Little Known Democrat Defeats President Gerald Ford in 1976 Election
STEVE EMBER: Welcome to THE MAKING OF A NATION — American history in VOA Special English. I’m Steve Ember.
This week in our series, we look back at the presidential election of nineteen seventy-six.
When Vice President Gerald Ford became president in nineteen seventy-four, he took office during a crisis. For the first time in American history, a president — Richard Nixon — had resigned.
Nixon resigned as a result of the case known as Watergate. It involved the cover-up of illegal activities related to his re-election campaign. Lies about Watergate only added to the mistrust of Americans angry at having been misled about the war in Vietnam. After Vietnam and Watergate, many people no longer believed their public officials.
Voters rejected Gerald Ford, a Republican, in the presidential election of nineteen seventy-six. Instead they chose Jimmy Carter, the candidate of the Democrats. Why?
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One reason was that Ford had pardoned Nixon. He declared a pardon for any crimes that Nixon might have committed. This made many people angry. Also, he refused requests for federal aid for New York and other cities. Voters may have felt that he was not concerned about the problems of poor people.
Others believe that unemployment and inflation defeated Gerald Ford. He was not able to deal effectively with these problems during his short presidency.
There was competition for the Republican Party nomination in nineteen seventy-six. Ford’s chief opponent was Ronald Reagan, who had just served two terms as governor of California.
Democrats thought that voter anger about Watergate would help their party win the White House. Eleven Democrats campaigned for the nomination. Two well-known politicians did not campaign, but they said they would serve if no other candidate won the party’s support. They were former vice president Hubert Humphrey and Senator Ted Kennedy.
One of the lesser-known candidates was the former governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter.
JIMMY CARTER: “My name is Jimmy Carter, and I’m running for president.”
Political experts gave him little chance of winning the nomination. Most Democrats did not even know who he was.
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Before becoming governor, he had been a nuclear power engineer in the Navy and a peanut farmer in Georgia. Again and again, he told people that he was not part of the political establishment in Washington. He also had strong Christian beliefs. This appealed to a lot of voters.
Jimmy Carter greets supporters in downtown Fort Myers as he makes his presidential campaign swing through Florida in March of 1976
AP
Many voters supported Carter in the primary elections leading up to the party’s nominating convention. His victory in the Florida primary was especially important. He defeated another politician from the South, Governor George Wallace of Alabama.
Jimmy Carter represented what was called the “New South.” He made it clear that he opposed the ideas of the “Old South,” like discrimination against blacks.
George Wallace spoke of creating a better life for both blacks and whites. Yet he had strongly defended racial separation for most of his political life. Many people remembered pictures of Governor Wallace at the University of Alabama in nineteen sixty-three. The pictures showed him blocking the door to prevent two young blacks from attending the school.
The Republican primaries had mixed results for President Ford.
PRESIDENT GERALD FORD: “Right now, I predict that the American people are going to say that night, ‘Gerry, you’ve done a good job – Keep right on doing it.’”
For example, in New Hampshire he won only fifty-one percent of the vote. Ronald Reagan won forty-nine percent. But in Massachusetts, Ford won twice as many votes as Reagan did.
The campaign showed that Reagan was more conservative than Ford. For example, Reagan talked strongly about United States control of the Panama Canal. In his words: “We built it, we paid for it, it’s ours, and we are going to keep it.” President Carter would later decide differently.
Ford, in his campaign speeches, denounced extremism. It was clear that he was talking about his opponent, Ronald Reagan.
Ford and Reagan won almost the same amount of support in the Republican primaries. Yet many delegates at the nominating convention remained undecided. This was a dangerous situation for the Republican Party. Party leaders did not want a fight over undecided votes at the convention. They worried that a lack of unity could damage the party’s chances in the general election.
The situation was similar for the Democrats. Support for Jimmy Carter increased. But some Democrats who did not like him began to say, “Anybody but Carter.”
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Carter’s campaign message was that he did not have ties to special interest groups, that he would be different.
JIMMY CARTER (in campaign film): “I see an America that has turned away from scandals and corruption. I see an American president who governs with vigor and vision and affirmative leadership. A president who is not isolated from our people, but a president who feels your pain and who shares your dreams.
“I see an America on the move again, united, its wounds healed, an America entering its third century with confidence and competence and compassion. An America that lives up to the majesty of its Constitution, and the simple decency of its people. This is my vision of America. I hope you share it. And I hope you will help me fight for it.”
Many people liked what they heard. Carter won the Democratic primaries in Georgia, Alabama and Indiana. The other candidates fell hopelessly behind.
At the party convention, he was nominated on the first vote. In his acceptance speech, he repeated the line that he continually used with voters.
JIMMY CARTER: “My name is Jimmy Carter, and I’m running for president.”
Carter said there was a fear that America’s best years were over. He said the nation’s best was still to come.
CARTER: “Nineteen seventy-six will not be a year of politics as usual. It can be a year of inspiration and hope, and it will be a year of concern, of quiet and sober reassessment of our nation’s character and purpose, a year when voters have confounded the experts. And I guarantee you that it will be the year when we give the government of this country back to the people of this country.” [Cheering]
Walter Mondale, a senator from Minnesota, became the party’s vice presidential candidate.
President Jimmy Carter, left, and Vice President Walter Mondale
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A month before the Republican Party convention, Ronald Reagan made a costly political mistake. He said that, if he won the nomination, he would want Senator Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania as his running mate. Conservatives got angry. Schweiker was a liberal Republican. Some political observers say this is why Reagan lost the nomination to President Ford.
Many of the delegates wanted Reagan to then be Ford’s running mate. But Reagan was not interested in becoming vice president. Instead, the nominee was Senator Robert Dole of Kansas.
Nonetheless, Reagan received a long and enthusiastic response from the convention delegates when Gerald Ford motioned for him to come down and join him at the podium.
RONALD REAGAN: “If I could just take a moment, I had an assignment the other day. Someone asked me to write a letter for a time capsule that is going to opened in Los Angeles a hundred years from now.
“We live in a world in which the great powers have poised and aimed at each other horrible missiles of destruction, nuclear weapons that can in a matter of minutes arrive at each other’s country and destroy virtually the civilized world we live in.
“And suddenly it dawned on me; those who would read this letter a hundred years from now will know whether those missiles were fired. They will know whether we met our challenge. Whether they have the freedoms that we have known up until now will depend on what we do here. Mister President…” [Cheering]
It was a preview of the strong and confident speaking style that would serve Reagan well four years later. Indeed, as the future president, Ronald Reagan would be known as “the Great Communicator.”
The general election campaign started in September nineteen seventy-six. One newspaper said the campaign left voters feeling sleepy because it was not very interesting.
Ford and Carter agreed to debate each other on television. Nobody had done that since nineteen sixty, when Richard Nixon and John Kennedy had several televised debates.
Many people thought Ford did a little better than Carter in the first debate. In the second debate, however, President Ford made a mistake. He wrongly suggested that the Soviet Union did not control Eastern Europe.
FORD: “I don’t believe that the Yugoslavians consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union. I don’t believe that the Romanians consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union. I don’t believe that the Poles consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union. Each of those countries is independent or autonomous. It has its own territorial integrity, and the United States does not concede that those countries are under the domination of the Soviet Union.”
Carter responded:
CARTER: “I would like to see Mister Ford convince the Polish-Americans, and the Czech-Americans, and the Hungarian-Americans in this country that those countries don’t live under the domination and supervision of the Soviet Union, behind the Iron Curtain.”
The third debate did not have a clear winner. Opinion polls showed that many voters were still undecided.
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President Gerald Ford in the White House Press Room in Washington, November 3, 1976, concedes defeat to Jimmy Carter
AP
In November, Jimmy Carter won the election. He received fifty-one percent of the popular vote. President Ford won forty-eight percent.
A lot had changed in the two years since Jimmy Carter began to receive national attention. Most Americans had never heard of him before. Now, many of those same people had just elected him the thirty-ninth president of the United States.
A look at the Carter presidency, next week.
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You can find our series online with transcripts, MP3s, podcasts and pictures at voaspecialenglish.com. You can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter at VOA Learning English. I’m Steve Ember, inviting you to join us again next week for THE MAKING OF A NATION — American history in VOA Special English.
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Contributing: Jerilyn Watson
This was program #221. For earlier programs, type “Making of a Nation” in quotation marks in the search box at the top of the page.
How Freud Changed What People Thought About the Mind
DOUG JOHNSON: Welcome to Explorations in VOA Special English. I’m Doug Johnson. The movie “A Dangerous Method” is showing in theaters across the United States and in other countries. The Film tells about Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung — two leaders in the use of psychotherapy to treat mental disorders.
The work of Freud continues to influence many areas of modern culture. Today, Bob Doughty and Faith Lapidus explore his influence on psychotherapy.
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BOB DOUGHTY: Sigmund Freud was born May sixth, eighteen fifty-six, in Moravia, in what is now the Czech Republic. He lived most of his life in Vienna, Austria. Early in his adulthood, Freud studied medicine. By the end of the nineteenth century, he was developing some exciting new ideas about the human mind. But his first scientific publications dealt with sea animals, including the sexuality of eels.
FAITH LAPIDUS: Freud was one of the first scientists to make serious research of the mind. The mind is the collection of activities based in the brain that involve how we act, think, feel and reason.
He used long talks with patients and the study of dreams to search for the causes of mental and emotional problems. He also tried hypnosis. He wanted to see if putting patients into a sleep-like condition would help ease troubled minds. In most cases he found the effects only temporary.
Freud worked hard, although what he did might sound easy. His method involved sitting with his patients and listening to them talk. He had them talk about whatever they were thinking. All ideas, thoughts and anything that entered their mind had to be expressed. There could be no holding back because of fear or guilt.
BOB DOUGHTY: Freud believed that all the painful memories of childhood lay buried in the unconscious self. He said this part of the mind contains wishes, desires and experiences too frightening to recognize.
He thought that if these memories could somehow be brought into the conscious mind, the patient would again feel the pain. But this time, the person would experience the memories as an adult. The patient would feel them, be able to examine them and, if successful, finally understand them.
Using this method, Freud reasoned, the pain and emotional pressure of the past would be greatly weakened. They would lose their power over the person’s physical health. Soon the patient would get better.
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FAITH LAPIDUS: Sigmund Freud proposed that the mind was divided into three parts: the id, the ego and the superego. Under this theory, the superego acts as a restraint. It is governed by the values we learn from our parents and society. The job of the superego is to help keep the id under control.
The id is completely unconscious. It provides the energy for feelings that demand the immediate satisfaction of needs and desires.
The ego provides the immediate reaction to the events of reality. The ego is the first line of defense between the self and the outside world. It tries to balance the two extremes of the id and the superego.
BOB DOUGHTY: Many of Freud’s theories about how the mind works also had strong sexual connections. These ideas included what he saw as the repressed feelings of sons toward their mothers and daughters toward their fathers.
If nothing else, Freud’s ideas were revolutionary. Some people rejected them. Others came to accept them. But no one disputes his great influence on the science of mental health.
Professor James Gray at American University in Washington, D.C. says three of Freud’s major ideas are still part of modern thinking about the mind.
One is the idea of the unconscious mind. Another is that we do not necessarily know what drives us to do the things we do. And the third is that we are formed more than we think in the first five years, but not necessarily the way Freud thought.
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FAITH LAPIDUS: Doctor Freud was trained as a neurologist. He treated disorders of the nervous system. But physical sickness can hide deeper problems. His studies on the causes and treatment of mental disorders helped form many ideas in psychiatry. Psychiatry is the area of medicine that treats mental and emotional conditions.
Freud would come to be called the father of psychoanalysis.
BOB DOUGHTY: Psychoanalysis is a method of therapy. It includes discussion and investigation of hidden fears and conflicts.
Sigmund Freud used free association. He would try to get his patients to free their minds and say whatever they were thinking. He also had them talk about their dreams to try to explore their unconscious fears and desires.
His version of psychoanalysis remained the one most widely used until at least the nineteen fifties.
FAITH LAPIDUS: Psychoanalysis is rarely used in the United States anymore. One reason is that it takes a long time; the average length of treatment is about five years. Patients usually have to pay for the treatment themselves. Health insurance plans rarely pay for this form of therapy.
Psychoanalysis has its supporters as well as its critics. Success rates are difficult to measure. Psychoanalysts say this is because each individual case is different.
BOB DOUGHTY: More recently, a number of shortened versions of psychological therapy have been developed. Some examples are behavior therapy, cognitive therapy and cognitive-behavioral therapy. Behavior is actions; cognition is knowing and judging.
Some patients in therapy want to learn to find satisfaction in what they do. Others want to unlearn behaviors that only add to their problems.
In these therapies, patients might talk with a therapist about the past. Or patients might be advised to think less about the past and more about the present and the future.
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FAITH LAPIDUS: Other kinds of therapy involve movement, dance, art, music or play. These are used to help patients who have trouble talking about their emotions.
In many cases, therapy today costs less than it used to. But the length of treatment depends on the problem. Some therapies, for example, call for twenty or thirty visits with a therapist.
How long people continue their therapy can also depend on the cost. People find that health insurance plans are often more willing to pay for short-term therapies than for longer-term treatments.
BOB DOUGHTY: Mental health experts say therapy can often help patients suffering from depression, severe stress or other conditions.
For some patients, they say, a combination of talk therapy and medication works best. There are many different drugs for depression, anxiety and other mental and emotional disorders.
Critics, however, say doctors are sometimes too quick to give medicine instead of more time for talk therapy. Again, cost pressures are often blamed.
Mental health problems can affect work, school, marriage, and life in general. Yet they often go untreated. In many cases, people do not want others to know they have a problem.
FAITH LAPIDUS: Mental disorders are common in all countries. The World Health Organization says hundreds of millions of people throughout the world are affected by mental, behavioral, neurological or substance use disorders.
The W.H.O. says these disorders have major economic and social costs. Yet governments face difficult choices about health care spending. The W.H.O. says most poor countries spend less than one percent of their health budgets on mental health.
There are treatments for most conditions. Still, the W.H.O. says there are two major barriers. One is lack of recognition of the seriousness of the problem. The other is lack of understanding of the services that exist.
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BOB DOUGHTY: The father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, left Vienna soon after troops from Nazi Germany entered Austria in nineteen thirty-eight. The Nazis had a plan to kill all the Jews of Europe, but they permitted Freud to go to England. His four sisters remained in Vienna and were all killed in Nazi concentration camps.
Freud was eighty-three years old when he died of cancer in London on September twenty-third, nineteen thirty-nine. Anna Freud, the youngest of his six children, became a noted psychoanalyst herself.
Before Sigmund Freud, no modern scientist had looked so deeply into the human mind.
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DOUG JOHNSON: The program was written and produced by Brianna Blake. Our announcers were Bob Doughty and Faith Lapidus. I’m Doug Johnson.
For English learning activities and interactive features, click on The Classroom at VOA Learning English. And follow us on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and iTunes. Join us again next week for more Explorations in VOA Special English.
American History: Ford Leads Nation After Nixon Resigns
Teachers: Download a version with English teaching activities for your classroom
STEVE EMBER: Welcome to THE MAKING OF A NATION — American history in VOA Special English. I’m Steve Ember.
This week in our series, we tell the story of the thirty-eighth president of the United States.
GERALD FORD: “Mr. Chief Justice, my dear friends, my fellow Americans, the oath that I have taken is the same oath that was taken by George Washington and by every president under the Constitution. But I assume the presidency under extraordinary circumstances, never before experienced by Americans.”
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Gerald Ford was sworn into office on August ninth, nineteen seventy-four. Ford was vice president to Richard Nixon, who had announced the day before that he would resign.
If Nixon had not resigned, he might have been removed from office. Congress had been moving to charge him with corruption in the Watergate case.
At his swearing-in ceremony, the new president spoke about the nation’s future.
GERALD FORD: “My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over. Our Constitution works. Our great republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule.”
He went on to say:
GERALD FORD: “As we bind up the internal wounds of Watergate — more painful and more poisonous than those of foreign wars — let us restore the ‘Golden Rule’ to our political process and let brotherly love purge our hearts of suspicion and of hate.”
Gerald Ford became the only leader in American history to have served both as vice president and president without being elected.
Richard Nixon chose him as vice president in October nineteen-seventy-three. That was when Nixon’s former vice president, Spiro Agnew, resigned because of criminal charges that he failed to pay his taxes.
When Nixon himself resigned, Ford became president.
Ford was a longtime congressman from the state of Michigan. He was well-liked by his congressional colleagues. His education was in economics and political science at the University of Michigan. Then he attended Yale Law School. During World War Two, he served as a Naval officer in the Pacific.
After the war, Ford entered politics. He was a member of the Republican Party. He was first elected to the House of Representatives in nineteen forty-eight. He won re-election twelve times. Republicans in the House elected him the minority leader during the administration of Democratic President Lyndon Johnson.
Ford was still minority leader when Richard Nixon, a fellow Republican, was elected president in nineteen sixty-eight. In his leadership position, Ford helped win approval of a number of Nixon’s proposals. He became known for his strong loyalty to the president. It was no surprise, then, when Nixon named Ford as vice president.
Gerald Ford was an “accidental president.” He came to office in a sudden turn of events. Almost as suddenly, he had to decide what to do about the former president.
After Nixon left office, he could have been charged with crimes for his part in covering up the events of Watergate. Instead, one month after Nixon resigned, President Ford settled the question. He pardoned Nixon for any crimes that he might have committed.
The pardoning of Nixon made many Americans angry. Some believed he should have been put on trial. They thought he might have answered more questions about Watergate if he had not been pardoned.
Ford said he pardoned Nixon in an effort to unite the country. For a while, though, the pardon only seemed to intensify the divisions.
REPRESENTATIVE ELIZABETH HOLTZMAN: “And I wondered if anyone had brought to your attention the fact that the Constitution specifically states that, even though somebody is impeached, that person shall nonetheless be liable to punishment according to law.”
President Gerald Ford testifies at a House of Representatives hearing in 1974 on his pardon of Richard Nixon
AP
In October nineteen seventy-four, President Ford appeared before a congressional hearing on the pardon. He gave a strong response to questioning by Democratic Representative Elizabeth Holtzman.
GERALD FORD: “Mrs. Holtzman, I was fully cognizant of the fact that the president, on resignation, was accountable for any criminal charges. But I would like to say that the reason I gave the pardon was not as to Mr. Nixon himself. I repeat – and I repeat with emphasis: The purpose of the pardon was to try and get the United States, the Congress, the president, and the American people focusing on the serious problems we have, both at home and abroad.
“And I was absolutely convinced then, as I am now, that if we had had this series – an indictment, a trial, a conviction, and anything else that transpired after that – that the attention of the president, the congress, and the American people would have been diverted from the problems that we have to solve. And that was the principal reason for my granting of the pardon.”
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Anger about the pardon was still strong when President Ford made another controversial decision. He pardoned men who had illegally avoided military service in the Vietnam War.
Most of them were not sent to prison. Instead, they were offered a chance to do work for their communities. Many of the men, however, did not accept the president’s offer. Some stayed in Canada or other countries where they had fled to avoid the draft.
President Ford received greater public support when he asked Congress to limit the activities of the nation’s intelligence agencies. He hoped better control would prevent future administrations from abusing the constitutional rights of Americans, as Nixon had done.
On another issue, Ford, while serving as vice president, had described inflation as America’s “public enemy number one.” He had supported several measures to fight it. As president, however, an economic recession forced him to cancel some of those measures. Inflation decreased during the recession, but unemployment increased.
On foreign policy issues, Ford kept Henry Kissinger as secretary of state. Kissinger had won much praise for his service to Richard Nixon, including in the opening of diplomatic ties with Communist China.
But Kissinger had also received much criticism. Critics accused him of interfering with civil liberties in the name of national security. They also accused him of supporting the overthrow of the Marxist government of Salvador Allende in Chile.
By the time Ford became president, the United States and the Soviet Union had taken steps to try to limit the spread of nuclear weapons. Nixon and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev had signed two such agreements as part of the détente policy to ease Cold War tensions. Relations with China were also less tense than before.
U.S. Marine helicopter crewmen carry Vietnamese civilians to safety aboard the U.S.S. Blue Ridge on April 29, 1975. Their evacuation helicopter crashed on the deck of the amphibious command ship. 
AP
American policy in Southeast Asia, however, had failed. Involvement in the Vietnam War had officially ended the year before Gerald Ford became president. But fighting continued between South Vietnam and communist forces from the North.
The peace agreement signed by the United States and North Vietnam in nineteen seventy-three left South Vietnam to defend itself. By nineteen seventy-five, South Vietnamese forces were clearly in danger of defeat.
President Ford tried to prevent a communist takeover. He asked Congress to approve seven hundred million dollars in military aid for South Vietnam. Congress said no. The American people were tired of paying for the war.
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Saigon, the South Vietnamese capital, fell to communist forces on April thirtieth, nineteen seventy-five.
President Ford ordered the rescue of American citizens and South Vietnamese who had supported the American efforts. Few people who saw those struggling to escape Saigon will ever forget that day.
MARINE AT AMERICAN EMBASSY: “Please stop pushing – one at a time.”
Terrified Vietnamese were screaming for help at the American Embassy. Everyone was pushing, trying to escape the city. Some held on to overloaded military helicopters as the aircraft tried to take off.
As a signal to American citizens to prepare to leave, Armed Forces Radio had played the song “White Christmas.”
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Some were to go to an apartment building where a helicopter would pick them up from the roof. But other people also tried to get onto the helicopter — a scene captured in a famous news photo of the fall of Saigon.
The former South Vietnamese capital was renamed Ho Chi Minh City.
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In the Middle East, Henry Kissinger led negotiations after the nineteen seventy-three Arab-Israeli war. Israel agreed to give up some captured territory. In return, the United States promised not to recognize or deal with the Palestine Liberation Organization unless the PLO met certain conditions.
In September nineteen seventy-five, Israel and Egypt signed an agreement that included permission for American civilians to act as observers along the ceasefire lines. Henry Kissinger was praised for his peacemaking efforts, though peace in the Middle East would remain a challenge for future administrations.
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At home, things seemed better as the presidential election campaign of nineteen seventy-six began. That year marked the nation’s two hundredth birthday. The United States was not fighting any wars. Unemployment remained high, but inflation had eased. Most importantly, Gerald Ford had led the country through the difficult period after Watergate.
The nineteen seventy-six election will be our story next week.
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You can find our series online with transcripts, MP3s, podcasts and pictures at voaspecialenglish.com. You can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter at VOA Learning English. I’m Steve Ember, inviting you to join us again next week for THE MAKING OF A NATION — American history in VOA Special English.
___
Contributing: Jerilyn Watson
This was program #220. For earlier programs, type “Making of a Nation” in quotation marks in the search box at the top of the page.
