Gerald R. Ford, who picked up the pieces of Richard Nixon’s scandal- shattered White House as the 38th president and the only one never elected to nationwide office, has died, his wife, Betty, said Tuesday. He was 93.
“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,” Betty Ford said in a brief statement issued from her husband’s office in Rancho Mirage, Calif. “His life was filled with love of God, his family and his country.”
He died at 6:45 p.m. Pacific time Tuesday at his home in Rancho Mirage, about 130 miles east of Los Angeles, his office said. Ford battled pneumonia in January and underwent two heart treatments – including an angioplasty – in August at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.
President Bush issued a statement from the White House calling Ford “a great American.”
Ford was the longest-living president, followed by Ronald Reagan, who also died at 93.
He was also a longtime resident of Beaver Creek. In October, Ford’s spokeswoman announced that he was considering selling his Colorado home after frail health forced him to cancel plans to spend the season in the mountains.
Bush expressed his condolences: “Laura and I are greatly saddened by the passing of former President Gerald R. Ford. President Ford was a great American who gave many years of dedicated service to our country. … The American people will always admire Gerald Ford’s devotion to duty, his personal character and the honorable conduct of his administration.”
Former first lady Nancy Rea gan issued a statement as well: “I was deeply saddened this evening when I heard of Jerry Ford’s death. Ronnie and I always considered him a dear friend and close political ally.
“His accomplishments and devotion to our country are vast, and even long after he left the presidency he made it a point to speak out on issues important to us all.”
Accidental president
Ford was an accidental president, Nixon’s hand-picked successor, a man of much political experience who had never run on a national ticket. He was as open and straightforward as Nixon was tightly controlled and conspiratorial.
Minutes after Nixon resigned in disgrace over the Watergate scandal and flew into exile, Ford took office and famously declared: “Our long national nightmare is over.”
But he revived the debate over Watergate a month later by granting Nixon a pardon for all crimes he committed as president.
That single act, it was widely believed, cost Ford election to a term of his own in 1976, but it won praise in later years as a courageous act that allowed the nation to move on.
The Vietnam War ended in defeat for the U.S. during his presidency with the fall of Saigon in April 1975. In a speech as the end neared, Ford said: “Today, America can regain the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam. But it cannot be achieved by refighting a war that is finished as far as America is concerned.”
Evoking Abraham Lincoln, he said it was time to “look forward to an agenda for the future, to unify, to bind up the nation’s wounds.”
Ford also earned a place in history as the first unelected vice president, chosen by Nixon to replace Spiro Agnew, also forced from office by scandal.
He was in the White House only 895 days but changed it more than it changed him.
Even after two women tried separately to kill him, the presidency of Jerry Ford remained open and plain. Not imperial. Not reclusive. And, of greatest satisfaction to a nation numbed by Watergate, not dishonest.
Even to millions of Americans who had voted two years earlier for Nixon, the transition to Ford’s leadership was one of the most welcomed in the history of the democratic process – despite the fact that it occurred without an election.
After the Watergate ordeal, Americans liked their new president – and first lady Betty, whose candor charmed the country.
They liked her for speaking openly about problems of young people, including her own daughter; they admired her for not hiding that she had a mastectomy – in fact, her example caused thousands of women to seek breast examinations.
And she remained one of the country’s most admired women even after the Fords left the White House when she was hospitalized in 1978 and admitted to having become addicted to drugs and alcohol she took for painful arthritis and a pinched nerve in her neck.
Four years later she founded the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, a substance-abuse facility next to Eisenhower Medical Center.
“Solid, dependable, loyal”
In a long congressional career in which he rose to be House Republican leader, Ford lit few fires. In the words of the Congressional Quarterly, he “built a reputation for being solid, dependable and loyal – a man more comfortable carrying out the programs of others than in initiating things on his own.”
When Agnew resigned in a bribery scandal in October 1973, Ford was one of four finalists to succeed him: Texan John Connally, New York’s Nelson Rockefeller and California’s Ronald Reagan.
“Personal factors enter into such a decision,” Nixon recalled for a Ford biographer in 1991. “I knew all of the final four personally and had great respect for each one of them, but I had known Jerry Ford longer and better than any of the rest.
“We had served in Congress together. I had often campaigned for him in his district,” Nixon continued. But Ford had something the others didn’t, he would be easily confirmed by Congress, something that could not be said of Rockefeller, Rea gan and Connally.
So Ford it was. He became the first vice president appointed under the 25th Amendment to the Constitution.
On Aug. 9, 1974, after seeing Nixon off to exile, Ford assumed the office. The next morning, he still made his own breakfast and padded to the front door in his pajamas to get the newspaper.
Said a ranking Democratic congressman: “Maybe he is a plodder, but right now the advantages of having a plodder in the presidency are enormous.”
But his relations with Congress did not always run smoothly. He vetoed 66 bills in his barely two years as president. Congress overturned 12 Ford vetoes.
In his memoir, “A Time to Heal,” Ford wrote, “When I was in the Congress myself, I thought it fulfilled its constitutional obligations in a very responsible way, but after I became president, my perspective changed.”
“Act of courage”
The decision to pardon Nixon won Ford a John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award in 2001. Sen. Edward Kennedy, acknowledging he had criticized Ford at the time, called the pardon “an extraordinary act of courage that historians recognize was truly in the national interest.”
While Ford had not sought the job, he came to relish it. He had once told Congress that even if he succeeded Nixon he would not run for president in 1976. Within weeks of taking the oath, he changed his mind.
He was undaunted even after two attempts on his life in September 1975. Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, a 26-year-old follower of Charles Manson, was arrested after she aimed a semiautomatic pistol at Ford on Sept. 5 in Sacramento, Calif. A Secret Service agent grabbed her and Ford was unhurt.
Seventeen days later, Sara Jane Moore, a 45-year-old political activist, was arrested in San Francisco after she fired a gun at the president. Again, Ford was unhurt.
Both women are serving life terms in federal prison.
Asked at a news conference to recite his accomplishments, Ford replied: “We have restored public confidence in the White House and in the executive branch of government.”
As to his failings, he responded, “I will leave that to my opponents. I don’t think there have been many.”
Played at Michigan
Ford spent most of his boyhood in Grand Rapids, Mich.
He was born Leslie King on July 14, 1913, in Omaha. His parents were divorced when he was less than a year old, and his mother returned to her parents in Grand Rapids, where she later married Gerald R. Ford Sr. He adopted the boy and renamed him.
Ford played center on the University of Michigan’s 1932 and 1933 national champion football teams. He got professional offers from the Detroit Lions and the Green Bay Packers but chose to study law at Yale, working his way through as an assistant varsity football coach and freshman boxing coach.
Ford got his first exposure to national politics at Yale, working as a volunteer in Wendell L. Willkie’s 1940 Republican campaign for president. After World War II service with the Navy in the Pacific, he went back to practicing law in Grand Rapids and became active in Republican reform politics.
His stepfather was the local Republican chairman, and Michigan Sen. Arthur H. Vandenberg was looking for a fresh young internationalist to replace the area’s isolationist congressman.
Ford beat Rep. Bartel Jonkman by a 2-to-1 ratio in the Republican primary and then went on to win the election with 60.5 percent of the vote, the lowest margin he ever got.
He had proposed to Elizabeth Bloomer, a dancer and fashion coordinator, earlier that year, 1948. She became one of his hardest-working campaigners and they were married shortly before the election. They had three sons, Michael, John and Steven, and a daughter, Susan.
Funeral arrangements are to be announced today.
Gerald R. Ford
Born: July 14, 1913, in Omaha
Education: University of Michigan, bachelor’s degree, 1935; Yale University, law degree, 1941
Military service: U.S. Navy, 1942-46
Religion: Episcopalian
Family: Married Elizabeth “Betty” Bloomer, 1948. Four children: Michael (born in 1950), John (1952), Steven (1956) and Susan (1957)
Political career: Member, U.S. Congress, 1949-73; U.S. vice president, 1973-74; U.S. president, 1974-77
