1974, September 8 – The Oval Office – The White House – Washington, DC – Gerald R. Ford – signing Nixon Pardon – President Gerald R. Ford signs the Nixon Pardon
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A0628-04A
WASHINGTON– SEPT 8:President Ford in Bill Timmon’s office at the White House moments after pardoning Richard Nixon, Sept. 8, 1974 (David Hume Kennerly)
The First Lady
Showtime recently announced that The First Lady series is cancelled. Mercifully it only had one season. This will spare other former presidential wives from the historical malpractice visited upon the three women portrayed in the show by creator Aaron Cooley. It will, however, be a crushing disappointment for those waiting for the Jacqueline Kennedy and Melania Trump stories.
I didn’t know that much about Eleanor Roosevelt, and even though I photographed Michelle Obama a few times, had no clue about the innerworkings of her world. Based on this show I’m sure I still don’t.
But I ‘m very well acquainted with Gerald R. Ford and his family thanks to a close friendship with the president, Mrs. Ford, and their children. I was the chief White House photographer with upstairs/downstairs access to the East and West Wings and everywhere in between. I probably spent more time with Mrs. Ford than anyone outside of her family. In this contorted version of Betty Ford’s life she was shown navigating their Alexandria home then later the White House in a cliche-infused-alcoholic haze. Nope, that’s not how it happened. If you want to know the real story read Mrs. Ford's book, "The Times of My Life." She didn't shy away from discussing her battle with pain killers and alcohol, quite the opposite, but she wasn't prancing around 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue plastered.
Betty Ford played by Michelle Pfeiffer (Photo by Murray Close/Showtime)
In their Hollywood imagination Cooley & Co. also drummed up a scenario where Mrs. Ford lectured her husband in their bedroom after he pardoned Richard Nixon. In a fiery and astonishing scene Mrs. Ford says, “You let him off without consequences for his actions. You know that makes us look complicit, that we are part of the coverup.” That was huge. You go strong woman! Give that presidential mate a piece of your first lady’s mind. Great stuff. Except it was 100% false. She in fact was sympathetic to the Nixons who were old family friends. Mrs. Ford was an empathetic human being who felt a deep sadness for former first wife Patricia Nixon. Betty Ford thought her husband had done the right thing, and wholeheartedly supported his decision. But hell, that’s not good television.
When The First Lady team was conjuring up this fantasy, neither creator Cooley nor any of his nine executive producers reached out to the Ford children or anyone else who knew them for input. They didn’t get in touch with me either and I was portrayed in an episode. One of the kids asked me why they didn’t call them for information. I said that they were going to make the show they had in mind and didn't want facts to get in the way of what turned out to be a subpar story badly and erroneously told.
I understand this wasn’t a documentary purporting to tell the real story and I didn’t expect that standard of accuracy. When Viola Davis, who played Michelle Obama in the series, was being interviewed by Leslie Stahl on CBS Sunday Morning she was questioned about the truth of a scene with White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel talking condescendingly to Mrs. Obama. Ms. Davis, who was also an executive producer of the project said, “With Rahm we took some liberties for dramatic purposes.” Indeed they did, and not only with Rahm. No White House chief of staff with half a brain would have done anything like that. Except for Ronald Reagan’s chief Donald Regan, who hung up the phone on First Lady Nancy and was fired shortly after. As Jim Baker who had been Reagan’s previous chief put it, “Hell, that wasn’t a firing offense, it was a hanging offense.”
Michelle Pfeiffer is Betty Ford, Viola Davis is Michelle Obama, Gillian Anderson is Eleanor Roosevelt (Showtime)
“Taking liberties” should not be grabbing history by the short hairs and tossing it kicking and screaming off the cliff. There is a professional responsibility in keeping historical drama within a realistic framework, unless of course you are Monty Python. It should have been designated a “fiction based on real characters” and a disclaimer at the beginning of each episode added that said:
The producers of The First Lady apparently had no idea what really went on with these ladies so they just made up the “facts.”
Another fabrication in this saga was portraying Don Rumsfeld, the president's White House chief of staff, and his deputy Dick Cheney as the requisite bad guys out to suppress the president’s “plucky wife” Betty Ford. Nope. Not the way it went down. In one overblown scene, Rumsfeld storms aboard Mrs. Ford's plane before she was about to take off to Atlanta for the funeral of Martin Luther King's mother. In a vaguely racist statement Rumsfeld told her what a bad idea it was for her to do that. Dammit, "I'm Jerry's chief of staff!" Nope. That scene never happened either. At the time, Mrs. Ford was the wife of Vice President Ford, and Rumsfeld was in Europe serving as Nixon’s U.S. Ambassador to NATO. Oops. Great alibi though. He didn't become chief until six weeks after Ford became president. Plus Rumsfeld didn’t call him Jerry after Ford became the chief executive. It was always "Mr. President." Same with Cheney. Same with me. Same with most people.
In another four-Pinocchio moment, the downer boys, Rumsfeld and Cheney, showed up in the Family Residence of the White House on Christmas Eve, 1975. In this depiction the Fords were in the middle of a nice, quiet, private holiday dinner. The downer duo’s mission was to admonish Mrs. Ford for another outspoken moment that they felt was going to hurt “Jerry’s” presidential campaign. Kind of unimaginable that anyone would do something like that on Christmas. They didn't. The Fords weren't even in the White House that night, they were in Vail. I was with them having dinner. Guess what? Neither Cheney nor Rumsfeld interrupted them there either. Another reason why not? Donald Rumsfeld had become Secretary of Defense, was no longer chief of staff, and was running the Pentagon, not trying to screw with Betty Ford's life. Details, details.
The requisite bad guys. Rhys Wakefield as Dick Cheney and Derek Cecil as Donald Rumsfeld (Showtime)
A fine young actor Cody Pressley played my character. His scene was based on what happened the day before the Fords left office on January 19, 1977. In real life Mrs. Ford was in the West Wing saying her goodbyes to the staff. We passed the empty Cabinet Room. She peeked in, looked at me with her trademark mischievous grin and said, "You know, I've always wanted to dance on the Cabinet Room table." The former Martha Graham dancer kicked off her shoes, jumped up on the table, and struck a pose that captured her irrepressible personality. She was also symbolically planting the feminist flag right in the middle of a predominantly white male domain. Nothing against Cody, but they had him carrying one of his cameras bandolier-style in a way you couldn’t quickly take a picture. It might work for tourists from Omaha, but not pros in the White House. He was also dressed in a light-colored turtleneck and not wearing a coat and tie. A photo of me and Mrs. Ford from that day by Eddie Adams would have helped the wardrobe department get it right.
Cody Pressley plays me in "The First Lady" (Showtime)
Mrs. Ford had given up dancing professionally long ago, but the producers of The First Lady took care of that. Michelle Pfeiffer, who portrayed Mrs. Ford, (Ms. Pfeiffer is the one thing Mrs. Ford would have liked about this series), started dancing around the table. Cody (as me) is taking pictures. President Ford walks into the Room and is “shocked” by the scene but thinks it’s funny. He exits. Two problems. The president didn’t find out about it until 15 years later when I showed him the picture. He exclaimed to his wife, “Betty, you never told me you did that!” She jokingly said, “There a lot of things I never told you, Jerry.”
Aaron Eckhart plays President Ford (Showtime)
The second problem is that their version played out in the Roosevelt Room. Another unforced error. All they had to do was look at my relatively well-known photograph of the moment to at least get that right, but hey, that would have involved paying a researcher.
Michelle Pfeiffer on The Roosevelt Room table (Showtime)
Betty Ford on The Cabinet Room Table (Kennerly)
The danger here is that many people who saw this thing will believe that this was how things happened and that they now know the real Betty Ford. They will not. My advice to those who really care about history is to read about the people who made it in their own words or in the words of trusted historians.
The First Lady wasn’t picked up for another season because it was fatally flawed historically, but for the ultimate sin in the entertainment world. It sucked, and toward the end people quit watching it. If you’re making shit up, at least make it interesting. And don’t pretend it’s based on real life.
Mrs. Ford and I in The Cabinet Room right after the shoot. Unlike the actor in the scene I'm wearing a coat and tie! (Eddie Adams)
The Real Betty Ford on The Cabinet Room Table (Kennerly)
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WASHINTON — SEPT 8: President Ford in his private office at the White House moments before signing the pardon of Richard Nixon Sept 8, 1974. Counsellor Robert Hartmann is with him. (David Hume Kennerly)
David Hume Kennerly named University of Arizona’s First Presidential Scholar
Prolific political photographer David Hume Kennerly has been appointed as the first University of Arizona presidential scholar by President Robert Robbins, the school announced Tuesday.
Kennerly won the Pulitzer Prize at 25 for his documentation of the Vietnam War and served as chief White House photographer for President Gerald Ford, among many other titles.
The unpaid, honorary appointment highlights the university’s drive to support the arts, humanities and social sciences, which are critical to success in the global economy, according to university officials.
Kennerly will work with the UA’s Center for Creative Photography, located on campus at 1030 N. Olive Road, to develop a series of lectures and events for students and the community that draw on his 60 years of experience.
David Hume Kennerly has photographed every president since Richard Nixon. Here are George H.W. Bush, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter.
“How wonderful for students to hear a lecture where David (Kennerly) is the one actually talking about the contextual history of his photographs,” said Anne Breckenridge Barrett, the center’s director.
His résumé includes capturing images from 12 presidential campaigns, every president since Richard Nixon, several wars and many other significant moments in history. He was close friends with world-renowned photographer Ansel Adams, who co-founded the UA center.
With this appointment, Robbins “is recognizing visual history as a key element in teaching where we’ve been as a country and society, where we are today and where we are heading,” Kennerly said in a statement prepared by the UA. “Pairing the Center for Creative Photography with the university’s courses in arts, social sciences and humanities will produce informative, entertaining and unique programming and lectures.”
President Gerald Ford prepares to take a picture of David Hume Kennerly, 27, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer in the White House Oval Office in Washington, Aug. 11, 1974. Ford named Kennerly as official White House photographer. Kennerly left his assignment with Time Magazine to replace Ollie Atkins in the post. (AP Photo/Charles Harrity)
“We’re thrilled at the center to have his partnership and contribution,” Barrett said.
“It’s a very good indicator of the university’s belief in the center and ability of visuals to connect us all.”
View Kennerly’s portfolio at kennerly.com
The original article written and released by Mikayla Mace of the Arizona Daily Star can be viewed here!
A0628-07
DAVID HUME KENNERLY ARCHIVE PROJECT – Why Now?
Every so often, I wake up in the middle of the night from a recurring nightmare. In it, I am watching the final scene of Citizen Kane. The camera slowly glides over hundreds of boxes and crates in a giant dark warehouse, a room that stretched to infinity. Then, the lens settles on a box marked, “Kennerly photos.” I realized that this warehouse contains my life’s work and I watch helplessly as workmen lift boxes filled with images and historic records and pitch them into a roaring fire. My pictures are Rosebud.
Throughout my fifty-year career, I have pursued a relentless mission to document history in the making. With a combination of hard work, research, and a little intuition I have been able to, on numerous occasions, get myself into the room where history is being made. Often, I am the only person there other than the history makers themselves. My photographs have documented the fields of fire during the Vietnam War and the President of the United States as he ended that bitter conflict. I was ringside when Frazier dealt Mohammed Ali his first knock-out at Madison Square Garden and stepped around hundreds of dead bodies in Jonestown. I documented Reagan and Gorbachev during their historic Fireside Summit and, on election night 2000, I was with Bush and Cheney as they realized their presidential contest had ended in a tie.
As a young shooter, barely out of high school, I wanted people to see my pictures; not because they were cool – well, not only because they were cool – but because they revealed moments of history that otherwise would have gone unseen. I am just as driven now to document history with my camera – to peer inside closed doors, to reveal an individual’s character through a portrait or a slice of our country that might be fading away. And I am just as determined to make sure that those images realize their mission of revealing that history to future generations.
In this digital era, images have the potential to provide visceral, visual primary source historic information. They provide dynamic new ways to teach history to future generations in any region around the globe. However, photography collections are expensive and cumbersome to manage. Too often, I have seen collections destroyed, lost, or stored away in a basement or conventional analog archive never to be seen again – their historic content and educational potential lost forever.
2016 marks the 50th anniversary of my career as a professional photographer. To celebrate that extraordinary milestone, I am launching the David Hume Kennerly Archive Creation Project with the objective of transforming my half-century of visual history into a cutting-edge digital educational tool that is fully searchable and available to the public for research and artistic appreciation.
Seeing this collection available to the public would be the realization of my lifelong dream for the possibilities for my collection. It is the flipside of that dark nightmare that haunts me about the many threats to these fragile historic objects. However, I know too well how real my nightmare could be and that making this dream a reality will take an all-out effort and a race against time.
Portions of my work are already housed in wonderful institutions, including the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History and my White House photos at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum & Library. And for more than a decade my wife, Rebecca Soladay Kennerly, and I have worked to make this good dream come true, investing every dollar we could to protect, organize and process my photographs and related materials. A year ago, we hired Randa Cardwell, an extraordinary curator who had recently graduated from UCLA with a Masters Degree in Library and Information Sciences to help with this project. And my collection, spanning a half-decade and containing more than a million items, the size of a small presidential library, is a real monster – impossible to tame by us alone. Our small team is now ready to take the next big steps in helping the Kennerly Collection fulfill its potential as an historic educational resource.
Check out our work in detail at the Archive Page on Kennerly.com.
And please, SIGN UP at the bottom of the Archive Page now to follow our progress in this ambitious project. By signing up you will receive –
• project updates
• archive stories
• ways to help
• appearance dates
• exhibition information
• print sales opportunities
• early sneak peeks at photos we unearth along the way – such as this unpublished collection of images I made of a young lawyer who I first photographed at an impeachment hearing of President Richard Nixon in the House Judiciary Committee in 1974.
It’s going to be quite a journey. Would love to have you along for the ride.
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SIMI VALLEY – – NOV 4: Five Presidents at the Reagan Library opening.
(L-R) President George H. W. Bush, former presidents Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, and Richard Nixon, Simi Valley, California, November 4, 1991. by David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images
The Day Hillary Clinton Lost the Election
I’d been covering the 2016 presidential campaign for CNN since the year before, but when I showed up to photograph an appearance by Hillary Clinton at St. Anselm College in New Hampshire, I hadn’t seen her in a couple of months.
The first time I photographed her was when she was a young lawyer working on the Nixon impeachment hearings in the House Judiciary Committee in 1974. I’d gotten to know her pretty well since then, even made a trip with her in 1998 where she visited Russia and several other countries in the area. So when Sec. Clinton saw me at the St. Anselm rally she came over to say a cheery hello. I asked how she was doing, and she leaned over and said, “I wish the election was tomorrow.” Had it been the next day she would have won, but two weeks and a day later, on Nov. 8, Donald Trump was elected president.
Hillary Clinton, St. Anselm College, Manchester, New Hampshire, Oct. 24, 2016
A young Hillary fan, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Oct. 28, 2016
What Mrs. Clinton and nobody else knew at that moment was that in reality she would lose the election four days later on October 28 when Director of the FBI James Comey reopened the investigation into her emails. It was a shocking and unpleasant twist, particularly being so close to a presidential election. Clinton’s use of a private email server during her time as Secretary of State had been a campaign issue, but earlier in July the FBI decided not to recommend criminal charges against her, so as far as the campaign was concerned it was case closed. Until suddenly it wasn’t.
On that day I was in the back of Sec. Clinton’s campaign plane traveling from New York to Cedar Rapids, Iowa with her. During the flight word reached us about the new investigation. Mrs. Clinton had no advance warning that the FBI would be doing that. Comey had informed Congress, but not her.
Clinton's top campaign staffers, including her close aide Huma Abedin, had to immediately figure out what to do about the earthshaking revelation. At that point it was only eleven days until the election. They learned later that the emails in question were part of an investigation into Abedin's estranged husband, former Congressman Anthony Weiner.
Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin on the campaign plane in Iowa, Oct. 28, 2016
Kennerly photographing Hillary deplaning in Cedar Rapids after FBI shocker
After landing in Iowa, we waited for almost 45 minutes for Sec. Clinton to exit her plane. It was clear there was an emergency meeting going on about how to deal with this unexpected crisis. The press shouted questions at her when she finally deplaned, but she ducked into her car without saying a word, and headed to her scheduled rally. I was with a pensive Hillary Clinton backstage as she waited to enter the event. Nobody was talking about the FBI.
Clinton waits backstage in Cedar Rapids before her rally after hearing about the FBI reopening her email investigation, Oct. 28, 2016
One poignant and ironic photo I made at her second campaign event in Des Moines was a shot of her striding down the catwalk with a large “Madam Potus” sign in the crowd. The rally wasn’t the story, although like the first one she got through it as if everything was ok. The press conference afterwards was where the news was made. The hastily put together presser was held in the school’s choir room. Clinton appeared grim but resolute. She said, “We don't know what to believe. And I'm sure there will be even more rumors . . . it is incumbent upon the FBI to tell us what they're talking about . . . We are 11 days out from perhaps the most important national election in our lifetimes. Voting is already underway in our country . . . so the American people deserve to get the full and complete facts immediately. [Comey] himself has said he doesn’t know whether emails referenced in his letter are significant or not. I’m confident, whatever they are, will not change the conclusion reached in July.”
Clinton at press conference in Des Moines addressing FBI email investigation. She said, "the American people deserve to get the full and complete facts immediately."
For election night Hillary Clinton's campaign had reserved the huge Javits Convention Center for what they thought would be a monumental celebration of the first woman in American history to become president. A few blocks away, in the smaller New York Hilton ballroom that had been contracted by a campaign who thought they would lose, I was there to document a stunned-looking Donald Trump as he declared victory. But he had really won eleven days earlier.
President-elect Donald J. Trump, wife Melania, daughter Ivanka, and son-in-law Jared Kushner, in the Hilton Ballroom after winning the election, New York City, Nov. 9, 2016
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