for they had secured an immediate reduction in the cost of domestic oil. The Democrats, it should be noted, worried that in the long term the end of price controls would raise the cost of oil. Conservative Republicans, on the other hand, had little to celebrate; they fumed at Ford's acquiescence to lower oil prices and his inability to win the immediate end to price controls.By 1976, the economy had begun to recover. The consumer price index—one measure of the rate of inflation—dipped from 9.1 percent in 1975 to 5.8 percent in late 1976. Unemployment also receded; by January 1977 it was at 7.4 percent, a significant drop from the previous year, when it nearly hit 9 percent. Nevertheless, the American economy remained sluggish.

Busing and the New York City "Bailout"

The most divisive issue in American race relations in the early and mid-1970s was busing. No city dramatized the tensions and problems inherent in the busing issue more than Boston, Massachusetts. In the summer of 1974, a Boston judge ordered the city school system to integrate immediately schools that were segregated and in close proximity by busing black students to predominantly white schools, and vice versa. In the parochial neighborhood communities of Boston, this was a recipe for disaster and violence. Mobs of whites greeted black children with taunts and obscenities, and fights broke out between black and white students inside the schools. The violence only worsened throughout the fall, culminating in the stabbing of a white student and a subsequent riot. At the same time, U.S. District Court Judge Arthur Garrity, Jr., ruled that the school system was implementing his initial desegregation order too slowly.

Many Democrats—as well as the only black member of Ford's cabinet, Secretary of Transportation William Coleman—called on Ford to intervene. The President, instead, chose to stay on the sidelines and out of the political fire. Ford was in favor of integrated schools; he had attended an integrated high school in Michigan and had thoroughly enjoyed it. But Ford opposed busing, largely because he believed the federal government had an obligation only to end "de jure" (by law) segregation rather than "de facto" (by circumstance) segregation.

In Boston, Ford reasoned, schools were not segregated because of legal mandate, so the federal government had no role to play. Ford, it must be said, was ready and willing to intervene with federal troops if the Boston situation deteriorated so egregiously that it endangered public safety. The President never reached this conclusion. He did, however, direct the Justice Department to press for a more conservative approach to integration. On this score, Ford and the Justice Department had little success. But Ford's actions on the busing issue reflected his preference for a less activist federal government that let state and local governments decide local issues.

Ford faced another potentially explosive issue—and another opportunity to demonstrate his desire to rein in the power and responsibilities of the federal government—when New York City nearly went bankrupt in the spring of 1975. Quite simply, the city's budget, which provided social services for a population the size of Sweden's, was greater than its income. Throughout the spring and summer, New York City officials tried to get financial aid from the federal government, which already supplied one-quarter of the city's budget. Ford never seriously considered intervening, despite the advice of his vice president, New York's own Nelson Rockefeller.

In October 1975, Ford publicly stated his opposition to a "federal bailout" of the city. The following day, the New York Daily News offered its own summation of Ford's position: "Ford to City—Drop Dead." After the state government of New York announced in late 1975 that it had a plan to put the city on long-term stable financial ground, Ford reversed course. He offered his support for a $2.3 billion loan to the state to assist in the bailout. Ford told his advisers, "I hope they understand this is it. Come hell or high water, this is it." Ford defended his change of heart by saying it was appropriate for the federal government to lend a hand after the city and state had taken appropriate steps to put their fiscal house in order. The historian John Robert Greene suggests that Ford acquiesced on the bailout to satisfy Senator James Buckley of New York, whose support the President desperately needed in the upcoming election year. Ford's reversal, however, did not help his political standing with conservative Republicans, who saw his actions as another example of Ford's lack of fealty to conservative principles.

Gerald Ford inherited Richard Nixon's foreign policies and his foreign policy advisers. While Ford had not developed an expertise in American foreign relations as a congressman or as vice president, he was generally familiar with the major international issues facing the country. Thus, Ford was certainly more prepared to direct the nation's affairs with the rest of the world than his critics would have admitted.

Ford asked Nixon's chief foreign policy advisers to stay on in his administration. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (who also served as National Security Adviser) and Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger agreed. But in late 1975, Ford undertook a major shake-up of his foreign policy team. The President reduced Kissinger's portfolio by naming Brent Scowcroft head of the National Security Council. As important, Ford fired Secretary Schlesinger and Director of Central Intelligence William Colby, replacing them, respectively, with his chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld, and the American envoy to China, George H. W. Bush.

Given Ford's ultimate decision to retain Kissinger, it came as little surprise that the new administration continued the foreign policies pursued by Nixon and Kissinger during the previous five years. Ford generally supported Nixon's goals of détente with the Soviet Union, of improved relations with China, and of American support for the government of South Vietnam. Nevertheless, circumstances—some beyond Ford's control—led Ford's policy prescriptions to evolve.

Détente with the Soviet Union

Ford and Kissinger made it clear to the Soviets that despite Nixon's resignation, the United States still hoped to pursue détente. Détente was an effort to lessen tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States that had existed since the end of World War II. It did not imply complete trust, nor was it a formal alliance; it was a period where the two nations began to explore ways in which they could work together for both national security and economic goals.

Ford entered the presidency with U.S.-Soviet relations on very shaky ground, however. The 1973 Yom Kippur War in the Middle East had nearly led to the massive military involvement of the superpowers. Moreover, throughout 1973 and 1974, the Soviets grew increasingly frustrated with several U.S. politicians—mainly Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson (D-WA)—who had successfully tied American trade with the Soviets to the relaxation of Soviet emigration policies. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, American relations with the Soviets during the Ford years witnessed notable failures as well as successes.

The President furthered détente in August 1975 when he joined with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and the heads of other European nations to sign the Helsinki Accords, which recognized the existing boundaries of European countries established at the end of World War II. The accords also included statements in support of human rights, to which the Soviets reluctantly acquiesced. Ford and the Soviets agreed in November 1974 to the Vladivostok Accords, which provided a general outline for a successor treaty to SALT I (Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty), negotiated by Nixon and Kissinger in 1972. But for the remainder of the Ford administration, discussions among American and Soviet negotiators about the exact details of a new treaty failed, largely because of differences over limits on Soviet bombers and American cruise missiles.

Breakdowns occurred in other areas of the Soviet-American relationship as well, most notably in Africa. In Angola, three factions vied for control of the government in the wake of that nation's independence from Portugal in 1975. A civil war soon broke out between these groups, with the Soviet Union and the United States, as well as China, providing financial and military support to different factions; the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) became deeply involved in Angola, much to the consternation of a number of Democrats in Congress. The entrance into the conflict of large numbers of Cuban troops in the spring of 1975 only raised the stakes—and exacerbated tensions between the superpowers.

Ford also had to manage the domestic politics of the Cold War. In short, the criticism of détente that had begun during the Nixon administration only grew louder during the Ford years. Restive conservatives in both the Democratic and Republican parties—and sometimes members of Ford's own cabinet, such as Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger—continuously attacked détente. These critics, who included California's Republican governor Ronald Reagan, believed that Nixon, Ford, and Kissinger had underestimated the Soviet threat and had proven too willing to deal with the Soviets rather than confront them from a position of strength. Moreover, they charged that détente was a morally bankrupt policy; the Soviet Union, according to this view, was a state with evil and illegitimate goals, one that the United States should criticize rather than accommodate. In sum, détente, according to this view, was both a moral and strategic failure.

The End of the Vietnam War

The Paris Peace Agreement of January 1973 established a ceasefire between North Vietnam, South Vietnam, and Communist insurgents in the South. Nevertheless, the war between North Vietnam (with its allies in the South) and South Vietnam resumed in 1973. By 1974, American experts on Vietnam, both inside and outside the government, understood that the military, political, and economic positions of South Vietnam were deteriorating rapidly. The American public and Congress, consumed by Watergate and a desire to move beyond the Vietnam War, paid little attention and had absolutely no interest in re-introducing American troops. High-level Nixon officials understood this dynamic, but wanted to continue economic, political, and military aid to South Vietnam.

Ford confronted this difficult situation when he assumed the presidency. In late 1974, he reiterated Nixon's request for a fresh infusion of aid; Congress responded by granting South Vietnam $700 million in military and humanitarian assistance, an amount that was far less than Nixon's original request. A renewed assault by Communist forces in the first months of 1975, however, brought South Vietnam to the brink of defeat. Ford made the case for more military aid, but Congress offered only humanitarian assistance.

The end came in late April as Communist forces overran Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam. At virtually the same time, America's allies in neighboring Cambodia and Laos were also falling from power. Ford ordered the evacuation of all U.S. personnel and South Vietnamese citizens with connections to the United States. Americans watched on television as U.S. helicopters, some with South Vietnamese civilians clinging to their landing gear, departed from the roofs of various buildings, including the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. These scenes stood as an ignominious ending to America's disastrous involvement in Indochina. For his part, Ford managed to avoid being tarred by the final defeat. His administration also oversaw the admission to the United States of tens of thousands of Vietnamese refugees. Ford had one more crisis to confront in Southeast Asia. In May 1975, Cambodian Communists, known as the Khmer Rouge, seized an American cargo ship—the Mayaguez—and its thirty-eight American crew members. The President and his advisers, determined to demonstrate American toughness to both the world and the U.S. public, ordered a commando raid to free the crew. More than forty Americans died in the complicated operation, but the Khmer Rouge released the crew and abandoned the Mayaguez in the middle of the U.S. attack.

Ford and Kissinger portrayed the return of ship and crew as a great American military victory, and the American public seemed to agree: Ford's public-approval rating soared eleven points. Looking back on the incident, historian John Robert Greene has raised questions about whether the Ford administration's rescue operation was unduly risky and focused more on punishing the Khmer Rouge than retrieving the American sailors.

Reforming the CIA

The conduct of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) came under increased scrutiny during Ford's presidency. The Watergate scandal revealed that the CIA had conducted domestic operations, a violation of its mandate. When the press learned that the CIA had conducted an internal study of its activities—nicknamed the "Family Jewels"—and that the report acknowledged CIA spying on American citizens and attempted assassinations of foreign leaders, a public fury erupted.

Ford, who claimed he had not known about the "Family Jewels" while in Congress, established a blue-ribbon commission headed by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller to investigate the CIA. The Senate and the House, however, also created their own investigatory bodies; the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations, known as the "Church Committee" after its chairman, Senator Frank Church of Idaho, quickly emerged as the most prominent in the public eye. While the Rockefeller commission issued findings generally sympathetic to the CIA, the Church committee, which Ford worried might turn into a politically motivated search for scapegoats, castigated the agency for its missteps and illegal activities.

Church's findings—and their public fall-out—cost CIA director William Colby his job in late 1975. More important, Congress adopted Church's recommendation for greater congressional oversight of the CIA, altering the practices of this important arm of American foreign policy. In fact, the Ford administration sparred repeatedly with Congress over the CIA's role in Angola.

Following his defeat in the 1976 presidential election, Gerald Ford retired to Rancho Mirage, California. Thereafter, Ford appeared frequently in public as a speaker, lecturing for private audiences and on university campuses. In his post-presidential years, Ford wrote a number of books, including an account of his presidency, A Time to Heal (1979), and Humor and the Presidency (1987). Always very athletic, Ford continued to enjoy the game of golf.

However, Ford's exit from Washington did not immediately end his political ambitions. He surprised most observers when he entered into discussions with Ronald Reagan in 1980 about running on the Republican ticket with the former governor of California. However, Ford took the offer to the media (specifically to CBS anchor Walter Cronkite in a convention interview); feeling betrayed, an angry Reagan withdrew the offer, which ultimately went to George H.W. Bush. During the 1980s and 1990s, Ford emerged as an elder statesman in the Republican Party. Likewise, Ford wrote extensively on domestic and foreign policy issues of the day. He also served on a number of corporate boards and commissions, including a stint as co-chair of The National Commission on Federal Election Reform in 2001.

President Bill Clinton awarded eighty-six-year-old Ford the Presidential Medal of Freedom in August 1999, in honor of his public service in binding the nation together after "the nightmare" of Watergate. Ford died on December 26, 2006, at his home in California. After a state funeral in Washington, D.C., he was buried in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on the grounds of the Gerald R. Ford Museum.

President Gerald Ford and his wife, Betty Ford, had three sons and one daughter. The First Family struck many Americans as fun, energetic, youthful, and, above all, normal—traits that added to the American public's comfort level with Ford, a man the people had not elected as their President.

The Fords' oldest son, Michael Gerald, was born in 1950. When his father became President, Michael was a student at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary and had recently married. John "Jack" Gardner Ford, born in 1952, was a student at Utah State University during Ford's presidential years and worked during the summer as a ranger at Yellowstone National Park. Steve, born in 1956 and known as the "charmer of the family," put off going to college to work as a ranch hand in Utah, Montana, and Idaho. He later became an actor and starred on the television soap opera, The Young and the Restless.Fords' teenage daughter, Susan Elizabeth, captured the most attention. A high school and then college student during Ford's presidency, Susan was a favorite subject for the press. She traveled with her father on his official trip to China, took up photography under the tutelage of White House photographer David Kennerly, and worked during the summer of 1975 as a news photographer with a Topeka, Kansas, newspaper.

Ford's children supported their father and even campaigned for him in 1976, but they also frequently displayed their political independence. Ford's eldest son Michael openly criticized the Nixon administration's handling of the Vietnam War as well as his father's pardon of the former President. Jack Ford made headlines by bringing a former member of the Beatles, George Harrison, to the White House. The children also chafed at the Secret Service protection assigned to them.

As President, Ford still found time to relax. He enjoyed all kinds of sports and especially liked fishing, golfing (18 handicap while President), swimming, tennis, horseback riding, and taking the family on skiing trips to Vail, Colorado. Although he took a lot of kidding from comedians for a presumed lack of physical coordination, he was in excellent health and was certainly one of the most athletic of all the nation's Presidents. He exercised with weights every day in his White House study and played tennis regularly with his family or his staff. Ford remained an avid sports fan and was especially fond of football.

Assassination Attempts

Ford emerged unhurt after two separate assassination attempts in 1975, both of which occurred in California. On September 5, as Ford greeted well-wishers outside the Senator Hotel in Sacramento, California, Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme—aged twenty-six and a follower of mass-murderer Charles Manson—leveled a Colt .45 at the President and squeezed the trigger at point-blank range. The gun misfired, and Fromme was wrestled to the ground before she could attempt a second shot. A little more than two weeks later, on September 22, Sara Jane Moore—aged forty-five and a one-time FBI informer—fired a .38 revolver at Ford in San Francisco. The shot missed Ford by a few feet. Both women were convicted under the 1965 law making attempted assassination of the President a federal offense punishable by life imprisonment.

The United States observed its 200th birthday in the summer of 1976. The great celebrations that marked the occasion contrasted sharply with President Ford's assessment of the state of the union eighteen months earlier, which he described bluntly as "not good." These widely divergent snapshots of the nation's mood only hinted at the magnitude of the political, economic, cultural, and demographic changes that buffeted America during the mid-1970s.

Immigration and Demography

Population growth in the United States slowed considerably during the 1970s. The number of Americans grew from just over 203 million persons in 1970 to about 226 million persons in 1980, the smallest percentage growth in any ten-year period since the 1930s. This deceleration cast the changes then taking place in immigration in even starker relief. Nearly five million immigrants arrived in the United States during the 1970s, the greatest influx of people to America since the 1920s. Of these five million, the vast bulk came from countries in Asia, the Caribbean, and Central America; more immigrants came from Mexico during the 1970s than from any other country.

These trends resulted largely from the landmark revision of American immigration laws in 1965, the effects of which became clear only during the second half of the 1970s. First, the new immigration system permitted relatives of American citizens or permanent residents to enter the United States without being counted against the yearly immigrant quotas. Thus, during the 1970s, actual immigration outdistanced the annual limits established by Congress. Second, the 1965 law eliminated restrictions on the entry of immigrants from Asia and South and Central America. In short, more immigrants from different countries arrived in the 1970s than at any previous time in American history.

These newcomers came with a wide array of economic skills. Among the 1.5 million Asian immigrants who arrived during the 1970s were thousands of well-educated technical workers and professionals, and even more low-skilled or unskilled laborers, who found back-breaking and low-paying work in restaurants, hotels, and the garment industry. Immigrants from South and Central America generally fit this employment profile as well, although a significant number of these immigrants found work in the agricultural sector. Many of these newcomers helped revitalize depressed parts of American cities and enrich the nation's culture.

The other important demographic trend of the 1970s was the continued rise of the Sunbelt, a region stretching across the southern half of the United States from the Carolinas to southern California. The explosive population growth in this area was fueled largely by economic development. In the South alone, two million jobs were created during the 1970s, a sharp contrast to the Northeast, where one million jobs disappeared. The growth of large cities such as Atlanta, Georgia, and Charlotte, North Carolina, in the South—and Phoenix, Arizona, in the West—were indicative of the shift underway. And with larger populations and economic might came political power and prominence. Indeed, every President elected since John F. Kennedy has claimed roots in the Sunbelt. The modern Republican Party—the dominant party in American politics since the 1970s—came to power because of Sunbelt voters.

Economic Troubles

The American economy ground to a halt in the mid-1970s. President Ford spent much of his administration battling inflation and unemployment (the tandem that economists referred to as "stagflation"), as well as energy shortages (see Ford Domestic Affairs section.) But America's economic woes during the Ford years were symptomatic of a longer-term decline in the nation's economic health. The American economy had soared in the post-war years in large part because it dominated international markets. But by the 1970s, foreign competitors, especially West Germany and Japan, had recovered their economic strength, and the United States no longer retained such a commanding international position. Indeed, the United States was routinely running trade deficits, the result of Americans spending more money on foreign goods than foreigners paid for U.S. exports. As the United States position in the international economy eroded, so did profits and job creation at home.

At the same time, the U.S. economy was undergoing a serious transformation that began in the late 1960s. During the first two decades after World War II, the American manufacturing and industrial sectors provided well-paying and plentiful jobs. But because of greater international competition and questionable leadership, these sectors of the economy had moved into a serious and sustained decline by the late 1960s. The service sector replaced industry and manufacturing as the fastest growing segment of the American economy, but at a significant cost. Service industry jobs were poorer paying, offered employees fewer benefits and opportunities for advancement, and were less likely to be unionized. The magnitude of these economic problems, though, can only be appreciated when viewed in historical context. The mid-1970s economic downturn was surely the most severe since the Great Depression. For the first time in thirty years, median family income stagnated and would have declined were it not for Americans working more hours and women and teenagers joining the labor force in larger numbers. Since World War II, Americans—and experts on the nation's economy—had always assumed that the next generation would enjoy a higher standard of living. This belief, and the confidence that accompanied it, came crashing down in the 1970s as the American economy stumbled.

Race Relations

American race relations entered yet another contentious period in the mid-1970s. The civil rights revolution of the 1960s had produced significant gains—greater numbers of blacks voted, attended colleges and universities, and had access to better-paying jobs—but significant problems still remained. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the nation's northern cities, where the flight of white, middle-class city dwellers that had begun in the late 1940s accelerated. In many northern cities, middle-class whites lived in the suburbs, while working-class white ethnics, middle-class and working-class African-Americans, and new immigrants lived in urban neighborhoods. The result was rigid segregation by neighborhood and school.

The Supreme Court attempted to solve the persistent problem of school segregation by mandating in 1971 that communities could and should bus students to achieve racial balance between schools (Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg County School District). The Court's decision meant that white students would be bused to predominantly black schools and black students to predominantly white schools. By the mid-1970s, as school boards and federal judges put these plans into action, working-class whites in Pontiac, Michigan, Louisville, Kentucky, and Kansas City, Missouri, were loudly voicing their opposition. In Boston, resistance took a violent turn in 1974 as anti-busing whites hurled insults at black children, rioted to protest integration plans, and sometimes attacked innocent blacks. The integrationist ideal of the 1960s civil rights movement supported by both blacks and whites—already weakened in the early 1970s by the white reaction to black nationalism—withered further.

Women's Movement

The gains won by the women's movement in the first half of the 1970s were very real and transformed American life. Female politicians won offices at the local, state, and national levels, and by the mid-1970s women were playing a larger role in both the Democratic and Republican parties. Women were also enrolling in medical and law school in larger numbers. At the same time, the women's movement fought tirelessly to win greater protections for victims of sexual abuse. Throughout the early 1970s, feminists won a series of court decisions that made it easier to prosecute rapists. At the grass-roots level, rape crisis centers and anti-rape task forces proliferated. Finally, the women's movement won a major victory in 1973 when the Supreme Court, in Roe v. Wade, legalized abortion.

But the defining women's issue during the Ford presidency was the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). The ERA would have amended the Constitution by declaring that "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged . . . on account of sex." Congress passed the ERA in March 1972 and, as required by law, sent it to the states for ratification. Feminists were optimistic—and with good reason. By 1977, thirty-five states had ratified the ERA, just three states short of the thirty-eight needed to make the ERA part of the nation's Constitution.

Conservative Backlash

The Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade and the efforts to pass the Equal Rights Amendment—like the busing plans to integrate school districts—aroused the passionate opposition of millions of Americans who began organizing as effective political action groups. The highly vocal Right to Life movement denounced Roe v. Wade and won a major victory in 1977 when Congress passed the Hyde amendment, which permitted states to ban the use of Medicaid to pay for abortions. Meanwhile, conservative author and activist Phyllis Schlafly formed the group "STOP ERA" in 1972, launching a sustained and effective attack on the ERA. Schlafly warned that the ERA would drastically expand the powers of the federal government and that it would destroy women's place in American society. Schlafly's leadership was one of many social and political factors that led to the ultimate defeat of the ERA during the Reagan administration.

The Right to Life Movement and STOP ERA, along with the opponents of busing who took to Boston's streets, symbolized an important shift in American politics. Participants in these protest movements believed that liberal politicians and their interest-group allies were imposing an excessively liberal political, social, and cultural agenda on local communities. Two distinctive parts of the American polity fueled this backlash against liberalism. First, white, often Catholic, working-class people from the urban North and Midwest emerged as some of the fiercest opponents of busing and increasingly announced their opposition to abortion.

Second, American evangelicals, whose numbers grew by leaps and bounds in the 1970s, rallied in opposition to abortion, pornography, homosexuality, radical feminism, and sexual permissiveness, all of which evangelicals saw as attacks on "family values." Millions of Americans joined groups like the evangelical Assemblies of God and the evangelical faction within the Southern Baptist Convention, or tuned-in to television evangelical preachers such as Oral Roberts, Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson. These individuals found comfort in a shared religious doctrine, a sense of community, and like-minded political and social beliefs. While a large number of evangelicals supported Jimmy Carter's run for the presidency in 1976—Carter himself was an evangelical, although with a liberal cast that he disguised well—they migrated increasingly to the conservative wing of the Republican Party. During the 1980s, evangelicals were by-and-large fervent supporters of Ronald Reagan.

Gerald Ford's presidency must be assessed in light of both the exceptional circumstances under which Ford assumed office and the severe challenges he faced during those years. Ford was not elected President (or vice president) by the American public; he became President in 1974 only after Richard Nixon chose to resign rather than face removal by Congress. As President, Ford confronted a failing economy, the likely collapse of South Vietnam (an American ally that 58,000 U.S. soldiers had died to protect), and a public suspicious of its political leaders. Democrats controlled Congress, which augured ill for Ford's legislative program. Of equal importance, congressional Republicans and Democrats alike seemed intent on retaking some of the powers they had ceded to the White House over the previous forty years.

Ford understood that his most pressing task was to help the country move beyond the despair, disgust, and distrust generated by the Watergate crisis. Ford's speech upon assuming the presidency, in which he declared that "Our long national nightmare is over . . . Our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men," was met with almost universal applause. But the public's (and Congress's) goodwill towards Ford quickly dissipated when the new President pardoned Nixon a mere month into his tenure. Ford certainly believed that the pardon would help the nation, as well as his own presidency, move forward. He also understood that most Americans wanted Nixon punished. But Ford miscalculated. Instead of further salving the wound of Watergate, Ford re-opened it. The howls of protest from both politicians and the public—including questions about a "deal" between the former and current Presidents—greatly damaged Ford's popularity and ended his honeymoon.

Ford emerged from this maelstrom to achieve a mixed record. In domestic affairs, the Ford administration failed to remedy the nation's dire economic problems, although by 1976 the economy had begun to recover from the previous year's recession. In Ford's defense, rising unemployment, soaring inflation, and the energy crisis, in addition to the nation's longer-term economic decline, were complex and interrelated challenges that confounded the era's most prestigious economists.

Ford's chief economic error, however, was political in nature. He replaced his first economic program, which raised taxes and capped spending in an effort to combat inflation, with a plan that cut taxes and limited government spending in the hopes of fighting unemployment. Democrats accused him of doing too little to help Americans suffering from the unforgiving economy and of flip-flopping on the tax issue. Ford similarly revised key parts of his energy program, which opened him to attacks from both Democrats and conservative Republicans. Ford's decisions to change course in these two policy areas raised questions about his ability to address these difficult issues.

In foreign affairs, Ford amassed a solid, if mostly unremarkable, record. He continued to pursue détente with the Soviet Union, meeting with moderate success. While the United States and the Soviet Union signed the Helsinki pact, they failed to agree on a major arms control agreement. Moreover, superpower tensions remained high as U.S. and Soviet proxies clashed in Angola. At the same time, while the Vietnam War ended on Ford's watch—with the memorable, ignominious departure of the United States from Indochina—the Communist victory failed to tar the President. One month after the fall of Saigon, Ford ordered a successful military operation to rescue the crew of an American ship, the Mayaguez, captured by Cambodia's Khmer Rouge; the President's approval rating shot up accordingly. But, as was the case with the economy, Ford's biggest problems in foreign affairs came from his political critics. Conservative Republicans and Democrats complained that the administration's policy of détente acquiesced to Soviet power. Critics on the left, meanwhile, demanded that Ford rein in the nation's intelligence agencies. When some in Congress deemed Ford's plans for greater oversight of the CIA unsatisfactory, they responded with their own programs.

Ford's presidency, then, was marked by three elements. First, Ford faced extraordinary challenges, especially involving the nation's economic woes, which he struggled to solve. Second, Ford had difficulty navigating a demanding political environment in which Democrats (from across the ideological spectrum) and conservative Republicans found fault with his leadership and his foreign and domestic policies. The combination of these first two elements helped bring about Ford's defeat in 1976. Just as surely, though, a third dimension of Ford's presidency deserves recognition: Americans, by and large, believed that Gerald Ford was an innately decent and good man and that he would (and did) bring honor to the White House. Although this sentiment proved too little to bring Ford to victory in 1976, it is an assessment that most Americans and scholars still find valid in the years after his presidency.

Jimmy Carter's one-term presidency is remembered for the events that overwhelmed it—inflation, energy crisis, war in Afghanistan, and hostages in Iran. After one term in office, voters strongly rejected Jimmy Carter's honest but gloomy outlook in favor of Ronald Reagan's telegenic optimism. In the past two decades, however, there has been wider recognition that Carter, despite a lack of experience, confronted several huge problems with steadiness, courage, and idealism. Along with his predecessor Gerald Ford, Carter must be given credit for restoring the balance to the constitutional system after the excesses of the Johnson and Nixon "imperial presidency."Carter was the first American President born in a hospital, and he was raised on his family's farm outside the small town of Plains, Georgia, where the family home lacked electricity and indoor plumbing. Jimmy was named after his father, a businessman who kept a farm and store in Plains. Carter's mother, "Miz" Lillian, a nurse by training, set a moral example for her son by crossing the strict lines of segregation in 1920s Georgia to counsel poor African American women on matters of health care.

Jimmy graduated valedictorian of the class at Plains High School. Captivated by the stories of exotic lands that his uncle visited in the U.S. Navy, Carter enrolled in the U.S. Naval Academy. He graduated in 1946 in the top tenth of his class and signed on as an officer under the tough but inspirational Captain Hyman Rickover in the Navy's first experimental nuclear submarine. (Rickover was later to become an admiral and build America's nuclear submarine force.)

Sowing Seeds of Change

In 1953, Carter and his new wife Rosalynn faced a difficult decision. His father, Earl, had died of cancer, and the family peanut farm and his mother's livelihood were in danger. Resigning from the Navy, Carter and his wife returned to Georgia to save the farm. After a difficult first few years, the farm began to prosper. He became a deacon and Sunday school teacher in the Plains Baptist Church and began serving on local civic boards before being elected to two terms in the Georgia state senate. There he earned a reputation as a tough, independent operator who attacked wasteful government practices and helped repeal laws designed to discourage African Americans from voting.

Though he had always stood up for civil rights and inclusion, and was able to win reelection to the state senate against a segregationist opponent, Carter was stung by a humiliating defeat in a run for governor of Georgia in 1966. He attributed this loss to a lack of support from segregationist whites, who had turned out in large numbers to vote for his opponent, a nationally known segregationist named Lester Maddox. In a bid to win their vote in the 1970 governor's race, Carter minimized appearances before African American groups, and even sought the endorsements of avowed segregationists, a move that some critics call deeply hypocritical. Yet after he became governor of Georgia in 1971, he surprised many Georgians by declaring that the era of segregation was over!

Presidential Politics: Scandal, Conflict, and Crisis

As Carter watched the defeat of Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern in 1972, he knew he would have to market himself as a different type of Democrat to have a shot at the White House in 1976. He was completely unknown on the national stage. In the aftermath of Nixon's Watergate scandal, however, this became an advantage. It also helped Carter that the disgraced Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew were replaced on the republican ticket by Gerald Ford, a political insider with no charisma and an uncanny knack for falling down stairs on camera. Despite an ill-advised interview in Playboy magazine, which plummeted his rating in the polls, Carter squeaked out a narrow victory.

Carter's newcomer status soon showed itself in his inability to make deals with Congress. Sensing his shallow public support, Congress shot down key portions of his consumer protection bill. Carter was determined to free the nation from dependency on foreign oil by encouraging alternate energy sources and deregulating domestic oil pricing. But the creation of a pricing cartel by OPEC, the oil producing countries organization, sent oil prices soaring, caused rampant inflation, and a serious recession. Carter was also deeply troubled by public scandals involving his family, including a mysterious $250,000 payment by the government of Libya to Carter's brother Billy.

Foreign affairs during the Carter administration were equally troublesome. Critics thrashed both Carter's plans to relinquish control of the Panama Canal and his response to Soviet aggression in Afghanistan by pulling out of the Olympics and ending the sale of wheat to the Russians. His recognition of communist China, which expanded on Nixon's China policy, and his negotiation of new arms control agreements with the Soviets, were both criticized by conservatives in the Republican Party. But the most serious crisis of Carter's presidency involved Iran. When the Ayatollah Khomeini seized power there, the U.S. offered sanctuary to the ailing Shah, angering the new Iranian government, which then encouraged student militants to storm the American embassy and take over fifty Americans hostage. Carter's ineffectual handling of the much-televised hostage crisis, and the disastrous failed attempt to rescue them in 1980, doomed his presidency, even though he negotiated their release shortly before leaving office.

Carter is positively remembered, however, for the historic 1978 Camp David Accords, where he mediated a historic peace agreement between Israel's Menachem Begin and Egypt's Anwar Sadat. This vital summit revived a long-dormant practice of presidential peacemaking, something every succeeding chief executive has emulated to varying degrees. Nevertheless, because of perceived weaknesses as a domestic and foreign policy leader, and because of the poor performance of the economy, Carter was easily defeated by Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980.

Since leaving office, Carter has remained active, serving as a freelance ambassador for a variety of international missions and advising presidents on Middle East and human rights issues.

James Earl Carter's ancestors had lived in America since the 1630s. They were residents of Georgia since just after the Revolution. “Jimmy” Carter’s parents, Earl and Lillian Carter, owned a peanut farm and warehouse and a store outside the small town of Plains, Georgia. Earl was bright, hardworking, and a very good businessman. "Miz" Lillian had been trained as a nurse, but abandoned her career when she became pregnant soon after marriage. She named the first of her four children James Earl, for his father. Jimmy's mother, well read and curious about the world around her, crossed the then-strict lines of segregation in 1920s Georgia by counseling poor African American women on matters of health care.

The family became moderately prosperous, but when Jimmy was born in 1924, the first American president to be born in a hospital, he was taken back to a house that lacked electricity and indoor plumbing. By the time he was ten, the boy stacked produce from the family farm onto a wagon, hauled it into town, and sold it. He saved his money, and by the age of thirteen, he bought five houses around Plains that the Great Depression had put on the market at rock-bottom prices. These homes were rented to families in the area. His father was stern but proud of Jimmy. His mother, Lillian, while also demanding, nurtured and encouraged his reading.

Entertainment was hard to come by in the rural Georgia of the 1930s, and for Jimmy his mother's brother offered a glimpse of the outside world. Uncle Tom Gordy had joined the United States Navy, and sent postcards to the Carters from around the globe. His nephew was fascinated with all the exotic places depicted in the cards and began to tell his parents that someday he'd be in the Navy, too. Before he even entered high school he had written the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, to ask for a catalogue. In 1941, he graduated as class valedictorian of his tiny high school.

Navy Career and Marriage

The events of World War II (1939-45) motivated many American patriots like Jimmy to enter the military service. There was stiff competition for admission into Annapolis and thus, Carter flung himself into his coursework, studying for a year at Georgia Institute of Technology in 1942. Carter was admitted to Annapolis in 1943 and graduated in the top ten percent of his class in August 1946, just after the end of the war.

Prior to his last year at Annapolis, while on leave, Midshipman Carter met Rosalynn Smith, a friend of his sister's. She was only seventeen-years-old, three years Jimmy's junior. When Carter first proposed marriage, she refused him. Early the following year, however, she visited him at Annapolis, and when he proposed a second time she accepted. The two were married in July of 1946.

For Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, the next eight years were typical of a young postwar, American couple. Their first son was born within a year of their marriage, and there would eventually be two more sons and a daughter. Carter worked long hours while his wife worked at home raising the children. Lieutenant Carter selected the submarine service, the Navy's most hazardous duty. One incident during this time clearly illustrated Carter's values and beliefs. While his submarine was moored in Bermuda, British officials there extended a party invitation to white crewmembers only. Partly at Carter's urgings, everyone on the submarine refused to attend.

About this time, the Navy was attempting to construct its first nuclear-powered submarines. The program was headed by the brilliant, tough Captain Hyman Rickover. Today regarded as "the father of the nuclear Navy," Rickover was slight, intense and a demanding taskmaster. Carter was assigned to Rickover's research team, and the young lieutenant was pushed mercilessly by the uncompromising captain. "I think, second to my own father, Rickover had more effect on my life than any other man," Carter would later say. One of the two new submarines being built was the Seawolf, and Carter taught nuclear engineering to its handpicked crew.

Then came bad news from Plains. Carter's father Earl had cancer, and in July 1953, he died. The farm had declined in his last years, and there was real danger that it would now be lost, a crushing prospect to Lillian Carter. After some hard thought, Carter decided to resign from the Navy, return to Plains, and help his family.

Southern Winds of Change

Carter threw himself into farming the way he had his naval duties. But the return to Plains became the greatest crisis of the Carter marriage. Rosalynn, deeply opposed to giving up the travel and financial security of military life, found it a difficult adjustment. The year 1954, saw a terrible drought in Georgia, and net profits from the farm totaled just $187.

The South was changing. The Supreme Court, in the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), had declared school segregation unconstitutional. Later in neighboring Alabama, an African American woman named Rosa Parks refused to surrender her seat on a city bus to a white person, and she was jailed for it. Black citizens boycotted the bus system and challenged the segregation in court. They were taking a stand against centuries of oppression, and the attitudes of many whites hardened. An organization called the White Citizens Council was formed to maintain the segregated status quo in the South, and its membership blossomed across the region-including Plains, Georgia. Carter was heavily pressured to join the organization in 1958, and was the only white male in Plains to refuse. The council's members boycotted Carter's business, but he stubbornly held out and over time, the boycott fizzled out.

Community Involvement and Political Aspirations

Hard work and effective management made the Carter farm prosperous by 1959. Jimmy Carter's involvement in his local community increased as he began to serve on local boards for civic entities like hospitals and libraries. He also became a church deacon and Sunday school teacher at the Plains Baptist Church. In 1955 he successfully ran for office for the first time-a seat on Sumter County Board of Education, eventually becoming its chairman. When a new seat in the Georgia State Senate opened up because of federally ordered reapportionment in 1962, Carter entered that race. Initially defeated in the Democratic primary, he was able to prove that his opponent's victory was based on widespread vote fraud. He appealed the result and a judge threw out the fraudulent votes, and Carter was handed the election.

During his two terms in the state senate, Carter earned a reputation as a tough, independent operator. He attacked wasteful government practices and helped repeal laws designed to discourage African Americans from voting. Consistent with his past practice and his deeply held principles, when a vote was held in his church to decide on whether to admit blacks to worship there, the vote was nearly unanimous against integration. Of the three dissenting votes, two were cast by Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter.

In 1966, Carter planned to run for United States Congress. However, a Republican rival announced his candidacy for governor of Georgia, and Carter decided to challenge him. This attempt was a mistake. The civil rights movement had created a conservative backlash in the South ending the solidly Democratic stranglehold on the South. Liberal Democrats like Carter were especially vulnerable. Although he campaigned hard, he finished a poor third in the 1966 Democratic primary. The eventual winner was Lester Maddox, an ultraconservative who proudly refused to allow blacks to enter a restaurant he owned, and who distributed ax handles to white patrons as a symbol of resistance to desegregation required under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Carter was bitterly disappointed by the defeat and was saddled with a substantial debt from it. He began to position himself for the 1970 gubernatorial election almost immediately. In the late 1960s Carter campaigned tirelessly up and down the state.

He campaigned on a platform calling for an end to busing as a means to overcome segregation in public schools. Carter thought that in order to win he would have to capture white voters who were uneasy about integration. Consequently, he minimized appearances before African American groups, and sought the endorsement of several avowed segregationists, including Lester Maddox. The leading newspaper in the state, the Atlanta Constitution, refused to endorse him, and described him as an "ignorant, racist, backward, ultra-conservative, red-necked South Georgia peanut farmer." The strategy worked, however, and with the support of rural farmers, born-again Christians, and segregationist voters, Carter forced a runoff election and won with 49 percent of the vote.

Delivering Change to Georgia

The new governor's inaugural address surprised many Georgians by calling for an end to segregation, and received national attention for it. By and large, Carter governed as a progressive and reformer. During Carter's term as governor of Georgia, he increased the number of African American staff members in Georgia's government by 25 percent. But his primary concern was the state's outdated, wasteful government bureaucracy. Three hundred state agencies were channeled into two dozen "superagencies." He promoted environmental protection and greater funding for the schools. However, he worked poorly with traditional Democratic politicians in the state legislature, and gained a deserved reputation as an arrogant governor, with a "holier than thou" attitude that isolated him from politicians who might otherwise have become his political allies.

While Carter was serving as governor, he was taking careful measure of the national political landscape. The Democratic presidential candidate in 1972 was George McGovern, a liberal who steadfastly opposed the war in Vietnam. Carter watched McGovern run an impracticable campaign, in which he was portrayed by his opponents as a radical extremist, and that ended with an overwhelming defeat at the hands of Republican incumbent, Richard Nixon. Governor Carter reasoned that the next election would require a different type of Democrat, and he quietly began laying the groundwork for a run for the White House in 1976.

The Campaign and Election of 1976:

Jimmy Carter took his first step on the road to the White House in 1972 by becoming chair of the Democratic Governor's Campaign Committee, and then his second step in 1974 by getting himself named as the campaign chairman of the Democratic National Committee. This position gave Carter access to key Democrats nationwide, and the major Democratic gains in the first post-Watergate election added to his reputation. Just before the end of the year, Jimmy Carter announced his candidacy for president. Public reaction to his candidacy revealed that exposure to his party was not enough to gain him wide recognition. He was all but ignored and his national profile was almost non-existent. In fact, the leading newspaper in his home state ran a headline the day after his announcement that proclaimed, "Jimmy Who Is Running For What!?"Just a few years before, Governor Carter had appeared on a television game show in which the object was to guess the occupation of a "mystery guest," and Carter stumped the panel. However, Carter's anonymity turned out to give him an advantage in the 1976 election. In response to the twin nightmares of Vietnam and Watergate that had shattered public confidence in government (see Nixon biography, Domestic and Foreign Affairs sections, for details), Americans gravitated toward leaders who were outside the Washington sphere. Answering the nation's need, Carter's slogan was "A Leader, For A Change."Nine other Democrats were seeking the nomination in 1976, most of them better known than Carter. But he approached the race like so many challenges before-with grim determination. Portraying himself as an outsider who could "clean up the mess in Washington," Carter simply out-hustled his competition. He won the first skirmishes, the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, and kept rolling, winning more than half the primaries. Instead of entering selected primaries, Carter recognized that under new Democratic rules, he could gather some delegates even in states where he would not come in first. And so he campaigned everywhere. One by one, the other Democrats dropped out, leaving Carter the front-runner, even though he had not won a majority of delegates in the primaries.

At the party convention that summer, he won the nomination on the first ballot. For his vice presidential running mate he chose Walter Mondale, a United States Senator from Minnesota. Mondale offered a "Northern presence" on the ticket to give it geographic balance, and his liberal record on labor issues helped calm the fears of labor unions that were uneasy about a president from the traditionally anti-organized labor south.

Carter vs. Ford

The incumbent president, Gerald Ford, was the first "unelected" president in the United States. A political insider, he was appointed to the vice presidency by Richard Nixon and consented to by the Congress under provisions of the Twenty-fifth Amendment, after a scandal forced elected Vice President Spiro T. Agnew to resign. Ford assumed the presidency after Nixon resigned.

As a presidential candidate, Ford had a lot of liabilities. He had given Nixon a full pardon shortly after assuming office, and many people believed that the pardon had been the price Ford had to pay to gain the presidency. His popularity had plummeted immediately thereafter. Even though he had been a football player in college and was a skilled athlete, mass media portrayals of the president made him out as weak and clumsy. In Lyndon Johnson's gibe, Ford was a man who "couldn't walk and chew gum at the same time." For example, he was often depicted as physically and socially awkward because the president had an uncanny ability to be photographed while stumbling, with photos showing him doing so when boarding Air Force One. Additionally, every weekend, the popular new television show called Saturday Night Live featured a skit lampooning his missteps. All of this made it difficult for Ford to command respect from pundits and voters alike. Meanwhile, economic inflation was high, at nearly eight percent. One of Ford's responses had been to distribute buttons that said "WIN" (for "Whip Inflation Now"), a poor choice of words that did not elicit positive public reaction. In one public opinion poll, only 5 percent of voters considered Ford "experienced." Moreover, obtaining the Republican nomination was not an easy task for the incumbent Ford.

Fair or not, the campaign turned on the bitter legacy of Richard Nixon. Not surprisingly, as Ford tried to move away from the former president, Carter subtly tried to pin Ford to the failures and disgrace of the Nixon administration. He called for "a government that is as honest and decent and fair and competent and truthful and idealistic as are the American people." As with most campaigns, both candidates sought to define the other as something the voters didn't want. Carter painted Ford as an extension of Nixon. Ford portrayed Carter as an inexperienced liberal who would create new government programs paid for by tax increases.

Campaign Missteps

Carter had a double-digit lead going into the fall, but then made a serious error. He consented to an interview in Playboy magazine, and discussed a number of personal issues. For many voters, Carter's admission to having lusted "in his heart" was disconcerting, and Carter's lead slipped to nothing. Three nationally televised debates failed to have much effect on the polls, but Ford made a bad gaffe of his own, claiming, "There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe." Hounded mercilessly by the press in the days that followed, he stubbornly stood by what he had said, and the jokes about him intensified.

Carter's difficulties continued as well. Two days before the election, an African American minister was denied entry to the Plains Baptist Church, of which the candidate was a member. Carter's campaign handlers accused Ford's of engineering a publicity stunt to make Carter appear hypocritical about his stance on race.

The election was very close. Ford's strategy was to try to win five of eight elector-rich states-California, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas. He won four, but not five. Carter won with an interesting coalition of the entire Old South (excepting conservative Virginia) and northern industrial powers such as New York and Pennsylvania.

Carter's prospects seemed bright. People were eager for new leadership, and he enjoyed large Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. Pundits talked of a "one and a half" party system, with the Democrats so dominant and the Republicans seemingly doomed by Watergate to spend years in the political wilderness.

The Campaign and Election of 1980

Three days after the embassy takeover in Iran, Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts announced his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination. Incumbents rarely face a challenge from within their own party, but Kennedy was encouraged by Carter's weak poll ratings. When told of the Kennedy challenge, Carter snapped to reporters: "I'll whip his ass."Kennedy came close to defeating Carter as the party split into two wings. The day after the president lost the New York primary, a tabloid headline brayed, "Big apple to Carter: Get Smarter!" The president limped into that summer's convention weakened by the troubles at home and abroad, but he did have more delegates than Kennedy, and if they stuck to their pledges to vote for him, he would win the nomination. Kennedy desperately tried to get the convention to repeal the system of pledged delegates, arguing that if delegates could vote freely, they would dump Carter. But the convention refused to change its rules and Carter won renomination. To get Kennedy's endorsement Carter was forced to make many policy concessions to the liberal senator. Much of the Democratic platform reflected Kennedy's views, and some of it was an outright repudiation of the Carter record.

The Gipper Wins It

Ronald Reagan, meanwhile, had cruised to the Republican nomination almost effortlessly. He swatted off a challenge from George Bush, then named his rival as his running mate. "The Gipper" (a nickname derived from a movie role Reagan had once played) wrapped iron accusations of the president in velvet cowboy charm. He criticized Carter daily for the ongoing hostage crisis. Reagan referred to a city in Alabama that had hosted a Carter rally as the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan, one of several falsehoods that never seemed to hurt the challenger.

Carter tried to respond by painting Reagan as an unstable warmonger, but nothing seemed to stick to the former movie actor. The Republican replied by accusing the president of mean-spiritedness, and that did stick. Meanwhile John Anderson, a former Republican member of Congress running as an independent candidate for the presidency, threatened to draw votes away from Carter in some key northern states.A televised debate between the Carter and Reagan was set for a few days before the election, and it all but finished Carter. The president had prepared hard for the debate, recognizing it as the last card in his losing hand. But Reagan was an infinitely superior television candidate. Someone asked Carter a question about the arms race with the Soviets, and he claimed that he had helped decide policy towards it by discussing it with Amy, his eight-year-old daughter. When Carter acted querulous and sounded shrill, Reagan turned to him and said in a mock tone of exasperation, "There you go again." At the end of the debate, Reagan looked into the camera expertly and asked viewers, "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" The next day, Carter was stunned at the latest poll numbers-the very bottom had dropped out. The polls did not lie. When the election returns were released, the president had lost by nearly 10 percent of the popular vote and by 440 electoral college votes. Even had Anderson not been in the race (he drew votes equally from both major party candidates), Carter would have lost badly.

It was the first loss by an elected presidential incumbent since Hoover had been defeated in 1932. Although the United States was not in an economic depression, it could fairly be said that poor economic performance and problematic leadership by the president had caused his defeat. As the New York Times stated, "On Election Day, Mr. Carter was the issue."

Jimmy Carter sought to run the country the way he had run his farm—with unassuming austerity. This would be no "imperial presidency" like those of Johnson and Nixon. On inauguration day, Carter got out of the limousine and walked to the White House, delighting the crowd and horrifying the Secret Service who sought to protect him. His inauguration outfit was a business suit not formal wear, and the inaugural festivities were low key. When Carter addressed the nation, he wore a cardigan sweater and adopted an air of studied informality.

Carter came from an unusual Southern political culture. While most Democratic politicians were "good ole boys," happy to participate in corrupt county courthouse rings and city machines, adept at backslapping and deal making, Carter came from the Wilsonian southern tradition, which was far different. He was a reformer and progressive, who put his faith in science and technology to advance the human condition, even as he retained his moral values from his deep religious faith. He thought political leadership should function for the common good, not to please a set of organized constituencies. Like Woodrow Wilson, he intended to act with honesty and candor, leading people by setting an example, and by asking them to reach a higher moral plane. He promised he would never lie to the American people.

Relations with Congress

The country desperately wanted the president to succeed. Carter began with a series of bold strokes. He pardoned Vietnam-era draft resisters, killed funding for the B-1 bomber airplane, and pushed for a comprehensive consumer-protection bill. His opposition to a traditional rivers and harbors "pork barrel" bill early in his term was fiercely resisted by his own congressional leaders. He had to back down, but his charges that these bills were wasteful and corrupt left a bad taste in the mouths of the legislators with whom he would have to deal.

As when he was governor, Carter had an abiding dislike for the backroom dealing that is so pervasive in Washington. Congress which found the new president hard to deal with, quickly sensed his shallow public support. With this knowledge, Congress asserted its power over the president by shooting down the consumer-protection bill and the labor reform package. Carter responded by vetoing a public works package in 1978 on the grounds that it was inflationary. A pattern of mutual distrust and contempt had been set. When Congress transformed his tax plan into new favors for special interests, Carter called the taxing committees "a pack of ravenous wolves."Carter did have some successes with Congress, but often because he backed existing Democratic programs, such as raising the minimum wage. The president did have success with his own program to deregulate the airline, trucking, and railroad industries, which eventually resulted in lower transportation costs for industry and consumers. He also got Congress to establish a "superfund" to clean up toxic waste sites.

Energy Policy Success

Carter's main achievement involved energy policy, though he would receive little credit for it during his term. Despite the lip service paid by American presidents to reducing energy dependence, U.S. oil imports had shot up 65 percent annually since 1973. In 1976 the nation was consuming one-quarter of all Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) production. The U.S. remained wasteful in energy use, with consumption per capita 2.3 times the average for nations in the European Economic Community and 2.6 times Japan's. Carter set out to reduce this dependence.

The president got Congress to pass the Emergency Natural Gas Act, which would authorize the national government to allocate interstate natural gas. He created a Department of Energy to regulate existing energy suppliers and fund research on new sources of energy, particularly sustainable (wind and solar power) and ecologically sound sources. His Energy Security Act created the U.S. Synthetic Fuels Corporation, which would provide $20 billion in joint ventures with private industry. Carter signed his first energy package into law on November 9, 1978. The deregulation of oil and natural gas prices that resulted would lead to a vast increase in the supply of energy in the 1980s, and consequently a lowering of prices.

During Carter's term, however, the actions of the OPEC oil cartel (foreign oil producers) resulted in an increase in oil prices, from $13 a barrel to over $34. With America so dependent on oil, this huge price increase resulted in a run-up in inflation. Carter asked Congress to accelerate stockpiling 500 million barrels of crude oil in a national security reserve, setting target date by end of 1980 instead of 1982 (the deadline set by the Ford administration). The administration also developed new conservation measures that would sharply reduce industry's use of fuels, as well as automobile mileage standards. Strip mining would now be regulated by the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act, a victory for environmentalists.

Carter had other successes in energy policy, particularly in nuclear energy policy, in which he was an expert. He got Congress to abolish the powerful Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, a step that would make it easier to block breeder reactors and move toward light-water reactors of the kind favored by the administration. Carter won his route for a soon to be constructed oil pipeline in Alaska. He killed funding for the Clinch River Breeder Reactor, because the plutonium reactor technology would increase the risk of nuclear proliferation if adopted elsewhere in the world. Instead, Congress authorized and funded a shutdown of the reactor.

By April 1980, he had gotten much of his second energy package through, including a Crude Oil Windfall Profits Tax (with revenues designated for the general Treasury but not for specific energy projects), which would expire in 1993 or before, if the full amount of $227 billion had been collected. But there were two major defeats: Congress overrode a presidential veto of a bill that Congress had passed repealing a $4.62 per barrel oil import fee—the first time in twenty-eight years that a Congress had overridden a veto by a president from the majority party. It also defeated the Energy Mobilization Board that Carter had proposed to cut through "red tape" in developing new sources of energy.

While Americans had to endure long gas lines during the summer of 1979 and higher prices at the pump—effects of the Iranian revolution of that same year— Carter's program by and large worked. Consumption of foreign oil did go down, from 48 percent when Carter took office to 40 percent in 1980, with a reduction of 1.8 million barrels a day. When Carter left office there were high inventories of oil and a surplus of natural gas, delivered by a more rational distribution system. There was greater oil exploration than before, leading eventually to an oil glut and a drop in prices-which Carter's Department of Energy had not predicted. Between 1980 and 1985, domestic production would increased by almost 1 million barrels a day, while imports of crude oil and petroleum products declined from 8.2 to 4.5 million barrels a day. His goal of reducing U.S. dependency on foreign sources succeeded, at least temporarily.

Poor Media Image

But Carter was given little credit for these accomplishments. The energy program was complex, and no one could understand what was happening. But energy prices and taxes were going up, and that was easily understandable. Carter worsened his image problem by giving the so-called "malaise" (a French word meaning illness) speech, in which he described a lack of confidence in America's purpose and its future. In addition to admitting that people lacked confidence in his leadership, Carter blamed the crisis of America's spirit on the American people themselves. He then compounded his difficulties by firing four cabinet secretaries, transferring several others, and asking for resignations of dozens of lower level officials. Media commentators wondered if Carter was losing his grip. He went down sharply in the polls and never recovered from the "malaise" speech.

Carter gained a reputation for political ineptitude, even though his actual record in dealing with Congress belied that image. His success rate in getting presidential initiatives through Congress was much higher than that of his predecessors Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, and successors Reagan and Bush. One might expect a president with a majority in Congress to do better than presidents facing the opposition party majorities. But Carter was also close to Johnson's success rates. Carter did not like to bargain and appeared arrogant and aloof, but at the end of the day, he usually wound up with much of what he sought from Congress. His major problem was that the perception of his leadership did not correspond with the reality of his performance.

Scandal and Personal Embarrassments

Again and again during the campaign, Carter had presented himself as a man of honesty. Americans for the most part believed in their president, but the trust did not extend to some key members of his administration. His budget director had to be fired a year into the administration when he was connected to unsavory banking practices in Georgia. Later Lance was exonerated. There were allegations that Carter's treasury secretary had allowed a company he chaired to conduct illegal payoffs in doing business. Moreover, the president's chief of staff was accused of using cocaine in the White House. Eventually these charges too were shown to be false, but the damage to Carter's own reputation for honesty remained.

The president's negative press coverage also touched Carter's family. His sister, Ruth Carter Stapleton, appeared in public holding hands with a notorious pornographer, claiming she had converted him to Christianity. Billy Carter, the president's younger brother, quickly became nightly fodder for talk-show comedians with his country-boy image. He marketed his own brand of beer ("Billy Beer") and booked public appearances at bottom-barrel events. Then something not so harmless came to light about him. Libya-a nation that had sponsored terrorism for years-had given Billy Carter nearly $250,000 for an undisclosed reason. The Senate began an investigation of the matter, and the president's embarrassments dragged on.

Even without the scandals, Carter would not have had good press relations. He seemed aloof and condescending, stiff and impersonal with reporters. They chafed at his moralistic, "eat your peas" attitudes, and portrayed him either as either a cynical and manipulative politician or an amateurish incompetent. Carter was not physically clumsy like Ford, but his media images always came out wrong. On one vacation trip, photographers were asked to tag along to get some good photos of Carter relaxing. What they shot (and what networks covered that evening) was Carter trying to beat off a pesky rabbit from a canoeing expedition-and almost tipping over his boat in the process. If any president can be said to have had plain bad luck in dealing with the media, it was Carter.