Gerald Ford, R.I.P.
Former President Gerald Ford, who became Vice President after the resignation of Spiro Agnew, and then President with the resignation of Richard M. Nixon in 1974, died Tuesday at the age of 93. He was a good and decent man, and probably the last of the old-style Republican presidents. With him, perhaps, dies the type of "Rotary" Republican who stood for lower taxes when it didn't mean pulling the plug on government revenues, for internationalism when it didn't mean wars of choice in Iraq, smaller government when it didn't mean hatred for the poor and working man, and religion when it meant the Presbyterian church on the corner, not Bible-thumping, in-your-face fundamentalism. Hard to imagine, isn't it?
Ford served in the Congress from Grand Rapids, Mich., for nearly a quarter century before he ascended to the White House because of the Watergate and associated Republican scandals. His district included my hometown of Holland, Mich., until the redistricting of the early 1960s. It is and was a firmly Republican region, except for the post-Watergate election in 1974 when a Democrat, Richard VanderVeen, briefly held Ford's seat.
Ford seemed a bland, Rotary Republican from Grand Rapids, so much so that one couldn't imagine him as President. The jokes were many. "Played football without a helmet" was one, a backhanded tribute to his glory days on the gridiron for the University of Michigan. That segued easily into comedian Chevy Chase's pratfalls on Saturday Night Live, which debuted a year after Ford became President.
Yet he was exactly the right man for the moment. For one thing, he was confirmable by the firmly Democratic Congress (trivia question: who succeeded him as vice president? Answer: Nelson Rockefeller, who was replaced by Bob Dole on the 1976 Republican ticket). The exit of Nixon and the arrival of Ford was greeted by a profound sense of national relief. You couldn't imagine Ford and his press secretary, Jerry TerHorst, foisting the same nonsense on the nation as had Nixon and his press secretary, Ron Ziegler. He even had kids that seemed normal. The honeymoon ended when he pardoned Nixon to spare the nation the spectacle of a former President going to prison. That all but ensured his loss in 1976 to Jimmy Carter.
Ford left a toxic legacy, however, in Dick Cheney, who was Ford's White House Chief of Staff, and Donald Rumsfeld, who preceded Cheney as Chief of Staff and then moved to Defense Secretary after Ford was forced against his better judgment to turn to the right after the Nixon pardon. Historian Barry Werth's op-ed piece in Thursday's New York Times is quite illuminating on this score (I can't link to it, sorry). Cheney, in particular, has proven to be the anti-Ford, much more like Nixon than his old boss. It will be interesting to see who shows up for the funeral.
Postscript: There is an interview that Bob Woodward did with Ford in 2004 on the Washington Post website. Woodward did it for a future book project, but with the proviso that it could be published anytime after Ford's death. In it, Ford criticizes George W. Bush for going to war in Iraq. He says that running off to free people around the world--Bush's latest rationale for the war--is "not in the national interest." That is straight out of Henry Kissinger, yet Ford talks about the trials and tribulations of having Kissinger as his Secretary of State and National Security Advisor. He says Kissinger had the "thinnest skin" of any public figure he had ever known. Read it--it's great political history.
Postscript #2: Associated Press has released a round-up of interesting items from other embargoed interviews Ford gave prior to his death. You can read the story here.