The Other Born-Again President

By NANCY GIBBS, MICHAEL DUFFY

We can never know the real story about a President's faith. We know only what he does--or refuses to do--in God's name. Voters were unwilling to forgive Gerald Ford for his great act of forgiveness, the unconditional pardon of Richard Nixon. But there was another side to the pardon, the presidency and the 1976 campaign that received much less attention, in part because Ford wanted it that way. The contest between Ford and Jimmy Carter was a battle between two born-again Christians--but only one was willing to run as one.

Ford's faith was ignited in Grand Rapids, Mich., a center of Dutch Calvinist congregations so strict that even in the late 1950s there were arguments over whether it was appropriate to read the newspaper on the Sabbath. Ford's upbringing was more relaxed. Some Sunday afternoons, he recalled, "I'd just go out and play baseball. Of course, some of my Dutch friends weren't allowed to do that." As a young Michigan Congressman, he met a gospel-film executive named Billy Zeoli, who stopped by Ford's office and gave him a Bible. Over the next few years the two men became close--so close that Ford came to call Zeoli "an alter ego, a second self."

Among their bonds was a love of sports: Ford had been an All-American football player, and Zeoli created a ministry for professional athletes. It was at a pregame "football chapel," Zeoli says, that Ford renewed his personal commitment to Christ. Zeoli was holding a service at a Washington-area Marriott hotel for the Dallas Cowboys, in town to play the Redskins. Ford, who was then the Republican minority leader in Congress, went to hear his friend preach on "God's game plan." Ford was especially moved by the sermon and hung around to talk with Zeoli privately afterward about Christ and forgiveness and what it meant. The inquiry felt real and raw; was that the moment Ford committed himself to Christ? "It's hard to say when a man does that," Zeoli says plainly. "That's a God thing. But I think that day is the day he looked back to as an extremely important day of knowing Christ." Ford later affirmed in a published tribute to his chaplain that he and Zeoli "both put our trust in Christ, our Saviour, and have relied on Him for direction and guidance throughout our lives."

When Ford became Vice President in the fall of 1973, Zeoli began sending him a weekly devotional memo that would be waiting on Ford's desk on Monday mornings. It always had the same title--"God's Got a Better Idea"--and began with Scripture (always from the King James version, Ford's preferred translation) and ended with a prayer. Zeoli sent 146 devotionals in all, every week through Ford's presidency. "Not only were they profound in their meaning and judicious in their selection," Ford said, "I believe they were also divinely inspired." Beyond the memos, Zeoli and Ford would meet privately every four or five weeks for prayer and Bible study. Their conversations took place in either the Oval Office or the family quarters upstairs.

One of Ford's first acts as President was some spiritual housecleaning. Among the more ingeniously cynical inventions of the Nixon Administration was the much publicized White House church service, which in addition to providing genuine fellowship for those so inclined was a prime tool for image building, fund raising, arm twisting and dealmaking for the President's men. Two days after Ford was sworn in, his wife Betty Ford wrote in her diary, a little pointedly, "There aren't going to be any more private services in the East Room for a select few." During his first Sunday as President, Ford and his wife went to the same church they had attended for more than 20 years: Immanuel-on-the-Hill in Alexandria, Va.

Ford did have a private source of spiritual sustenance, which was in every way different from Nixon's public displays of piety. For years Ford faithfully attended a weekly late-morning prayer session with several friends in the House: John Rhodes of Arizona, Mel Laird of Wisconsin and Al Quie of Minnesota. The sessions, which began in 1967 and continued off and on through 1975, were "very quiet," totally off the record, Ford said. Talk about going to Bible study, he worried, and people might get the idea that you think you're somehow better than they are.

It's easier to understand the pardon when you reckon with the prayers. The question of what to do about Nixon landed hard on Ford from the moment he was sworn in. Apart from everything else, Nixon was a longtime friend. Ford worried about what putting the disgraced President in prison would do to him, as well as to a country so shaken by the betrayals of those years. Mercy and healing were very much on Ford's mind on Saturday, Aug. 31, when he spent the morning discussing an amnesty plan for Vietnam draft evaders. When the meeting was over, Ford went back to the Oval Office and called evangelist Billy Graham to talk about their mutual friend. "There are many angles to it," Ford said of Nixon's fate. "I'm certainly giving it a lot of thought and prayer." Graham, who was arguing for a pardon, told Ford he was praying for him, and before the two men finished their conversation, Graham recalled, "we had a prayer over the telephone."

A week later, on Sunday, Sept. 8, Ford went to St. John's Episcopal Church, directly across Lafayette Square from the White House. He took Communion with some of the 50 other worshippers and knelt in prayer. There was no sermon that morning--at least until Ford delivered one of his own. He went back to the Oval Office, practiced his speech aloud twice, moved to a smaller adjoining office and alerted congressional leaders of his plans. At 11:05, in a statement that invoked God's name six times, Ford told the nation he was pardoning Nixon. "The Constitution is the supreme law of our land, and it governs our actions as citizens," he said. "Only the laws of God, who governs our consciences, are superior to it ... I do believe, with all my heart and mind and spirit, that I, not as President but as a humble servant of God, will receive justice without mercy if I fail to show mercy."

Even as his faith inspired him to save Nixon, he refused to use it to save himself. Ford's discretion would be tested as the 1976 campaign took shape. Former Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter was a Southern Baptist who taught Sunday school, did mission work, filled in for preachers when they were on vacation and told the crowd at a backyard reception in 1976 that he had been born again. His sister Ruth Carter Stapleton was herself an evangelist who used to minister to reporters in the back of Carter's campaign plane and wrote letters to the faithful enlisting them in her brother's cause. Carter's campaign autobiography, Why Not the Best, talked about his midlife conversion and was a surprise best seller. Asked once to distill his campaign message into one word, Carter said, "Faith."

Carter's religious appeal inspired Zeoli to propose a counterattack. "I said, 'Jerry, look, Carter's a fine guy, a fine Christian. But nobody knows you're a Christian. Let's put a book together about your faith, and about how God has used you.'"

But Ford flatly refused. "You told me a long time ago we're not going to take advantage of our faith to get elected," he reminded Zeoli. Ford declined to allow Zeoli to lend his name to preachers' committees for Ford. "He thought he'd be using his chaplain to get votes," Zeoli recalled. Ford later revealed that he found Carter's discussion of his faith unsettling. "I have always felt a closeness to God and have looked to a higher being for guidance and support," Ford explained, "but I didn't think it was appropriate to advertise my religious beliefs."

Carter won by fewer than 2 million votes out of 81.6 million cast. But Ford never had any regrets about the pardon or his refusal to name Jesus as his running mate. His oldest son Jack told him, "You know, when you come so close, it's really hard to lose. But at the same time, if you can't lose as graciously as you plan to win, then you shouldn't have been in the thing in the first place."

To which Ford noted, "I couldn't have said it better myself." o

Gibbs and Duffy's book, The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham's White House Crusade, will be published in August by Center Street