President Ford
The abiding cliche about Gerald Ford -- who died Tuesday at age 93 -- is that he was a decent man who steadied the country but held the White House too briefly to leave a major imprint. We've always thought that view of his Presidency is too diminishing, not least because he led the nation at a dangerous time and resisted political furies that could have done the U.S. far more harm.</br></br>"America's Suicide Attempt" is how the historian Paul Johnson describes the 1970s. And it is important to recall the bad temper of the times that Ford inherited in becoming the 38th President. He succeeded Richard Nixon, who had resigned over the Watergate coverup and amid an unpopular war in Vietnam. He faced large liberal majorities in Congress that were emboldened by their ouster of Nixon and set to revive the Great Society. And he had to clean up the financial problems caused by a burst of inflation and wage and price controls. Ford navigated all of these traumas better than he gets credit for.</br></br>---</br></br>It is true that Ford was something of an accidental President, the only one in U.S. history never elected as either President or Vice President. Before Nixon picked him to replace the disgraced Spiro Agnew as his Vice President, Ford had been contemplating retirement from his Grand Rapids, Michigan, House seat. But like another unlikely President from the Midwest, Harry Truman, he had reserves of honesty and fortitude that served him well.</br></br>He made a particular contribution in pardoning Nixon, though he knew Nixon's enemies would accuse him of a quid pro quo. The decision cost him dearly in the polls and may have cost him the election in 1976, but it also spared the country from years of division over a criminal trial that special prosecutor Leon Jaworski seemed determined to pursue.