15 - Memories of the Ford Administration

Summary

MEMORIES OF THE FORD ADMINISTRATION (1992) is a strange hybrid of a novel, as its split cover—half of Gerald Ford's face, and half of James Buchanan's—suggests. The novel is formatted as a response to a query on the part of the Northern New England Association of American Historians for “Memories and Impressions of the President Administration of Gerald R. Ford (1974–77) for Written Symposium on Same to Be Published in NNEAAH's Triquarterly Journal, Retrospect.” Its author is Alfred L. Clayton, a professor of history at a women's college in New Hampshire, and he turns in a much longer text than the NNEAAH must have expected. What is more, it has little to do with what we think of as history, and what history there is has little to do with Gerald Ford's administration. Instead, he talks about his own life, which was in an absolute shambles in the mid-70s, interspersing his personal memoirs with sections from a book he was at the time trying—and failing—to write about James Buchanan. As he sees it, the editors of Retrospect cannot possibly want the bare political details of the period, “which any sophomore with access to a microfilm reader that hasn't broken its fan belt can tote up for you. You want living memories and impressions: the untamperedwith testimony of those of who fortunate enough to have survived … the Ford Administration” (9). Living memory, however, is by definition always being tampered with, always being rewritten as the present influences the past and the past influences the present. And in fact, the major theme of Memories of the Ford Administration is the unreliability of the discipline of historiography in dredging up the facts of history. History, it turns out, is l’être-en-soi, and historiography is the imaginative projection of l’être-pour-soi. Historiography thus imagines a past that history constantly tears down.

The novel opens with Alf, freshly separated from his wife, babysitting his children and watching Nixon's resignation. He lives, at the time, in something of an imaginative world, in that he cannot quite believe that his old life has come to an end; he has “the illusion that the house we were in, a big Victorian with a mansard roof, a finished third floor, and a view from the upper windows of the yellow-brick smokestacks of the college heating plant, was still mine” (7).