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First official portrait of President Gerald R. Ford. Photographer: David Hume Kennerly Date: August 27, 1974 Credit: Courtesy Gerald R. Ford Library (public domain)

Gerald R. Ford
1913-2006
politician (Republican party), United States President

[Ed. Note: Mr. Ford is related to the Sadowski (Sandusky) Family through his biological father Leslie L. King.]
Sadowski Progenitors

"Gerald Ford Dies: President led the nation after Watergate"
by Larry Eichel, Inquirer Staff Writer

Gerald R. Ford, 93, the 38th president of the United States and the only man ever to reach the White House without being elected to national office, has died, his wife, Betty, said last night in California.

"My family joins me in sharing the difficult news that Gerald Ford, our beloved husband, father, grandfather and great grandfather has passed away at 93 years of age," she said in a brief statement issued from her husband's office in Rancho Mirage. "His life was filled with love of God, his family and his country."

The statement did not say where Mr. Ford died, or list a cause of death.

Just last month he became the nation's longest-living president, at 93 years, 121 day surpassing the mark of Ronald Reagan.

Mr. Ford, who was appointed vice president after a long career as a Republican congressman from Michigan, succeeded to the presidency on Aug. 9, 1974, upon the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon -- the culmination of the scandal known as Watergate.

"My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over," he said that day after being sworn in. "Our Constitution works. Our great republic is a government of laws and not of men."

A month later, though, he incurred the wrath of millions by granting Nixon a full pardon for Watergate, even though the former president had not been charged with any crime.

Mr. Ford's tenure as president was relatively uneventful and his mark on the nation not particularly lasting. Still, Democrat Jimmy Carter, who defeated him in the 1976 election, used his own inaugural address to salute Mr. Ford for succeeding in one significant mission.

"For myself and for our nation," Carter said, "I want to thank my predecessor for all he has done to heal our land."

In 1999, on the 25th anniversary of his taking office, Mr. Ford was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his post-Watergate efforts toward reconciliation.

Although Mr. Ford was the target of two assassination attempts, his accidental presidency brought the nation more than two years of relative calm, serving as a bridge between the constitutional crisis of the Nixon years and the economic chaos of the Carter era.

Unlike his predecessor, who seemed obsessed with the trappings of the office, Mr. Ford portrayed himself as a regular guy just trying to do a job.

He projected the image of an honest and decent man, albeit one with an unfortunate habit of slipping and falling when the television cameras were rolling. He carried his own luggage. He picked up his own newspaper. He toasted his own English muffin. He once said that he was "a Ford, not a Lincoln."

As chief executive, he succeeded in reducing inflation, in cutting the rate of growth of federal spending and, after seeing the end of the war in Vietnam, in keeping the nation at peace. He presided over the nation's Bicentennial celebration, speaking on July 4,1976, at Independence Hall and at Valley Forge, where he signed the law that made the Revolutionary War site a national historic park.

Mr. Ford would be remembered, as aide Robert L. Hartmann predicted years ago, primarily "for never having been elected, for healing our land, for falling down steps and for pardoning Richard Nixon."

Gerald Ford carne into the world on July 14, 1913, in Omaha, Neb., as Leslie L. King Jr.

His parents -- Leslie L. King and Dorothy Gardner -- were divorced soon after his birth, and Mr. Ford went with his mother to live with her parents in Grand Rapids, Mich. There, his mother married paint salesman Gerald Ford, who adopted the boy and gave him his name.

After graduating from high school, he went to the University of Michigan where he worked his way through college and played football well enough to get offers, which he turned down, to play professionally for the Detroit Lions and Green Bay Packers. Instead, he took a job as a line coach for the Yale University football team before going to Yale Law School and serving in the Navy during World War II.

In 1946, he was elected to Congress from Michigan's Fifth District, which included Grand Rapids, a post he held for 25 years.

Later, he served on the Warren Commission that investigated the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. But he did become known nationally until he became House minority leader in 1965.

In that post, he frequently criticized the policies of the Democratic president, Lyndon B. Johnson. President Johnson responded with two personal attacks that would stick with Mr. Ford the rest of his life: That he had "played football without a helmet" and "couldn't walk and chew gum at the same time."

In 1968, Mr. Ford resisted overtures from Nixon, then a candidate for president, to be his running mate. But in 1973, at a time when Mr. Ford was contemplating retirement from public life, events took command of his career.

On Oct. 10 of that year, Nixon's vice president, Spiro T. Agnew, resigned as a result of a federal investigation into payoffs that Agnew had received while governor of Maryland. Under the 25th Amendment, Nixon had to name a new vice president, subject to confirmation by Congress.

Nixon already had been weakened by Watergate, a scandal that had its roots in the June 1972 break-in at Democratic Party headquarters at a Washington apartment complex. The president did not want a contentious battle on Capitol Hill.

So he tabbed Mr. Ford; knowing that Congressional approval for the well-liked Republican leader would come easily. The new vice president was sworn into office on Dec. 6, 1973.

In that role, Mr. Ford defended Nixon doggedly and clung to the notion that the president would serve out his term.

By the summer of 1974, Nixon's political support was hemorrhaging. On Aug. 8, Nixon announced his plans to resign, and the next day, Gerald Ford became president.

No one could have started a presidency any better than Mr. Ford did.

He had the perfect credentials for the moment. He was an Eagle Scout, a Rotarian, an athlete and a down-to-earth family man. And after declaring that the national nightmare had ended, he made all the right moves.

He announced that the star of the Nixon administration, Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, would remain in office. He traveled to Capitol Hill to speak to Congress, telling his former colleagues: "I don't want a honeymoon with you. I want a good marriage." To bolster the sense of healing his accession had generated, he offered a partial amnesty to Vietnam War resisters.

He demonstrated self-confidence and security by choosing as his own vice president former New York Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller, a longtime presidential aspirant and one of the most powerful, ambitious Republicans in the land.

But things turned sour when, a month after taking office, he announced the Nixon pardon.

"My conscience tells me clearly and certainly that I cannot prolong the bad dreams that continue to reopen a chapter that is closed," Mr. Ford told < p> Mr. Ford would say in retrospect, that he had done a poor job of explaining his motives, which he said had less to do with sympathy for Nixon -- although he did worry about his predecessor's mental health -- than with concern for a functioning government.

And in testimony before a congressional committee that investigated the pardon, he denied speculation that granting it had been part of a deal to bring about Nixon's resignation.

After Mr. Ford announced the pardon, a Gallup Poll showed that his approval rating had dropped from 71 percent to 49 percent. He didn't help matters by suggesting that one cure for the higher prices damaging the economy was for Americans to wear WIN buttons, with WIN standing for Whip Inflation Now.

The next few months brought a recession, severe losses for his Republican Party in the midterm elections, and the final act of the Vietnam War -- the fall of Saigon in April 1975. Mr. Ford's first real crisis was an outgrowth of that drama.

On May 12,1975, an American merchant ship, the SS Mayaguez, carrying a crew of 39, was seized by two Cambodian gun-boats in international waters off the Cambodian coast.

Mr. Ford feared that the incident would become a repetition of the 1968 Pueblo debacle, in which a U.S. spy ship, apparently operating in international waters, had been seized by North Korea and its crew held prisoner for a year. The way to avoid that, he figured, was to use force to prevent the Cambodians from getting their prisoners to shore.

And use force he did. He rescued the crew of the Mayaguez, but the cost was high: 41 American military personnel killed, including 23 in a helicopter crash, and 50 wounded.

Mr. Ford devoted much of his stay in the White House to international relations.

He met twice with the President of the Soviet Union, Leonid Brezhnev. The first meeting was in Vladivostok, Siberia, in November 1974. There, in a session generally perceived as a success, the two men reached agreement on the outlines of what would eventually become the second Strategic Arms Limitation Talks pact. They met again in Helsinki, Finland, nine months later.

His attendance at those meetings and his other trips around the world built an image for him, but not precisely the one he had intended.

When he arrived at the airport in Salzburg, Austria, for a meeting with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, he fell down the rain-slicked, metal steps leading from the plane.

"From that moment on," Mr. Ford remembered, "every time I stumbled or bumped my head or fell in the snow, reporters zeroed in on that to the exclusion of almost everything else. "The news coverage was harmful, but even more damaging was the fact that [comedians] Johnny Carson and Chevy Chase used my 'missteps' for their jokes. Their antics ... helped create the public perception of me as a stumbler. And that wasn't funny."

Nor were the attempts on his life.

On Sept. 5,1975, he was walking across the grounds of the state capitol in Sacramento, Calif., when Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, 26, a disciple of mass murderer Charles Manson, was arrested carrying a pistol and shouting, "This man is not your president."

On Sept. 22, he was coming out of the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco when Sara Jane Moore, 45, a radical activist, took a shot at him from close range and missed.

As president, Mr. Ford pursued policies that were seen as too moderate by many in his party. So it was no great surprise when the champion of the Republican Party's conservative wing, former California Gov. Ronald Reagan, challenged him for the GOP nomination in 1976.

Reagan and his backers were fueled by several of Mr. Ford's decisions which they saw as evidence of an insufficiently hard line vis-a-vis the Soviets. One such move was Mr. Ford's signing of the Helsinki human-rights accord, which, in their minds, gave the Soviet Union a dignity it did not deserve.

Mr. Ford fended off the Reagan challenge, prevailing in a nomination fight that was close, bitter and divisive.

He entered the fall campaign as the overwhelming underdog to Democrat Carter, the former governor of Georgia. With Watergate still fresh in the public mind, the image Carter had cultivated -- of being a problem-solving, intelligent outsider with few Washington connections suited the times.

In competing against Carter, Mr. Ford became the first sitting president to debate his opponent, thereby making the debates a future of the American political process. The Ford-Carter encounters were only the second such series in history, after Nixon-Kennedy in 1960.

The second of the three Ford-Carter debates, held in San Francisco, helped guarantee Mr. Ford's defeat.

During that encounter, he committed one of the more memorable gaffes in modern American politics. Asked about U.S.-Soviet relations, he responded by saying, "There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford administration."

What Mr. Ford meant, he would explain later, was not that the governments of Eastern Europe were free from Soviet dominance but that the "heart, soul and spirit" of the people of Eastern Europe were. But that was not what he had said, and his reluctance to concede his mistake damaged his campaign.

Still, the race tightened in the final days. The final tally showed Carter the victor, winning the popular vote 51 percent to 48 percent, the electoral vote 297-240.

Upon leaving office at age 63, Mr. Ford became a semi-retired senior statesman. He divided his time between one condominium in Vail, Colo., where he skied, and another in Rancho Mirage, Calif., where he golfed. He worked on his memoirs, gave speeches and served on corporate boards.

But as Carter struggled in office and Reagan moved into the role of Republican front-runner, Mr. Ford dreamed that his party would turn to him once again in 1980.

When no groundswell of support emerged, he chose not to run, clearing the way for Reagan. But Mr. Ford almost did become the Republican candidate for vice president.

During the GOP convention in Detroit in July 1980, Reagan toyed with putting Mr. Ford into the No. 2 slot as part of what party leaders called the "dream ticket." No former president had ever accepted such an offer; Mr. Ford was interested enough to talk about it.

Ultimately, Reagan balked at Mr. Ford's terms and turned instead to George Bush, the runner-up in the primaries.

In the years that followed, Mr. Ford faded from the national scene. He granted occasional interviews, served on several commissions, and wrote op ed pieces, often bemoaning the increasing conservatism of his party.

In 1999, the airport in Grand Rapids, his political home, was renamed in his honor, as was the school of public policy at the University of Michigan.

In 2000, he suffered a mild stroke while attending the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia. He subsequently recovered and was healthy enough in 2004 to join the other living ex-presidents at the funeral of Ronald Reagan.

Mr. Ford is survived by Betty, his wife; three sons, Jack, Mike and Steve; and a daughter, Susan.

Obituary Article: "Gerald Ford Dies: President led the nation after Watergate" by Larry Eichel, Inquirer Staff Writer; Philadelphia Inquirer, Dec. 27, 2006

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