Nation: Inside the Jerry Ford Drama

How the Republicans' dream ticket was born—and died

The extraordinary hours in which the friends and agents of Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan tried to fashion a unique ticket composed of a once and a (possibly) future President were political drama of the highest order. How the effort to get Ford to run with Reagan began and ballooned and why it finally burst is told in this story reported by TIME Correspondents Robert Ajemian, Laurence Barrett, Neil MacNeil and Hugh Sidey:

In the end, they failed. But as they rode an emotional roller coaster through the Republican National Convention, some of the coolest operators in U.S. politics clung to the heady notion that they could somehow restructure the American presidency in a mere 36 hours. Even after their feverish efforts collapsed, reducing their spirits from exhilaration to a despair tinged with bitterness, political intimates of former President Gerald Ford and Republican Presidential Candidate Ronald Reagan looked back wistfully at how close they felt they had come to working a strange sort of political miracle.

To an unprecedented degree, the surface of the drama was played out on the nation's television screens. The premature reports from TV's ubiquitous and often intrusive microphones in the Joe Louis Arena not only broadcast both true and false details of the bargaining but influenced the actors trying to shape history in the glass-walled suites of the 73-story Detroit Plaza Hotel, which towers above the city's scenic waterfront.

Ultimately, the Ford men and the Reagan men failed because they talked past each other across the deeply carpeted rooms. Reagan's aides concentrated on creating that "dream ticket" that would, they felt certain, get their chief to the White House. Ford's aides struggled to pin down exactly what their chief would do if he returned to Washington as the first President ever to step down to the vice presidency. All the while, George Bush, who was ultimately to benefit from the try that failed, sat silently by, a nearly forgotten spectator.

Here, hour by hour, is how the drama unfolded:

Tuesday Noon: Reagan Has a Better Idea

As they walked into Reagan's 69th-floor suite in the Plaza, the two Republican Senators (John Tower and Strom Thurmond), two Congressmen (Robert Michel of Illinois and Robert Bauman of Maryland) and two Governors (Pierre du Pont of Delaware and Charles Thone of Nebraska) had no inkling that they were stepping into G.O.P. history. They were there for a long-scheduled appointment to give Reagan their advice on who would be his best running mate. Most of the group favored Bush. But Reagan sounded skeptical. He asked just how Bush would help the ticket.

Finally he posed the startling question: "What about Ford?"

The idea was hardly new to the group, but the fact that Reagan was still thinking about it amazed the six. They had assumed that Ford had firmly squelched the notion of his running in the second spot when he and Reagan had discussed it in a well-publicized 1¼-hour meeting at Ford's Rancho Mirage home near Palm Springs, Calif., on June 5.