James Humes' commentary on the passing of Gerald Ford follows:
On July 4, 1976, President Ford was flying back to Washington, D.C., from Philadelphia, where he had delivered an address at Independence Hall. He recalled to staff that only two years before, when he headed the Bicentennial Commission as vice president, he had speculated how America's 200th birthday would be celebrated.
Headlines in 1974 had been dominated by the latest developments in Watergate and bodies returning from Vietnam. Ford recalled how almost every day it seemed that there were protesters at the White House gates. News came in on Air Force One that in the hundreds of thousands of communities in the nation, not one flag-burning demonstration or protest was reported. At that point the president reached for his wife's hand and said, "I think the nation has recovered its faith. It's healed now."
The first and singular move in beginning the healing process was the pardon of President Nixon. The action triggered an avalanche of criticism. Ford's own press secretary resigned in protest.
Yet, as the president told this writer in Vail, Colo., in 1977 while working on his memoirs, "A Time to Heal," Ford said: "I did it not for Nixon but for the country. I knew at the time it would probably cost me my re-election, but President Nixon's legal team could advance constitutional arguments that could tie up the courts for years. The prospect that a former president could face jail time would divert the country's attention ... I had to turn the page and let the healing process begin."
Two decades later, the Kennedy Institute of Politics awarded Ford its Profile in Courage Award, confirming what historians now say.
There was no deal. Nixon chose Ford to replace Spiro Agnew as vice president because it was the most logical in constitutional terms. In presidential succession, the speaker of the House is next in line after the vice president. To have chosen a Democrat would've nullified the election of 1972, when the Republican presidential ticket carried 49 states. Thus, the leader elected by the Republican congressmen in districts across the nation was most fitting for the constitutional tradition.
The mainstream media underestimated Ford. Republican presidents from Dwight Eisenhower to Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush have always been considered dumb (except for Nixon, who was "Tricky Dick"). The Washington press corps found Ford stiff and slow in press conferences. His presidential addresses sounded too much like the speeches he must have given to the local chambers of commerce in his Grand Rapids, Mich., constituency.
But his dean's list grades at the University of Michigan were enough to earn him a scholarship to Yale Law School. In his rankings there, he topped fellow classmates Cyrus Vance and Sargent Shriver.
Ford was not a quick thinker, but a thorough one. He astonished this writer by his total recall of the exact amounts of military appropriations for weapons systems in bills passed 20 years before. He would also, from the top of his head, go through the year's national budget, line by line, for the items for each department and each agency.
The reporters would call him "clumsy and awkward." He was, in fact, the greatest natural athlete of any president in history. He was the captain of the Michigan football team and he played for the college all-stars in the annual bowl game against the current NFL champions.
Afterward, he was drafted by the Green Bay Packers and Detroit Lions.
Washington reporters have circulated stories about how women in America gushed over the looks of Presidents Kennedy and Clinton, but they never reported that the only president to appear as a male model - on the cover of a women's fashion magazine - was Ford. As a Yale Law School student, he appeared on the cover of Cosmopolitan in 1939.
The Kennedy family is called "America's royalty" by the gossip columnists, but it is Ford who actually inspired the trivia question, "Who is the only president who was also a king?" (Ford was born Leslie King. He took later the name of his stepfather.)
But all joking aside, Ford would have flourished in a constitutional monarchy-parliamentary system like Great Britain's.
Reagan would never have risen to become prime minister in Britain. His extraordinary talent for communication was particularly suited to our presidential system.
The legal craftsmanship, the tradeoffs, the protracted debate about wording in a bill would have bored Reagan. But to a lawyer like Ford, as he said to this writer, "that is the nitty-gritty of representative government and democracy."
The qualities that propel a candidate to the White House - charisma, name recognition, and popularity - are not that much different from what puts someone on the cover of People magazine. However, the ascent to the leadership position in Congress is by the respect of one's peers. Ford earned that by his integrity, his commitment, and sense of judgment. To echo Teddy Roosevelt, Ford possessed that quality that may not always help one to be elected president, but determines whether the president is a good one.
When the illumination in the Capitol dome was turned off in 1977 in an attempt to conserve energy, the then ex-president (in a rare poetic fancy for him) observed in a speech that the dome was perhaps lit by the "heat of debate and the friction of ideas below." Ford delivered those words on March 5, 1978, in Fulton, Mo., on the anniversary of Winston Churchill's famous "Iron Curtain speech."
Like Churchill in 1946, Ford was a year out of office at a time when the communists were threatening to win elections in Europe. President Carter, unlike every president since Harry Truman, was silent in response to the jeopardy facing NATO. Ford said there was "no partisanship in one-party government." His warning concluded: "Let not the lights fueled by partisanship in the capitals of Paris, Rome, Madrid, and Lisbon be dimmed." The speech was featured on the front pages of newspapers in those cities, and the communists failed in their quest for power. If Ford was no Churchill, he loved freedom no less.
As a lover of freedom, Ford had the resolute convictions of a principled conservative. As an anti-communist, he was an internationalist when most Midwestern Republicans were still isolationists. As a congressman, Ford supported Truman's programs, like NATO and the Marshall Plan to contain communism. On the House Armed Services Committee, no congressman had a better record in promoting military preparedness. But in domestic spending, Ford was a deficit hawk. In the 1976 presidential campaign against Carter, Ford, against political advice, vetoed the big spending bills pushed by the Democratic Congress that would've benefited the special interests.
In the opening remarks of his inaugural address, the newly sworn-in Carter gracefully saluted his predecessor "for healing the nation." The audience erupted with heartfelt applause that exceeded the reception at the end of Carter's speech. It was an indication that the politicians in Washington, and their staffs, had far more affection for "good old Jerry Ford" than for the ex-Georgia governor who was now president.
Ford had gained the respect of Republicans who followed his leadership as well as those Democrats who opposed him. All would agree that he heeded the words of the Apostle Paul: "Walk worthy in the vocation in which ye have been called."
In 1944, Ford was serving as a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy, in the Pacific. The destroyer he was on was bombed by Japanese planes. The skipper was killed and Ford took over as executive officer. The fires in the burning vessel were doused. Lt. Cmdr. Ford set the ship aright. Similarly, President Ford put the ship of state back on its course.
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