Ford no stranger in Maine

Throughout the week’s multiple televised funeral services for former President Gerald Ford, network commentators repeatedly made the point that the ceremonies would be kept relatively simple; that, in keeping with President Ford’s character and with his expressed wishes, certain ostentatious touches that had marked other president’s final farewells would be skipped.

Along about the third day of a “somber week of benedictions,” as The Associated Press put it, I’m sitting there thinking that the networks’ definition of simplicity is sure out of whack with mine. Understated, the pageantry wasn’t. Elaborate, it was.

Executed with great attention to the smallest detail. And long. Mind-numbingly long. But not modest, by any stretch of the definition. Not that the late beloved president didn’t deserve the memorable sendoff. If any of our modern-day presidents had earned such an impressive display of the nation’s respect, it would certainly be this man of the people – the Eagle Scout who, according to the news coverage and the stirring eulogies, embodied the Scout ethic of trustworthiness, loyalty, helpfulness, reverence and the like while steering the country through one of the more trying crises of government in its history.

Still, while watching the proceedings it occurred to me, as I’m sure it did to most viewers, that highly visible public grieving which can last the better part of a week in these state funerals must be impossibly exhausting for the surviving family, no matter how stiff the upper lip that is displayed to the public. Granted, it comes with the territory, a trade-off of sorts for the many privileges of power. But it would probably not be the cup of tea that most people would choose, given their druthers.

As the BDN political writer when then-House Minority Leader Ford visited Maine on several occasions during the mid-1960s to put the bite on wealthy Mount Desert Island summer residents in behalf of the Republican cause, I found him as easy to chat with as my next-door neighbor. Maybe even easier.

The proposed $227 million Dickey-Lincoln hydroelectric power project on the St. John River – a controversial public power proposition that was anathema to the state’s private power companies – figured in those visits. In 1966, Ford, who had expressed “sympathy with the aims” of the power project while in Maine the previous year, said he doubted if Congress could afford the undertaking that had been endorsed by Republicans as well as Democrats. That upset Republican Gov. John H. Reed and Republican State Chairman Roger Putnam of Cape Elizabeth, and caused the volatile First District Rep. Peter Kyros, a Democrat, to go ballistic.

Kyros charged that Ford had been squired around the area in an automobile owned by the Bangor Hydro Electric Co. “How dare he pretend that he is being objective about Dickey when he received such favors from the very people who are waging an all-out campaign in an attempt to defend their own selfish interests? Now I know what a national magazine meant when it recently stated that the private electric corporations pull the strings of Congressmen,” Kyros exclaimed. Ouch.

Ford, calling the Kyros outburst “pure demagoguery,” said he had not been furnished transportation by Bangor Hydro, but had ridden in a car owned by his Northeast Harbor host, A.M. Burden, a former U.S. ambassador to Belgium. He said the Kyros allegation was “a falsification typical of most Democratic candidates.” Double ouch.

On a fundraising trip to Mount Desert Island the following year, Ford was criticized by another Democrat, Second District Congressman Bill Hathaway, for allegedly marshaling Republican forces to defeat the Dickey appropriation in Congress. At a Seal Harbor press conference, Ford said Hathaway had made him a scapegoat to cover up for his (Hathaway’s) inability to sell his Democratic colleagues on Dickey-Lincoln. He said the Johnson administration was faced with a huge budgetary deficit “and now is not the time to venture into projects the magnitude of Dickey.” Dickey-Lincoln, like a proposed public power project that would have harnessed the ocean tides of Passamaquoddy Bay in an earlier time, died aborning and eventually faded from the public consciousness.

Hathaway got in the last word on that 1967 Ford visit, charging that the GOP minority leader was “unmoved by the wishes of the people of Maine. He is against us.” It was an assessment that may have been good politics at the time. But after the events of the past week, culminating in President Ford being laid to rest in Michigan after the final eulogy had been delivered on Wednesday, such a sentiment would likely be a tough sell here today.

Kent Ward lives in Limestone.