What to Say About Jerry

It was probably the roughest caricature of Gerald Ford ever seen in a major U.S. publication: New York magazine last week ran a cover of the President as Bozo the Clown. Some journalists quickly questioned New York's taste and timing in running the burlesque just when Ford was on a national mission abroad. But after the WIN buttons, the list of undistinguished nominations, the drift, the constant domestic travels, the bloopers and the gaffes, few could deny that New York's article inside had brought to the fore some basic questions about the President's capacity to do his job. Many commentators strongly disagreed, however, about the article's claim that the limits of traditional journalism are forcing most reporters to pull their punches on Ford.

The author of the article, Richard Reeves, who traveled with Ford for ten days during his late October campaigning, confessed to a personal confusion as to how to describe a President who, he claims, habitually says the wrong thing or says nothing at all. Argues Reeves: "It is not a question of saying the emperor has no clothes. There is a question of whether there is an emperor." At one stop, Reeves contends, Ford apparently equated the legitimacy of Jordan with that of the Palestine Liberation Organization, but no journalist squawked. Along the campaign trail, says Reeves, many journalists referred to Ford in private as "dummy" or "Bozo," but treated him with due deference in print.

How fair is Reeves' rap? Many reporters traveling with Ford believe that they have honestly hit him harder in his first three months than any other President has been hit. Peter Lisagor, veteran Washington bureau chief of the Chicago Daily News, finds the Reeves thesis mystifying. "What shortcomings don't we report? We make every joke in the book at Jerry Ford's expense. We report all his clumsy, well-meaning activities. Every Ford cliche is covered, parsed, dissected. We treat him with slightly amiable disdain." Centrist commentators like James Reston of the New York Times have on occasion criticized Ford unsparingly. After Ford's economic speech to Congress, Reston wrote: "The fear here is that he didn't bite the bullet but nibbled it." The judicious David S. Broder of the Washington Post, who had defended the Nixon pardon, summed up Ford in his first hundred days as "surely the simplest man to occupy the White House in modern times."

ABC-TV's Harry Reasoner visited Ford at Camp David for a private interview and asked him: "Can you grow into the office, sir?"

Yet some Washington press observers believe that there is an unspoken rule among many reporters and editors to write about Ford with a respect that they do not feel. Perhaps so, but so far, that attitude may only add up to a kind of fairness to a man who has had barely 100 days to learn how to be a President.

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