Gerald R. Ford, 1913-2006
Gerald Ford was perhaps the most gifted natural athlete ever to occupy the White House. Captain of his high school football team and on the varsity of a major football power, the University of Michigan—where he was voted the most valuable player in 1934—he excelled as well in swimming, skiing, tennis, and golf, participating well into old age. It was probably lucky that he was so good at sports, for history has seldom thrown a curve ball like the one it threw at Gerald Ford.
On October 10, 1973, he held the relatively powerless position of minority leader of the House of Representatives, with very limited prospects of ever realizing the greatest ambition of his political career, to one day be speaker. But just 10 months later, on August 9, 1974, he was sworn in as the thirty-eighth President of the United States, the only man never elected to either the presidency or the vice-presidency to hold the office.
Gerald Ford was born on July 14, 1913, in Omaha, Nebraska, and named after his father, Leslie Lynch King. But his parents’ marriage broke up two weeks after he was born, and his mother moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she was from. Two years later, she married Gerald R. Ford, a paint salesman. They began calling the young boy Gerald R. Ford, Jr. His name wasn’t legally changed until 1935.
After graduating from the University of Michigan, he attended Yale Law School, paying for it by coaching boxing and football at the university. He passed the Michigan bar in 1941 and set up a law partnership with his friend Phillip Buchen (who would later serve as White House counsel), but he left to join the Navy after Pearl Harbor. He saw much action in the Pacific and was serving on the USS Monterey when he barely escaped being swept overboard in the storm known as “Halsey’s typhoon” in December 1944.
Returning to Michigan, he joined a law firm but soon became involved in politics. Previously an isolationist, he had been convinced by the war that the United States needed to take an active role in the world. In 1948 he defeated Rep. Bartel Jonkman, an isolationist, in the Republican primary and was elected by more than 60 percent of the vote. He would be reelected 12 times, always by very sizeable majorities. He described himself as “a moderate in domestic affairs, an internationalist in foreign affairs, and a conservative in fiscal policy,” a formula he stayed with throughout his entire political career.
He proved an able congressman and popular among his fellow House Republicans. In 1961, as one of the “young Turks,” a group of younger Republicans who thought the party leadership in the House was out of date and out of touch, he defeated 67-year-old Charles Hoeven to become chairman of the House Republican Conference, the No. 3 position among House Republicans.
In 1963 he was appointed by Lyndon Johnson to the Warren Commission, which investigated the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and he was its last surviving member. In 1965 he challenged Charles Halleck of Indiana for the position of minority leader and narrowly won. He traveled widely across the country, making as many as 200 speeches a year to political gatherings and becoming, as a consequence, widely known.
Long a political ally of Richard Nixon, he had been considered for the vice-presidential nomination in 1968 before Nixon chose Maryland Governor Spiro Agnew. Because the Republicans would not attain a majority in the House until 1994, it is unlikely that he would have served as minority leader long enough to become speaker. But on October 10, 1973, Vice President Agnew, caught in a bribery scandal, was forced to resign. Under the Twenty-fifth Amendment, adopted in 1967, President Nixon had the power to nominate a replacement, who would need to be confirmed by both houses of Congress.
But Nixon was caught up in his own scandal, Watergate. He needed someone who was both squeaky clean and popular enough with Congress to be easily and quickly confirmed. He chose Gerald Ford, who was sworn in as Vice President on December 6, 1973. In his remarks following taking the oath of office, Ford got off one of the great puns in American political history when, with characteristic modesty, he told the assembled dignitaries, “I’m a Ford, not a Lincoln.”
By then the Watergate scandal had deepened considerably. Ten days after the Agnew resignation, Nixon had fired the special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, in what came to be called the “Saturday Night Massacre.” For the next nine months, the scandal continued to worsen, and by the summer of 1974 the House of Representatives was considering articles of impeachment against the President. When the Supreme Court ruled, on July 24, that the tapes made of Oval Office conversations had to be turned over to the new special prosecutor and Congress, the Nixon presidency began to collapse.
When Ford took the oath of office, on August 9, the executive branch of the federal government was a shambles and the country as a whole had been through the gravest political crisis of the postwar era. Ford moved immediately to try to put the past behind us, telling the nation that “our long national nightmare is over. The Constitution works. Our great republic is a government of laws and not of men.”
A month later, believing it necessary for bringing Watergate to a close and knowing it would be unpopular, he granted former President Nixon an unconditional pardon in all matters relating to Watergate. It is widely thought that this act cost Ford election in his own right in 1976.
But if the executive branch was in disarray when he took office, so was the American economy. Inflation was climbing by near double digits while unemployment increased and the stock market fell into the worst bear market since World War II. The oil shock following the Yom Kippur war of October 1973 had caused long gas lines.
Although the most lopsidedly Democratic Congress since the Great Depression was elected in 1974, Ford was able to work with the new Congress to enact decontrol of some industries, such as railroads, and to cut some taxes. He used the veto extensively to keep spending under control.
In foreign affairs as well, the mid-1970s were a bad time for the United States. The South Vietnam government fell to the Communists in 1975. That year as well, Ford ordered the SS Mayaguez, which had been seized by Cambodian gunboats, to be recaptured. It was, and its crew was recovered unharmed, but the operation cost 41 American lives. There were successes too, such as the Helsinki Accords signed with the Soviet Union, establishing human-rights principles. Ford was the host to numerous foreign leaders in 1976 when they came to help celebrate the 200th anniversary of American independence.
Nominated for election in his own right as President after a bruising primary battle with Ronald Reagan in 1976, Ford lost to Jimmy Carter in one of the closest elections in years. Given the movement in the polls in the final weeks of the campaign, it is likely that had the election been held even a week later, he would have won.
Gerald Ford held an extraordinarily weak political hand in the two and a half years of his presidency. He had not been elected to either the presidency or the vice-presidency. He succeeded a disgraced President who had been forced to resign. He faced a hostile Congress that was dominated by the other party. And yet he played that hand with considerable skill.
He conducted himself with an unfailing dignity and honesty that did much to restore the prestige of the Presidency and the people’s faith in it. He had the courage to make tough decisions, including ones that he knew would not be popular but that he thought were necessary. He left the White House (and thus the country) a better place than he had found it. Under the circumstances, that was no small achievement.