Nation: Ford's Future?

• Share

Michigan's Gerald Ford has worked hard as the House Republican leader ever since he upset Indiana's garrulous Charlie Halleck for the job in January. But Ford has been edged out of the headlines consistently by such veteran press performers as his own Senate G.O.P. counterpart, Everett Dirksen, and the master of them all, Lyndon Johnson. Last week Ford got some notable newsprint at last—thanks, ironically, to the President himself.

It wasn't all that flattering to begin with. Ford found himself being called by reporters, who told him that he had been denounced by Johnson as "a man who broke my confidence and not only broke it but distorted it."

The President, who was saying all this on the front porch of his ranch house in Texas, didn't mention Ford by name, of course. But everybody was supposed to know whom he meant—and everybody did.

Reports supposedly spread by Ford were "untrue and perhaps malicious," the President said. And he added:

"Most of the people you deal with respect the confidence, but once in a while an inexperienced man or a new one or a bitter partisan has to play a little politics. I think they keep it to a minimum, generally speaking, but one or two of them will do it—and boys will be boys."

What was the squabble all about? Johnson somehow got the idea that at a background-only session held for a few reporters Ford had inspired stories that the President was chicken; that Ford had told the newsmen that Johnson wanted to take a sterner, tougher stand on Viet Nam, but had retreated because mild Mike Mansfield was threat ening to raise a big row. If this had been true, Johnson might have had reason to get mad. But it wasn't—and it's one of the mysteries of Washington how Johnson got his lines of information clogged up.

Mike Mansfield had indeed read a memo in which he hoped that Johnson wouldn't be ferocious, but he also told Johnson that he'd support any action the President might take. Congressman Ford did have a lunch for nine Washington reporters, but he did not say anything about Mansfield's putting the blocks to Johnson. (TIME was at the lunch.)

But Ford wasn't too unhappy. He hadn't had that much publicity in months, and he saw to it that the press notices kept flowing by retorting righteously: "I broke no confidence. I refuse to be baited into a verbal donnybrook with the Commander in Chief that would play into the hands of Hanoi, Peking and Moscow."