Editorial: Honorable stand-in

Sacramento Bee ^ | 12/28/6 | Editor

[SmithL]

Sometimes, in what may be the only country whose people rhapsodize about a national dream, what the people need most is something less fanciful: integrity, common sense and a common touch, without flourishes, rhetorical or otherwise.

Gerald Ford brought those qualities to a troubled country at the right moment. His accidental presidency may not be rated highly by historians, but Ford was the kind of man a nation in agony needed.

Uniquely, Ford served as both vice president (named to the post after President Nixon's vice president, Spiro Agnew, resigned in disgrace over a bribery scandal) and then president without having been elected to either office. And Nelson Rockefeller was chosen by Ford to be vice president and confirmed by Congress after Nixon resigned over the Watergate coverup and Ford moved into the Oval Office.

Ford's death at age 93 ends a long life untainted by scandal. That such a point needs to be made says something about much in our national life since he left the White House after just 29 months, having lost his bid for election in his own right to Jimmy Carter (who also failed to gain a second term).

It was Ford's fate to become president in a time roiled both by Watergate and Vietnam, which U.S. combat troops had left but where a U.S.-backed South Vietnamese government tried to fend off an armed takeover by Communist North Vietnam -- unsuccessfully, thanks in part to a cutoff of U.S. funds by Congress. At home there were raging inflation and economic stagnation, fueled by Nixon's failed attempt to control wages and prices. Ford's own response, a mostly voluntary program called Whip Inflation Now, also failed.

However lackluster his image, and the eight times Congress overrode his vetoes, Ford, a veteran of 25 years in the House,...

[samtheman]

Ford's own response, a mostly voluntary program called Whip Inflation Now, also failed.

Mostly voluntary... and utterly moronic.

(Maybe we can re-cycle the buttons:         Whip Islam Now)

[Cicero]

Ford was a good man. The media were riding high after their assault on Nixon succeeded, and they weren't about to let Ford accomplish anything at all.

They managed to portray him as a clumsy fool, even though as other Freepers have pointed out he was a great athlete and a Phi Beta Kappa. Al Gore, in contrast, got a D in Nature Studies at Harvard, where his daddy got him admitted, and bill clinton flunked out of Oxford after his political friends got him his Fullbright.

I blush to say that back then, even though I was highly suspicious of Watergate, I believed what they said about Ford.