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The "accidental" president whose innate decency and steady hand restored the presidency after its greatest crisis
When Gerald R. Ford entered the White House in August 1974, he inherited a presidency tarnished by the Watergate scandal, the economy was in a recession, the Vietnam War was drawing to a close, and he had taken office without having been elected. Most observers gave him little chance of success, especially after he pardoned Richard Nixon just a month into his presidency, an action that outraged many Americans, but which Ford thought was necessary to move the nation forward.
Many people today think of Ford as a man who stumbled a lot--clumsy on his feet and in politics--but acclaimed historian Douglas Brinkley shows him to be a man of independent thought and conscience, who never allowed party loyalty to prevail over his sense of right and wrong. As a young congressman, he stood up to the isolationists in the Republican leadership, promoting a vigorous role for America in the world. Later, as House minority leader and as president, he challenged the right wing of his party, refusing to bend to their vision of confrontation with the Communist world. And after the fall of Saigon, Ford also overruled his advisers by allowing Vietnamese refugees to enter the United States, arguing that to do so was the humane thing to do.
Brinkley draws on exclusive interviews with Ford and on previously unpublished documents (including a remarkable correspondence between Ford and Nixon stretching over four decades), fashioning a masterful reassessment of Gerald R. Ford's presidency and his underappreciated legacy to the nation.
- Sales Rank: #499773 in Books
- Published on: 2007-02-06
- Released on: 2007-02-06
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.50" h x .63" w x 5.50" l, .80 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 224 pages
About the Author
Douglas Brinkley is the director of the Theodore Roosevelt Center and professor of history at Tulane University. He is the author of biographies of Henry Ford, Jimmy Carter, Dean Acheson, James Forrestal, John Kerry, and Rosa Parks, and his most recent books include The Reagan Diaries, The Great Deluge, and The Boys of Pointe du Hoc. He is a contributing editor for Vanity Fair, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, and American Heritage and a frequent contributor to The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic Monthly. He lives in New Orleans with his wife and children.
From The Washington Post
Reviewed by David S. Broder
When historian Douglas Brinkley was asked by the late Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., general editor of the American Presidents series published by Times Books, to undertake a short biography of Gerald R. Ford, the man from Michigan who served less than three years in the White House was a neglected subject.
By the time Brinkley had finished the manuscript, Ford's story had been told, copiously and repeatedly, in newspaper obituaries recording his death at age 93 last December, and his contributions to American life had been praised in memorial ceremonies in California, Washington and Grand Rapids, Mich. -- and in dozens of columns and editorials. As his body was carried across the country, from his final home near Palm Springs, to the Capitol where he had served, and then back to Michigan for burial, the praise rolled in for the man who had applied the healing comfort of his common sense and goodwill to a nation badly bruised by the ordeals of the Vietnam War and Watergate.
After all that, the current generation of readers -- unlike those who in future decades may turn to Brinkley's book for basic information about the life of the 38th president -- will wonder what fresh insights the author offers. He had only one personal interview with Ford for this project, back in 2003, and he mines it for a number of autobiographical comments, none of them groundbreaking. But Brinkley does address -- and help settle -- some of the unresolved questions about Ford's career.
He has delved deep, for example, into the relationship between Ford and Richard Nixon, the man who appointed Ford to the vacancy created by the resignation of Vice-President Spiro T. Agnew, and thereby put Ford in line for the presidency. After Ford's death, journalists who had interviewed him late in life quarreled among themselves about whether the Ford-Nixon relationship was simply one of mutual political advantage or a genuine friendship.
Brinkley makes a strong case that they were far more than partners in partisanship. He quotes Ford as telling him that Nixon was "my close friend," a man whose views on both foreign and domestic issues "were almost mirror images" of his own, as he quickly discovered when they met as members of the House. Beyond that, both men had grown up in families struggling during the Depression, so, as Ford said, "we understood what it meant to rise on merit, not privilege."
In a private collection of Ford's correspondence, still in the hands of a New York dealer, Brinkley unearthed a number of letters written by Nixon after his resignation, counseling and offering moral support to his successor, whose brief tenure was beset by troubles. In August of 1976, with Ford's approval scores around 30 percent, Nixon wrote from exile urging Ford to "keep that confident, fighting spirit -- and the only poll that matters will come out alright on November 2."
It did not, of course. Brinkley sympathetically repeats Ford's own complaint that it was the long battle that the unelected president had to wage just to keep the Republican nomination in 1976 from Ronald Reagan that fatally weakened Ford for the battle with Jimmy Carter. Ford called Reagan's decision to challenge him "a low-down stunt" and said the Californian's standoffish attitude after losing the nomination fight probably cost him the election. "He snubbed me," Ford said. "Put his nose up in the air."
That bitterness was at odds with most of Ford's life. He had a talent for reconciliation, forging friendships with past antagonists, including Jimmy Carter and many of the journalists who had ridiculed or criticized him as president. Brinkley does full justice to those qualities of Midwestern goodwill exhibited by Ford all his life, and he excuses Ford's anger with Reagan and the right-wingers because he plainly shares Ford's preference for a more tolerant, pragmatic version of conservatism.
The result is a highly sympathetic but largely accurate appraisal of Ford's accomplishments. I would fault Brinkley's account of Ford's rise to the White House in one respect. When discussing the series of backbench revolts that moved Ford into the post of Republican leader of the House, Brinkley makes it sound as if Ford himself were the ringleader in all these efforts. In fact, much of the strategy and organizing was done by others, who were smart enough to recognize that the rapport Ford had gained among his colleagues made him the ideal candidate to put forward against the Old Guard leaders. But a biography of Jerry Ford that contains no mention of the work of Melvin R. Laird, Charles Goodell and Glenard Lipscomb in advancing his career is hardly complete.
That said, I can fully endorse Brinkley's contention that Ford did the right thing in pardoning Nixon -- I thought, and wrote, so at the time -- and that he accomplished more as president than "healing" the wounded presidency. "It was Gerald R. Ford who dissipated the pall of Richard Nixon, however controversially, and who shepherded the nation safely through to the end of its most divisive war while living up to the United States's ensuing responsibilities to South Vietnam's refugees. It was Ford whose help in forging the Helsinki Accords opened the way for the collapse of Soviet communism. It was Ford who acknowledged the seriousness of the global energy crisis and who conveyed the urgent need for cooperation to do something about it to the rest of the industrialized world, and whose careful fiscal policies cut inflation in half and boosted the U.S. economy out of its direst fix since the Great Depression. And it was Ford who, purely by dint of coming across as a really nice, normal guy, restored Americans' faith in the validity of their government."
All of which, Brinkley argues, should boost him into the rank of "near-great president."
Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One Michigan Upbringing The executives at Harper & Row, Publishers were smart back in 1979 when they chose a black-and-white photograph of a relaxed Gerald Ford to adorn the cover of his memoir, A Time to Heal. Surrounding Ford were wisps of smoke from his trademark pipe, creating an ethereal aura around him. You could almost hear him go puff-puff-puff between sentences. The profile of his wide forehead and prominent jaw exuded vigor while his broad shoulders reminded everybody of his football years at the University of Michigan. The photograph, in fact, conveyed an inner steadiness of purpose, his low-key demeanor offering up an oddly calming sensation for an all-powerful commander in chief. But that, in a nutshell, was the genius of Ford. His decency was palpable. Following the traumas of the Vietnam War and Watergate, he was a tonic to the consciousness of his times, a Middle American at ease with himself and the enduring values of our Constitution. "Nobody really knows that my real birthname wasn’t Ford," the thirty-eighth president recalled. "People think of me as a brand name for even-keeledness. But I had plenty of adversity growing up. I just chose to accentuate the positive."1 When Gerald Ford came into the world on July 14, 1913, in an ornate Victorian house on Woolworth Avenue in Omaha, Nebraska, he was named Leslie Lynch King Jr.2 His mother, the former Dorothy Ayer Gardner, had been a nineteen-year-old college student when she met and soon married the well-to-do Leslie King Sr. the previous year. Her infatuation faded fast: she later charged that King punched her at the least provocation. When he flew into another violent rage two weeks after she bore their son, brandishing a knife and threatening to kill both her and the baby, Dorothy packed up her belongings and her son and fled Omaha in the cold glare of an afternoon. That she did so in an era of mores that favored spousal battery over divorce bespeaks the steel in the stock behind Jerry Ford. Baby in tow, Dorothy moved back to her parents’ house in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Comfortably prosperous thanks to its well-regarded furniture manufacturing industry, the state’s second-largest city was "one of those exceedingly agreeable, homelike American cities," with rows of neat houses tucked amid rolling hills of surrounding farmland.3 But Grand Rapids was also decidedly unsophisticated, lacking large-scale municipal projects or much in the way of cultural activity. Relatively recent Dutch immigrants accounted for about half the local population; another quarter claimed Polish descent. The area’s progress was fueled largely by these newcomers eager to work hard for a share in the American dream. Among the city’s residents was a descendant of early English settlers with a locally renowned surname. However, twenty-five-year-old Gerald Rudolf Ford was not related to the pioneering automaker Henry Ford, Michigan’s leading citizen. Ford was a paint salesman with little money and less education, having dropped out of the tenth grade, but he boasted all the bedrock virtues, including honesty, charity, and a deep-seated work ethic. Dorothy Gardner King recognized his merits immediately upon meeting him at an Episcopalian church social. Ford returned her interest. He was not put off by her status as a young divorcée with a son. The couple married on February 1, 1917, and settled into a loving home. Ford, however, never took out adoption papers for his stepson. Dorothy thought adoption would lessen her chances to procure child support from King. The couple did informally rename the child Gerald Rudolf Ford Jr. (His name would be legally changed on December 3, 1935, with the son choosing to spell his middle name "Rudolph" to give it a less Germanic cast.)4 The elder Fords told their son he had a different biological father when he was twelve or thirteen. But when Leslie L. King Sr. approached Jerry at Bill Skougis’s hamburger joint, located across from the high school, where the teen worked part-time after school, and told him he was his real father, Jerry was stunned.5 Although Jerry accepted King’s invitation to lunch, the encounter left him bitter at his birth father’s long absence and resentful of his apparent wealth. King, whose own father’s holdings included several businesses, land, and railroad stock, let out that he had come to Michigan from Wyoming to pick up a new Lincoln, detouring from Detroit to Grand Rapids on a whim to look up his abandoned son.6 The revelation of his true paternity made little impact, however, on the boy’s relationship with Gerald R. Ford Sr. Even at seventeen, the strapping youth had the good sense to recognize the firm but kind man who had raised him as his "real" dad. He admired the way his adoptive father plodded tirelessly through every detail of his business, always forgoing the quick buck in favor of steady progress toward measured financial success. He and Dorothy also devoted considerable time and effort to charitable undertakings. Among many such endeavors, the couple helped establish a community center in one of the city’s racially mixed, most disadvantaged neighborhoods. Western Michigan was a resource-rich area, and young Jerry Ford grew up seeing pine logs floating down the Grand River and wooden furniture being loaded onto trains. When Grand Rapids celebrated its centennial in 1926 the city had plenty to be proud of—a first-rate public school system, a bustling railroad depot, regular air service to Detroit, four huge movie theaters, hundreds of grocery stores, five golf courses, a low tax rate, a church on practically every city block, and a ranking as the number-one tree city in America. Virtually every lawn was manicured, and homes displayed the Stars and Stripes year-round. Visitors came to Grand Rapids for conventions and reunions, often filling all eight thousand hotel rooms to capacity.7 By the late 1920s, the Ford household included four sons. Jerry and his half brothers divided their time among schoolwork, chores, and family fun. Because Michigan was blessed with blue lakes and pristine forests, many hours were spent outdoors. Early in the autumn of 1929 Gerald Ford Sr. founded the Ford Paint & Varnish Company with a partner and moved his brood into a big new house on Lake Drive in prosperous East Grand Rapids. The stock-market crash that October decimated his new venture and drained his family’s carefully kept savings. The Fords left their fine new house for cheaper quarters. A Dreiserian grimness now entered the Ford household as they struggled to avoid debt. But during the Great Depression no one in the Ford family ever went to bed hungry—a tribute to the probity of Dorothy and Gerald Ford Sr. and their sons. In the first half of the twentieth century, Michigan was largely a Republican state. In Grand Rapids, most folks seemed to accept that they had been born into the GOP fold, and just stayed there. Long before Gerald Ford Jr. was old enough to understand the positions or even recognize the leaders of America’s two main political parties, he considered himself a diehard Republican. When Ford was growing up, Michigan’s leading political lights were its two U.S. senators, James Couzens and Arthur H. Vandenberg (from Grand Rapids)—both Republicans, naturally. Couzens, who had made a spectacular fortune as a founding partner in the Ford Motor Company, was irascible and politically independent. The consequences of Couzens’s deviation from the party by supporting Rooseve
Most helpful customer reviews
16 of 16 people found the following review helpful.
Excellent and Absorbing!
By S. Schockow
Brinkley's account of the underappreciated Presidency and life of Gerald R. Ford was a fast and informative account of our 38th President. Though a biographer of Jimmy Carter, Brinkley gives Ford his due credit, but also manages to draw attention to Ford's mistakes, such as jettisoning Rockefeller from the Vice Presidency. Brinkley's 2003 interviews with Ford also provide rich background to a book that one can easily read in a single day. Since his death, the public adoration for Ford has been deafening. This biography hit the shelves only 6 weeks after his death, which is included in the
book. As a public school Social Studies teacher, I would highly recommend this book!
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful.
Ford grows with time
By Jon Hunt
The American Presidents series, snapshot biographies of most of our presidents, is a great addition to our knowledge of this small number of men who have been our nation's Chief Executive. With the recent publication of Douglas Brinkley's book on Gerald Ford the series has just gotten even better. The timeliness of the book's release, so soon after President Ford's death, (not to mention the passing of Arthur Schlesinger, general editor of the series) is particularly welcome. Ford's growing popularity, as witnessed not only by Brinkley's offering but also by the former president's funeral, adds to the luster of a president who, during his tenure at the White House, was considered either a buffoon or just simply not up to the job.
Brinkley stresses Gerald Ford's midwestern roots, his service to the country during World War II and his ascension through the Republican ranks in the House of Representatives to become that party's Minority Leader. Politically ambitious, Brinkley recalls that Ford's wish was to become Speaker of the House. How things changed for him almost overnight! When Nixon needed a new Vice President after the disgraced Spiro Agnew resigned, there was really only one man who was acceptable...Jerry Ford.
His 896 days as president had some notable achievements, our extrication from Vietnam and the Helsinki Accords to name just two, but the pardon of Nixon....always the pardon...came around to haunt Ford for years. Fortunately, for those of us who were outraged at Ford for doing so at the time, now see the wisdom of his decision and Brinkley balances this nicely with other aspects of the Ford administration.
The assessment of President Ford's performance in office is far from complete but his personal attributes of honesty and integrity will only help to reinforce a rising look at Gerald Ford as a man and as a president. Douglas Brinkley has done an excellent job of reminding us what a good man President Ford was and how he helped get us through the aftermath of our "long, national nightmare".
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
Meet President Gerald Ford
By Steven Peterson
Well known historian Douglas Brinkley has written this brief biography, as a part of the American Presidents series of works. In the series editor's Introduction, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. notes that (Page xv): "The president is the central player in the American political order." Gerald Ford was an accidental president, taking over after Richard Nixon's downfall resulting from Watergate and his subsequent resignation.
Gerald Ford's name at birth was Leslie Lynch King, Jr. His father had a violent temper and the marriage did not last long. His mother later married Gerald Rudolf Ford; after a time, her son was renamed Gerald Rudolph (an Americanized version of the stepfather's middle name) Ford. As a youngster, he excelled at athletics and even had the possibility of a pro football career. However, he chose law school and, shortly after that, electoral politics. He saw action in World War II.
When he was elected to the House of Representatives 1948, he began to formulate the ambition to become Speaker of the House. His chosen career was in the legislature. The book does a nice job profiling his rise in the House, with carefully crafted advancement through the ranks; it also depicts the start of a long-time friendship between Ford and Richard Nixon.
When Ford finally became Minority Leader in the House, he used his conciliatory approach well. As Brinkley says (Page 31), ". . .he played the good coach, giving his squad wide latitude to speak their minds. In exchange, he wanted no bickering. Ford's open forum proved smart strategy." Some tho9ught him rather slow of thought, but his amiability and ability to work with others represented a great strength.
When Nixon was elected President, he tended not to work so well with Congress--including his own Republican mates. Ford did not distinguish himself with his unabating support for Nixon after Watergate became a public matter; after former Attorney General John Mitchell reported that the White House was not involved, Ford clung to that long after so many others had seen through the falsehoods.
Then, the unlikely story of his rise to Vice-President and his subsequent ascension to the presidency after Nixon's downfall. The book does a nice job in a brief space noting the major decisions/actions of the Ford Administration, some working out well and some not so well. Here, we read about Whip Inflation Now, swine flu, the withdrawal from Viet Nam, the Mayaguez incident, the Helsinki Accords, and so on. The internecine Republic nomination politics of 1976 essentially doomed him to lose to Jimmy Carter. Then, the amazing life after the presidency and people's changing reflections on his accomplishments. . . .
Another well turned work in the American Presidents series. These short volumes cannot go into the depth that I would sometimes like, but the tradeoff is accessible books for people who might not have the patience to wade through a 600 page tome.
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