President Ford's remarkable 1975 day in New Hampshire
By DAVID OMAN
Guest Columnist
For most Americans over the age of 30, the date September 11, 2001, is etched in our minds as a day that shook the nation and world. Younger Americans have since learned of the surreal, serial tragedies of four hijacked planes crashing and killing 3,000 people in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania.
In New Hampshire, the City of Portsmouth annually remembers the horrific day and honors one of their own, First Officer Thomas McGuinness, co-pilot of American Airlines Flight 11, the first hijacked plane flown into the World Trade Center.
Events in New Hampshire 50 years ago this month share only the same day on the calendar and do not at all compare with one of America’s darkest days 26 years later. A Presidential visit September 11, 1975, is little remembered even in New Hampshire, with its long history connected to politics and picking presidents.
The visit occurred after the Watergate scandal, between two rancorous political campaigns in 1974 and 1976, and between two assassination attempts on President Ford in 17 days.
It is worth a look back in time.
On 9/11/75, America’s 38th president, Gerald Ford traversed the state from Keene to Portsmouth. He made 23 stops, greeting crowds in 16 cities, towns, and rural intersections in 12 hours. Security was very tight that day. Given far more stringent Secret Service demands, no president could match this packed schedule today.
Ford’s New Hampshire visit occurred two years after becoming Vice President when Spiro Agnew resigned, and one year after assuming the Presidency after the disgraced President Richard Nixon resigned. Having thought about retiring from Congress after 1976, Ford had rapidly become America’s first unelected Vice President and then an unelected President.
Unlike previous presidents elected after campaigning in New Hampshire’s primaries, little known Gerald Ford had made only one prior stop as president, visiting Concord April 18,1975. During a talk before a Joint Convention of the legislature in Representatives Hall, a breeze through an open window caused a large venetian blind to crash down on seated legislators, sounding like rapid gunfire. The Secret Service immediately surrounded and embraced the president.
Why was Ford back in the ‘Granite State’ five months later? An unbelievably close 1974 U.S. Senate race had produced a full state recount and a formal review of disputed ballots, netting two different winners and no new Senator.
The dispute was tossed to the U.S. Senate which requested all ballots be sent there for recounting. More than five months of contentious debate resulted in some U.S. Senators attempting to examine ballots on the Senate floor. Ultimately, Senators informed the state they would never be able to finish the count. The matter was sent back to New Hampshire, which set a new election for September 16, 1975.
President Ford decided to throw his untested political clout into this bizarre, first and only U.S. Senate election re-run in American history. He flew to New Hampshire September 11 to boost GOP nominee and former Congressional pal Louis Wyman, with the high stakes do-over vote five days away.
Ford also aimed to get a head start on what would be a fierce, hard fought ‘First in the Nation’ New Hampshire GOP Presidential primary five months away in February,1976 against Ronald Reagan.
The former California governor delivered a soaring speech in Manchester the evening of September 10, hours before Ford’s visit. Indeed, the president’s advance team feared Reagan would show up unannounced at the Keene airport the next day to ‘welcome’ Ford to New Hampshire and upstage him.
Ford’s trip remained on the calendar despite a foiled assassination attempt one week earlier in Sacramento, CA when Lynette ‘Squeaky’ Fromm pulled a .45 pistol, which jammed when a Secret Service agent pushed his hand on it. Alarmingly, there would be a second unsuccessful attempt on Ford’s life in San Francisco September 22, 1975, when Sara Jane Moore fired a shot as he walked towards his limousine. He ducked and she missed.
All of this was only 12 years after the November 22,1963 killing of President John Kennedy. Afterward, new President Lyndon Johnson asked then Congressman Gerald Ford to serve on the Warren Commission, which examined the Kennedy tragedy. Classified papers regarding the Kennedy assassination were just released in 2025.
On the day of Ford’s New Hampshire visit, the state’s largest newspaper, the Manchester Union-Leader, ran a page one editorial signed by publisher William Loeb. It alerted New Hampshire readers of the risks to Ford on his 119- mile trek through their state. Loeb urged people who might get near Ford to protect him by watching the faces and hands of others nearby to thwart an attempt on his life.
Here are my eyewitness memories of a beautiful, sunny September 11, 1975, working as a 23-year-old volunteer for the White House Advance Office. They begin at the Keene airport, where Gov. Reagan fortunately did not show up.
President Ford stepped off Air Force One at 9:30 a.m. and immediately made news. As he shook hands with local dignitaries, it appeared something was stuffed under his white shirt. An athletic former Michigan football player, Ford looked more like a baseball home plate umpire. National media began buzzing, then reporting, what may have been a Presidential first.
By 12 noon, Deputy White House Press Secretary Bill Greener was asked who could confirm Ford was wearing a bulletproof vest. Greener’s enigmatic response was, ‘Nobody who could tell you.’ The next day’s New York Times page one headline was ‘President Wears Protective Vest’.
From the Keene airport, Ford, candidate Wyman, and Sen. Norris Cotton (appointed by Gov. Meldrim Thomson to fill the vacant seat from which Cotton had just retired) were driven to picturesque Keene Towne Center where an estimated 10,000 people eagerly awaited.
Presidents like to get out of Washington and Ford was no exception. He received a hero’s welcome and took as much energy from the crowd as he gave it with a patriotic and positive message. At 37 minutes it was his longest event of the day.
A buoyant Ford motored 10 minutes to Marlborough, where town officials gave him a Bicentennial coin and carved wooden elephant, the first among dozens of small gifts that day. Most are stored at the Ford Presidential Museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Along highway 101, Ford visited Yankee Publications in Dublin where he was given an ‘Old Farmer’s Almanac’ from his birth year, 1913, and a first edition 1976 Farmer’s Almanac ‘Useful, with a Pleasant Degree of Humor.’ Ford gamely said he would read the Almanac.
Also in Dublin, the owner of a general store said an influx of Secret Service agents had ‘been in here again and again, but they haven’t bought a thing.’
Ford’s next stop was Peterborough. During pre-visit work two days earlier, White House advance man Eric Rosenberger and I stopped in Peterborough where AM radio station WSCV broadcast from the basement of a women’s hair salon. We went downstairs, met the station manager, told him Ford’s motorcade would stop there in 48 hours, and offered an exclusive interview with the President of the United States. At first, he didn’t believe us, but then agreed to do the interview.
The next day, the Secret Service told the station to not promote the interview ahead of time. No one was to learn an exposed President would be outside in the town square. Later, agents asked shopkeepers and apartment dwellers to keep windows closed.
On the 11th, the motorcade rolled up and the radio DJ downstairs literally stopped the music. Ford did a live one-on-one three-minute interview with News Director Dave Goblaskas, who later moved on to a career in New England radio and TV. The interview covered events in the Middle East and the price of home heating oil, always a big issue in New Hampshire. UPI reported Ford expressed ‘cautious hope’ the U.S. might barter surplus wheat for oil from the (then) Soviet Union to lower consumer prices.
Goblaskas remembers the President being warm and unassuming in the only media interview Ford did that day.
Outside of Peterborough, President Ford paused to say hello to schoolchildren by the side of the road. Perhaps to reassure him, one fourth grader from Hancock school in Peterborough held up a sign that read, ‘Our hands hold friendship, not guns.’ Nevertheless, an armed state trooper was patrolling nearby.
At a brief stop in Wilton, Ford hopped out of his 22-foot bulletproof, black limousine to greet residents. He again received a generous, warm welcome. Ford shook hands readily and repeatedly said, ‘glad to see you’. One school leader added, ‘Seeing the President is like watching history. And he is a nice gentleman.’
Next, the President visited the large Hitchiner Manufacturing, Co. in Milford, which makes an array of metal castings, subassemblies, and components. Executive offices for the company, then and now, are in an older structure known as ‘The White House’. During one advance visit, the owner of the firm, John Morrison, asked if he could present amateur golfer Jerry Ford with a new driver. The Secret Service turned down the offer, concerned someone could have sabotaged the club.
Down the road in Milford, a one-time member of the notorious Manson family, Linda Kasabian, was kept under surveillance in her home by the Secret Service and state police. In another town, Boston Globe reporter Curtis Wilkie was detained four hours ahead of the visit for asking too many questions about security. At points along the route, a National Guard helicopter hovered overhead.
Running an hour behind schedule, Ford’s entourage arrived in well-manicured Amherst for lunch hosted by retired legislator and postal employee, G. Winthrop Brown and his wife at their home. Ford took off his jacket revealing the sleeveless half-inch think bulletproof vest.
White House records show only one official lunch guest, Gov. Thomson, the Reagan supporter following protocol to join the sitting President. The Browns invited neighbors, friends, and legislators, including New Hampshire House Speaker George Roberts, who made the full day trip with the President.
Last year, Roberts told former New Hampshire Sec. of State Bill Gardner and me there was another reason for the private lunch in addition to Ford needing a meal. With Gov. Thomson already helping Reagan, former Gov. Hugh Gregg (father of former Sen. and Gov. Judd Gregg) wanted to back Ford in the looming ’76 primary. A secret meeting was arranged after lunch behind the home, in a woodshed. You cannot make this up.
Ford White House Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld was on the trip. A good but tough guy, Rumsfeld later became Sec. of Defense for Ford and, again, for President George W. Bush. Ford and Rumsfeld met with Gregg, who guided many New Hampshire GOP primary winners over decades. Gregg offered to endorse the President, serve as his State Chairman, and control the New Hampshire operation.
The key word was control. Rumsfeld to direct the important first primary effort from the White House. The conversation was heated and overheard. Rumsfeld and Gregg took each other ‘to the woodshed’ in a real woodshed!
Gregg was told he would receive a phone call from the White House; he waited two weeks. Meanwhile, Reagan’s team pressed hard for Gregg to chair that campaign. Former Gov. Gregg ultimately agreed to endorse former Gov. Reagan.
After the long lunch, Ford was further behind schedule. From the home (today owned by the Matthew Larson family) the President jogged two blocks to the Amherst Town Center for a large, colorful rally full of cheering, patient townspeople.
Ford then stopped in Nashua and Hudson, at an elementary school and to view a circus elephant. He made a closed ‘no press’ visit to what was then Sanders and Associates and is now part of BAE Systems. The facility then and now works on classified defense material, according to former State Rep. Ed Lecius.
Students in Windham and Salem were held after school to see Ford. The kids couldn’t vote but their parents could. The President made a five-minute stop in Hampstead and visited yet another school in Kingston, where one young adult observing was Ken Weyler, now a longtime State Representative.
In Exeter shortly before 7 p.m., Ford plunged into the mass of people surrounding the bandstand. No wonder they were excited. He was the first sitting president since George Washington to visit Exeter, the birthplace of the Republican Party.
Running two hours late, Ford’s motorcade drove at full speed for an hour to reach Portsmouth on the Atlantic Coast. For the last few miles, Ford and Wyman threw caution to the wind and stood up through the limo’s roof, waving at people.
They arrived in Portsmouth at dusk to find a huge crowd waiting. A few men carried torches, a throwback to 19th century evening parades. Balloons popped and a few people feared it was gunfire. Despite a broken leg, N.H. State Representative Jim Splaine was in Market Square for the rally. The smiling Splaine earlier that year had sponsored legislation that guarantees the state's lead-off status with the Nation's first Presidential Primary. It was signed into law by Gov. Thomson.
The Portsmouth High School Clipper band played at the Presidential event only after a school board vote. One member said he approved ‘because the band had played for Santa Claus and the opening of a liquor store.’
After being introduced one last time by House Speaker Roberts, Ford gave his final talk on September 11, starting quietly ‘This trip to New Hampshire has been a great lift. You make me feel so much at home. I wish I could stay a couple of days.’
Ford praised Wyman and then gave it his all, perhaps thinking ahead to his own campaign for President in America’s Bicentennial Year, 1976. With the Vietnam War and Watergate mostly in the rear-view mirror, Ford talked about America coming together and pointed to a brighter future. The Portsmouth Herald reported the crowd’s response to Ford was ‘like he was Elton John or the Rolling Stones.’
Upon taking office a year earlier, America’s 38th President had said he was, ‘a Ford not a Lincoln.’ On the road in New Hampshire that warm, bright, autumn day, in a Lincoln, Ford was simply who he always was – a man who humbly revealed his humanity, his values and vision, with energy and good humor, all with a touch of class.
Heading home on Air Force One after nightfall in Portsmouth, Gerald Ford had reason to feel good about a well spent day. Granite State citizens did their part too, showing up big time. State law enforcement officials estimated the President was seen by an astounding 108,000 people -- one in eight of all state residents.
Many of those people decided to vote five days later. Turnout for the special election for only one office in 1975 was much higher than the turnout in the general election the previous November. President Ford’s eleventh-hour barnstorming trip did not bring beleaguered Louis Wyman a first-place finish. He lost to Democrat John Durkin, who finally won the open U.S. Senate seat by 27,000 votes and served one term.
Ford’s visit did help him eke out a win in the February 24,1976 New Hampshire GOP Presidential primary -- 55,156 votes (50.1%) to Reagan’s 53,569 (48.6%).
Had Ford accepted Gov. Gregg’s ‘woodshed’ advice, he might have won a larger victory but did earn 18 of 21 New Hampshire delegates to the 1976 Republican National Convention. After a grueling six-month primary battle with Reagan, Ford won a nail-biting 1,187 to 1,070 first ballot nomination in Kansas City.
The nominee chose popular Kansas Sen. Bob Dole as his Vice-Presidential running mate. One of the fall campaign’s upbeat TV ads featured young people singing, ‘I’m feeling good about America, I’m feeling good about me…’
Gerald Ford, never having been elected President, ran a vigorous general election campaign, with many long days like the one in New Hampshire a year earlier, which helped him carry the Granite State in ‘76 by 55 to 44 percent.
Ford lost nationally to political outsider, Democrat former Gov. Jimmy Carter of Georgia. Carter in turn was defeated in 1980 by Ronald Reagan, who briefly considered asking Ford to come back into the arena as his Vice-Presidential running mate. That didn’t happen after Ford suggested what was deemed a co-President role for himself.
Gerald Ford earned the respect and affection of many millions of Americans for working to bring the country together after Watergate and the Vietnam War. He lived thirty more years as a former U.S. President and passed away in 2006 at the age of 93. History has been good for his legacy.
PHOTO CREDITS: New Hampshire State Archives and the President Ford Archives.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Oman was Press Secretary to Iowa Gov. Robert Ray when he assisted the White House Advance Office with President Ford’s visit to the Iowa State Fair, August,1975. One month later, he was invited to navigate local, Boston, and New England media for the Ford visit to New Hampshire. Oman became Chief of Staff for Gov. Ray and his successor, Gov. Terry Branstad. Later, while an executive in the cable-television industry, Oman served eight years as Co-Chair of Iowa’s Republican Party. He credits his time in New Hampshire in 1975 for his respectful advocacy of both states holding ‘First in the Nation’ Presidential caucuses and primaries every four years.
The writer expresses gratitude to former New Hampshire Sec. of State and friend, Bill Gardner, who also wrote detailed accounts of the unique 1974-75 New Hampshire U.S. Senate race. Additional thanks to journalist, Substack writer, and Iowa friend, Douglas Burns, for his expert advice.
About The Iowa Mercury
(Douglas Burns, founder of The Iowa Mercury and a fourth-generation Iowa journalist from Carroll, is a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. Read dozens of the most talented writers in Iowa in just one place. The Iowa Writers' Collaborative spans the full state. It’s one of the biggest things going in Iowa journalism and writing now — and you don’t want to miss. This collaborative is — as the outstanding Quad Cities journalist Ed Tibbetts says — YOUR SUNDAY IOWA newspaper. )
David, thanks for a most interesting article. Thanks for offering some fascinating insight. Larry Morgan.
A fascinating read. Such a turbulent time. My parents were quiet Ford supporters. They were drawn to his affable personality. I was too young to know about the fierce rivalry between Reagan and Ford. I remembered that my grandfather voted for Jimmy Carter in 1976 and my parents got a kick out of that. Thank you for recounting this moment to moment politicking that Ford pursued on the heels of two assassination attempts. Wow. And Reagan had already come through but not as purposefully as Ford. But Ford, like a Michigan football player played the long game winning the New Hampshire Primary. Such colossal political battles.