HE DESERVES CREDIT FOR THE HELSINKI ACCORDS...:

Ford, for his part, adopted the Kissinger policy as his own, so much so that his closeness to the man who served as both his secretary of state and his national-security adviser, if not as his Metternich and Bismarck, created what Rumsfeld calls "a worrisome perception of dependency." It didn't help when, in response to a query, Rumsfeld was told by a National Security Council staffer that "Henry is in the middle of sensitive negotiations and therefore the President shouldn't mess in foreign affairs." Yet Ford was soon more royalist than the king. Hesitant to offend Kremlin sensibilities, he refused to receive Solzhenitsyn in the White House. Kissinger himself, who was in the Virgin Islands at the time, was more accommodating. He has suggested that, had he been in Washington, he might "have been wise enough to propose a low-key meeting with either the President or me."

Rumsfeld sensed in the predominance of Kissinger the makings of a political disaster. He "understood far better than I," Kissinger has written, "that Watergate and Vietnam were likely to evoke a conservative backlash." To Ronald Reagan, whose star was rising in the Republican party, "détente seemed like an accommodation with totalitarianism." Rumsfeld urged Ford to declaw Reagan by bringing him into the administration. "If [the Reaganites] are out," he told Ford in 1975, "they can make mischief," but "if they're in, they're in the same rowboat we are." Ford offered Reagan a seat in the cabinet, but Reagan refused it.

Plan A having failed, Rumsfeld moved to Plan B. However unfairly, Ford was coming to be perceived as a bumbling incompetent out of touch with vital elements in his party. There was only one way to restore the impression of command and reassure the GOP faithful: He must smack down the man his opponents had made out to be his Svengali. Kissinger, Rumsfeld writes, continued to "wield outsized power and influence" over Ford even as he enjoyed the constant support of his friend Nelson Rockefeller, whose aura of wealth and power made him a force in the administration in spite of his bad ideas. In every NSC meeting, Rumsfeld writes, Rockefeller "was a consistent vocal supporter of any position or view Kissinger put forward." At the same time, Rockefeller conceived himself as Ford's unofficial "head of domestic policy," a role in which the architect of the Great Society on the Hudson could only antagonize voters sympathetic to what Rumsfeld calls the "new Sunbelt, limited-government" Republicanism Reagan was selling.

Rumsfeld made his move in late October 1975. In When the Center Held, he describes how he submitted his resignation to Ford. Having failed to "get the President to take the management actions that I was convinced were required for him to succeed," he would fall on his sword. But it was not Rummy's blood that was shed in the Halloween Massacre that followed. Taking his chief of staff's counsel to heart, Ford summoned a startled Kissinger to the Oval Office and without inviting discussion outlined a reordering of the regime. Rocky was purged -- he would not have a place on the 1976 ticket. Kissinger was out as national-security adviser, though he retained the State Department. Rumsfeld himself replaced James Schlesinger at the Pentagon, where, as Kissinger tells it, he would ensure that the State Department's SALT negotiations with Moscow went nowhere. Détente was dead, and Kissinger ceased to be the prime minister of the Ford administration.

It was brilliant Machiavellian stuff, a realignment that moved Ford's government a little farther away from Nixon Republicanism, a little closer to the world of Reagan. But whether sacrificing a vizier or two and throwing the bones to the Reagan camp amounted to centrism is another question: It might as easily be read as weakness, expediency, and desperation. Ford seems less to have found a middle way than to have meandered unsuccessfully between two different paths.

The same confusion that marred the president's foreign policy spoiled his conduct of domestic affairs. As the GOP was recovering its faith in the rational self-interest of markets, Ford bizarrely launched into the volunteerist whimsies of "Whip Inflation Now," in which citizens were urged to wear shiny red buttons while planting vegetable gardens in order to stabilize prices, a program about as viable as Mao's pipe dream of promoting Chinese steel production with backyard furnaces. It is true that Ford would later, in his own words, "reverse completely" the unpropitious direction of his economic program and sign the Tax Reduction Act of 1975, which cut some $22 billion in taxes and led to the beginnings of an economic recovery. But an administration that embraced both WIN and the Laffer curve savors less of centrism than of incoherence.

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