Wayne Valis joined the White House staff during President Nixon's second term and performed duties in areas of public liaison, recruitment, legislative tracking and speechwriting under the direction of Melvin Laird and William J. Baroody. He continued to perform many of the same duties during the Ford administration and was given the title of Director of Planning and Research for the Office of Public Liaison (OPL) in January 1975.
Dale Van Atta is a Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist whose work has appeared in newspapers and magazines nationwide, including Reader’s Digest where he was a contributing editor, as well as The New York Times, Washington Post, Newsweek, Time, Harper’s, the Washingtonian, and many others. He is co-author, with Jack Anderson, of The New York Times best-selling biography Stormin’ Norman: An American Hero (1991), and the author of two other books, Trust Betrayed: Inside the AARP (1998) and With Honor – Melvin Laird in War, Peace, and Politics (2008).
The Gordon Vander Till Papers consist of files from Gerald R. Ford's Grand Rapids office. Vander Till was the office director from 1969-74. The initial gift of papers was opened to research in May 1985. An accretion of papers was received and opened in February 1994.
John C. Vickerman joined the White House staff in 1973. Early in the Ford administration he served as Executive Assistant to Counsellor Anne Armstrong and as Executive Secretary of the Federal Property Council. He was appointed to the Office of Public Liaison as Director for Business and Trade Associations on December 18, 1974. In this position he reported directly to William J. Baroody, Jr., Assistant to the President for Public Liaison.
In August 1975, the President Ford Committee (PFC) hired attorney Robert Visser as General Counsel. In October, Visser hired Tim Ryan, a Baltimore attorney who had been a volunteer advanceman for the White House and the Assistant Director of the 1972 Inaugural Parade, to work as his assistant. Unlike most PFC offices, there was no staff turnover during the campaign, so Visser and Ryan handled the PFC's legal work through Election Day and into early 1977.