Gerald R. Ford

President of the United States (1974–1977)

• Born: July 14, 1913
• Birthplace: Omaha, Nebraska
• Died: December 26, 2006
• Place of death: Rancho Mirage, California

Becoming president after Richard M. Nixon resigned in disgrace, Ford restored integrity to the office of president of the United States and a sense of decency and unity to the nation.

Early Life

Gerald Rudolph Ford Jr., was born Leslie Lynch King Jr., the son of Leslie and Dorothy King. When the boy was two, his parents divorced, and his mother later married Gerald R. Ford Sr., who adopted her son as his own. Ford Jr. grew up in the conservative environment of Grand Rapids, Michigan, in a warm family in which the emphasis was on integrity and hard work. These traits helped Ford Sr. maintain his paint manufacturing business through the Depression of the 1930s, which must have been a lesson for his sons. A good student in high school, Ford was also an exceptional athlete both in high school and at the University of Michigan, where he earned a BA degree in 1935 with a B average while starring as a football player. He then enrolled in the Yale Law School, also working full time at Yale as a football and boxing coach. He earned his law degree in 1941, also with a B average, despite his full-time work. By this time he was more than six feet tall, powerfully built, with ruggedly handsome features that allowed him to model sports clothing in Look magazine. As the years passed, his full blond hair slowly receded from his forehead.

Admitted to the Michigan bar in 1941, Ford and a friend founded their own law firm. Ford specialized in labor cases, always important in Michigan. When the United States entered World War II, he entered the Navy as an ensign, on April 20, 1942. After a year of giving aviation cadets physical training, he went first to gunnery school and then to the Monterey, a new, small aircraft carrier in the Pacific. He received the highest ratings possible for an officer while serving in ten battles and through one of the worst typhoons in history. His commander described him as an “excellent leader . . . steady, reliable, resourceful.” He was released from active duty early in 1946 with the rank of lieutenant commander and returned to Grand Rapids. There Gerald Ford Sr. had become Republican Party chairman for Kent County, elected by reformers who wanted to clean up the local political machine. There, too, was Republican senator Arthur Vandenberg, a leader of the Senate’s internationalists and a believer in a bipartisan foreign policy. Young Ford’s military experience had convinced him that prewar isolationism had been disastrous. He also believed in honest government and ran for the local seat in the United States House of Representatives in 1948, campaigning hard and winning the Republican nomination with 62.2 percent of the vote, and the general election with 60.5 percent. The same year, on October 15, he married Elizabeth “Betty” Bloomer; they had three sons and a daughter: Michael, John, Steven, and Susan.

Life’s Work

Ford represented Michigan’s Fifth District for more than twenty-four years, never winning less than 60.3 percent of the vote in general elections and usually winning far more. In the House, he served on the Central Intelligence Agency and Foreign Aid subcommittees of the Committee on Appropriations and was soon regarded as an expert on drafting defense budgets. Such budgets are infinitely complex; his expertise made him one of the significant members among the 435 representatives. Hoping to become Speaker of the House one day, he turned down chances to run for the Senate or for governor of Michigan.

With the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower to the presidency in 1952, there seemed a chance of an era of Republican control of government, but Eisenhower’s popularity did not have enough impact on congressional elections. Apart from 1953–1955, Ford always served in a Congress with Democratic Party majorities. His record was one of enlightened conservatism with some liberal tendencies, supporting foreign aid and military appropriations, the reform of House rules, civil rights bills, and caution in government spending. In 1966, Americans for Democratic Action rated his voting record liberal 67 percent of the time. By the 1960s, he was making hundreds of speeches each year to raise money for Republican candidates.

Ford also began to have formal leadership roles, being elected chairman of the Republican caucus in the House in 1963 and serving on the Warren Commission to investigate the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In 1965, he was the House Republicans’ choice to become the new minority leader, replacing the older, more conservative, and less effective Charles Halleck of Indiana. This meant that if the Republicans had won control of the House, Ford would have become the Speaker. As minority leader, Ford listened to the views of congressional representatives of all opinions, respected others’ principles, accepted differences, and tried to avoid enforcing party loyalty on every vote. He helped to shape legislation in fields ranging from education to crime control. He became a national figure and a leading spokesperson for his party on major issues. He continued to support civil rights legislation, tried to keep government spending down in President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society programs, and supported Johnson’s actions in Vietnam.

Ford had first visited Vietnam in 1953, becoming a “hawk” in his support for American intervention. In the 1960s he urged more effort to win the war, not less, telling a group of Nixon campaign strategists in 1968 that the proper response to that year’s Tet Offensive was to Americanize the war. He later defended Nixon’s bombing of Cambodia and served as a channel to the House for the views of the administration. Critics accused him of being an unthinking “hawk” who merely reacted patriotically rather than analyzing the problem.

Ford’s loyalty to an administration already haunted by Watergate probably made him Nixon’s choice for vice president under the Twenty-Fifth Amendment when Spiro T. Agnew, under indictment, resigned the office. Allegedly, Nixon’s first choice had been John Connally, a recent convert from the Democratic Party, but the Texan was too controversial to win congressional confirmation. The Senate confirmed Ford by a vote of 92 to 3 and the House did so by 385 to 35. As vice president, Ford remained doggedly loyal to Nixon while the Watergate cover-up became ever more obvious. He later said, “I had to go down this narrow path of not supporting him too much or not criticizing him too frequently. It was not a pleasant experience.” When the House Judiciary Committee was about to vote articles of impeachment, the president resigned. On August 9, 1974, Ford became president, an office he had never contemplated holding or even seeking.

Ford’s presidency was made difficult by the lack of time for a proper transition, such as occurs after an election, and by the presence in the White House of many Nixon men whose loyalty remained to their old boss. Some critics and even some friends asserted that Ford was not really in command of his administration. Moreover, he inherited an economy caught in the grip of “stagflation” (recession accompanied by inflation, supposedly an impossible combination) and the aftermath of both the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal. He did have widespread public approval, but that dropped from 71 percent to 50 percent, according to the Gallup poll, after he gave Nixon a pardon , and he never succeeded in regaining his initial popularity during his term. Yet this was something that Ford believed he “must” do in mercy to Nixon and his family and to end a “nightmare” for the country. He also divided his own party by naming the often controversial Nelson A. Rockefeller , governor of New York for several terms, as vice president.

The Ford administration was unable to end either the recession or inflation, in part because of a difficult global economic situation and in part because of advisers’ belief that tight money and a slump would soon end inflation. The slogan Whip Inflation Now (WIN) and presidential exhortations became subjects of ridicule. Ignorant of foreign policy matters, Ford was virtually the captive of the able but egocentric Henry Kissinger, who served as both secretary of state and presidential adviser. Ford’s summits with Soviet leaders accomplished little but to associate the United States with the Helsinki Accords on human rights and Eastern Europe, which left that region under Soviet control without ending Soviet human rights violations. Worse, South Vietnam fell during Ford’s time in office, its impending collapse leading him to ask Congress for massive aid for the Saigon regime, using such 1960s rhetoric as South Vietnam’s “fighting for freedom.” He was bothered by congressional refusal, apparently not grasping the Vietnam War’s impact on the country, which included widespread distrust of Saigon. He tried to prevent Congress from raising the national debt with nonmilitary spending programs, vetoing thirty-nine measures. Most of his vetoes were sustained.

In 1976, Ford was defeated for reelection by Democrat Jimmy Carter , former governor of Georgia. Probable reasons include Carter’s imaginative and relentless campaigning, Ford’s choice of the capable but then acid-tongued Senator Bob Dole of Kansas as his running mate, and voters’ perception of Ford himself as a good man but an inept one. After leaving the presidency on January 20, 1977, Ford wrote his memoirs. In 1981, he represented the United States at the funeral of assassinated Egyptian president Anwar el-Sadat, along with fellow former presidents Nixon and Carter, and later joined Carter in sponsoring conferences for serious discussion of major international issues.

It was during that trip to the Sadat funeral that Carter and Ford became friends, putting behind them the acrimony from their presidential campaign. Thereafter, they frequently visited each other and in 2001 served together as honorary cochairs of the National Commission on Federal Election Reform and, with former presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, on the Council for Excellence in Government. The four also became honorary members of the board to rebuild the World Trade Center in New York following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

In 1980, Ford was close to reentering politics. At the Republican National Convention he negotiated with the candidate, Ronald Reagan, to become the vice presidential candidate. However, the negotiations broke down over power sharing: Ford reportedly wanted to be a “co-president” and Reagan chose George H. W. Bush instead. Otherwise, Ford’s presence in American politics remained consultative and honorary. He opened the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at Albion College in Michigan in 1977 and the Gerald R. Ford Museum in Grand Rapids and the Gerald R. Ford Library in Ann Arbor, both in 1981. President Bill Clinton awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1999.

Ford’s differences with Republican administrations following his own sometimes brought him into conflict with his party. In 2001 he insisted that gay and lesbian Americans should receive equal treatment, an unpopular view among conservatives. Moreover, Ford told Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward in 2004 that he considered President George W. Bush’s justification for war in Iraq to be a big mistake.

Ford remained active, playing golf frequently and often with such celebrity friends as Bob Hope, but in 2000 his health began to deteriorate. He suffered two minor strokes that year and in 2006 was hospitalized several times for various reasons. In November 2006, even as he surpassed Reagan as the nation’s oldest-ever former president, he was confined to bed at his Rancho Mirage, California, home. He died there on December 26 of heart failure. He was survived by Betty and their four children, the eldest of whom, Michael, a minister, performed last rites for his father. Ford was laid in state in the Capitol Building, Washington, DC, only the eleventh president to be so honored. Following a state funeral and memorial service at the National Cathedral on January 2, 2007, he was laid to rest in a tomb at his museum in Grand Rapids.

Significance

Ford’s presidency was one of integrity, character, and modesty, in important contrast to his imperious predecessors of questionable honor, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon. Johnson and Nixon had divided the nation; Ford sought to heal it and to some extent succeeded. Americans were relieved to find an honest person in the highest office and also to find that the “imperial presidency” of Johnson and Nixon was not permanent. Ford thus redressed the balance in American public life, making the president once more a part of the federal government rather than its tyrant. Voters also, however, perceived him as less than imaginative and forceful in a time of economic trouble; at such times Americans have customarily demanded strong leadership. Ford’s speaking style, adapted to pretelevision party rallies, made him seem inarticulate, even fumbling, when exposed to the new medium nationwide and in comparison with anchors and actors. The length of his presidency and his impact on the country were thus limited by his own characteristics.

Ford’s best-known legacy came to be the action that cost him the most public support during his presidency: the Nixon pardon. In 2001 he received the John F. Kennedy Profiles in Courage Award for having pardoned Nixon despite the political backlash that it caused. Following his death, commentators commonly praised the pardon as a bold and wise decision. Ford demonstrated, as he put it himself, that “our Constitution works. Our great republic is a government of laws and not of men.”

Bibliography

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DeFrank, Thomas M. Write It When I'm Gone: Remarkable Off-the-Record Conversations with Gerald R. Ford. New York: Berkley, 2007. Print.

Ford, Gerald R. A Time to Heal: The Autobiography of Gerald R. Ford. New York: Harper, 1979. Print.

Hartmann, Jerry. Palace Politics: An Inside Account of the Ford Years. New York: McGraw, 1980. Print.

Hersey, John. The President. New York: Knopf, 1975. Print.

Mieczkowski, Yanek. Gerald Ford and the Challenges of the 1970’s. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2005. Print.

Moran, Andrew D. "More than a Caretaker: The Economic Policy of Gerald R. Ford." Presidential Studies Quarterly 41.1 (2011): 39–63. Print.

Reeves, Richard. A Ford, Not a Lincoln. New York: Harcourt, 1975. Print.

Werth, Barry. Thirty-One Days: The Crisis That Gave Us the Government We Have Today. New York: Doubleday, 2006. Print.

Woodward, Bob. Shadow: Five Presidents and the Legacy of Watergate. New York: Simon, 1999. Print.