A Ford, Not a Lincoln

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. $8.95

“While President Ford happily posed for happy photographers, Alexander Haig and Henry Kissinger ran the country.” So goes the tone of this street-wise, hard-nosed account of the waking hours and days after what Gerald Ford, in his first speech as President, called “our long national nightmare.”

Reeves on Ford:

Ford may have become President by accident, but it was no accident that a Ford became President. In many ways he was the very model of a modern American politician. His success was a triumph of lowest-common-denominator politics, the survival of the man without enemies, the least objectionable alternative.

Ford on Ford, quoted by Reeves, describing his work habits on Sundays when the nation’s airwaves observe golf:

I sit in front of the television and take a pile of work, and in between this shot and that shot, I try to concentrate.

Ford, writes Reeves, is “a pretty nice guy and a professional politician”; the press has tended to focus on the former in euphoric relief from the Nixon nightmare, but it is the President’s performance in the latter role that matters. If he has the virtue of being unpretentious in action and words (five of which gave Reeves his title), he is in this portrait a man with little to be pretentious about.