With the death yesterday of President Gerald Ford’s former press secretary Ron Nessen at 90 years old, a new light is being shined on his 1976 appearance on Saturday Night Live, which would thrust the show into the national political conversation for the first time. Needlesstosay, it would not be the last.
It came at a pivotal moment both for the show and for the Ford Administration, which was gearing up for an election showdown against Democratic candidate Jimmy Carter.
Ford had succeeded Richard Nixon following his resignation, then pardoned the former President, tarring his own presidency. Not helping matters, Ford had been caught on camera stumbling up and down the steps to Air Force One a few times, which the rebellious new comedy show had taken to regularly playing up for laughs.
Nessen had an idea: Perhaps the way to beat ‘em was to join ‘em. SNL, however, had other ideas.
What resulted was a watershed moment: SNL would bring on a politician as host. No, not Ford. His press secretary.
The unusual move came about thanks to Chevy Chase’s exaggeratedly clumsy, blundering take on Ford, which solidified the public’s perception of the real President as an inept klutz. In one fateful sketch, Chase played Ford alongside host Buck Henry as Nessen.
Nessen caught the episode and enjoyed it. So did other White House staffers. So much, in fact, that Nessen contacted the show requesting a tape of the episode. Then at a New Hampshire campaign stop, SNL writer Al Franken bumped into Nessen and suggested he appear on the show. Within weeks, Nessen was on the phone with Lorne Michaels. “We began talks about him doing an appearance on the show and it evolved into his hosting a show,” the SNL creator told the AP.
For Nessen, it was an opportunity to reach younger voters and prove Ford had a sense of humor about SNL’s weekly jabs. (As a former NBC News correspondent, it would also be a homecoming of sorts for him.)
For Michaels, it was a chance to address a concern the network had had about his program. “We’d been getting some flak from NBC,” Michaels told the AP. “There seemed to be some feeling that we were only hitting Ford and Reagan, hitting only Republicans.” (Ironically, NBC’s initial reaction to the idea of Nessen hosting was worry that the episode would seem too pro-Republican.) It was also, he told the press, about getting a host who knew what he was doing in front of the camera.
“It’s more and more difficult to find people with the proper background and the proper sense of humor to host this live television show,” Michaels said. “Working at the White House is perhaps the best training there is today. And, from what I can see, Ron Nessen is not a man who is likely to stumble or be tripped up.”
But many behind the scenes didn’t want Nessen’s experience to be smooth sailing.
Word was that the President would be tuning in from Camp David. At the very least, The Not Ready for Primetime Players wanted to have some fun with the opportunity.
In March, Chase hosted the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and performed his bumbling Ford impression to the President’s face, repeatedly falling and getting rescued by “Secret Service agents” Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi. It was well-received—including by President Ford, who got his own shots in at Chase.
But when Ron Nessen hosted Saturday Night, it would be on the cast’s turf, for the whole country to see. That included Ford’s supporters—many of whom skewed older, conservative, and evangelical. And it would all go down on the eve of Easter Sunday.
“I told them I can’t do anything truly embarrassing or in bad taste to the White House,” Nessen would later say. “And they agreed there’d be nothing like that on the show.”
While Nessen’s first mistake may have been agreeing to the show, his second and third came before he set foot in 8H. For one, he’d convinced President Ford to appear in a series of pre-taped cameos on the show. For another, the press secretary didn’t plan on showing up at SNL until the Thursday before the show. By the time he got there, the tight schedule left him little time to monitor the sketches he wouldn’t appear in.
Those sketches would go on to cause him problems. And the President’s pre-tapes would compound them. The three clips of the real Ford would be important to how the episode was received. While Nessen hoped it would show that Ford was in on the joke, viewers could just as easily have taken it to mean that the next ninety minutes of content they were about to see had the President’s approval. And as the show went on, it was hard to imagine it did.
Nessen would later claim he did cut some material, but didn’t specify what. Others say he didn’t make any objections. The NBC executives didn’t have many either, according to the book Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live. In their minds, the President’s press secretary knew what he was doing. He could take care of himself.
Michaels would later deny the show had any desire to “take the president and shove his press secretary up his ass.”
But the writers and performers apparently had other intentions, according to writer Rosie Shuster: “The President’s watching. Let’s make him cringe and squirm.”
The Show
After an unassuming cold open, the show kicked off with the first of Ford’s appearances as the President stiffly declared, “Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night.”
After the credits, Ford’s second clip played to announce Nessen. In the monologue that followed, Nessen repeatedly made the President the punchline as he explained what his job entailed: basically, making excuses for Ford’s clumsiness, misstatements, and mispronunciations. Throughout the show, Nessen would continue to play into the idea that press secretaries lie for a living.
He ended the routine with a faux phone call from Ford. “You heard the monologue? And you had it explained to you?” he said into the receiver before finding out he’s been fired.
But the most direct skewering of Ford came a couple sketches later. Set in the Oval Office, Nessen played himself, press secretary to Chase’s Ford, asking his boss if it’s okay to host SNL. “I think it would be a good idea to show that you can take a joke to demonstrate that this administration has a sense of humor,” Nessen said in the meta send-up, asking his boss to participate.
Chase-as-Ford refused to stumble around on TV “like Chevy Chase,” as he stumbled around the room. He repeatedly couldn’t find Nessen, who was sitting right next to him. He talked to a stuffed dog. He mistook his stapler for a phone, stapling his ear. When Nessen apologized for something, Ford joked that he was pardoned.
On one hand, the sketch certainly showed Nessen was willing to take a joke for his boss, but it’s also easy to see how it could perceived as undermining the President. As one of the night’s few sketches that Nessen appeared in himself, many inferred that the sketch got not only his seal of approval, but his direct complicity.
Other moments in the show were not direct hits on Ford, but political enough to make things potentially awkward. In one, Richard Nixon’s daughter is heard grilling her husband (Dwight D. Eisenhower’s grandson) over whether he was a source for Woodward and Bernstein. In another, John Belushi played a hippie Army recruiter in an ad extolling the benefits of joining the forces: namely, access to drugs. “The best stuff an Army helicopter can carry in from all over the world!,” he promised after hiding a bag of weed.
Counterculture made a return in a sketch SNL actually reran from its second-ever episode, where real-life activist and Yippie movement leader Jerry Rubin advertised wallpaper pre-covered in protest graffiti.
Aykroyd also debuted his Tom Snyder impression, asking Nessen whether there’s any truth to rumors about “wild parties in Washington” and “the sex lives of Presidents.”
Also tucked into the show were two edgy music performances by Patti Smith. Smith introduced punk rock to SNL, tackling censorship in one and Christianity in another. At 12:01am Easter Sunday morning she began her first poem-song, “Gloria,” with its declaration of “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.”
Meawhile, as Nessen focused on the sketches he was in and toeing the line politically, SNL‘s writers and performers doubled down on raunch.
The result were a handful of sketches crude enough for the time to make even moderately conservative viewers blush: Gilda Radner advertised “Autumn Fizz, the carbonated douche.” (“Don’t leave him holding the bag!”) A viewer-submitted home movie depicted a chorus of men singing at urinals. And then there was the gross-out one-upmanship of “Jam Hawkers,” in which the cast pitched Smuckers-inspired jam products with increasingly unappealing brand names: Death Camp. Dog Vomit. Monkey Pus. Painful Rectal Itch. Mangled Baby Ducks.
The real President Ford’s final appearance came at the top of “Weekend Update.” After Chase delivered his usual “I’m Chevy Chase, and you’re not,” a video of Ford played: “I’m Gerald Ford, and you’re not.”
Anchoring the newscast, Chase directed a few more one-liners at Ford and Nixon, though he devoted equal time to three Democratic Presidential candidates. Then in a desk piece, Gilda Radner’s Emily Litella delivered an op-ed on “Presidential erections.” She used the word to refer to monuments of Presidents, but the implication was clear.
The night’s most sexually suggestive sketch was also political—and timeless. In “Supreme Court Spot Check,” Chase and Curtin played a couple getting intimate, only to be interrupted by all nine Supreme Court justices in their bedroom, wanting to make sure the couple isn’t doing anything “unnatural.” Earlier that month, SCOTUS had upheld a Virginia law prohibiting sodomy, classifying it as a “crime against nature”—essentially allowing the high court to police private, consensual acts it deemed “unconventional.”
An NBC Standards exec almost axed it, but relented when he saw the sketch didn’t visibly depict any sex. But the sketch remained rife with sexual connotations, from “I’m a little nervous about where that mouth is heading” to “Place a moratorium on the butterfly flick” and talk of “how low Rhonda’s teeth may go on Dwayne’s trunk.”
By the end of the show, it was clear that SNL‘s counter culture bonafides would not be stirred by anyone—not even multiples appearances from the sitting President. “I was proud of us… because we didn’t put any restrictions on what we thought was funny,” Gilda Radner later told Playboy.
The Fallout
Nessen felt good about the show at the after-party. By the after-after-party at Paul Simon’s, he was boasting that he’d bested SNL, thwarting the show’s attempts to “get” him. The larger-than-usual group of NBC executives who attended the taping weren’t so sure.
Back in Washington on Monday, the fallout was swift. Reports circulated that President Ford was “not pleased” with the show. Reviews from Ford’s team used words like “vulgar,” “crude,” “tasteless,” and “dumb.” Nessen, they felt, had made the President “look stupid.”
Nessen began the day by denying any problem, saying Ford had “no reaction,” despite watching “most of the show.” But within hours, the Press Secretary’s patience had worn thin and he was sparring with the press.
“This is stupid,” he shouted at a reporter from the Chicago Sun-Times. “It’s bullshit.” The discussion, he said, was “not something grown men should be doing.”
In truth, Ford had found the show distasteful at times. First Lady Betty Ford felt the same, worrying what her husband had appeared to endorse by appearing on the show. (She did, however, claim they found the White House material funny.)
Ford’s son Jack fumed at Nessen, despite being an SNL fan himself, accusing the press secretary of only being interested in his own self-promotion. Ford’s television adviser insisted to the press that he had nothing to do with the mess.
Reviewers were stunned that the administration ever let it happen. “I saw it but I still don’t believe it,” Buffalo News critic Jeff Simon said of the “extremely raunchy version” of the show that Nessen had been subjected to. The New York Times said the show “lacked a certain sense of decorum usually associated with the Presidency.”
That may have been true, but there didn’t seem to be a strong reaction from Ford’s base. His office didn’t field many calls from upset supporters. “I’d guess people who would be turned off by the show probably wouldn’t turn it on,” one White House aide posited after the episode.
But that didn’t matter—a sentiment even Nessen would come to agree with. “It was a failure,” Nessen told Bethesda Magazine 40 years later. “The press coverage of my appearance was almost universally negative.”
“I tried not to partake in anything that was overly critical of Ford. I got them to soften some items a little bit,” he added. “But I was egotistical. I wanted to be on the program, even though most on Ford’s staff disagreed.”
Looking back, Nessen felt he was set up for failure. “Later I found out Chase had it in for Ford,” he said, citing interviews the actor gave criticizing the President afterwards. “A lot of what Chase did was nasty, designed to denigrate Ford. I was naive.”
“Had I been duped by the cast and producer, whose real goal in inviting me to appear was to gain wider attention for their demeaning portrayal of the president?,” Nessen reflected in his 2011 memoir, noting he even considered resigning.
Whatever the intent of the team at SNL truly was, the power of that 1976 broadcast as a cautionary tale still holds.
Since the Ford episode, no other sitting President has appeared on Saturday Night Live, though the show has become a popular campaign stop for particularly daring candidates (Barack Obama, Al Gore, John McCain, Donald Trump, among others) and one former Commander-in-Chief (George H.W. Bush).
Ironically, while it was Nessen as host and the night’s most outrageous sketches that drew the most attention at the time, the best remembered sketch to come out of his episode was one that didn’t feature him and wasn’t political or raunchy in the least: Dan Aykroyd’s Super Bass-O-Matic ’76 commercial.
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Technically Biden appeared while president in a pre-taped bit during Aubrey Plaza’s monologue