50 Years Ago, My Father Wrote the Headline ‘Ford to City: Drop Dead’

My father dropped dead. His headline lives on.

Fifty years after my father, William J. Brink, wrote the words “Ford to City: Drop Dead” on a piece of copy paper at The New York Daily News, the headline endures in the national consciousness. It has become a universal front-page stand-in for No Way, No Chance, Go Take a Hike or, in New York City parlance, Fuhgeddaboudit.

And headline writers can’t seem to forget about it. Publications as disparate as The Char-Koosta News in Montana (the official publication of the Flathead Indian Reservation) and a baseball newsletter (“Reds to Metsies: Drop Dead”) have used it this year. The New York Post apparently keeps the headline on a shelf and dusts it off every now and then, as it did in March with “Albany to Crime Victims: Drop Dead.” Friends have told me they’ve seen a version staring up at them from newsstands in small Midwestern cities.

The headline has thrived in the Trump era. CNN Business invoked it earlier this month to describe National Guard troops in Portland, Ore., and Chicago (“Trump to Cities: Drop Dead”). The New York Times’s Opinion section copied it in 2020 for a column about the pandemic: “Trump to New York: Drop Dead.” In September, Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, vowed that the Trump administration would never bail out New York City in any future fiscal crisis, declaring: “It will be the same thing that Gerald Ford said: ‘Drop dead.’”

Ford, then the president, never actually uttered those fateful words. My father did, on the night of Oct. 29, 1975, as he stood with Daily News editors barking out various options as deadline approached. No matter. The words played an outsize role in history. Ford himself acknowledged that the headline, driving home his denial of federal aid to help New York avoid bankruptcy, contributed to his loss in the 1976 presidential election against Jimmy Carter.

“Drop Dead” is generally considered one of the two most memorable headlines of the last half-century, along with The New York Post’s 1983 gem, “Headless Body in Topless Bar.” But why is it so enduring? I wouldn’t want to overinterpret its social or cultural significance. After all, the beauty of the headline was in its simplicity. As Margalit Fox wrote for The New York Times in my father’s obituary, the headline delivered “the power of a knockout punch.” When we get hit hard in the face, we tend to remember it.

But the headline also had the benefit of truth-telling, at a time when truth was easier to discern and less open to argument. There were only three major television networks, with anchors who enjoyed respect and credibility. Time and Newsweek still mattered. The Daily News itself still carried heft as the paper of New York’s working class, with a weekday circulation of around two million.

More significantly, media consumers didn’t face a fire hose of conflicting or false messages that distorted their understanding of events. Today, we don’t even agree on facts. Back then, we could rally as a country around messages so direct and attention-getting that they stood as anthems for a moment in time: “Men Walk on Moon,” “Jets Win Super Bowl” (now you know we’re talking about a long time ago), “Nixon Resigns.”

“Drop Dead.”

(A tip to headline writers: Avoid commas, semicolons and the word “castigate,” if you want to have impact. The Times’s corresponding headline that day — “Ford, Castigating City, Asserts He’d Veto Federal Bailout; Offers Bankruptcy Bill” — stands as a verbose counterpoint to “Drop Dead.”)

I was young at the time, and its impact barely registered on me. But the headline never really disappeared from any discussion of my father’s career: “Drop Dead” was constantly resurrected by family, friends or people who randomly discovered he had written it.

This is curious for anyone who knew him and the story of his life, which spanned the arc of the 20th century. Born during World War I and raised during the Great Depression, he served in the Army Air Corps during World War II and as a journalist for United Press International and then Newsweek. He covered the Nixon-Kennedy election, the Kennedy assassination and the civil rights movement, on which he co-wrote two books. His last stop: managing editor of The News.

I was certainly familiar with my father’s no-nonsense approach. Two of his favorite expressions when he was fed up were “for crying out loud” and “knock it off,” which I knew meant it was time to drop the shenanigans and do the right thing. Implicit in “Drop Dead” was not only that Ford had rebuffed New York, but that he had made a big mistake in doing so.

The headline also hinted at an arched eye, and a certain playfulness, that my father brought to his job. During New York’s dire fiscal times, he came up with a scheme to chronicle the horrible potholes that were wreaking havoc on the city’s cars and trucks: He ordered up a jerry-built vehicle that he called the “Joltmobile,” which rumbled across the boroughs bumping over potholes and registering their impact with a makeshift meter on the back.

For Nixon’s famous visit to China, he decided to have a calligrapher draw Chinese characters for a front-page message to Nixon. But as deadline approached, my father panicked over the accuracy of the characters. He went around to Chinese restaurants to show the page to workers, and he wasn’t satisfied until three of them verified that the message was correct.

He was self-effacing, but I would try to get him talking about his life and career as we ate breakfast on the back porch of my parents’ home in Connecticut, or watched the Yankees on a summer evening. He chuckled as he told me how he had been fired from his first job at The Indianapolis Star for “writing bad headlines.” It was really for union activities, he said, but they needed an excuse to let him go. For all his professional attributes, none were greater than the example he set as a husband for more than 50 years to my mother, as a father to four sons and as an inspiration for my career in journalism.

All this, so much of what made him the person he was, seems to recede in favor of the famous headline that is still going strong 50 years later. When my father died in July 2005, I delivered a eulogy that recalled him as a master of small acts that added up to a lot. The irony is that he is remembered for one big one.