Gerald Ford

(PD) Photo: David Hume Kennerly / Ford Library & Museum
Gerald Ford, official portrait

Gerald Ford (Gerald Rudolph Ford, Jr., usually called Jerry Ford) (1913-2006) was the 38th president of the United States (1974-77), the first one not elected as either president or vice-president. Ford was appointed to the vice-presidency by President Richard M. Nixon under the provisions of the 25th Amendment and became president on Aug. 9, 1974, after Nixon was forced to resign. He received heavy criticism for pardoning Nixon. Ford watched helpless as South Vietnam fell to a Communist invasion, after all American forces had been removed. He promoted détente with the Soviet Union, incurring the wrath of the conservatives, led Ronald Reagan. He narrowly defeated Reagan for renomination in 1976 by the Republican party, then lost narrowly to Democrat Jimmy Carter.

Early Career

Ford was born on July 14, 1913, in Omaha, Nebraska, and was named Leslie King after his father, a Montana wool trader. When Ford was two years old his parents were divorced, and his mother, Dorothy Gardner King, moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan There she met and married Gerald R. Ford, owner of a small paint manufacturing business. Ford adopted her son, and the boy's name was changed to Gerald R. Ford, Jr. Gerald Ford, Sr., described by biographers as a dominant athletic man and strong believer in self-discipline, later fathered three sons. He never told young Gerald that he was adopted until years later.

At South High School in Grand Rapids, the younger Ford was all-city football center for three years and also made the all-state team. As a high school senior, Ford was chosen the "most popular" member of his class; the prize was a trip to Washington, D.C. Ford continued his football career at the University of Michigan. He was a substitute center and linebacker on Michigan's undefeated football teams of 1932 and 1933. In 1934 he became the Wolverines' most valuable member, and in 1935 he played in the college all-star game against the professional Chicago Bears. Ford also maintained a respectable B average in his studies and earned money by waiting on tables. He graduated in 1935 with a bachelor of arts degree.

Ford refused bids from professional football teams in order to attend Yale Law School. He alternated semesters at study with work as an assistant football and freshman boxing coach. His football charges included future senators William Proxmire of Wisconsin and Robert Taft, Jr., of Ohio.

Ford graduated in 1941 in the top third of his class and returned to Grand Rapids to practice law. Less than a year later he joined the Navy as an ensign. He served 47 months, including 18 months aboard the light aircraft carrier USS Monterey in the South Pacific, and was discharged in January 1946 as a lieutenant commander. Back home, Ford plunged into law practice and community work.

Congress

Both his father, a Republican Party leader in Grand Rapids, and the late Republican Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg urged young Ford to run for Congress. Vandenberg, who was an internationalist, wanted to oust the isolationist Republican congressman from the Grand Rapids area district, Bartel Jonkman. Ford won the primary by more than 9,000 votes and went on to an easy victory.

Three weeks before that first election, on Oct. 15, 1948, Ford married Elizabeth Bloomer, a former model and aspiring dancer. Born in Chicago, she had lived most of her life in Grand Rapids and had been married and divorced. The Fords subsequently had three sons and a daughter.

In 1949, the year he entered Congress, Ford was selected by the U.S. Junior Chamber of Commerce as one of the country's ten outstanding young men. Ford's rise in the House was steady, assured by his repeated reelection from the strongly Republican district in a conservative region.

After two years in the House, Ford won a seat on the powerful House Appropriations Committee and soon became the top Republican on its defense subcommittee. He became an expert on defense and military affairs and emerged as a strong hawk in the cold war years.

House leader

Ford headed a group of 15 House Republicans who produced an exhaustive study endorsing the Cold War policies of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. In 1963 Ford took over as chairman of the House Republican caucus. Two years later, with the help of House Republican colleagues Melvin Laird of Wisconsin, Robert Griffin of Michigan, and Charles Goodell of New York, Ford became House minority leader by ousting Charles Halleck of Indiana by a 73-67 vote. In the meantime Ford accepted the appointment by new president Lyndon B. Johnon to the Warren Commission, which investigated the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He supported Kennedy and Johnson's involvement in the Vietnam War.

Domestically, he was consistently conservative, and led the fight against Johnson's Great Society. As long as the Conservative Coalition was intact he usually won; Johnson's landslide in 1964 over Barry Goldwater brought in scores of new Democrats and opened the door for liberal legislation. Ford's conservatrism was endorsed by the voters in 1966, as the New Deal Coalition started flying apart. For had a good television persona, which he needed as the main spokesman for his party, He showed a knack for wooing more liberal congressmen, especially within his own party. His easygoing amiability made him widely popular. Ford had harbored only one further ambition--to become speaker of the House--but he became discouraged when the Republican Party could not gain a majority.

Vice-President

In October 1973, Vice-President Spiro T. Agnew resigned in the wake of disclosures that he had accepted illegal bribes. President Nixon, empowered by the 25th Amendment to nominate a successor, was said to favor John Connally, former secretary of the treasury. But, Laird, then a White House adviser, convinced Nixon that Connally would be unacceptable to Congress, which had to confirm the nomination, and recommended Ford. Nixon nominated Ford on Oct. 12, 1973. Ford then underwent an intensive investigation of his personal life by the FBI and by Congress. Charges by a lobbyist that Ford had done political favors for contributors were found to be fabricated. Ford's leadership of an effort in 1970 to impeach liberal Supreme court Justice Wiliam O. Douglas was attributed to soldierly loyalty to the White House. Ford was confirmed by Congress and was sworn in as vice-president on Dec. 6, 1973.

As vice-president, Ford called inflation "Public Enemy Number One" and urged budget cuts. He was an ardent foe of school busing to achieve racial integration. He repeatedly defended President Nixon's innocence in the Watergate Scandal and its cover-up. Ford dropped that defense only when Nixon, on August 5, 1974, released tapes that showed his complicity in the cover-up and made his impeachment and conviction inevitable. Nixon then resigned, and Ford became president on Aug. 9, 1974.

Presidency

Ford nominated Nelson Rockefeller for vice-president and kept Henry Kissinger as secretary of state.There was little criticism of Ford until, on September 8, he gave Nixon an unconditional pardon for all federal crimes he might have committed in office. Soon after, Ford offered Vietnam War military deserters and draft dodgers a conditional amnesty, with penalties. Most war resisters still in hiding or exile ignored the offer.

The initial goodwill toward Ford was further eroded by his handling of the nation's economic problems. He took office at a time of the worst inflation in the nation's history and high unemployment; by early 1975 the jobless rate was the worst since the Great Depression. Ford insisted that inflation was the greater problem. He sought to slow it, as Nixon had, by severe restraints on government spending for social programs. He also tried to curb private spending by asking Congress to raise the taxes on personal incomes. But the Democratic majority refused, and in congressional elections in November Democrats increased their majorities to three-fifths in the Senate and two-thirds in the House. In January 1975 Ford finally yielded to liberal demands for a program to stop the economic slump and promote hiring. He proposed personal income tax rebates, especially to higher-income people, who might spend extra money on expensive durable goods, such as automobiles. Liberals criticized Ford's proposal for offering little relief for poor people unable even to afford necessities such as food and housing. They pushed through Congress a modified, though modest, tax rebate bill favoring lower-income people. Ford signed it reluctantly. He continued to resist liberal demands for massive public works spending to employ the jobless.

Ford also wanted to make the domestic energy industry more profitable, even at the cost of inflation, in order to encourage more private investment in it and thereby reduce the dependence on oil from abroad. He sought therefore to cause oil prices to rise. He proposed huge public subsidies for developing new energy sources.

Deregulation--that is the removal of the old New Deal controls on transportation, communications, finance and other businesses began under Ford (Nixon was more of a New Dealer who liked federal regulations), and continued under Carter and Reagan until most of the New Deal controls on business had ended.

Foreign affairs

In foreign affairs, Ford preserved the détente forged by Nixon and Kissinger. The Helsinki Treaty, ratifying the postwar borders in Europe, was signed in August 1975. Republican conservatives, led by Ronald Reagan, bemoaned détente as another indicator of the slippage of American power and prestige, and laid plans to defeat Ford's bid for reelection.

Vietnam

He blamed Congress for Communist North Vietnam's conquest of American ally South Vietnam in April 1975, because it had banned the renewed use of U.S. military forces there and refused his request for more aid to the crumbling resistance. In May 1975, when Cambodians seized a U.S. merchant ship, the Mayagüez, sailing close to their coast, he demonstrated that he could still act with secrecy and haste by sending U.S. marines to help recover the vessel and planes to bomb Sihanoukville. In 1975-1976 he sanctioned secret U.S. aid to the anti-Soviet factions in the civil war in Angola, which ended in a leftist victory.

But by late 1976 the United States was not involved in any war. Inflation had slowed. Business had recovered from the deep slump, though unemployment was still high.

Reelection fails

In the 1976 presidential campaign, Ford was opposed by Jimmy Carter, a former Georgia governor who promised to restore trust in government, reduce unemployment, and shrink the federal bureaucracy. Ford, after overcoming a strong challenge for the Republican nomination from conservative Ronald Reagan, replaced liberal Rockefeller with conservative Senator Robert Dole of Kansas, as his running mate. He campaigned on his record of having blocked expensive social programs and thereby slowed inflation. He also accused Carter of being fuzzy on issues and of lacking experience in foreign affairs. However inb one debate Ford blundered badly by saying Poland was free of Soviet domination. In a close election Ford lost, thus remaining the only president who never won a national election.

Bibliography

• Abramowitz, Alan I. "The Impact of a Presidential Debate on Voter Rationality, " American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 22, No. 3 (Aug., 1978), pp. 680-690, advanced analysis of debate with Carter on unemployment, showing voters shifter their opinion to agree with Ford or Carter. in JSTOR
• Cannon, James. Time and Chance: Gerald Ford's Appointment With History (1998), the major biography
• Greene, John Robert. The Presidency of Gerald R. Ford (1995), 272pp, the standard scholarly survey. excerpt and text search
• Greene, John Robert. The Limits of Power: The Nixon and Ford Administrations (1992)
• Greene, John Robert. Betty Ford: Candor And Courage In The White House (2004) excerpt and text search
• Mieczkowski, Yanek. Gerald Ford And The Challenges Of The 1970s (2005) excerpt and text search
• Werth, Barry. 31 Days: Gerald Ford, the Nixon Pardon and A Government in Crisis (2007), 416pp

Primary sources

• Ford, Gerald R. A time to heal: the autobiography of Gerald R. Ford (1979)

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