Remembering a President

If ever a modern American president has been overlooked or misjudged, it has been Gerald Ford. Our 38th president served just 29 months, taking over in August 1974 when Richard Nixon resigned in the middle of the Watergate scandal. In taking office, Ford told America, “Our long national nightmare is over.” That’s why he pardoned Nixon just days later in an attempt to move on from the scandal and get back to the work of the American people. Critics were not kind to him. The pardon forcing Ford to testify before a Congressional committee investigating whether he and Nixon had made a deal to keep the disgraced Nixon out of court and jail. Years later, the Kennedy family honored Ford’s decision to issue the pardon with its Profiles in Courage Award. Time, it appears, does heal all wounds.

Most Americans, especially those of us born after Ford’s term in office, probably best know him as the subject of Chevy Chase’s aping on “Saturday Night Live,” in which he made fun of the president’s infamous clumsiness. But what many people may not know is that Ford was perhaps the most athletic of all American presidents, having been an all-star football player at the University of Michigan and offered chances to play professional football. Instead, Ford chose to go into law and public service.

Ford has a unique distinction in American politics. He is the only man to gain the White House without having been elected President or Vice President. He was dubbed the “Accidental President” because he was only in line to succeed Nixon after Nixon appointed Ford, at the time a Congressman from Michigan and Minority Leader of the House of Representatives, to replace Spiro Agnew, who had resigned the vice presidency in disgrace during a bribery investigation. He also has the distinction of perhaps being less famous than his wife. First Lady Betty Ford has become synonymous with fighting alcoholism. She also became a well-known crusader for breast cancer awareness.

In the coming days, we will hear a lot more about Ford than most of us have ever heard or things we’d forgotten; everything from the two assassination attempts on Ford to the fact that he was born Leslie Lynch King, Jr., named after an abusive, alcoholic father and renamed by his mother in honor of her new husband who adopted the boy. Most of what we will hear surely will be positive, as it normally is when we eulogize a president. But in the case of Gerald Ford, it is also warranted. By all accounts, he was a good and decent man, and a man who will hopefully be better treated and remembered in posterity than he was in life.