Gerald Ford, 93, dies
Published 9:00 pm Monday, December 25, 2006
LOS ANGELES – Gerald R. Ford, who picked up the pieces of Richard Nixon’s scandal-shattered White House as the 38th and only unelected president in America’s history, has died, former first lady Betty Ford said Tuesday. He was 93.
The statement did not say when or where Ford died or list a cause of death. Ford had battled pneumonia in January and underwent two heart treatments – including an angioplasty – in August at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.
He was the longest living president, followed by Ronald Reagan, who also died at 93. Ford had been living at his desert home in Rancho Mirage, about 130 miles east of Los Angeles.
Ford was Nixon’s hand-picked successor, a man of much political experience who had never run on a national ticket. He was as open and straight-forward as Nixon was tightly controlled and conspiratorial.
He took office minutes after Nixon resigned in disgrace over the Watergate scandal and flew off into exile. Ford famously declared “our long national nightmare is over.” But he revived the debate a month later by granting Nixon a pardon for all crimes he committed as president.
That single act, it was widely believed, cost Ford election to a term of his own in 1976, but it won praise in later years as a courageous act that allowed the nation to move on.
The Vietnam War ended in defeat for the U.S. during his presidency with the fall of Saigon in April 1975. Ford also earned a place in the history books as the first unelected vice president, chosen by Nixon to replace Spiro Agnew who also was forced from office by scandal.
He was in the White House only 895 days, but changed it more than it changed him.
Ford slowed down in recent years. He had been hospitalized in August 2000 when he suffered one or more small strokes while attending the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia.
In January, Ford was hospitalized with pneumonia for 12 days. He wasn’t seen in public until April 23, when President Bush was in town and paid a visit to the Ford home.
An appointed leader
When Agnew resigned in a bribery scandal in October 1973, Ford was one of four finalists to succeed him: Texan John Connally, New York’s Nelson Rockefeller and California’s Ronald Reagan.
“Personal factors enter into such a decision,” Nixon recalled for a Ford biographer in 1991. I knew all of the final four personally and had great respect for each one of then, but I had known Jerry Ford longer and better than any of the rest.
“We had served in Congress together. I had often campaigned for him in his district,” Nixon continued. But Ford had something the others didn’t, he would be easily confirmed by Congress, something that could not be said of Rockefeller, Reagan and Connally.
So Ford it was. He became the first vice president appointed under the 25th amendment to the Constitution.
On Aug. 9, 1974, after seeing Nixon off to exile, Ford assumed the office. The next morning, he still made his own breakfast and padded to the front door in his pajamas to get the newspaper.
Said a ranking Democratic congressman: “Maybe he is a plodder, but right now the advantages of having a plodder in the presidency are enormous.”
It was rare that Ford was ever as eloquent as he was for those dramatic moments of his swearing-in at the White House.
“My fellow Americans,” he said, “our long national nightmare is over. Our Constitution works. Our great republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule.”
And, true to his reputation as unassuming, he added: “I am acutely aware that you have not elected me as your president by your ballots. So I ask you to confirm me with your prayers.”
The pardon controversy
Some suggested the pardon was prearranged before Nixon resigned, but Ford, in an unusual appearance before a congressional committee in October 1974, said, “There was no deal, period, under no circumstances.” The committee dropped its investigation.
Ford’s standing in the polls dropped dramatically when he pardoned Nixon unconditionally. But an ABC News poll taken in 2002 in connection with the 30th anniversary of the Watergate break-in found that six in 10 said the pardon was the right thing to do.
The late Democrat Clark Clifford spoke for many when he wrote in his memoirs, “The nation would not have benefited from having a former chief executive in the dock for years after his departure from office. His disgrace was enough.”
The decision to pardon Nixon won Ford a John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award in 2001, and Sen. Edward Kennedy, acknowledging he had criticized Ford at the time, called the pardon “an extraordinary act of courage that historians recognize was truly in the national interest.”
Undaunted, unassuming
He was undaunted even after the two attempts on his life in September 1975. Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, a 26-year-old follower of Charles Manson, was arrested after she aimed a semiautomatic pistol at Ford on Sept. 5 in Sacramento, Calif. A Secret Service agent grabbed her and Ford was unhurt.
Seventeen days later, Sara Jane Moore, a 45-year-old political activist, was arrested in San Francisco after she fired a gun at the president. Again, Ford was unhurt.
Both women are serving life terms in federal prison.
In office, Ford’s living tastes were modest. When he became vice president, he chose to remain in the same Alexandria, Va., home – unpretentious except for a swimming pool – that he shared with his family as a congressman.
After leaving the White House, however, he took up residence in the desert resort area of Rancho Mirage, picked up $1 million for his memoir and another $1 million in a five-year NBC television contract, and served on a number of corporate boards.
At a joint session after becoming president, Ford addressed members of Congress as “my former colleagues” and promised “communication, conciliation, compromise and cooperation.” But his relations with Congress did not always run smoothly.
He vetoed 66 bills in his barely two years as president. Congress overturned 12 Ford vetoes, more than for any president since Andrew Johnson.
Roots in Michigan
Ford spent most of his boyhood in Grand Rapids, Mich.
He was born Leslie King on July 14, 1913, in Omaha, Neb. His parents were divorced when he was less than a year old, and his mother returned to her parents in Grand Rapids, where she later married Gerald R. Ford Sr. He adopted the boy and renamed him.
Ford played center on the University of Michigan’s 1932 and 1933 national champion football teams. He got professional offers from the Detroit Lions and the Green Bay Packers, but chose to study law at Yale, working his way through as an assistant varsity football coach and freshman boxing coach.
Ford got his first exposure to national politics at Yale, working as a volunteer in Wendell Willkie’s 1940 Republican campaign for president. After World War II service with the Navy in the Pacific, he went back to practicing law in Grand Rapids and became active in Republican reform politics.
His stepfather was the local Republican chairman, and Michigan Sen. Arthur Vandenberg was looking for a fresh young internationalist to replace the area’s isolationist congressman.
Ford beat Rep. Bartel Jonkman by a 2-to-1 margin in the Republican primary and then went on to win the election with 60.5 percent of the vote, the lowest margin he ever got.
He had proposed to Elizabeth Bloomer, a dancer and fashion coordinator, earlier that year, 1948; they were married shortly before the election. They had three sons, Michael, John and Steven, and a daughter, Susan.
‘A caretaker’
Clark Clifford, an adviser to presidents since Harry Truman, summed up his legacy: “About his brief presidency there is little that can be said. In almost every way, it was a caretaker government trying to bind up the wounds of Watergate and get through the most traumatic act of the Indochina drama.
“Ford … was a likable person who deserves credit for accomplishing the one goal that was most important, to reunite the nation after the trauma of Watergate and give us a breathing spell before we picked a new president.”
