Mr. Ford was also an unlikely whipping boy. His resolve against profligacy was stiffened by more inviting villains, especially his treasury secretary, William E. Simon, whom even the president referred to as “hard-nosed.”

Mr. Simon warned that bailing out the city would amount to nationalizing municipal debt and rewarding local officials who lacked the will to stanch the inevitable hemorrhaging inflicted by bankrupt liberalism. (The investment banker Felix G. Rohatyn, recruited by Mr. Carey to rescue the city, would liken default to “someone stepping into a tepid bath and slashing his wrists — you might not feel yourself dying, but that’s what would happen”).

The Ford administration’s politically suicidal demands to city officials — raise transit fares, abolish rent control, scrap free tuition at the City University — prompted Victor Gotbaum, the municipal labor leader, to complain that Mr. Simon barely believed in government at all, except for police and fire protection, “and he’s not sure about fire.”

David R. Gergen, an assistant to Mr. Simon at the time and later a presidential adviser, recalled that Mr. Ford himself “was one of those moderate Republicans who actually liked New York” — he chose Nelson A. Rockefeller as his vice president — but that “he was offended by the city’s profligate spending.”

“The president’s speechwriters whipped up one draft, and I was asked by the White House chief of staff to write an alternative version,” Mr. Gergen said. “I wrote a hard-hitting piece, assuming that if it ever saw the light of day, the White House would, in the normal course, invite me to smooth the rough edges. Instead, someone plopped a few of my rough, unedited paragraphs into the final text.”

In the speech, the president said: “The people of this country will not be stampeded. They will not panic when a few desperate New York officials and bankers try to scare New York’s mortgage payments out of them.”