WASHINGTON — After Gerald R. Ford became president in 1974, he assembled a staff of strong, brilliant and highly opinionated personalities. Ford's most enduring legacy, some have argued, is the people he brought into power, including Donald H. Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Brent Scowcroft and James A. Baker III.
Under three Republican presidents, it is a group that has shaped U.S. foreign policy through the end of the Cold War and its aftermath, nowhere more than during the presidency of George W. Bush, where Rumsfeld and Cheney helped set the course for a war on terrorism and the invasion of Iraq.
"I've talked to people over and over again, and if there is such a thing as a Republican national security apparatus in personnel, they're all Gerald Ford's people," said Scowcroft, who replaced Henry Kissinger as national security advisor in the Ford years. "That's pretty remarkable."
Despite the continuity of the personnel, the way they made policy under Ford and the current president could not be more different, say officials familiar with both administrations. And that contrast has drawn attention as critics have probed the judgments that led to an Iraq war that is increasingly troubled.
In seeking answers to problems, Ford -- a veteran of more than two decades of debate in the House of Representatives -- relished the give-and-take of open and sometimes heated debate. He would force the strong egos that surrounded him to make their case in person during lengthy White House sessions, where he would constantly question the most minute details.
James T. Lynn, Ford's budget director, recalled one particularly heated discussion among Cabinet members in front of Ford, which ended with the president thanking both sides and retreating to the Oval Office: "I had to go back into the president's office with him, and he turned to me and said, 'Wasn't that fun?' "
Said L. William Seidman, a top Ford economic advisor, "I worked for three or four presidents, and I think more than any other president, [Ford] was determined that all views be presented to him before he made a decision. I think it's very clear in the early days of the Bush administration, they did not have a process like that, and you had people like [Secretary of State Colin L.] Powell saying the State Department never had a chance to present to the president what would happen after the war started."
