Publishers Rediscover President Ford
By Dermot Mcevoy -- Publishers Weekly, 5/4/2007 5:00:00 AM
President Gerald Ford’s death in December seems to have sparked renewed interest not only in the Ford presidency, but in his status as the final living member of the Warren Commission. This year brings at least three new books about Ford.
Ford’s own last book deals with his experience on the Warren Commission. Originally published in 2004 with the title, The John F. Kennedy Assassination: Report of the Warren Commission, it is now available in trade edition paperback with a new title: A Presidential Legacy and The Warren Commission. The new
trade paperback edition had a first printing of 10,000-copies. "We worked directly with Gerald Ford for the last three years," said Tim Miller, chairman of the board of Flatsigned Press, "producing a leather-bound autographed edition. The content of the new edition is identical. I own the rights and we decided to do a low-end [$17.95] French flaps edition for the general public. The autographed edition sold for $489. The new trade paperback will have ads in the back that Miller hopes will help sell the autographed edition, 1,500 of which are available at the Gerald Ford Library as well as the George Bush Library.
With next week’s publication of David Talbot’s book about the Kennedys, there is likely to be renewed attention to Ford’s observations. "Ford admits that the CIA did destroy documents" in connection to the assassination, Miller said. Ford also talks extensively about 9/11 and the comparisons to the aftermath of JFK’s death. "The two instances in history have a lot of things in common," said Miller, "Ford contends that if recommendations of the Warren Commission had been implemented [namely, better FBI-CIA interagency communications] 9/11 would not have happened."
Historian Douglas Brinkley has penned Gerald R. Ford: 1974-1977 for Times Books/Henry Holt’s The American Presidents Series, which was edited by the late Arthur Schlessinger. Although most of Brinkley’s book deals with Ford’s short presidency, the Warren Commission weighed heavily in his conversations with the president. Brinkley told PW that Ford had every book in his library on anything that has ever been written about the Kennedy assassination. "He was very much up on all of that. The fact that he was still having to grapple with the Warren Commission in 2006 is very intriguing." According to Paul Golob, editorial director of Times Books, the decision was made in early December to move the pub date from July to February. "After Ford’s death on December 26," he says, "we shaved some more time off the schedule in order to have finished books ready in mid-January and books in stores by February 5. The first printing was 30,000-copies.
On October 30, Putnam will publish Write It When I’m Gone: Remarkable Off-the-Record Conversations with Gerald R. Ford by New York Daily News Washington bureau chief Thomas M. DeFrank. For 16 years DeFrank met with Gerald Ford and got his opinion on everything—Nixon, politics, the Iraqi war—with the understanding that none of it would be published until after the president’s death. The book, according to Marilyn Ducksworth in Putnam publicity, will be embargoed to "protect any revelations."
