Former President Ford dead at 93

LOS ANGELES - Gerald R. Ford, who picked up the pieces of Richard Nixon's scandal-shattered White House as the 38th and only unelected president in America's history, 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," Mrs. Ford 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 Ford died or list a cause of death. Ford had battled pneumonia in January 2006 and underwent two heart treatments — including an angioplasty — in August at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.

He was the longest living president, followed by Ronald Reagan, who also died at 93. Ford had been living at his desert home in Rancho Mirage, Calif., about 130 miles east of Los Angeles.

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 straight-forward as Nixon was tightly controlled and conspiratorial.

He took office minutes after Nixon flew off into exile and declared "our long national nightmare is over." But he revived the debate 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 the history books as the first unelected vice president, chosen by Nixon to replace Spiro Agnew who also was 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 Richard 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.

Ford slowed down in recent years. He had been hospitalized in August 2000 when he suffered one or more small strokes while attending the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia.

The following year, he joined former presidents Carter, Bush and Clinton at a memorial service in Washington three days after the Sept. 11 attacks. In June 2004, the four men and their wives joined again at a funeral service in Washington for former President Reagan. But in November 2004, Ford was unable to join the other former presidents at the dedication of the Clinton presidential library in Little Rock, Ark.

In January, Ford was hospitalized with pneumonia for 12 days. He wasn't seen in public until April 23, when President Bush was in town and paid a visit to the Ford home. Bush, Ford and Betty posed for photographers outside the residence before going inside for a private get-together.

The intensely private couple declined reporter interview requests and were rarely seen outside their home in Rancho Mirage's gated Thunderbird Estates, other than to attend worship services at the nearby St. Margaret's Episcopal Church in Palm Desert.

In a long congressional career in which he rose to be House Republican leader, Ford lit few fires. In the words of 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 then, 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, Reagan 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."

It was rare that Ford was ever as eloquent as he was for those dramatic moments of his swearing-in at the White House.

"My fellow Americans," he said, "our long national nightmare is over. Our Constitution works. Our great republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule."

And, true to his reputation as unassuming Jerry, he added: "I am acutely aware that you have not elected me as your president by your ballots. So I ask you to confirm me with your prayers."

For Ford, a full term was not to be. He survived an intraparty challenge from Ronald Reagan only to lose to Democrat Jimmy Carter in November. In the campaign, he ignored Carter's record as governor of Georgia and concentrated on his own achievements as president.

Carter won 297 electoral votes to his 240. After Reagan came back to defeat Carter in 1980, the two former presidents became collaborators, working together on joint projects.

Even as president, Ford often talked with reporters several times a day. He averaged 200 outside speeches a year as House Republican leader, a pace he kept up as vice president and diminished, seemingly, only slightly as chief executive. He kept speaking after leaving the White House, generally for fees of $15,000 to $20,000.

Ford never second-guessed Nixon pardon
LAURIE KELLMAN, Associated Press Writer

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061227/ap_on_re_us/ford_nixon_pardon

WASHINGTON - The presidential pardon of Richard Nixon's Watergate misdeeds defined Gerald Ford's singular presidency. That's not exactly what Ford had hoped. He saw Nixon's pardon as the first step toward being elected to the presidency on the merits of his own work. And there was no way Ford could focus on the nation's business as long as Nixon's legal fate remained unresolved. A criminal trial could take years, and Nixon would not wait out that time quietly, Ford wrote in his autobiography.

Yes, he hoped that pardoning Nixon would soothe the wounds of anger and distrust inflicted on the nation by Watergate. He felt, too, that Nixon and his family had suffered enough.

But in pardoning Nixon Sept. 8, 1974, Ford was tending to his own future, too.

"I had to get the monkey off my back," Ford wrote in his 1979 memoir, "A Time to Heal."

In fact, pardoning Nixon did nothing to seal Ford's place in history as, he hoped, a popularly elected president. Instead, the pardon had the effect of denying Ford his goal and delivering his opponent, Democrat Jimmy Carter, the White House in the 1976 election.

Even as he pondered the question that summer of 1974, Ford saw the downside no matter what he did.

If he sided with the 56 percent of Americans who wanted Nixon denied a pardon and tried in court, the legal drama would overshadow Ford's administration and possibly his election campaign.

Nixon, after all, had not been indicted but stood accused of serious crimes that would take time — perhaps years — to sort out. A grand jury had voted 19-0 to name him an unindicted co-conspirator in the coverup of White House involvement in the 1972 break-in at Democratic headquarters in the Watergate office building.

On the other hand, granting a pardon could touch off an uproar that would sink Ford' s election hopes.

"I'm aware of that," Ford recalled snapping at a cautious aide. "It could easily cost me the next election if I run again. But damn it, I don't need the polls to tell me whether I'm right or wrong."

Ford sought wisdom from the nation's founders, who had foreseen the possibility of a president faced with just such a choice.

"Oftentimes a pardon can be issued to maintain public order and confidence," Alexander Hamilton counseled from the pages of The Federalist.

The Supreme Court, too, offered direction in the form of a 1915 case in which the justices ruled that a pardon "carries an imputation of guilt, acceptance and a confession of it."

"So I had the legal authority to move ahead," Ford wrote. But arriving at the decision to grant the pardon was only the first step in Ford's painful political and personal struggle to shake himself — and the nation — free of Watergate.

Nixon, of all people, held up the process when he balked at Ford's request for a public statement of contrition.

"President Nixon is not issuing any statement whatsoever regarding Watergate, whether Jerry Ford pardons him or not," declared Nixon's spokesman, Ron Zeigler, Ford wrote.

The defiant style and the condescending use of Ford's name tempted Ford's aides to get up and leave a meeting with Nixon's representatives. Instead, Zeigler drafted three versions of the statement, the first "disastrous," Ford wrote.

The final draft, while worded more strongly, bore no acknowledgment of guilt.

"That the way I tried to deal with Watergate was the wrong way is a burden I shall bear for every day of the life that is left to me," Nixon wrote.

Before taking the statement back to Washington, Ford's aides asked to see Nixon.

Shuttered in his San Clemente, Calif., offices, Nixon was gaunt, shrunken and unresponsive. His handshake was weak, Ford's aides reported.

"His attention span was short," Ford wrote. "What few remarks he made were left incomplete, in mid sentence."

"I was taking one hell of a risk, and he didn't seem to be responsive at all," Ford wrote.

Still, he accepted the statement and made his way to the Oval Office. Ford turned to face the cameras, and the nation.

"My conscience tells me it is my duty not merely to proclaim domestic tranquility but to use every means that I have to ensure it," he explained. And with that, Ford read from the text of the pardon.

"Finally, it was done," Ford wrote in his book. "It was an unbelievable lifting of a burden from my shoulders. I felt very certain that I had made the right decision, and I was confident that I could now proceed without being harassed by Nixon or his problems any more."

___

Gerald R. Ford Library and Museum: http://www.fordlibrarymuseum.gov

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