Maybe Ford had been right when he asserted in his August 1974 speech after being sworn in that "our long national nightmare is over." Edgar Hoover had abused his power by illegally ordering the investigation and persecution of thousands of Americans were oddly comforting: though these disclosures offered additional chilling proof of how the nation's highest offices had been befouled by some of the most viciously amoral characters in American history, the mere fact that Hoover's transgressions were coming to light-and provoking considerable outcry from even the most conservative corners of the media-seemed to indicate that sanity was finally creeping back into the national discourse. Even recent revelations that the late FBI director J. Still, the overall mood of the country at the end of 1975, if not exactly celebratory, was at least notably lighter than it had been during the bleak closing days of 1974, when the acrid stench of the Watergate scandal was still hanging thickly in the air. When New York City faced bankruptcy in October, the president initially refused NYC's mayor Abraham Beame's pleas for a federal bailout, thus inspiring the infamous New York Daily News headline, "Ford to City: Drop Dead." Though Ford-fearing the national, international, and political repercussions of having the country's largest metropolis go into default-eventually relented, the city's long-term prospects appeared pretty grim, as did Ford's prospects in next year's presidential elections. economy out of its mild recession with the Tax Reduction Act of 1975, a one-year tax cut of $22.8 billion that was supposed to stimulate economic growth. The country's unemployment rate had stubbornly refused to dip below 8 percent all year, despite Ford's attempt to shake the U.S. Chevy Chase, a cast member of NBC's new late-night sketch comedy/variety program Saturday Night, had become the show's first breakout star, partly due to the popularity of his portrayal of President Ford as a bumbling boob who never met a flight of stairs he wouldn't eventually fall down. The dark cloud of corruption and paranoia that enveloped the White House during the Nixon administration also seemed to have dissipated during the new commander in chief's tenure, replaced by a fog of amiable incompetence that was relentlessly mocked and parodied by political cartoonists and stand-up comedians alike. Armed revolution, once a fashionable concept in various left-wing circles, was no longer a viable threat to the status quo, now that radical organizations like the Black Panther Party, the Weather Underground, and the Puerto Rican liberation collective FALN had been decimated by infighting, heroin addiction, and aggressive law enforcement harassment. "I'm primarily thankful for the fact that this country is at peace on this Thanksgiving," Ford responded, "rather than engaged in a war, as we were for four or five or six years." Though he got the math wrong, this was no mere platitude on the president's part the traumatic and divisive Vietnam War had come to a close in April 1975 with the fall of Saigon, making this the first Thanksgiving in over a decade where American troops weren't on the ground in Vietnam, nor actively involved in any other foreign war.Īmerica was also largely at peace on the home front, at least in the sense that the race riots and antiwar demonstrations that had been a recurring part of American life from the mid-'60s through the early '70s were now mostly just bitter memories.
"Tomorrow being Thanksgiving Day," asked the reporter, "as the President of the United States, what do you have, number one, to be thankful for?" On November 26, 1975, toward the end of a press conference filled with thorny questions about federal spending, Soviet involvement in Angola, Israeli occupancy of the Golan Heights, and the CIA's role in political assassinations, a journalist tossed Gerald R.
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