Remaking the Imperial Presidency: The Mayaguez Incident of 1975 and the Contradictions of Credibility

This article argues that the Mayaguez incident of 1975 was a missed opportunity to establish a more democratic American foreign policy. President Gerald Ford managed the crisis with an eye toward domestic and international credibility. But his conception of credibility was more fractured than that of his predecessors, who regarded it as synonymous with militarism, presidential primacy, and official secrecy. Ford’s sense of domestic credibility was bound up with a determination to preside over a period of national reconciliation after the traumas of Watergate and Vietnam, and his sense of international credibility was subsumed within a belief that the preservation of American power depended upon a renewal of American democracy. His sense of credibility, therefore, pushed him toward diplomacy in addition to militarism, cooperation with Congress in addition to presidential unilateralism, and openness in addition to secrecy. The antinomies within Ford’s sense of credibility were partly a product of his time, which saw an eruption of public skepticism toward American and presidential power and partly of his personality and temperament, which endowed him with a reverence for democratic consensus. Ford wrestled with the contradictions embedded within his sense of credibility throughout the Mayaguez crisis. Although he ultimately resolved those contradictions in an anti-democratic direction and deepened the imperial presidency, that outcome anything but foreordained.