Memories of the Ford Administration (48 page)
Read Memories of the Ford Administration Online
Authors: John Updike
The Ford years. What else can you say about them/him? Or, really, any of them? These men, our Presidents, do their confused best, toward the end of their lives usually, and there’s no proving that different decisions would have produced better results. They were constrained by invisible walls, assumptions and pressures that have melted into air, that were always air—
Zeitgeist, Volksgeist
. Time was on the North’s side, and as Trescot said in his account,
Besides, like the Northern members of his Cabinet, he
[JB]
was a Northern man. If this revolution was checked he and they would claim credit for their firmness, if it succeeded they were to remain at the North and must be supported by Northern opinion
. The half-degree between Lancaster and the Mason-Dixon Line was, in the end, crucial. Perhaps I would have
succeeded if I had tried a book about Pierce, but his administration was relatively dull (not one Cabinet change in four years!) and his household gloomy and Nathaniel Hawthorne and Roy Nichols had already written creditable biographies. I was drawn to the unknown—the unpossessed—in scholarship as in love. I loved Buchanan because he was a virgin.
Gerald Ford, it remains to say, is the only non-assassinated President whose name ends with “d,” the only Nebraska native and Michigan politician to attain the office, and the only skier. Oh, perhaps Kennedy and Roosevelt in the course of their privileged boyhoods strapped on some boards, but only Ford flashed down the slopes while President, creating a wholly new protection problem for the Secret Service.
I remember (this is the end,
Retrospect
, and remember, you asked) taking a run under Ford, on I forget what mountain. At the top, at the clattering terminus of the upper lift, where the pines were stunted and ice was prevalent and the trails were narrow, a taste of fear made the high air hard to breathe as I buckled on my skis, bending over to fasten my safety straps in this era before retractable ski brakes, my only companions on the dazzling windswept summit seeming to be whooping adolescent boys and leather-faced ski bums whose tans stopped at their goggles. Nervously I picked my way down the first glazed turns, trying to stay to the edges where the snow could still grab, the whole purple-blue valley yawning in the tree-gaps like a view from an airplane, and then I gathered looseness and confidence on the broader middle slopes. I began to swing from side to side as if striding through air, singing to give myself rhythm. I had discovered as a boy on the tilted fields around Hayes that singing helped your skiing, almost any tune, strangely enough, if you shifted weight—boot to boot, edge to edge—on the beat. This day, as I remember, the
tune was a Beatles oldie, but not such an oldie then; “
Yes
terday,” I sang, “all my
troub
les seemed so
far
away,” keeping my chest to the valley, “now it
looks
as though they’re
here
to stay,” my knees bent and thrusting, my mittened black hands in front of me as the poles pricked the snow alternately, elbows in. “I be
leeeve
in
yes
terday!” The held notes gave the ski tails time to turn and say
swish
. I felt weightless, and seemed to be carving a swanky great signature in the moguls and swales of the middle run. A quickening of tempo forced me to wedel: “
Why
she
had
to
go
, I don’t
know
, she wouldn’t
say
. I said something
wrong
, and now I
long
, for
yes
terday-ay-ayy-ayyy.” Then came a flat lookout at the top of the beginner’s slope, and I rested my trembling legs a moment, the lodge as small beneath me as a matchbox, its vicinity crawling with colored dots. I shoved off, and gathered speed, my knees and feet absolutely together, the whole trick of it absurdly simple, a matter of faith and muscle memory, and, as I with one concluding wiggle-waggle swooped to a stop in a plume of slush, there they all were, my life’s companions, at an outdoor picnic table, their parkas off and jumbled with the wine bottles and picnic hampers: Norma and my children in woolly sweaters cats had napped on, and Genevieve looking terrific in her white cashmere and black headband, and Brent smugly polluting the mountain air with pipe smoke, and the Wadleighs in typically jolly matching Day-Glo yellow high-waisted ski pants with red suspenders, and assorted pink-cheeked children, their lips flecked with relish and mustard, and some other adults, the German professor and his Jewish wife, he still skiing in knickers and long-thongs and she togged out in a camel loden coat as if to go shopping at Bloomingdale’s, and a pair of freckled second wives, and poor elegant Mario Alvarez before his disgrace and abashed return to Providence.
There were smiles on their ruddy faces; they had been waiting for me; they were pleased to have seen me ski so well. In those years I was a fabulous creature, wiry and rapacious, racked by appetites as strange to me now as the motivations of a remote ancestor. I was slender, the result not of exercise but of nervous energy, and my hair was still mostly brown, and like animal fur to the touch, bouncy and soft, not brittle and white and thinning. I wore a ski cap on only the coldest days. Today was not one. It must have been during the Washington’s Birthday weekend (before it was dissolved into Presidents’ Day) or perhaps even the Easter break, because of the strengthening sun; it was picnic weather in the lee of the lodge. But what mountain could it have been? Gunstock and Sunapee don’t have outdoor tables, and Cranmore and Wildcat don’t have run-out slopes the way I remember this one. Could it have been Pleasant Mountain, across the state line in Bridgton, Maine? How could Norma and Genevieve, rivals for my hand, have been there both at once, beaming at me from above the Chardinesque tumble of welcoming food? Perhaps my vivid mental picture derives from the winter before our
crise
began. Or perhaps we had all patched things up for appearances’ sake, for this holiday outing, one big falsely happy family. Or perhaps memory is more trustworthy than history
—Retrospect
, your sub-editors might want to check if futons, boom boxes, ripped jeans, chirping video games, and Apple computers were around in 1974–77 or crept into this reminiscence from later years, other eras. Back there somewhere, I had descended the mountain into bliss; this lengthy response to your provocative query seems to have delivered me into darkness. The more I think about the Ford Administration, the more it seems I remember nothing.
*
Think: if we
were
members of a two-dimensional world, creatures pencilled onto a universal paper, how would we conceive of the third dimension? By strained metaphoric conjurations, like these of mine above. If we were dogs, how would we imagine mathematics? Yet there would be a few inklings—the hazy awareness, for instance, that the two paws we usually see are not all the paws we have, and that two and two might make something like four. It is important, for modern man especially, as we reach the limits of physics and astronomy, to be aware that there truly may be phenomena beyond the borders of his ability to make mental pictures—to conceive of the inconceivable as a valid enough category.
†
Installed in Philadelphia’s New Theatre in 1816, their first commercial use in America. Their very first use had occurred ten years earlier, when David Melville, of Newport, Rhode Island, bravely utilized gas to light his home and the street directly in front. Across the water, London first publicly installed gas in 1807, and Paris adopted it for street lighting in 1818.
‡
Even as I write, dear fellow New Hampshire historians, a young lady of our state, exactly Ann Coleman’s last age of twenty-three, one Pamela Smart, a high-school media counsellor, has been indicted and convicted of seducing (with the aid of a videotape of
9½ Weeks
, described in
Halliwell’s Film Guide
as a “Crash course in hot sex for those who wish to major in such studies”) a fifteen-year-old student with the successful aim of getting him and his thuggish pals to murder her husband. She remained impassive during her trial, but in a subsequent hearing, as her late husband’s aggrieved father prolongedly hectored her from the witness stand, she jumped up and in her thrilling young voice exclaimed, “Your Honor, I can’t handle this.” We all saw it on television; one had to love her for it. Her utterance brings me as close as I am apt to get to the truth of Ann Coleman’s conjectured and disputed suicide: Your Honor, she couldn’t handle it.
§
The obituary says “Anne,” but the tombstone has it “Ann.” I have chosen the name writ in stone.
‖
Major John Henry Eaton, Jackson’s Secretary of War, whose marriage, at Jackson’s advice, to Margaret O’Neale Timberlake, a tavern-keeper’s daughter of considerable romantic experience even before her marriage at the age of sixteen to a navy purser whom the infatuated then-Senator Eaton used his influence to keep at sea while he comforted the lonely bride, failed to quiet scandalized Washington tongues, especially those wagging on the distaff side of the Calhoun camp: Buchanan had approached Eaton with the Adams-appointment question before approaching Jackson, and was rather curtly advised by the major to inquire of the general himself. And so he did.
a
George Kremer, Congressman from Pennsylvania and Ingham satellite, whose letter to the
Columbian Observer
of Philadelphia the January after Buchanan’s interview with Jackson claimed that Clay had offered to vote for whoever would give him the State Department; Clay’s challenge to a duel was retracted after it was rumored that Kremer proposed to duel with squirrel rifles. Jackson’s reference here assumes that Kremer’s basis was a conversation with Buchanan describing the epochal interview of December 30th.
b
Moore, ed.,
Works
, Vol. II, pp. 378–82.
c
Moore, ed.,
Works
, Vol. II, pp. 348–63.
d
Moore, ed.,
Works
, Vol. II, pp. 368–9.
e
Does it need explaining? A matter of opportunity and romance, let’s say—the romance of the child’s fever, the closed door at the end of the hall, the look of the side yard from what had been our window, motionless in the blue night like a frozen garden of ferns. A sentimental carryover from the faculty party, where we had momentarily seemed again a couple. Don’t ask,
Retrospect
. At some point history becomes like topography: there is no
why
to it, only a
here
and a
there
.
f
I was reminded, possibly, of washing our windows in Hayes with my mother as a child—the running-down ammonia-tinted suds, the squeak of the slowly soggy-becoming cloth, the growing ache in the forearm, the sunny bite in the air, which in northern Vermont can be cool even in August. A child sees no difference between clean and dirty windows, so the ritual was for me, like so much adult behavior, a purely magical act, an ordeal invented to bring me to my mother’s side and under her fond supervision. Through Genevieve’s ideally transparent panes the outdoors seemed to have crept closer, like a beast about to pounce.
g
Historians have generally treated this crushed cigar as a sign of great distress: e.g., Nichols has it that the Senators found the President greatly agitated.
He stood by the hearth crushing a cigar in his shaking fingers and stammered that the move was against his policy
. But Trescot, in the sentence that is the only source for the detail, takes the trouble to say that this untidy practice was a habit with Buchanan. His words are:
The President was standing by the mantelpiece crushing up a cigar into pieces in his hand—a habit I have seen him practice often
.
The punctuation and emphases for Buchanan’s utterance considerably vary. Trescot’s original, hastily jotted memoir gives it as “
My God are calamities (or misfortunes, I forget which) never to come singly. I call God to witness—you gentlemen better than anybody know—that this is not only without but against my orders, it is against my policy
.”
Nevins dresses it up considerably: “
My God
,”
wailed
[
sic
]
Buchanan, who stood at the mantelpiece crushing a cigar in his hand
, “
are misfortunes never to come singly? I call God to witness,
you
, gentlemen, better than anybody,
know
that this is not only without, but against my orders. It is against my policy
.”
h
According to Thurlow Weed’s account in the London
Observer
of February 9, 1862, Stanton’s protest was even more elaborate and allusive:
“That course, Mr. President, ought certainly to be regarded as most liberal towards erring brethren, but while one member of your Cabinet has fraudulent acceptances for millions of dollars afloat, and while the confidential clerk of another—himself in South Carolina teaching rebellion
i
Then, in Weed’s spirited reconstruction, Black seconded the offer of resignation, followed by Holt and Dix, who did not join the Cabinet until the middle of the next month—which shows only that these rememberers get carried away, and history is built upon shifting sands.
i
An allusion to Bailey (see
this page
) and Thompson, who was right there, as we can see, and who in any case went to
North
Carolina, the previous week, leaving on December 17th and back in Washington by the 22nd, when the Indian-bonds scandal
j
broke.—has just stolen $900,000 from the Indian Trust Fund, the experiment of ordering Major Anderson back to Fort Moultrie would be dangerous. But if you intend to try it, before it is done I beg that you will accept my resignation.”
j
See
this page
–
this page
and
this page
–
this page
.
k
And yet he seems miscast as villain. In the photograph of Buchanan with his Cabinet taken by W. H. Lowdermilk & Co. of Washington, D.C., sometime between the death of Aaron Brown and the resignation of Howell Cobb, Thompson is on the extreme left, blurred, looking stolid and, with his short haircut and clean shave, oddly modern. He was self-made, a poor boy from North Carolina who, Nichols says,
in the young and growing state of Mississippi … amassed political power and a fortune
. A frontiersman, if we remember that much of the Deep South was frontier, torn open by the rapid spread of cotton—a terrain for entrepreneurs and arrivistes. Romantically, he had fallen in love with a poor girl of fourteen, married her without consummating the marriage, and sent her off to Paris for four years of schooling; she was Kate Thompson, one of the social ornaments of Buchanan’s Washington, a special favorite of the old chief, and the author of lively letters that form an important illumination of the era and administration. When Thompson at last resigned (
I go hence to make the destiny of Mississippi my destiny
) Buchanan wrote a warm letter saying,
No man could have more ably, honestly, & efficiently performed the various & complicated duties of the Interior Department than yourself.… I regret extremely that the troubles of the times have rendered it necessary for us to part
. This billet-doux as late in the day as January 11, 1861!
l
One hazel, one blue, according to Nichols. He cites no ophthalmological source. It’s hard to believe, but magical to picture. The portrait by Jacob Eichholtz, done when Buchanan was about to go off to Russia, is chromatically inconclusive. The one by George P. A. Healy, in the National Portrait Gallery, shows his eyes as both blue, with a slight cast (strabismus) in the left. Opposite this portrait in
The American Heritage Pictorial History of the Presidents
the unsigned text parenthetically claims
one eye
[was]
nearsighted, the other farsighted
. See Kierkegaard,
Journals
, December 10, 1837.
m
Not, in fairness, that I was entirely oblivious to popular music. It was the Ford era that saw the rise of Pachelbel’s Canon in D on the charts; I know because the tune, with its low, slow, trickling theme of infinite forestallment, became something like our, my and Genevieve’s, romantic anthem, along with
The Divine Miss M
, a cassette I gave her on our affair’s first Christmas, for its terrific one-two punch of “Do You Want to Dance?” followed by Midler’s ding-dong belting-out of “Chapel of Love.”
Going to get ma-a-arried …
n
James Buchanan, who served from 1857–1861, is said to have had the neatest handwriting of any President
. This encomium from
Facts and Fun About the Presidents
, by George Sullivan, illustrated by George Roper (New York: Scholastic, Inc., 1987). The same valuable source informs us that
Three American Presidents were left-handed: James Garfield, Harry Truman, and Gerald Ford
. Since 1987, the voters have added a fourth.
o
Derived, of course, from that callous passage in Emerson’s essay “Experience” which states,
I have learned that I cannot dispose of other people’s facts.… A sympathetic person is placed in the dilemma of a swimmer among drowning men, who all catch at him, and if he gives so much as a leg or a finger, they will drown him
.
p
In a letter of October 21, 1865, he replied to a correspondent, a Mr. Faulkner, who had supposed that the former President might admit, in retrospect, some mistakes,
I must say that you are mistaken. I pursued a settled, consistent line of policy from the beginning to the end; & on reviewing my past conduct, I do not recollect a single measure which I should desire to recall, even if this were in my power. Under this conviction I have enjoyed a tranquil & cheerful mind, notwithstanding the abuse I have received
.