50 Years Ago, My Father Wrote the Headline That Refuses to Die

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.