City To Ford: Scoreboard

The Times revisits the Daily News’ famous headline after the former President, er, passes away at the age of 93:

Mr. Ford, on Oct. 29, 1975, gave a speech denying federal assistance to spare New York from bankruptcy. The front page of The Daily News the next day read: “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.”

Mr. Ford never explicitly said “drop dead.” Yet those two words, arguably the essence of his remarks as encapsulated in the immortal headline, would, as he later acknowledged, cost him the presidency the following year, after Jimmy Carter, nominated by the Democrats in New York, narrowly carried the state.

“It more than annoyed me because it wasn’t accurate,” he recalled years later. “It was very unfair.”

That view is echoed in an evolving version of historical revisionism. Only two months after saying or meaning or merely implying “drop dead” — or, perhaps, resorting to tough love by holding the city’s feet to the fire — Mr. Ford signed legislation to provide federal loans to the city, which were repaid with interest.

. . .

The Ford administration’s politically suicidal demands to city officials — raise transit fares, abolish rent control, scrap free tuition at the City University — prompted Victor Gotbaum, the municipal labor leader, to complain that Mr. Simon barely believed in government at all, except for police and fire protection, “and he’s not sure about fire.”

David R. Gergen, an assistant to [treasury secretary William E.] Simon at the time and later a presidential adviser, recalled that Mr. Ford himself “was one of those moderate Republicans who actually liked New York” — he chose Nelson A. Rockefeller as his vice president — but that “he was offended by the city’s profligate spending.”

“The president’s speechwriters whipped up one draft, and I was asked by the White House chief of staff to write an alternative version,” Mr. Gergen said. “I wrote a hard-hitting piece, assuming that if it ever saw the light of day, the White House would, in the normal course, invite me to smooth the rough edges. Instead, someone plopped a few of my rough, unedited paragraphs into the final text.”

In the speech, the president said: “The people of this country will not be stampeded. They will not panic when a few desperate New York officials and bankers try to scare New York’s mortgage payments out of them.”

The speech had a powerful impact, Mr. Gergen said. “It was a doozy of a speech, but events caught both sides by surprise,” Mr. Gergen remembered. “New Yorkers had not foreseen how tough the president would be, and Republicans in Washington had not anticipated how angry the response would be.”