Feeling Good About America: The 1976 Presidential Election

[ Static whirring ] [ Channels clicking ] [ Theme music from "Sanford and Son" plays ] [ Theme music from "Barney Miller" plays ] Those were the days [ Theme music from "MASH" plays ] We're movin' on up Movin' [ Theme music from "Police Woman" plays ] I'm feeling good about America It's something great to see I'm feeling good about America I'm feeling good about me 1976 was the Bicentennial of America.

There was a feeling around the Bicentennial that we're gonna pull together again, as Americans, something new was in the air.

The '76 election was the first national election after Watergate.

I shall resign the Presidency effective at noon tomorrow.

Watergate was probably the overriding issue of that campaign.

You know, we wanted to recover from Vietnam and the assassinations and Watergate.

We needed candidates who could reassure us that that would, in fact, be the case.

We must have the will to resolve those problems.

And we ended up with two candidates who did precisely that.

I think the country's looking for something that's absolutely decent, absolutely clean.

In 1976, the reason Jimmy Carter could be a candidate for President was because of Watergate and Vietnam.

I believe the Republican Party has a platform that is a banner of bold, unmistakable colors with no pale, pastel shades.

It gives you the emergence of Ronald Reagan almost unseating a sitting Republican President.

You had Gerald Ford, an appointed President, who had pardoned Richard Nixon.

It really looked like this was a time for change, which meant that the Republicans were not gonna win the White House.

The whole world was watching.

Will our democracy hold up?

Will things collapse?

Is this gonna work?

Funding is provided by... And by... Additional support was provided by the following... Trust is not cleverly shading words so that each separate audience can hear what it wants to hear.

It's not enough for anyone to say, "Trust me."

Trust must be earned.

[ Cheers and applause ] Spiro Agnew, the sitting Vice President under Nixon, was busted on bribery charges and was forced to resign the Vice Presidency.

I categorically and flatly deny the assertion that have been made by the prosecutors with regard to their contention of bribery and extortion on my part.

Richard Nixon very shrewdly turned to Gerald Ford.

Who could object?

Gerald Ford was just the right choice at the right moment.

Ford was a genial guy who was well-liked on both sides of the aisle.

He was a regular guy.

People could relate to him.

Watergate was unfolding on a daily basis.

The pressure got more and more against Nixon, and the tapes were being revealed.

To continue to fight through the months ahead for my personal vindication would almost totally absorb the time and attention of both the President and the Congress.

Therefore, I shall resign the Presidency effective at noon tomorrow.

Dad got the call, was told that the President was gonna resign... [ Applause ] ...and that he needed to be prepared to take the Oath of Office and move forward.

I, Gerald R. Ford, do solemnly swear... ...that I will faithfully execute... ...that I will faithfully execute...

...the Office of President of the United States... ...the Office of President of the United States... He understood with this opportunity forced upon him that he had to step up to the plate and do the best job that he could.

My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.

Our Constitution works.

Our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men.

I believe that truth is the glue that holds government together.

Even though this is late in an election year, there is no way we can go forward except together.

People were really questioning integrity and their government officials and how government was gonna run and can you trust and believe in the government.

So I thought it was very important that we have a campaign that was focused on a President that we could trust, that we could believe in.

Carter is a reaction to Richard Nixon's corruption, but he's also a reaction to the culture at the time.

The big music of the time was John Denver... I'm Euell Gibbons.

...Euell Gibbons, back to Earth.

"The Waltons" were the most popular TV show.

Carter is an outsider.

Carter is a farmer.

Carter is a reformer.

Carter is a Southerner.

Everything that the culture's going through at the time in the '70s, Carter represents.

But it was Jimmy who?

Nobody knew this guy.

[ Theme music plays ] If you went into September, October of 1975 and went to Las Vegas, you would have had a 100-to-1 betting odds that Jimmy Carter could have gotten the Democratic nomination a year later.

Panel, all I can tell you about Mr. "X" is that he provides a service.

Is it a, uh -- a service that has anything to do with the way a woman looks?

Not really.

No.

Is this anything to do with the world of fashion?

No.

Does he recruit nuns?

I can rule out that you are a government official of any kind, can't I?

No.

Oh, you fresh -- [ Laughter ] Oh.

A government official that provides a service?

You are a non-Federal official -- is that correct?

That's correct.

Are you a state official?

That's correct.

Are you a governor?

Yes.

That's it.

He is Governor Jimmy Carter of the state of Georgia.

Ohh!

[ Applause ] My initial reaction was, "He's never gonna get the nomination, number one, and, number two, if he does get the nomination, he is, you know, a first-term governor from a small Southern state with no foreign policy or really major domestic policy experience, and this is gonna be a piece of cake.

I couldn't conceive of Gerald Ford losing to Jimmy Carter.

The President's schedule every day had hours blocked out for meeting with Nixon's attorneys.

It was taking so much valuable time away from things that he needed to do to get the country back on track, as well.

If he was going to fulfill the role that he saw for himself, which was getting the country turned in the right direction, then he couldn't spend 20%, 30% of his time every day dealing with legal matters regarding Richard Nixon.

In his mind, the easiest way to settle it, put it behind us, and let's look forward rather than backwards was to issue the pardon.

Now, therefore, I, Gerald R. Ford, President of the United States, do grant a full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon.

So many cynics had been suggesting that there was a deal, that Nixon would get a pardon and Ford would get the Presidency.

Well, Ford got the Presidency, and now, just a month after Ford had taken office, here was the full and free pardon so that Nixon would never pay for any of his crimes.

And, of course, as it turned out, there wasn't a deal.

You stated that the theory on which you pardoned Richard Nixon was that he had suffered enough.

The Constitution specifically states that even though somebody is impeached, that person shall, nonetheless, be liable to punishment according to law.

People wanted Nixon to pay a price beyond resignation, so there was tremendous anger, tremendous anger.

There are posters of Nixon with the prison bars on it, and people wanting to see him handcuffed, you know, walking through corridors and things, and he denied the Left -- Gerald Ford -- the visual satisfaction of seeing Nixon suffer.

pictures of Nixon wandering the beach in San Clemente, California, where it looked very idyllic and pretty nice.

He got away with it is, I guess, the way many people perceived the pardon, and so the pardon was, in a lot of ways, unpardonable for President Ford.

The pardon was a problem, and we knew it would be a problem, but we also knew politically that if he didn't pardon him, it would be a problem.

He was in no-win situation.

The Republicans had the largest field in American history for 2016 at 17.

Well, the second largest field was in 1976 for the Democrats.

They had 15 candidates.

Everybody thought that "Scoop" Jackson was presidential timber.

He looked it, spoke it.

He was sane, rational -- I mean, perfect candidate.

Then you had Mo Udall from Arizona.

Mo Udall was a major candidate.

George Wallace represented the conservative wing of the Democratic Party, the old Democratic Southern segregationists.

The last thing people wanted was another politician.

They didn't want another Richard Nixon, they didn't want another Lyndon Johnson.

Carter's the only outsider who's running, and he plays this, and he works this assiduously.

And the major issue is, the relationship that ought to exist between the people, ourselves, and our government, that's been torn.

I like the fact that when he was being quizzed by newspaper people, who were obviously laughing at him because there were so many more prominent Democrats running for President -- "Ha, ha, ha.

Do you really think you can get the Presidency?"

-- he was very self-controlled, keeping a smile on his face.

Our hands were so full with the Republican campaign that there wasn't a lot of time spent focusing on the Democratic side because it was such a large field.

There was no preemptive nominee in the field, but I guarantee you, nobody thought that governor from Georgia by the name of Jimmy Carter was gonna be the one.

I'm a great believer in likability, and Ford was an enormously likeable man.

Everybody liked him.

They liked him on Capitol Hill.

He was friends with everybody.

His view of his Presidency was to heal this nation and to restore dignity and respect and civility and to enable people to trust each other again, and his personality was perfectly suited to do that.

There was always that question, you know, would he decide to seek re-election or election?

The first obstacle I saw was Ronald Reagan was gonna run.

The whole Washington, D.C., establishment at that point in time, number one, didn't think he was gonna run in the end, and, number two, thought he would be easy to beat.

I went on the mission of trying to convince him that this guy is tough and he's a good campaigner.

I really don't think I got very far until we got to New Hampshire.

Gerald Ford's foreign policy, in particular, gave Reagan a reason for running.

Ford did a number of things which really provoked Reagan -- one of them, the refusal to meet with Solzhenitsyn.

Solzhenitsyn, he'd been in Soviet work camps and gulags since the '40s when he had criticized Joseph Stalin in a private letter.

He had become a cause clbre among the West because of his writings.

Only too soon your state will have need, not only of exceptional men, but of great men.

[ Speaking Russian ] Find them in your soul.

[ Speaking Russian ] Find them in your heart.

[ Speaking Russian ] Find them in the heart of your country.

[ Applause ] He comes to the United States.

There is an official welcoming ceremony for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in the U.S. Capitol.

Ford is told by his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, "Don't meet with Solzhenitsyn.

It will insult the Kremlin.

It will piss off Moscow.

Don't meet with him."

So, instead of just coming out and saying, "I'm knuckling under the Soviets.

I'm not gonna meet with Solzhenitsyn," Ford puts on a series of really B.S.

excuses.

Reagan's watching all this, and he's furious.

He's furious.

The evidence mounts that we're Number Two in a world where it's dangerous, if not fatal, to be second best.

Is this why Mr. Ford refused to invite Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to the White House?

Or why Mr. Ford traveled halfway 'round the world to sign the Helsinki Pact, putting our stamp of approval on Russia's enslavement of the captive nations?

We gave away the freedom of millions of people, freedom that was not ours to give.

Now we must ask if someone is giving away or own freedom.

[ Applause ] Reagan goes from a Hammett-like maybe I will run, maybe I won't run to a Jack Dempsey-like let me at the son of a bitch.

I've called this press conference to announce that I am a candidate for the Presidency and to ask for the support of all Americans who share my belief that our nation needs to embark on a new and constructive course.

I didn't quite understand why people within the party would want to turn out somebody who had worked so hard to save not only the nation, but, in the process, also save the Republican Party and restore it to a sense of vitality, I think, and dignity.

Obviously those who backed Governor Reagan thought differently.

The Jimmy Carter campaign really made Iowa an important first stop on the trail to a Presidential nomination.

Before then, caucuses were not considered to be terribly important.

Momentum from Iowa, we were able to then use to win in New Hampshire, and the campaign had always focused on an intensive door-to-door candidate in New Hampshire.

That had always been the linchpin to the strategy.

And they created out of Sumter County, Georgia, Plains, the hamlet where he's from, a group called The Peanut Brigade, and The Peanut Brigade came into Iowa, came into New Hampshire, and they are the dream people knocking at the door because they weren't just young kids from college on a lark, but friends, the Georgia crowd.

They were banging on doors saying, "I've known Jimmy Carter for 30 years."

It is probably the finest door-to-door campaign in recent American history as Carter's Peanut Brigade and the work they did in Iowa and particularly New Hampshire.

Ford is doing an okay job as President, at least as far as just calming the country down.

We're in a period of normalcy heading toward the Bicentennial, and things were actually starting to feel a little bit better.

You know, things have been so bad so long, any ray of sunshine is welcomed.

His biggest strength was the incumbency itself.

When you take Air Force One, and you land it in New Hampshire, everybody brings their kid and their grandkid out to see Air Force One and the President.

The incumbency itself is a big thing in any election.

Ford wasn't the incumbent that other Republican Presidents had been.

He's the only person to this day in American history who was never elected to the Vice Presidency or the Presidency, but served in both the offices.

So, he was always the incumbent President with an asterisk, and that weakened him.

A sitting incumbent President has to win that New Hampshire primary.

He has to win the next primary.

You cannot get beat if you're sitting in the White House in an early primary and hope to survive.

So our tactic basically was, we put everything we had into New Hampshire and into Florida.

We won New Hampshire by, like, 2,500 votes, and it was touch-and-go the whole way.

We did much better in Florida.

We won Illinois, and then we got our tail handed to us in North Carolina, and then the campaign really started.

[ Laughs ] There were several moments where we thought we'd win the nomination, and it would be over, but that didn't happen.

It went all the way to the convention.

I'm a Southerner, and I'm proud of a heritage that shows concern for the working men and women who are the backbone of our great nation.

These are the people who are often cheated by an unfair system of government.

These are the people forgotten by the present administration while the influential and powerful get special favors.

When I'm elected President, that will change.

We in the South can help by voting for Jimmy Carter -- a leader for a change.

If Carter had an unusual political talent, it was he was a Southern politician in the sense that he knew how to talk to Southern people, and when the Northern media was mocking Jimmy Carter as a hayseed, many Southerners said, "Hey, this guy went to Annapolis.

He's Naval Academy.

He's brilliant.

This is just Northern Yankees making fun of Southern culture again.

Well, 'F' you."

Never once until then had a Southerner in recent history ever been elected President of the United States because they had strong records of segregation that they couldn't deny.

How do you think Carter stands with the Black community?

Well, I think that the elections so far have shown that in every instance, we have gotten the Black vote.

He had a positive record.

He had people around him who the Black community related to.

Listen to what Dr. Martin Luther King Sr. says about Jimmy Carter.

I have never met a finer person than Governor Carter.

And it was clear that Carter had a background that was integrated, that he utilized the best people he could find, and that sent a very positive message to the Black community that, "Hey.

This guy may be able to make a difference as far as we're concerned."

There was a hunger for new leadership, a hunger for someone from outside Washington, and a hunger for someone that you could believe in and believe that they would do the right thing.

I want to see us once again have a nation... that's as good and honest and decent and truthful... and competent... and compassionate...

and is filled with love as are the American people.

Jesse Jackson actually once put it really greatly.

He said, "'Scoop' Jackson and Birch Bayh and all of them running around talking about Senate Bill 725 and whatever, and Jimmy Carter carrying his own bag saying, 'Love your country, love each other,' and just walked into people's hearts."

He said, "You know, sometimes people need their hearts fixed more than they need legislation."

But for myself, I want to know about you and your community and your problems to help put back the things that we've lost in this country.

The key to Carter's success, in my mind, was in 1976, that campaign is the first campaign on a national basis that brought together the Evangelical Christian movement in America.

That gave him a solid base all through the South, and the thing that a lot of people forget is that there are a lot of Evangelicals across America, and you can go to rural Ohio, rural Pennsylvania, rural Michigan, Iowa -- all those places, there's a big Evangelical vote -- not big in terms of percentages as a state, but enough to swing a state.

It's easy to extrapolate and say, you know, Evangelical vote was the difference -- same thing in Pennsylvania.

Carter had to prove that his appeal was to Democrats in the big industrial states that had the electoral votes he needed to win the election, and in that respect, Pennsylvania was a key, key state for us, and winning that primary was the thing that finally set us on the absolute road to being nominated.

There was no stopping us after the Pennsylvania primary.

We've just completed the first phase of the Presidential Campaign of 1976 in Pennsylvania by wiping out every possible obstacle that they put in our way.

[ Loud cheers and applause ] Carter goes to North Carolina and took on George Wallace and wins the North Carolina primary.

Then it started becoming an anybody but Jimmy Carter movement and how do we stop this guy?

You know, Jerry Brown and Frank Church started really kind of getting some momentum.

So to those who say it's too late, I reply that it's never too late to try.

But it was too late.

People who were simply a part of the Washington establishment, they didn't know Governor Carter well.

They weren't sure what kind of a President he would be.

There was an attempt to try and deny him the nomination in the hopes that the party powers could then have a brokered convention and pick somebody else in New York City where the convention was held.

The Bicentennial was a very welcome moment when Americans could reunify at least a bit and feel proud of their country again.

We'd been through a hell of a couple of decades -- one disaster right after another, one mistake right after another, one failed Presidency right after another.

[ "America the Beautiful" plays ] Independence has to be defended as well as declared.

Some people will call what Gerald Ford did by not campaigning vigorously in the summer of '76 a rose-garden strategy.

I call it the Bicentennial strategy.

[ Bell rings ] The Bicentennial is gonna be so big -- you know, Bicentennial minutes on the network news and big PBS concerts... giant mast ships in New York Harbor and the Freedom Train showing moon rock.

All of this was going on, and Ford's strategy was, I'm gonna just be Mr.

Bicentennial through the summer instead of being the retail politician.

Ford thought he could be anointed off of the good vibrations of the Bicentennial.

And crown thy good with brotherhood Paradoxically, the Bicentennial was both Gerald Ford's greatest asset in 1976 and his biggest mistake.

So he basically just hunkered down on the Bicentennial and didn't start campaigning as a candidate normally would until October.

In retrospect, Gerald Ford needed to have started campaigning in earnest and hard very early.

[ Choir vocalizing ] [ Cheers and applause ] The last time the Democratic Party came to New York City for our convention was the year I was born -- 1924.

That year we had 104 ballots before we chose a nominee.

But this year I hope to abbreviate that just a little bit with your help.

We're gonna have a great party in New York this week, right?

Before the Republican Convention was the Democratic Convention.

It was a love fest even though about 40% of the delegates at the convention were very wary of Jimmy Carter.

He was an Evangelical Christian.

He talked in Evangelical terms.

They weren't used to that.

He had had a moderate to even conservative record in Georgia.

There were a lot of worries about Jimmy Carter as to whether he was a "real Democrat," meaning liberal Democrat, but the convention really smoothed it over, and it worked as a public relations week beautifully.

My name is Jimmy Carter, and I'm running for President.

[ Loud cheers and applause ] He gets a lot of good speeches, he gives a good speech himself accepting the nomination, and he picks Walter Mondale, who was the perfect choice to unify the party between the moderate/conservative Carter and the liberal Walter Mondale, which is what parties should do.

They should unify in order to have the best chance to win in the fall.

Mondale had excellent relationships on the Hill.

He knew how to work with Capitol Hill, which was something that Carter had no background in at all.

So if, in fact, he were elected, he needed to have a Vice President who understood how federal government worked.

Most of us on the surface probably thought, "Hey, this is a good thing" -- you know, you're running against a governor from the South who has no real national presence other than having organized a really good campaign to win the nomination.

On the other hand, he was a fresh face, and so not having sort of a national presence was an advantage.

After the Democratic Convention, you had a ridiculously large percentage of Americans claiming they were gonna vote for Carter, and Carter had, on paper, a 33% lead.

Now, that's virtually unprecedented in American politics for the situation that existed in '76, and, sure enough, it was just a mirage.

It didn't take very long for the 33 points to boil down to about 10.

Carter had an 8- to 10-point hard lead to start the election campaign at Labor Day.

An effort has been made in this campaign to suggest that there aren't any real differences between Mr. Ford and myself.

Well, I believe there are, and these differences are fundamental.

One of them has to do with our approach to government.

The Washington establishment is not the answer, it's the problem.

Its tax policies, its harassing regulation, its confiscation of investment capital to pay for its deficits keeps business and industry from expanding to meet your needs and to provide the jobs we all need.

As the Democratic nominee, it's to your advantage to have a Republican Party which is fighting and which is not unified, and that was certainly the case for the Republican Party.

We went into that convention with about 86 more votes than Ronald Reagan.

That's a very thin margin.

Nobody knows who has enough votes for a first-ballot nomination.

The Reagan high command had some fascinating stratagems that nearly worked.

One, which was unprecedented, was naming a Vice Presidential choice ahead of the convention, and he named a moderate, even a liberal from Pennsylvania, U.S.

Senator Schweiker, in the hopes of shaking loose the Pennsylvania delegation, which had been pledged to Ford.

[ Chanting ] We want Reagan!

We want Reagan!

The Reagan forces want to force Ford to name his running mate.

They believe that whoever Gerald Ford picks, it's gonna make a certain constituency unhappy enough to withhold their votes on the first ballot and vote for Reagan on the second or third ballot.

It comes down to a rules change.

This becomes known as 16-C... Any nominee of our party chosen by the party at convention must, on the day before his nomination, reveal to the delegates of the convention who his choice for Vice President will be.

[ Cheers and applause ] ...which would have forced Ford to name his running mate ahead of the actual nomination.

31 votes, yes.

15 votes, no.

4 votes, yes.

4 votes, no.

Mississippi, after much consternation, cast 30 votes no.

[ Cheers and applause ] Ford prevails by 69 votes out of 2,259 cast.

69 votes -- you know, that's less than 2%.

We had delegates at our convention who loved Ronald Reagan.

We held some delegates with the power of the incumbency of which is a tenuous situation in an emotional-charged atmosphere that a convention can be.

I am honored by your nomination, and I accept it.

The Ford forces heave a sigh of relief because Gerald Ford now has enough demonstrated votes to get the nomination, and that he does.

And there was even talk for a while could there be a ticket of Ford and Reagan?

But the camps were too bitter at each other at that moment in time.

Ford picks Senator Robert Dole as his running mate.

Robert Dole, ironically, was picked by Ronald Reagan.

Well, Bob Dole was a safe selection.

I was more of the camp that the Vice President should bring you a chance in a state which you might not win.

And if we weren't gonna win Kansas, we were in a lot bigger trouble [Laughing] than anyone recognized.

Ford is the nominee of a divided party because half of the convention is for Ronald Reagan, half of the convention is for Gerald Ford.

He needs to unify the party, and the best way to unify the party is to bring Reagan down onstage.

He motions for Reagan, and Reagan waves him off, and the crowd is chanting, "We want Ron, we want Ron," and Reagan is shaking his head no, waving Ford off, and Ford family and Ford are all waving to Reagan to come down, and finally Reagan reluctantly goes down.

[ Cheers and applause ] And Reagan goes out and gives an extemporaneous speech -- no notes, no preparations.

Maybe the most important political speech of his life, other than the '64 speech with Goldwater.

I believe the Republican Party has a platform that is a banner of bold, unmistakable colors with no pale, pastel shades.

[ Cheers and applause ] We must go forth from here united, determined that what a great general said a few years ago is true -- "There is no substitute for victory."

Mr. President.

[ Cheers and applause ] Many of the delegates left saying, "Boy, I wonder if we nominated the wrong guy."

They didn't because I don't think Reagan, being as conservative as he was, could have been elected in 1976.

It worked out beautifully for Reagan.

There's a change that's come over America A change that's great to see President Ford has restored my faith in the United States government.

Ford makes me feel like America's going in the right direction.

I'm feeling good about America And I feel it everywhere I go I'm feeling good about America And I feel you ought to know Yes, Ford has made me feel proud to be American.

I think he's done a wonderful job for America.

I'm feeling good about America I'm feeling good about me [ Cheers and applause ] This was a remarkable campaign because finally we restarted the debate tradition that had begun with the Kennedy-Nixon debates in 1960.

Lyndon Johnson refused to debate in 1964.

Richard Nixon refused to debate -- I wonder why -- in 1968 and 1972.

But they were revived in '76 because Jimmy Carter wanted to prove that he was up to the job of President.

I hope that everybody that's interested in the future President will watch tonight.

And he wanted to get better known, and Gerald Ford thought, as the incumbent President and somebody who'd been around national politics since the '40s, he was in a much better position to do well than Jimmy Carter.

So they both had a motive to re-establish the debate tradition, and thank goodness they did.

The first debate, which was at the end of September, was quite well-handled by Ford.

He did exactly what he had hoped to do, which was to show after two and a half years as President, he knew what the Presidency was all about, and he knew at least some of the ways to handle domestic and foreign policy, and Jimmy Carter was clearly nervous.

He was off his game in the first debate.

Ford scores his biggest success on the first debate.

I think he clearly won it -- I almost would say destroyed Jimmy Carter in it, but the big mistake Gerald Ford made in the second debate.

There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford Administration.

Ford astonished us.

I'm sorry.

Did I understand you to say, sir, that the Russians are not using Eastern Europe as their own sphere of influence and occupying most of the countries there and making sure with their troops that it's a Communist zone?

And he wouldn't let up.

For about five days, he kept saying that strange thing.

I'm sorry to be so brusk, but it was really laughable for the President of the United States to be saying that, and one had to wonder whether we heard it correctly, in fact.

And secondly, it created an enormous opening precisely for a person like Carter.

He had something in hand here.

It made his opponent -- President Ford, who was a very nice, decent person -- very vulnerable to criticism.

Ford's alleged debate mistake -- it wasn't that big a mistake.

It's not what they say.

It's not the night of debate.

It's how the media reports it.

It's what they say who won, who lost.

So from that standpoint, the mistake that Ford made on the Polish question was played out by the media in a manner which was not helpful to him at all.

Ford was on track to win that election.

It was close enough, anyway.

Had things gone well in that October 6th debate, Gerald Ford probably would have won that four-year term as President.

But things didn't go well.

Ford was the last President who liked the press, who got along with the reporters, and you know the reason why?

Because he'd been on Capitol Hill.

It was a chummy relationship there -- even between the press, kind of liberal, but even with the Republicans, they got along well.

So when he got to the White House, he loved to chitchat, you know, and he'd have press conferences or he'd come in the press room and say some things, and he'd talk to the reporters.

He knew us all by our first name.

So it was a different kind of President there.

You did not have the adversarial relationship that was there with Nixon and then followed it, and it's continued today.

There is liberal bias, and that affected Ford -- probably less than other Republicans, however, because he was such a likeable guy.

You know, and there was that famous quote from LBJ -- you know, "Here's a guy that can't chew gum and walk at the same time," and the press played on that.

He really opened himself up to the media, and Ford said, "Hey, I'll talk to you, take pictures.

When I'm coming up and down the steps on the plane, take them."

Well, what happened is, he stumbled once, and it was played again and again and again, and then made out to be the bumbling President.

To me, it is so ironic because he is the most athletic President we've ever had.

He was a huge Big Ten football-player athlete.

He was All-American.

He swam every morning.

I remember they sent out an all-points bulletin across the country for the Secret Service to find agents who could ski as well as he and keep up with him and protect him while he was in Vail.

The "Saturday Night Live" thing was very harmful because "Saturday Night Live" -- it's still pretty big today, but it was new then, and it was really big then.

And in politics, perception can be an awful lot.

When you're a regular character on "Saturday Night Live," that's not a good thing for your image.

I thought the media's portrayal of Ford was grossly unfair.

They sort of made fun of the fact that he was a regular guy when I thought being a regular guy was very, very important in this junction.

Now, in the context of today's political adversarial relationship between the media and candidates, that was like white-bread.

It was "nothing."

But back then, it was really quite nasty.

Carter was looking at where's my support, but, also, where can I improve?

One thing he did effectively is recognized he needed what was then in 1976 called the rock-'n'-roll vote.

He very assiduously cornered gonzo journalist Hunter Thompson and got like a Rolling Stone endorsement.

Carter started hanging out with the Allman Brothers and Charlie Daniels Band and Willie Nelson -- that whole Southern Rock groove of the 1970s.

So he was showing that he's kind of hip, Jimmy Carter, even when he seems square.

He did well playing that game.

He had a bit of a problem with blue-collar, working-class white men who weren't sure.

Jimmy Carter, he seemed odd.

He seemed like not one of them.

He was acting holier-than-thou.

So Carter decides to do an interview with Playboy.

In 1976, it was very controversial to even give an interview to Playboy.

It was considered pornography, even if soft porn, and then it's what Carter said.

He said, "I have lusted in my heart for many women who are not my wife."

Well, what a strange thing to say.

It was another reason why people started to question whether Jimmy Carter was the right kind of person for the White House.

[ Applause ] The history since 1948 is that every incumbent President in every incumbent party has always gained in the last week of the campaign.

We started behind and kept closing and closing.

It reminds me just a bit of the kind of momentum that one of my idols, a Democrat, Harry Truman, experienced in the final days of his campaign.

Carter, again, was sort of the new, shiny car, and everyone was kind of in love with it, but every day in the campaign, the polls were closing.

People, after being up in the air during the primary process, generally come home by Election Day, and so you have sort of a natural returning home on both sides of the aisle.

I've seen this so many times with the American electorate.

They want change, boldly, three or four months ahead of the election, but as Election Day approaches, they get more cautious and careful, and they start to weigh the pluses and minuses a little bit differently, and they often go with the status quo.

To Ford's credit, right as it started heading into Election Day '76, he got with former baseball great Joe Garagiola, and they did a "Jerry and Joe" kind of informal show, a kind of new media format that worked exceedingly well for Gerald Ford.

If he could have done something like that earlier in '76, he may have had lightning in a bottle, but, alas, it was too little, too late.

By Election Day, this was an extremely close election.

Both sides thought they were going to win, but they also knew that the other side could win narrowly.

Both sides were extremely nervous.

Pins and needles.

Pins and needles.

It was a seesaw, and as it turned out, both sides had a long time to wait.

It was one of those all-night affairs.

All of us felt that momentum in the closing of the election, and if you've ever been involved in a campaign, every campaign sort of develops a feel to it and you gain confidence when you know you're doing well, and when it's not, it goes the other way, and we all felt like we're gonna pull this off.

I think there were about, perhaps, 20 people in a room along with President and Mrs. Carter and the key staff from the campaign, and just watching the televisions.

All our strength came in, and we were still 7 or 8 votes behind, and then, of all things, Mississippi came in for us 2 o'clock in the morning and put us over the top.

What are the odds that Mississippi would put a Mondale over the top?

But they did.

[ Cheers and applause ] This tremendous crowd at 4 o'clock in the morning represents hundreds of millions of American people who are now ready to see our nation unified, and I want to congratulate the toughest and most formidable opponent that anyone could possibly have -- President Gerald Ford.

[ Cheers and applause ] My dad was very, very disappointed.

Because it was so close, I think it was heartbreaking.

Ford won more states than Jimmy Carter did, but didn't win as many electoral votes.

I remember telling him after the election, I said, "You accomplished one very big thing."

"What's that?"

I said, "You're the only guy that's beaten Ronald Reagan in a Republican primary," and I said, "That was, in my mind, a major accomplishment."

With what Reagan did after that, I think makes that a stronger statement than when I made it.

After the convention, when Ford would ask Ronald Reagan to speak directly on behalf of his Presidency around the country at addresses, Reagan refused.

And there's anger about it because we wanted to hold the party together and bring it together.

Years later, when Reagan was running for President, Ford went out and campaigned for him all over the country.

There are some who argue that that had a bigger impact on his loss than the pardon of Nixon.

President Ford would later tell me in retirement that he really never forgave Reagan for challenging him in '76.

There was always a bitterness and animosity towards Ronald Reagan that never really, truly healed.

I think the pardon was the single most difficult issue to overcome because many people would say, you know, "Even though I like your dad, he pardoned Nixon.

I'll never vote for him."

And then I saw a post-election study one time that showed me that about 6% of Republicans across America, Republicans who normally voted, stayed home -- couldn't vote for Jimmy Carter, but they weren't gonna vote for the guy that pardoned Richard Nixon.

Now, 6% of your base is a pretty large number.

So I can come to only one conclusion.

The fact that he pardoned Richard Nixon hurt him deeply in the campaign.

Ford said in interviews that he believes he lost to Carter because of his pardon of Richard Nixon.

But he also said, to his credit, he wouldn't have changed things.

He still would have pardoned Richard Nixon.

I thought from the beginning it was the right thing to do.

It was really a sacrificial step by Gerald Ford.

He knew it was gonna hurt him.

It did hurt him.

I said at the time I thought it was a bad mistake.

I made an issue out of it, but the more I look at it, the more I think, well, maybe there's nothing that the country could have done comfortably to get by this awful issue except in the way that Ford did it, and I once apologized to Ford personally for it.

I said, "I thought I was right.

I wasn't.

You were right."

As President, he made a controversial decision of conscience to pardon former President Nixon and end the national trauma of Watergate.

In doing so, he placed his love of country ahead of his own political future.

We are honored to present you, President Ford, with the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award for 2001.

[ Applause ] No doubt arguments over the Nixon pardon will continue for as long as historians relive those very, very tumultuous days.

For, in the age-old contest between popularity and principle, only those willing to lose for their convictions are deserving of posterity's approval.

When I look back at the '76 election, I realize that it was the last time that Americans weren't polarized.

They weren't polarized in the way they are today.

There was no gender gap.

Men and women voted exactly the same in the election of '76.

Jimmy Carter got a third of the conservative vote.

Gerald Ford got a quarter of the liberal vote.

These things are unheard of today because the Democratic Party is solidly on the left, and the Republican Party is solidly on the right.

Carter and Ford, being relative moderates, had opportunities to join forces.

President Reagan sent them, along with Richard Nixon, to Anwar Sadat's funeral.

Apparently, it was Richard Nixon who brought them together.

Nixon was jovial.

I think he was thrilled to be included.

[ Laughs ] He was out of exile, and he was in such a good mood that he got Ford and Carter talking to one another and to him, and by the end of that long trip -- and it is a long flight each way -- they had a different view of one another, and they had, in a sense, buried the hatchet.

Their families spent time together.

They spent time together.

When Gerald Ford died, Ford had designated Carter to give his eulogy.

"For myself and for our nation, I want to thank my predecessor for all he has done to heal our land."

Those were the first words I spoke as President, and I still hate to admit that they received more applause than any other words in my inaugural address.

[ Light laughter ] To me, the legacy of that campaign that year politically was Watergate basically left the political platform from there on out.

1976 campaign put that to bed.

What's interesting to me about 1976 is it was a six-year period where we may have had the two right men.

We didn't need a lot of acrimony.

We didn't need drama.

We wanted just a kind of steadiness and integrity, and Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter are two of the most honest, decent men that have ever entered the annals of American politics.

I think it's a great example of when solid people can go ahead and run against each other in a positive way and really celebrate democratic values.

Think about all the other countries in the world that cannot do this.

And our country and the citizens in the middle of this disaster in the country were able to come forward and do this peacefully and respectfully.

We take this stuff for granted, you know?

We really do.

[ Channels clicking ] Said his name was Jimmy Carter And he was running for President And he laid out a plan of action Made a lot of sense He talked about the government And how it used to be for you and me That's the way it ought to be, right now Once and for all, why not the best?

[ Channels clicking ] I'm feeling good about America There is a change that's come over America.

After a decade of tension, the people and their President are back together again.

It's something great to see I'm feeling good about America I'm feeling good about me [ Cheers and applause ]