Presidential Odd Couple: After a Tough Race, Carter and Ford Became Friends

They did not think much of each other at first. They crisscrossed the country for months, warning voters that the other one should not be trusted with power. Their campaign was as bitter as any of the era and ended in one of the closest elections in modern times.

And then, against all odds, against all political logic, Jimmy Carter and Gerald R. Ford actually became friends.

Not friends in the Washington sense, where someone talks on the floor of Congress about “my friend from the state of Georgia” before stabbing them in the back. Real friends. Friends who commiserate on the phone over shared struggles. Friends whose wives and children become close. Friends who see a like-minded soul. Friends who speak at each other’s funerals.

The unlikely bond between Mr. Carter and Mr. Ford is a rare story in the history of the American presidency and all the more unimaginable in today’s polarized environment, but it transcended politics and partisanship. The two men who clashed in the 1976 election eventually became so tight that they made a pact that when one of them died, the other would give a eulogy. Mr. Carter did that for Mr. Ford in 2007. Now, in a way, Mr. Ford will return the favor on Thursday.

While he did not survive to honor his successor in person, Mr. Ford left behind a written eulogy before he died and it will be read at Mr. Carter’s service at Washington National Cathedral by Steven Ford, the former president’s third son. Walter F. Mondale, who was Mr. Carter’s vice president, likewise left behind a eulogy before his own death to be read by his son Ted Mondale.

“It was just a different time and they were a different type of men,” Steven Ford said in an interview on Wednesday about his father and Mr. Carter. “They differed politically, but they so much had a sense of shared values — that idea that both men were so grounded in what I think was honesty and truth-telling and values.”

The younger Mr. Ford knew that the two presidents had forged a true friendship, but even he was surprised to discover after his father’s death that he had inherited the task of reading a eulogy for Mr. Carter when the time came. “Your father left this for you to do at the Carter funeral,” he remembered a member of the former president’s staff telling him.

That the nation’s 38th and 39th presidents would become bosom buddies was not a given. They hailed from different parts of the country with different backgrounds — a peanut farmer from Georgia who ran for president as an outsider, and a college football star from Michigan who spent years in Washington as a quintessential insider.

But they also had some intriguing similarities that ultimately overcame their differences. Both came from families of relatively modest backgrounds with strong mothers. Both were men of faith. Both served proudly in the Navy. Both married young and stayed married for decades, linking up with wives who were independent-minded partners. Both had three sons before, at long last, a daughter came along to dote on.

“They were alike to a big degree,” said David Hume Kennerly, Mr. Ford’s White House photographer and longtime confidant. “It was a genuine friendship. Ford talked about it and he admired Carter in the end. He was hurt by losing, but he got over it. I mean, what a concept.”

While occupying opposite sides of the political aisle, neither was especially ideological and each was more moderate than the prevailing winds within their parties at the time. They both owed their presidencies to Richard M. Nixon — Mr. Ford as the vice president who succeeded Mr. Nixon when he resigned in 1974, and Mr. Carter as the Democrat who rode public outrage at the Watergate scandal to victory in 1976.

And while each in his own way helped the country heal from Watergate, demonstrating the personal integrity that Mr. Nixon had not, they both proved to be transitional presidents who blamed their downfalls on the same man. Ronald Reagan challenged Mr. Ford for the Republican nomination in 1976 and, while unsuccessful, damaged him for the general election, then ended up defeating Mr. Carter four years later before ushering in what he called “morning in America.”

“They were the un-Nixons,” Richard Norton Smith, a former director of the Gerald R. Ford Museum and Library and author of “An Ordinary Man” about Mr. Ford, said in an interview on Wednesday. “They both suffer historically from being in Nixon’s shadow and being perceived as in the anteroom to ‘morning in America.’ They were the predawn to morning in America.”

Indeed, some associates have said that Mr. Carter and Mr. Ford became friends for one reason: They both despised Mr. Reagan. “There was a bond because they both felt they had been defeated by Reagan,” James Cannon, a Ford aide and biographer, said at a 2006 seminar in Washington.

The friendship was born after both men had left office and no longer had any future political ambitions. In 1981, Mr. Reagan asked them, along with Mr. Nixon, to represent the United States at the funeral of President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt, who had been assassinated. The three presidents, none of them all that thrilled, boarded the plane each of them had once used as Air Force One for the long flight to Cairo.

Mr. Ford tried to lighten the mood. “Look, for the trip, why don’t we make it just Dick, Jimmy and Jerry?” he offered. But the flight over was awkward and uncomfortable. “Oil and water, you know,” Mr. Carter told the reporters traveling with them.

When an Air Force steward asked the three presidents to pose for a picture, Mr. Carter impatiently asked how long it would take. Unimpressed, Mr. Ford confided in another member of their delegation: “You know, that just goes to show you can’t make chicken salad out of chicken shit.”

But after the funeral, Mr. Nixon went his separate way, leaving just Mr. Carter and Mr. Ford on the return trip. On the long flight, they talked about everything from their children to arms control. They bonded particularly over the hated task of raising money to build presidential libraries. By the end of the flight, Mr. Carter had agreed to attend a conference at Mr. Ford’s library and Mr. Ford had agreed to help lead several Carter Center projects.

“I guess we figured we were gonna be in a plane together 40 hours, more or less, and in order to be pleasant, it was a good idea to just wipe the slate clean, which we did,” Mr. Ford told the journalist Thomas M. DeFrank a few days later in a conversation he reported in his book, “Write It When I’m Gone.”

Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy, authors of “The Presidents Club,” concluded that the two presidents were also brought together by the Sadat funeral itself, when they had to wear bulletproof vests because of the volatile situation in Egypt. “Death has a way of rearranging perspective,” they wrote, “and Carter and Ford realized how silly their grievances and disagreements had been.”

Other presidents have forged friendships, including George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, but few collaborated as much as Mr. Carter and Mr. Ford. In the 25 years after their Cairo flight, the two were co-chairmen of about 25 projects, by Mr. Carter’s count. They wrote a Reader’s Digest article together in 1983 criticizing Israel, they teamed up to help pass the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993, and they jointly opposed legalizing drugs in California in 1996.

In 1998, two days before Mr. Clinton faced impeachment for lying under oath about his relationship with a White House intern, Mr. Carter and Mr. Ford wrote a New York Times opinion piece proposing an alternative of bipartisan censure and admission of wrongdoing.

“It was real,” Mr. Smith said of the friendship. “I heard more than one phone conversation. “They were only human. I’m sure they identified any number of things they could have done better. But they didn’t live in the past.”

Beyond their post-presidential activities, their wives became close, too, bonding over similar priorities. Betty Ford worked to expand alcohol and drug treatment, while Rosalynn Carter worked to expand mental health care.

Steven Ford said the presidential friendship should be a model. “I just think there’s a great civics lesson to be learned from how these two men treated each other,” he said. “The greater good is to find that greater good — not to draw hard lines and make it either my way or no way. We just work in extremes now and we don’t talk to each other in civil ways. It’s so toxic.”

When Mr. Ford was memorialized in January 2007, Mr. Carter fulfilled their pact and delivered a moving eulogy in Michigan. “The four of us learned to love each other,” Mr. Carter said of the two couples, and he choked up for a moment near the end. Now it is Mr. Ford’s turn, albeit from the grave.

“I think it’s a unique relationship,” Mr. Kennerly said. “I don’t think there’s ever been anything like it.”

Mr. Smith agreed. And, he added, “We’re not likely to see it again.”