Workers World, Vol. 22, No. 30
July 22 – What were the Ford-Reagan negotiations really all about? And why did they collapse?
The negotiations were an attempt to form a governing coalition very much on the model of the European parliamentary type but within the framework of a single party of big business.
This may appear to be a sharp departure from the constitutional structure of the U.S. capitalist state.
In reality, however, there have been quite a number of U.S. administrations where many of the seats of power in the president’s cabinet were shared out secretly in advance.
The difference between the Ford-Reagan negotiations and Carter’s attempt to form his cabinet before the 1976 elections is that the Democratic Party was not seriously split along factional lines, as both parties are today.
Had the Ford-Reagan negotiations succeeded and the secret commitments been carried out according to the promises made, the result would have been a classical right-center coalition. Such coalitions in European parliaments, especially those in France, Italy, and elsewhere, last for a period of time as the situation permits. Depending on the crisis they face they usually tend to break up under the pressure of events and new formations are established.
What would have differentiated such a right-center coalition from the European model is that it would have been in the framework of a single party rather than two or even three parties, as sometimes is the case in European parliamentary politics.
The key question in the negotiations between Ford and Reagan concerned foreign policy, particularly as it affects the Soviet Union. The presence of Henry Kissinger as a principal negotiator symbolized not merely the vast Rockefeller economic and financial interests but a huge conglomeration of transnational corporations historically supported by Northeastern and Midwestern interests.
Where the military-industrial complex put its weight is difficult to make out. Suffice it to say that the vast majority of retired admirals and generals, and especially the most rabid and rightist elements, at present support Reagan.
Most of the capitalist press omitted in their voluminous accounts of the negotiations an important fact – the presence of retired General Alexander Haig. Haig is the former commander of NATO and present chairman of one of the most powerful corporations of the military-industrial complex, United Technologies Corporation.
Apparently the military, or a section of it, felt it necessary for Haig not only to be present at the Republican Convention as a lookout for the military, but to be there as a delegate as well.
“I am comfortable with Henry Kissinger,” Haig told ABC on the day before the actual negotiations.
The negotiations collapsed not because the Ford forces demanded too much or the Reagan forces gave too little. They collapsed because of the sharp and conflicting views of those in the highest echelons of American finance capital on the perspective of U.S. foreign policy, particularly in relation to the Soviet Union, other socialist countries, and oppressed peoples as a whole.
This is really the crux of the issue in the struggle between the more rabid rightists supporting Reagan and the somewhat more moderate centrists. The Reagan rightists had much to gain by the coalition. It would certainly have broadened their base.
It is vitally important to recognize that it was the Reagan forces who were most eager for the coalition. Their eagerness for the coalition shows that in reality the Reagan forces are a narrow, reactionary current in the political spectrum of even a big business party like the GOP.
It reveals that all the talk about a “grassroots, rightward swing” is something that even Reagan does not believe. It explains why Reagan initiated the negotiations, as James Reston correctly points out in the New York Times of July 22, 1980.
The sharp differences over foreign policy were emphasized by the fact that Ford felt it necessary to publicly spell out the terms of the agreement with Reagan to ABC and CBS television. This is what really busted up the negotiations because it operated to discredit Reagan among the right-wingers, especially the most rabid of them, because in their view the public commitments made by Ford would most certainly be widely regarded as a capitulation, if not betrayal, to the Easterners, symbolized by Kissinger and Alan Greenspan, Nixon’s former economic adviser.
The reason why Ford went public in divulging the secret commitments was, of course, the fear that once Reagan was elected he could always disavow the promises made earlier. Central to the commitments was, of course, the posts of Secretary of Defense and State.
Thus it is plain that the Reagan rightwing on its own failed to have the necessary support to form a viable, governing right-wing administration. In Reagan’s view, the centrists, who held most of the strings in both the Ford and Nixon administrations and the seats of power, such as Secretary of State, Defense, and Treasury, as well as head of the CIA, pushed for a hard bargain.
It was not so much the distribution of posts as such that was at issue, but that the character of the posts, if worked out under the aegis of Kissinger, with or without him in office, would have been a signal that the rightwing and the ultra-rightists had lost out somewhat in the foreign policy struggle. That, Reagan could not agree to. It would have invited an erosion of his reactionary support, especially among the ultra-rightists.
The domestic issues were not a divisive force among the top leaders of the Republican Party. They were all in agreement that the Reagan administration should be a more outlandish variant of Thatcherism and its cruel effects on the mass of the working class, especially the oppressed people.
[George H.W.] Bush as a vice-presidential candidate is no such coalition leader as Ford might have been. A multimillionaire with oil and investment banking family relations in the East, he has tried to stretch out to the Southwest by establishing a base in Texas.
Should a Reagan victory ensue in the November 1980 elections, the right-center will not, under pressure of a new crisis, be able to make the kind of challenge to a Reagan presidency as did, for instance, the coalition of liberals and rightists which unseated Nixon. More than the Bush forces will be needed for that.
All in all, the Reagan nomination brought to the surface a growing trend to the right. But it is a narrow current and stems wholly from the ruling class, generated by them, and pushed by the media.
What happened at the Republican Convention is strictly a ruling class family affair. So far as the broad masses of workers are concerned, so far as the millions of unemployed with the stupendous economic hardships they face, their authentic voice has not at all been heard. Indeed, it is correct to say about the Republican Convention as a whole that it would have been easier to find a needle in a haystack than to find a genuine worker there, except, of course, for those who were attending to the needs of the stadium.
It is only the capitalist media that has tried to put words into the mouths of the masses. But the masses have not really been heard from.
Last updated: 11 May 2026