Gerald Ford: 1913-2006
by Ted McClelland

Gerald R. Ford was my favorite president. I know, you don't read that sentence too often. But I'm not the only one. I did an Internet search. Alex, from Mrs. Brausieck's fourth-grade class, is a Fordie, too. "He was very cool because he played for the University of Michigan's football team," Alex wrote. "The last thing that I thought was interesting is that he liked swimming so much that he built a swimming pool in the White House. He must have been athletic all his life." Other bloggers appreciated him from a libertarian perspective: "Ford may be my favorite president because he really didn't do anything. Fly around on a plane, fall down, play some golf. That's my ideal president."

My memories of President Ford are inseparable from memories of childhood. His was the first inauguration I watched on televison. I was seven years old, probably wearing a pair of Toughskins and a double-knit polyester shirt with a batwing collar. I recall standing in the family room, next to a couch covered with a green-and-orange zigzag patterned afghan. My mother had to adjust the antenna to bring in the local CBS channel. That was the moment the '70s began for me.

Being from Michigan, I thought the new president's thin, measured drone was exactly how an authority figure should sound. He talked like Mr. Dwelley, the nice old man next door who was always good for a bowl of ice cream. Jimmy Carter sounded like someone on Hee-Haw. On Election Day 1976, I heard Barry Manilow's "It's A Miracle" on the car radio, and told my father, "That's what they'll be singing if Carter wins!" By Wednesday morning recess, I still had hope, telling a fourth-grade Democrat that Ford could still win, if he took New York. Alas, New York told Ford to drop dead. Michigan's only president had lost.

A few years ago, I made a pilgrimage to the Gerald R. Ford Museum and Library, in Grand Rapids, Mich. The building sits beside the city's namesake rapids, which are barely a ripple in the cider-colored Grand River. The boom and churn of whitewater would be too dramatic for that content Midwestern burg. Sinclair Lewis could have set a novel in Grand Rapids. Its burghers are frugal in business, Republican in politics, and Protestant Reformed in the struggle towards heaven. The local college is named for John Calvin; the largest grocery store chain was, until a few years ago, called "Meijer's Thrifty Acres." If a Grand Rapidian wants to show off, he decorates his Buick with a bumper sticker that crows "If You Ain't Dutch, You Ain't Much."

Ford wasn't Dutch, but he embodied the city he represented in Congress for twenty-five years. He never grasped for the presidency; he got the job because he was stolid and hardworking, a good guy, well-liked by his fellow Congressmen. After offering forgiveness to his disgraced predecessor, Ford provided America with the cheerful jock blandness it needed to recover from Nixon's Richard III brooding.

His presidential library is both the humblest and the most colorful display imaginable. The first room didn't even mention Ford. It was about the Disco Era that coincided with his presidency. Flashing lights tinted plaster dancers, Marvin Gaye sang "What's Goin' On?", a TV played Alka-Seltzer's "I Can't Believe I Ate the Whole Thing" commercial. Did you own a Pet Rock, a crocheted wall hanging, a Carpenters eight-track, a smiley-face poster? Did you have a ticket to see Blue Oyster Cult and Kiss at the Michigan Concert Palace? If so, your youth was on display here. Ford was our least flashy president, but this man from the fox-trot generation was the indulgent father who led the country through the peak of the sexual revolution. For a politician, Ford was amazingly secure: I can't imagine Lyndon Johnson allowing himself to be upstaged by a display of Janis Joplin's go-go boots.

Ford was aware that he didn't make history, history made him. Specifically Watergate, the subject of the next room. Still no Ford there, but you could watch a video of John Chancellor announcing the Saturday Night Massacre, see a door and filing cabinet from the Democratic National Committee office, an Oval Office tape recorder, and a letter from Ford to Nixon, recommending replacements for Vice President Spiro Agnew (Ford mentioned "John Connally, Mel Laird, Rockefeller, Reagan," but not himself).

Although his name is on the museum (as well as the local freeway, airport and federal building), Ford seemed to feel that visitors didn't really come to learn about him. When the museum finally got around to his life story, I learned that the son of the owner of Ford Paint and Varnish Co. was an all-city football center and an Eagle Scout. In his University of Michigan yearbook, under a photo of the silk-haired, dark-browed senior (the young Ford was handsome enough to model for "Look" magazine) there is this epitaph: "He never smokes, drinks, swears or tells dirty stories ... he's not a bit fraudulent, and we can't find anything really nasty to say about him."

Those qualities helped Ford win the football team's most valuable player award. They helped make him vice-president. Ford made no enemies in the House of Representatives. When it was time to replace Spiro Agnew, Speaker Carl Albert told Nixon that Ford "would be the easiest man that I know of to confirm." Ford's next promotion was noted with this White House personnel memo: CHANGE: Gerald R. Ford, Vice President to President, effective 12:05 p.m., Aug. 9, 1974. The Pardon was the most famous act of Ford's presidency. People still wonder whether he struck a pardon-for-presidency deal with Nixon, but there's an insistence of Ford's innocence at the museum, in a statement he read after Nixon released the expletive-undeleted White House tapes.

Ford had been traveling the country, defending his president, but during Nixon's final week, he told the Cabinet in his typical workmanlike, repetitive prose, "Had I known and had it been disclosed to me what has been disclosed in reference to Watergate affair in the last 24 hours, I would not have made a number of the statements that I have made, either as a minority leader or as Vice President of the United States."

Ford sacrificed his political future to spare Nixon from prison. The outraged telegrams were arranged on a table — from Dr. Spock, from game-show host Allen Ludden, from an old law-school classmate who had been on a "Jerry-to-Jerry basis" with Ford for 35 years. Ford's own press secretary, Jerald TerHorst, resigned in disappointment.

What do we remember about Ford, the president? He guided us through the last remnants of the 1960s. In a room devoted to his foreign policy, there's a section of the helicopter that rescued the last stragglers from Saigon. In another room, the pistol wielded by Squeaky Fromme, the Manson follower and aspiring assassin. His one original slogan was WIN — "Whip Inflation Now." It was commemorated on buttons, pens, medallions, playing cards, and a needlepoint sampler. His major contribution to modern America: legislation allowing the development of the ATM machine. Ford was colorless — Rich Little used to complain that his voice offered no features for the impressionist. An Oval Office model featured a recorded voice of "Ford" barking orders, but that actor couldn't quite capture his plain speaking. His 1976 defeat was inevitable: only the larger-than-life characters are asked back. An election-night photo of a grim-faced Ford watching returns with Joe Garagiola showed the one moment of disappointment in a happy, optimistic life.

Ford was the last president from the industrial North, and the last Republican who truly represented the Party of Lincoln. A Rotarian when it came to economics, he was a social progressive who supported civil rights, Roe v. Wade, and the Equal Rights Amendment. As the election map shows, Carter swept the old Confederacy, while Ford carried the cradles of the GOP — Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Michigan, Illinois.

After losing the presidency, Ford didn't go back to Grand Rapids. Like so many Michiganders, he retired to the Sun Belt — Palm Springs, Calif. — where he played golf in those loud checked pants that were as much a part of mid-70s style as wide lapels and sideburns. A few people resented him for leaving. When there was a proposal to turn his old house into a historic site, one neighbor snapped, "There's enough stuff named after him already."

Ford was just a local guy who had a big-shot job for two-and-a-half years. Why the fuss? He was more human than most presidents we remember — Reagan and Clinton were too smooth, the Bushes too aristocratic. His story has an "It Could Happen to You" quality. Nixon used to sit behind his Oval Office desk and crack, "Can you imagine Jerry Ford in this chair?" Nixon thought only a great man could handle the presidency. Ford proved that a decent one could, too.

E-mail Ted McClelland at tedsgarage at yahoo dot com.