50 years ago, Ford told New York to drop dead—in so many words

The city was on the brink of bankruptcy. But Gerald Ford was reticent about helping.

President Gerald Ford speaks to the press outside the White House. (Marion S. Trikosko)

By Frederic J. Frommer

A half-century ago Wednesday, President Gerald Ford bluntly announced that New York City, which was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, would not be getting a federal bailout.

Or, as the New York Daily News liberally paraphrased Ford’s speech, in a front-page headline the next day: “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.”

Of course, Ford never uttered those words, but the headline will nevertheless be associated with him forever—it’s even in his New York Times obit.

Today, a brash president is sending federal troops to patrol cities such as Chicago and Memphis, in what critics see as an authoritarian overreach. But 50 years ago, a mild-mannered Midwestern president was seen as too hands-off America’s largest and most important city.

“The people of this country will not be stampeded,” Ford said in the Oct. 29, 1975, speech at the National Press Club. “They will not panic when a few desperate New York officials and bankers try to scare New York’s mortgage payments out of them … I can tell you, and tell you now, that I am prepared to veto any bill that has as its purpose a federal bailout of New York City to prevent a default.”

Although Ford was a moderate Republican, he took issue with the city’s out-of-control spending, which he called an “insidious disease.”

“This sickness is brought on by years and years of higher spending, higher deficits, more inflation, and more borrowing to pay for higher spending, higher deficits, and so on, and so on, and so on,” he said. “It is a progressive disease, and there is no painless cure.”

Today, that “Drop Dead” front page remains in infamy. The National Press Club, for example, prominently displayed a framed photo of the newspaper on one of its walls. That front page has a picture of a deadly serious president delivering his speech, and, under the provocative headline, a subhead more calmly explains, “Vows He’ll Veto Any Bail-Out.”

New York Mayor Abe Beame and the state’s governor, Hugh L. Carey, condemned the speech. Ford took thinly veiled shots at both men.

“What I cannot understand—and what nobody should condone—is the blatant attempt in some quarters to frighten the American people and their representatives in Congress into panicky support of patently bad policy,” he said.

Ford’s hardline Treasury secretary, William Simon, had demanded that the city abolish rent control, jack up subway fares, and eliminate free tuition at the City University of New York—quite a contrast to the agenda of today’s mayoral frontrunner, Zohran Mamdani, who is promising free bus service, among other goodies.

Ford later said that the Daily News headline cost him New York state in his razor-thin 1976 loss to Democrat Jimmy Carter—and, by extension, the presidency.

“It more than annoyed me because it wasn’t accurate,” he said years later. “It was very unfair.”

The New York Times went with a staider headline but took the unusual step of running it across all eight columns at the top of the front page: “FORD, CASTIGATING CITY, ASSERTS HE’D VETO FUND GUARANTEE; OFFERS BANKRUPTCY BILL”

And in fact, two months later, he signed a law that provided federal loans to New York, which the city repaid with interest.

New York, like other cities in the mid-1970s, suffered from a loss of manufacturing jobs, suburban flight of middle-class families, and a ballooning municipal workforce. The Big Apple also relied on budgetary tricks that concealed its worsening financial state—including using money borrowed against city pension funds to run mass transit.

In his speech, Ford promised that if the city did default, a potential solution would ensure that “essential public services for the people of New York City” would be maintained.

“White House officials said privately, however, that Ford had no intention of committing federal money to maintain such services,” the Daily News reported in its story. “They also conceded that as defined by the Ford administration, ‘essential services’ may not include public schooling.”

It was a dark time in New York. Kids had gone unschooled at the beginning of the 1975-1976 school year because of a teachers strike, and, later that year, garbage piled up through the city in the wake of a building services strike. Graffiti covered subway trains as they snaked through the city.

While the city faced financial headwinds, Ford was dealing with his own political troubles. He had taken office the previous August and was bracing for an insurgent primary from Ronald Reagan from the right. Ford’s chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld, and his deputy, Dick Cheney, convinced the president to drop from the ’76 ticket his liberal vice president – former New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, who had supported the bailout. (Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas took his place.)

Ironically Ford’s tough medicine, which seemed to doom the city at the time, might have actually saved it. As Jeff Nussbaum wrote in a 2015 New Yorker story, “For New York, Ford’s statement convinced the key players that no federal help would be forthcoming. It galvanized the city to make tough choices and significant changes.” By 1981, the city had a balanced budget under Mayor Ed Koch.

Frederic J. Frommer, a writer and sports and politics historian, has written for the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Atlantic, History.com and other national publications. A former Associated Press reporter, Frommer is the author of several books, including “You Gotta Have Heart: Washington Baseball from Walter Johnson to the 2019 World Series Champion Nationals.” He is working on a book about 1970s baseball. Follow him on X.

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