Washington – Across the United States, messages of sympathy and fond remembrance followed the death of Gerald Ford, the nation’s 38th president.

Ford died in California December 26 at the age of 93. (See related article:
(http://usinfo.state.gov/xarchives/display.html?p=washfile-english&y=2006&m=December&x=20061227070542jatia0.052746 ) )

Among the many Americans recalling him with praise and affection are figures who served in Ford’s administration. A confident leader who did not fear being upstaged by subordinates, Ford surrounded himself with many promising figures whose careers would carry them to higher office.

“Americans will always admire Gerald Ford's unflinching performance of duty and the honorable conduct of his administration, and the great rectitude of the man himself,” said President George W. Bush, whose father served in Ford’s administration. “We mourn the loss of such a leader, and our 38th President will always have a special place in our nation's memory.”

Vice President Cheney, who served as Ford’s chief of staff, described Ford as a "dear friend and mentor to me until this very day. ... Gerald Ford embodied the best values of a great generation: decency, integrity, and devotion to duty." In a December 26 statement, Cheney praised Ford for bringing strength, wisdom and good judgment to the presidency at a time of constitutional crisis, and for leaving office with the nation’s confidence and faith restored.

Alexander Haig, who served both Ford and President Ronald Reagan as chief of staff, and later also served Reagan as secretary of state, said Ford "had to bring our country back [following President Richard Nixon’s resignation] and make it whole again and he did it with dignity, he did it with great, great skill and sensitivity."

Alan Greenspan served as Ford's chief White House economic adviser before being appointed to the Federal Reserve Board by President Reagan. "Jerry Ford was the most decent man I ever encountered in public life,'' he said on learning of Ford’s death. "His reputation has risen year by year since he left office.''

Former presidents and their surviving relatives are among those praising Ford's character and dedication.

Patricia Nixon Cox, daughter of the 37th U.S. president, Richard Nixon, recalled her father's "deep respect for Gerald Ford as an honorable and dedicated public servant."

Jimmy Carter, Ford’s 1976 electoral opponent and the 39th president, called Ford "a man of the highest integrity" and "an outstanding statesman ... who frequently rose above politics." Carter’s 1977 inaugural speech began with unstinting praise for Ford, the candidate he had defeated -- an unprecedented beginning for a new president’s term.

Ronald Reagan, the 40th president, challenged Ford for the 1976 Republican presidential nomination and briefly considered Ford as his running mate in 1980. His widow, Nancy Reagan, praised Ford as a "dear friend and close political ally" whose "accomplishments and devotion to our country are vast."

President George H.W. Bush, who served as both Ford’s chief diplomat in China and then as director of the Central Intelligence Agency, called Ford "one of the most decent and capable men I ever met." In a joint statement, former President Bill Clinton and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton recalled that Ford "brought Americans together during a difficult chapter in our history with strength, integrity, and humility. … All Americans should be grateful for his life of service."

Funeral arrangements for President Gerald R. Ford will be announced at the Gerald Ford Memorial Web site (http://www.geraldfordmemorial.com/ ).

The full text ( http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/12/20061226-3.html ) of Cheney’s statement and a transcript (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/12/20061227.html) of President George W. Bush’s remarks on December 27 are available on the White House Web site.

*WPD307 12/27/2006
Gerald Ford, Former U.S. President, Dead at 93
(Ford’s leadership helped heal partisan divides in wake of Nixon’s resignation) (1660)

By Michael Jay Friedman
USINFO Staff Writer

Washington -- Gerald R. Ford, the improbable 38th president of the United States, and the man charged with upholding the nation’s democratic traditions and soothing its sharp partisan divides in the aftermath of Richard M. Nixon’s resignation from the presidency, died December 26 at 6:45 p.m. PST (December 27, 0245 GMT). He was 93.

"My family joins me in sharing the difficult news that Gerald Ford, our beloved husband, father, grandfather and great-grandfather has passed away at 93 years of age. His life was filled with love of God, his family and his country," his widow, Betty Ford, said in a statement released shortly after the former president’s death.

Praising Ford as “a great American who gave many years of dedicated service to our country,” President Bush issued a statement expressing his sympathies to Ford’s family, mourning the loss of a leader known for his “devotion to duty, his personal character, and the honorable conduct of his administration.”

The only individual elevated to the U.S. presidency without having been elected either to that office or the vice presidency, Ford served during a tumultuous period of increasing partisan and ideological divides, when Congress challenged many presidential prerogatives and attempted to assert greater control of the direction and substance of U.S. foreign policy.

“With his quiet integrity, common sense, and kind instincts, President Ford helped heal our land and restore public confidence in the Presidency,” President Bush said.

Although Ford’s decision to pardon his predecessor for all offenses he "committed or may have committed or taken part in" during Nixon’s presidency cost the new president much of his initial popularity, Ford nearly won a full term of his own, narrowly losing the 1976 presidential election to Jimmy Carter.

EARLY LIFE

Gerald Rudolph Ford Jr. was born Leslie Lynch King Jr. in Omaha, Nebraska, on July 14, 1913. His parents separated that same year, and the infant moved with his mother to Grand Rapids , Michigan, home of his maternal grandparents. In 1916, Dorothy King married Gerald R. Ford, a Grand Rapids paint salesman. In 1935, the young man legally took Ford’s name.

Ford attended the University of Michigan on a football scholarship. He played on two national champion teams and was voted most valuable player in his senior year of 1935. Offered professional contracts by two National Football League teams, Ford chose instead to pursue legal studies at Yale Law School. Admitted in 1938, he graduated in the top quarter of his class.

Ford briefly practiced law in Grand Rapids, but on U.S. entry into World War II, he received a commission in the Naval Reserve, saw action in the Pacific and, at war’s end, was discharged as a full lieutenant.

A CONGRESSMAN’S CONGRESSMAN

Ford’s quarter-century tenure in the U.S. House of Representatives spanned a period of substantial bipartisan foreign policy consensus built on international engagement and the "containment" of Soviet-sponsored communism. Along with Michigan’s Republican Senator Arthur Vandenberg, Ford supported President Harry S. Truman’s Marshall Plan and U.S. membership in the United Nations. He defeated an isolationist incumbent in a 1948 Republican primary and was elected to Congress that fall.

Ford’s gregarious nature swiftly won him friends among congressional Republicans and Democrats alike. He was considered ideologically flexible and an astute practitioner of the art of legislative compromise. Typically viewed more as a practical lawmaker than an intellectual, Ford was not seen as a dynamic leader with presidential aspirations.

Ford’s voting record on domestic issues reflected that era’s mainstream Republicanism. He typically opposed expansion of the federal role in the economy but favored most civil rights legislation, casting votes for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965.

In keeping with his role as a legislative craftsman, Ford gradually transformed himself into a respected expert in budgetary matters. In 1963, the American Political Science Association named him the “Congressman’s Congressman.” In January 1965, supported by younger Republicans seeking a more vigorous opposition to the Democratic majority, Ford captured the position of House minority leader. He remained the House Republican leader until resigning from Congress in 1973 to assume the vice presidency.

Even as Ford assumed a leadership role in Congress, U.S. engagement in the Vietnam War began to fracture the bipartisan foreign policy consensus. Subjected to increasing criticism from within the Democratic Party, President Lyndon B. Johnson pursued a "gradualist" war strategy, and by March 1968 had moved unilaterally "to de-escalate the conflict." Meanwhile, Ford, in an April 1966 speech, attacked Johnson from the opposite perspective, charging him with "shocking mismanagement" of the war. The growing divide over Vietnam and more broadly over America’s role in the world would come to fruition during Ford’s presidency.

AN IMPROBABLE PRESIDENT

The October 1973 resignation of Vice President Spiro T. Agnew triggered the 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which requires the president to nominate a replacement, subject to confirmation by Congress.

President Nixon, politically weakened by the Watergate scandal, and facing solid Democratic congressional majorities, was informed by leaders of both parties that the widely respected Ford was possibly the only member of the Republican leadership who could gain confirmation. Ford was sworn in as vice president on December 6, 1973. On Nixon’s resignation on August 9, 1974, Ford was sworn in as president, promising the nation, “Our long national nightmare is over.”

The nation extended its new, unpretentious president (“I’m a Ford, not a Lincoln,” he memorably said, likening himself to the more modest automobile) a measure of popular goodwill, but his political situation was weak. Ford’s September 9, 1974, pardon of Nixon likely spared the nation the embarrassing spectacle of one or more trials, but it was unpopular and cost Ford considerable support.

Lacking an electoral mandate of his own, the new president faced opposition over domestic and foreign policy issues, both from the majority Democrats and increasingly from within his own Republican Party.

Ford’s presidency began during a period of economic crisis. He sought to address simultaneous increases in inflation and unemployment by trimming domestic spending even as congressional majorities favored the large-scale social programs established and expanded under Presidents Johnson and Nixon. Ford vetoed more than 50 bills passed by Congress, and managed to halve inflation -- from 11.2 percent to 5.3 percent.

Ford’s selection of the liberal New York Republican Nelson Rockefeller as his vice president damaged his standing among Republican conservatives, some of whom increasingly looked to the outgoing governor of California, Ronald W. Reagan, as a possible challenger to Ford.

FOREIGN POLICY AT A TIME OF DISSENT

Ford and Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, who also had served Nixon, sought to continue the containment of communist power while managing tensions with the Soviet Union through the Nixon-era policy of détente. Even though these policies initially were popular, they grew controversial as members of both political parties increasingly diverged from the old consensus Ford represented.

The 1974 congressional elections brought to Washington many new and younger members determined to challenge a containment policy they perceived as rigid, counterproductive and conducive to both a dangerous aggrandizement of presidential authority and the curtailment of domestic civil liberties.

Congress rejected Ford’s efforts to extend emergency aid to the beleaguered South Vietnamese regime, which ended with the fall of Saigon in April 1975.

Ford similarly was unable to lift fully a congressionally mandated arms embargo imposed on Turkey after the August 1974 Turkish military intervention on Cyprus despite the resultant loss of Turkish military bases. Nor could he prevent adoption of the Clark Amendment, which barred U.S. military aid to any faction in the Angolan Civil War, notwithstanding Cuban intervention in that conflict.

Increasingly, figures clustered around Reagan and Democratic Senator Henry M. Jackson challenged Ford’s continuance of détente with the Soviet Union. Even though Ford’s realist approach led to the 1974 Vladivostok summit with Leonid Brezhnev and a modest arms control agreement, conservative critics sought a harder line, and sought to wage against communism a contest of ideas and ideals.

1976 ELECTION AND BEYOND

Reagan launched a determined primary campaign to deny Ford the Republican presidential nomination in 1976. Ford narrowly turned back this challenge, but it weakened him politically. Ford was considered a decisive underdog in the fall election against the Democratic candidate, former Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter. He nonetheless nearly closed the gap, losing to Carter by 297 electoral votes to 240, on a popular vote of 50 percent to 48 percent.

With the expiration of his term, many Americans came to hold Ford in greater esteem, valuing more highly his plain decency, his calm leadership during a time of political turmoil and his post-Watergate efforts to restore respect for and faith in government. By 1980, Ford was considered a respected political elder statesman.

Ford continued an active private life, teaching at the University of Michigan (whose public policy school is named for him) and on several corporate boards.

In 1999, President Bill Clinton awarded Ford the Presidential Medal of Freedom. “President Ford,” Clinton said, “represents what is best in public service, and what is best about America.”

In 2001, the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation validated with a "Profiles in Courage Award" Ford’s most controversial and self-damaging political act, the pardon of Richard Nixon. By then, most Americans already recognized Ford’s ultimate contribution: Called on to serve at the highest level, Gerald Ford bestowed on the American people the precious gifts of personal decency, political normalcy, and, as his 1979 autobiography suggests, A Time to Heal.

The former president is survived by his wife; three sons, Michael, Jack and Steven; and a daughter, Susan; as well as grandchildren and great grandchildren.

 
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