Gerald Ford Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

Politics: Don’t forget about 1974

RMN

Understandably, many people’s jaws have dropped over the changes in the political landscape during July 2024. Many of them compared it to 1968, and rightly so.

But don’t forget about 1974. That was the year that Richard Nixon resigned after the Watergate debacle. I was reminded of this when my Wordle buddy used PENCE on the way to PENNE. He said he was thinking about the money, not the VEEP. I replied: “Of course, but it reminds me to try the word occasionally.”

His response: “AGNEW has 5 letters, but nobody ever thinks of him.” Au contraire! “I think of Ted all of the time. He’s why Jerry Ford became president 50 years ago.”

Ted

Vice-President Spiro T. Agnew was newly re-elected in 1972 with Richard Nixon. Initially, he was not the target of an investigation in Maryland, where he had been governor. However, by June 1973, [Lester ] “Matz’s attorney disclosed to Beall that his client could show that Agnew had not only been corrupt but that payments to him [from Matz’s engineering firm] had continued into his vice presidency. The statute of limitations would not prevent Agnew from being prosecuted for these later payments.”

Ultimately, “on October 10, 1973, Agnew appeared before the federal court in Baltimore and pleaded nolo contendere (no contest) to one felony charge, tax evasion, for the year 1967. [U.S. Attorney General Elliot] Richardson agreed that there would be no further prosecution of Agnew and released a 40-page summary of the evidence. Agnew was fined $10,000 and placed on three years’ unsupervised probation. Immediately prior to entering court, Agnew had an aide submit his formal letter of resignation to the Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, and sent a letter to Nixon stating he was resigning in the best interest of the nation. Nixon responded with a letter concurring that the resignation was necessary to avoid a lengthy period of division and uncertainty, and applauding Agnew for his patriotism and dedication to the welfare of the United States.”

25A

This kicked in Section 2 of the 25th Amendment, which reads: “Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of the Vice President, the President shall nominate a Vice President who shall take office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both Houses of Congress.”

Some Vice-Presidents ascended to the Presidency and had no Veep: John Tyler (after William Henry Harrison, 1841-1845); Millard Fillmore (after Zachary Taylor, 1850-1853); Andrew Johnson (after Abraham Lincoln, 1865-1869); Chester A. Arthur (after James Garfield, 1881-1885). Others – Teddy Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Harry Truman, and Lyndon Johnson – had no Veep until the following election.

So this was a new thing. Gerald Ford, the House Minority Leader, “was nominated to take Agnew’s position on October 12, the first time the vice-presidential vacancy provision of the 25th Amendment had been implemented. The United States Senate voted 92 to 3 to confirm Ford on November 27. On December 6, the House confirmed Ford by a vote of 387 to 35. After the confirmation vote in the House, Ford took the oath of office as vice president.”

Then, after Watergate became untenable for Nixon, he addressed the nation on television on August 8, 1974, and resigned from the presidency the next day.

When Gerald Ford became President, the 25th Amendment was used again to elevate Nelson A. Rockefeller to vice president in December 1974. Those were weird times.

1968

Not that 1968 wasn’t strange. Doris Kearns Goodwin, who has a recent book about how she and her late husband interacted with the times, appeared on The Weekly Show in late July. She schooled Eugene Daniels and host Jon Stewart on the situation’s complexity.

Not only did Lyndon Johnson, the Democratic President, decide he would not run for re-election, but he would also engage in some diplomacy to end the Vietnam War. He realized that if he couldn’t do the latter without doing the former, so he went on TV at 9:00 PM on March 31st.

But only four days later, Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated. This put the kibosh on the peace plan, as he had to deal with massive disruptions on the streets. Robert Kennedy started actively running for president after Eugene McCarthy had gotten 42% of the vote in the New Hampshire Democratic primary against the incumbent. He was very likely to become the party nominee when, in early June, just after the California primary, RFK was assassinated.

This caused chaos at the Democratic convention in Chicago in August 1968. Hubert Humphrey, Johnson’s vice president, became the nominee, but so many people were slow to get behind HHH that Richard Nixon – remember him? – barely won the Electoral College, with George Wallace, the third-party candidate, taking five states.

2024

So, it is not shocking that the Democrats have coalesced behind Kamala Harris. Her campaign could keep the money raised by the Biden/Harris campaign.

I find it hysterically funny that the Republicans are suggesting that those 14 million people who voted for Joe Biden in the very non-contested Democratic primaries were losing their franchise because Harris is now the nominee. They have supported a candidate on the Republican side who wanted to disenfranchise 81 million people who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 and, more than that, continue the lie that the election was stolen.

It’s almost humorous to listen to djt being surprised that Kamala Harris identifies as part black, given the fact that she attended an HBCU, Howard University, and was a member of a black sorority, AKA. Her mother has been on record that she raised Kamala as black because she knew that she would be perceived as black by most people. Yes, race in America is complicated, but the misogynoir in djt has often been very strong.

I’ve been aware of Rachel Scott, the ABC reporter who questioned him at the black journalists’ event, for a while. She, along with Diane Sawyer, presented a Peabody-nominated report about how pregnant women who wanted to have kids were experiencing severe outcomes but, because of anti-abortion laws, could not receive medical treatment. She’s not a new kid on the block but is the senior congressional reporter for ABC News.

Ranking the Presidents of the USA

Numbers 32 to 36 ranked highly

In response to my Presidents Day post about knowing all of those guys – they’re all guys – in order, led to a couple of discussions.

One involved a friend of mine whose kid, who I’ve known since he was a baby, has “very strong feelings” about ranking the Presidents. I think we all should have a “resident political scientist” (RPS), in our midst, and a credentialed one at that.

I find the exercise interesting, as an old poli sci major would. Yet I’ve always been mildly conflicted between whether President was successful and how that success or failure turned out historically. (I have one specifically in mind; see below.)

Nevertheless, here’s a list, not the whole roster. The comparative rankings I’ll refer to is the overall 2021 C-SPAN Presidential Historians Survey, linked to here. I’ll not create a full list of my own.

So it begins

1. George Washington, #2. Does he get nicked for owning slaves? Of course, true of many of the early dudes. But as anyone who’s heard Hamilton knows, part of George’s greatness is not staying around too long.

7. Andrew Jackson, #22. Jackson has tumbled over the years. But not far enough for the RPS, who would put him third from the bottom, ahead of only Trump and perennial cellar-dweller Buchanan. As abhorrent as I think he was, I’m not ready to put him down that low. Among other things, he kept South Carolina from seceding and paid off the national debt. Conversely, the spoils system started with him. And he’s responsible for the Trail of Tears.

Surely, he should be off the $20 bill. Incidentally, some versions of his dollar coin are flawed.

9. William Henry Harrison, #40. Seriously? Why is this man even ranked? Some polls exclude him. His only major decision was to give a too-long inaugural speech. Then he died a month later.

10. John Tyler, #39. Can we count the stuff after he left office? I think we do anyway, and I have a couple of examples. This traitor sat in the Confederate Congress for a few months before he died in 1862.

Leading to the Civil War

11. James K. Polk, #18. I was helping my daughter with her history homework last year. The fact that he met every major domestic and foreign policy goal he had set during his single term was impressive. But he led the country into a nasty war against Mexico, which accelerated the divide between free and slave states.

13-15. Millard Fillmore, #38; Franklin Pierce, #42; James Buchanan, #44. Worser and worse, as they say. Shortly after Fillmore’s ascent to the presidency upon the death of Zachary Taylor (#35), he supported the odious Fugitive Slave Law, part of the Compromise of 1850. Pierce, who was recently featured on CBS Sunday Morning, signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which fractured the Missouri Compromise more slavery in the territories.

Perhaps there was nothing for Buchanan to do. As JFK was quoted, “No one has a right to grade a president — even poor James Buchanan — who has not sat in his chair, examined the mail and information that came across his desk, and learned why he made his decisions.”

16. Abraham Lincoln, #1. Perhaps no President has been more analyzed, for good and ill.

17. Andrew Johnson, #43. What might Reconstruction have looked like if not for him? An oversimplification, sure, but…

18. Ulysses S. Grant, #20. Few have been more rehabilitated than USG. Yeah, the Panic of 1873, but Reconstruction helped. So did his book.

20th century

29. Warren G. Harding, #37. When I was growing up, only some of the Presidents around Lincoln fared worse than Harding, with Teapot Dome.

31. Herbert Hoover, #36. Another “worst ” President growing up.

32. Franklin D. Roosevelt, #3. New Deal, WWII. Conversely, internment camps for the Nisei. Plus many provisions of the New Deal actually harmed black people. Much of the positive energy of the administration came from his wife Eleanor.

33. Harry Truman, #6. The fact that the military desegregated under his administration is a BFD for me. Berlin airlift, and reining in MacArthur are pluses.

34. Dwight Eisenhower, #5. Even though he likely wasn’t in favor of the ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, he respected the process. So he sent in troops to desegregate Little Rock HS. He also created the armistice in Korea, despite opposition in his own administration. He initiated a massive interstate highway system. But he also gave one of the best farewells, warning us of the “Military-industrial complex.”

Ones I remember

35. John Kennedy, #8. I’d long thought that JFK was overrated, a function of his youth and being assassinated. He had that Bay of Pigs debacle, though the world DIDN’T go to war in ’62. He was coming around on civil rights in ’63. But I must credit him with the initiation of the space program that DID go to the moon in that decade.

36. Lyndon Johnson, #11. The most vexing President in my lifetime. On one hand, he pushed the civil rights legislation, sometimes in the name of his late predecessor. And he had a robust social welfare program. But the massive escalation in the Vietnam war was unforgivable.

37. Richard Nixon, #31. RPS’s mom would put Nixon in the lower echelon of presidents, “but maybe that’s just because I was in high school and college in the 70s.” I DESPISED Nixon politically when he was in office, over Vietnam response but also his war on drugs. The EPA was created, only Nixon COULD have gone to China, and a more robust health care COULD have happened except… Watergate, of course, was the public spectacle debacle that I watched on TV daily.

The unelected President

38. Gerald Ford, #28. ADD asked, “What are your thoughts about the one that was never elected President or Vice-President? That’s my favorite trivia question.” My favorite, “Which President was born Leslie Lynch King Jr.?” Now here’s my unanswerable question: would the Republicans push out Nixon if Spiro Agnew would have become President? I’ll acknowledge that I opposed Ford’s pardon of Nixon at the time, but I’ve softened on it.

His problem was that he was tasked with cleaning up messes: Nixon, but also Vietnam, inflation, an economic downturn. Ford’s social policies were liberal by today’s standards, notably his support of the Equal Rights Amendment, but he didn’t have a lot of political capital, especially after the 1974 Congressional elections, which brought in a wave of Democrats. He did the best that he could. His wife Betty, though: SHE was a force.

Oh, and his appointed Veep was Nelson Rockefeller, considered a liberal, but he ran with BobDole in 1976 and lost.

39. Jimmy Carter, #26. The Camp David between Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachim Begin was a highlight. But the ongoing energy crisis was a drag. He had solar panels installed on the White House (and Reagan had them taken down.) Of course, the Iran hostage crisis sunk him.

A different job

40. Ronald Reagan, #9. I always thought Reagan should have been king. A cheerleader for America. He was good at that, actually. But his policies, from trickle-down economics to anti-union policies to a larger war on drugs to ignoring HIV/AIDS for years. But he knew how to sell it like an actor. Getting shot and coming back healthy certainly helped. He DID appoint the first woman to SCOTUS. The fact that he said to Gorbechev “Tear down this wall” and the Berlin wall came down a couple of years later means he gets to take credit.

41. George H. W. Bush, #21. Breaking his “no new taxes” promise helped to sink him.

42. Bill Clinton, #19. He had to face that horrendous wave of Contract On America tools such as Gingrich. Even at the time, I dismissed the idea that the Telecommunications Act of 1996 would be a boon to competition in local cable markets. His war on drugs was as bad as recent Republicans. He did select Stephen Breyer and RGB for SCOTUS. His impeachment was silly, especially given the behavior of some Republicans, such as Gingrich, which we didn’t know at the time.

21st century

43. George W. Bush, #29. Going into Iraq was the big debacle, though his Hurricane Katrina response was lousy. Oh, yeah, and the 2008 economic collapse. #29 seems high.

44. Barack Obama, #10. He signed the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) when so many others had tried and failed. He also backed the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act and ended Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. it appeared Obama was working hard on his economic stimulus program in response to the Great Recession even before he was inaugurated. Unsurprisingly, he talked a lot about race, which I thought was appropriate.

45. Donald J. Trump, #41. Tax cuts for the riches. His disturbing relationship with Putin in Helsinki and subsequently. Amazingly racist comments. His bromance with Kim Jung-un. His pathological need to try to undo everything his predecessor accomplished, from Paris climate change to the Iran nuclear agreement. He lied all of the time, even about things not worthy of the effort. His administration developed the COVID vaccine, but his messaging undermined its success. Still, it was the Big Lie over the 2020 election and his culpability on 6 Jan 2021 that truly puts him so low on my list. Twice impeached.
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This is difficult, but my bottom five probably are Buchanan, Trump, Pierce, Harding, A. Johnson. Tyler, Hoover, and W would be in the next five.

NSFW video: Earl Butz and “Loose Shoes”

About an hour into the film Loose Shoes was a short musical sketch based on Earl Butz’s joke that also gave the movie its title.

Earl Butz, who was born 105 years ago today, was one of the worst US government officials ever. He was Secretary of Agriculture in the Cabinets of Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. “His policies favored large-scale corporate farming” which has damaged the family farm to this day, and arguably “led directly to overproduction of corn and a subsequent rise of obesity in the United States.” But “he is best remembered for a series of verbal gaffes that eventually cost him his job.”

Butz resigned his cabinet post on October 4, 1976… News outlets revealed a racist remark he made in front of entertainer Pat Boone and former White House counsel John Dean while aboard a commercial flight to California following the 1976 Republican National Convention. The October 18, 1976 issue of Time reported the comment while obscuring its vulgarity [which I will only mildly do so here]:

…When the conversation turned to politics, Boone, a right-wing Republican, asked Butz why the party of Lincoln was not able to attract more blacks. The Secretary responded… “I’ll tell you what the coloreds want. It’s three things: first, a tight p****; second, loose shoes; and third, a warm place to s***.”
After some indecision, Dean used the line in Rolling Stone, attributing it to an unnamed Cabinet officer. But New Times magazine enterprisingly sleuthed out Butz’s identity by checking the itineraries of all Cabinet members.

Butz was later convicted of tax evasion. He died in 2008 at the age of 98. As Arlo Guthrie said: “But that’s not what I came to tell you about.”

There was a 1980 movie called Loose Shoes, a/k/a Coming Attractions, which was probably filmed two or three years earlier. The premise was rather intriguing, to make a series of trailers for films that actually did not exist. The movie did not fare particularly well critically. It featured author Kinky Friedman, Buddy Hackett, Howard Hesseman (WKRP), Jaye P. Morgan, songwriter Van Dyke Parks, Avery Schreiber, Betty Thomas (Hill Street Blues), and Mark Volman of the singing group The Turtles, with voiceovers by, among others, Gary Owens and Harry Shearer. The reason it probably got released at all was the ascendant star power of Bill Murray, who had starred in Meatballs and Caddyshack, plus his tenure on Saturday Night Live.

But there was one segment of the comedy that was almost universally praised. From HERE: “A sketch movie along the lines of Kentucky Fried Movie, it was racially and sexually offensive and mostly unfunny, except…about an hour into the film was a short musical sketch based on Earl Butz’s joke that also gave the movie its title. This sketch is pure offensive genius. I can’t/won’t describe it, but its effect is on the order of the ‘Springtime for Hitler’ scene in The Producers.”

The reason I found it at all humorous, in its vulgar sort of way, was, in skewering the bigot Butz, that it is an almost letter-perfect take on jazz great Cab Calloway’s band. It was SO good, in fact, that Internet references ask whether the song was some lost Calloway ditty; it was not.

OK, if you like it, fine. If you’re offended, don’t say you weren’t warned. Watch Darktown After Dark HERE or HERE.