Ask the Scholar
Document scope · 1 page
Scholar
Ask about this object, its catalog metadata, its source description, or the page inventory.
For page-specific OCR and visual context, open one of the page chats.
Scholar Source Context
Document identity
localId
7335622
label
Swearing-In Ceremony of the President [Pool Report]
core
doc
dtoType
document
citationUrl
pageCount
1
Source metadata
id
7335622
sourceUrl
contentType
document
title
Swearing-In Ceremony of the President [Pool Report]
citationUrl
collections
White House Press Releases (Ford Administration)
Press Releases
largeImageUrl
imageCount
1
hasImages
yes
source
import
hasTranscription
no
Source extras
naId
7335622
levelOfDescription
item
productionDates
day
9
logicalDate
1974-08-09
month
8
year
1974
recordType
description
ocrSource
nara-archive
Single page context
seq
1
pageIndex
0
type
document
mediaId
f3a5b9dd658ec0ee
ocrText
Digitized from Box 1 of the White House Press Releases at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library
AUGUST 9, 1974
POOL REPORT
OF THE SWEARING-IN CEREMONY
OF THE PRESIDENT
I won't try to go through the speech, which I
am sure all of you heard and they will have texts on shortly.
Most of what we have to give you is names of people there.
There may be a list later, but some may be in a rush for it.
The first people we saw come in were Melvin
Laird and his wife, and John Byrnes, the former ranking
minority Member on the Ways and Means Committee and a
friend of the President.
General Haig came in. Rose Mary Woods; Congressman
Sam Devine of Ohio; Peter Rodino, the Chairman of the House
Judiciary Committee; John Scali. We saw some of the
President's staff, Milton Friedman, a speech writer; Leslie
Arends, the Republican whip in the House; Bob Griffin, the
assistant minority leader in the Senate; Senator McClellan;
Senator Young of North Dakota; Representative Barber Conable;
Harley Staggers, Chairman of the Interstate and Foreign
Commerce Committee in the House; Al Quie from the House.
Then came Speaker John McCormick, the former
Speaker of the House; George Mahon, the Chairman of the
Appropriations Committee; Herbert Stein; Attorney General
Saxbe; Secretary of State Kissinger; Max Fisher from
Detroit, a fund-raiser for various philanthropic causes
and also, I believe, for the President.
Kissinger chatted with Saxbe and with Scali. Then,
we got Kissinger's attention and asked him if the letter
of resignation had been delivered to him and he said that
it had been delivered at 11:35 and we asked if it specified
the time of President Nixon's resignation, and he said it
"didn't specify the time." I will leave that to your
assorted constitutional scholars or the ones you call
as to whether that means that Ford became President at
11:35 or not. The letter was typed. He said it would
be released.
Going back to the people we saw coming in,
Senator Marlow Cook; Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz;
Rogers Morton; William Simon, former Congressman
Richard Poff, of Virginia; Bryce Harlow; George Bush;
Bill Timmons; Senator Tower; the retired parliamentarian
of the House, Lewis Deschler; Congressman James O'Hara,
Michigan Democrat; Dean Burch; James Lynn, Secretary of
Housing and Urban Development; Senator Mansfield; Carl
Perkins of Kentucky, the Chairman of the House Education
and Labor Committee; Arthur Burns, the Federal Reserve Board.
MORE
&
FORD
GERALD
LIBRARY
- 2 -
Secretary Weinberger; Brent Scowcroft, Roy Ash,
Murray Widenbound, former official whose title I have
forgotten for the moment. Speaker Albert; Senator Hugh
Scott; Senator Hart of Michigan; Representative Dingell;
Secretary of Defense Schlesinger; John McFall, the Democratic
whip; Richard Bolling, the Democrat from Missouri;
Senator Robert Byrd.
At noon, as you probably heard, a voice announced,
"Ladies and gentlemen, the Chief Justice of the United
States."
Q
Do you know who the voice was?
MR. CLYMER: No. It took him about a minute
to walk in. Mr. Ford was introduced, "Ladies and gentlemen,
the Vice President of the United States," and Ford came in.
Ford's hand was up to take the oath before the Chief
Justice told him to raise it. There was a constant clicking
of shutters in the room, particularly at the beginning,
but it may not have been audible on the TV mikes, but
it was very audible in the room.
We spotted John Anderson of Illinois. After
he took the oath, the Chief Justice said, "Congratulations,
Mr. President." They shook hands, Ford kissed his wife.
Mrs. Ford put the Bible under her arm and she sat down
and put it in her lap. Ford smiled rather broadly before
he started his speech.
There were standees in the center aisle of
the East Room. The East Room was set up more or less
as it is for a press conference, but it was quite
crowded. There were standees in back and also fairly
solidly in the center aisle. I couldn't see at this point,
but that may have been what caused the brief delay after
the announcement of the Chief Justice and the time he
got in. It may have been the crowd there.
Ford was turning pages, regular letter-sized
pages, I think, 8-1/2 by 11, and after he finished, the
Chief Justice picked up his text and handed it to an
aide, Air Force aide. At the point when he said that
he wanted to meet with the leaders of the House and
Senate and asked if they could see him afterwards, Carl
Albert nodded. Otherwise, I didn't detect any particular
reaction from the people we could recognize to anything
in particular that he said.
As he faced the audience, the Cabinet was on
his right. His family was in the front row of the sort of
center-right section and there were some White House staff
people behind them. The left section, as he faced it, was
almost entirely Congressional and wives of Members of
Congress. As he came out, the Marine Band was playing
"God Bless America." Then it played "The Battle Hymn
of the Republic. Another person I saw there, I saw
Congressman Don Riegle, Michigan Democrat who used to be
a Michigan Republican and campaigned very actively against
President Nixon in the Republican primaries in 1972. I asked
Riegle how long it had been since he had been in the White
House and he said, "It has been a very long time."
Adam Clymer - Baltimore Sun
GERALD LEBRARY FORD