Joe Waggonner - Relations With Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan

Relations With Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan

On August 8, 1974, Waggonner prepared a special list of House and Senate lawmakers who were among a shrinking band of Nixon supporters. The lawmakers met that night with a "visibly distraught" Nixon, who told the group that he would resign on Friday, August 9, at noon. "'I am sorry I have let you down,'" Waggonner recalled Nixon having said.

Waggonner flew to Yorba Linda, California, in April 1994 to attend Nixon's funeral. Indeed, he had maintained communication with Nixon long after both had left Washington. Nixon's first outing after his resignation was a trip to Shreveport for an event the Waggonners hosted at their home, remembered Rene Gibson, a former Waggonner staffer, as reported in the Shreveport Times on the occasion of Waggonner's death.

Though friendly with Nixon, he quarreled with Nixon's successor Gerald Ford when Ford, as a former president, came into the 4th District in 1978 to support a Republican candidate, James H. "Jimmy" Wilson of Vivian (northern Caddo Parish), a former state representative who narrowly lost the general election race to Waggonner's choice, Buddy Leach.

In the 1964 gubernatorial second primary and general election, Waggonner endorsed Democrat John McKeithen who, like Waggonner in 1961, was opposed by the Republican Charlton Lyons. Waggonner objected to the strengthening of the Republican Party in Louisiana. He once said that Louisiana, unlike other southern states, already had a two-party system through its "Long" and "anti-Long" factional competition. Nevertheless, in his later years, Waggonner did occasionally endorse Republicans, including the 1996 presidential nominee Robert J. "Bob" Dole of Kansas, who had been Ford's vice-presidential running mate in 1976.

In 1981, President Ronald W. Reagan, who had campaigned for Charlton Lyons for governor of Louisiana in 1964, appointed Waggonner to the 15-member National Commission on Social Security Reform, headed by Alan Greenspan.