[Vision2020] 38th President, Gerald R. Ford Dies

[Chasuk]

That's sad.  Ford was somehow lovable, though of course that may only
have been his public persona.  His SNL depictions were endearing.  I
do wish he hadn't pardoned Nixon; it seemed to bless the Nixon
corruption, and made it almost a foregone conclusion that subsequent
presidential misdeeds would be likewise forgiven.

Gerald, say hello to James Brown.

That's two out of three, right?

On 12/26/06, Jerry Schutz <jerry at airjer.com> wrote:
> (CNN) -- Gerald Ford was the unlikeliest of presidents, a man brought to
> power by unprecedented circumstances without seeking the office, at a time
> when Americans -- reeling from the Watergate scandal -- were disillusioned
> and weary.
>
> But in his very first speech as president in August 1974, after taking the
> oath of office, Ford vowed he would "not shirk" what appeared to be a
> thankless task. And he tried to set a tone of reconciliation and renewal by
> telling his countrymen that "our long national nightmare is over."
>
> "This is an hour of history that troubles our minds and hurts our hearts,"
> Ford said. "I am acutely aware that you have not elected me as your
> president by your ballots, and so I ask you to confirm me as your president
> with your prayers."
>
> Over the next 2½ years, Ford tried to bind up the nation's wounds in his
> plain-spoken, Midwestern manner, reminding Americans that "I'm a Ford, not a
> Lincoln" and providing a steady hand on the wheel during a turbulent time.
>
> Yet, the enormously controversial decision he made in his first month in
> office to pardon his predecessor, Richard Nixon, is widely blamed for
> costing him an election in his own right in 1976, in one of the closest
> presidential elections in U.S. history.
>
> Ford, 93, the oldest surviving former U.S. president, died Tuesday, his
> wife, former first lady Betty Ford said.
>
> The nation's 38th president spent several days in the fall of 2006 at
> Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage, California, for medical tests.
> At the time of his release, on October 16, his chief of staff, Penny Circle,
> said he would "resume normal activities."
>
> In August, he was discharged from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota,
> after undergoing an angioplasty procedure to reduce or eliminate blockages
> in his coronary arteries. Doctors also implanted a pacemaker to improve his
> heart performance.
>
> He is survived by his wife, Betty, 88; three sons, Michael, Jack and Steven;
> and a daughter, Susan.
>
> Ford was born Leslie Lynch King on July 14, 1913, in Omaha, Nebraska. When
> he was just 2 years old, his parents divorced, and his mother moved to Grand
> Rapids, Michigan, where he grew up. His mother remarried, and he was adopted
> and renamed after his stepfather, Gerald Rudolff Ford.
>
> After playing football at the University of Michigan and serving on an
> aircraft carrier in the Navy during World War II, Ford was elected to the
> U.S. House in 1948 as a Republican, representing a district centered on his
> hometown of Grand Rapids.
>
> He spent 25 years in Congress, working his way up to minority leader in
> 1965. His ambition was to be speaker of the House, not president. Indeed,
> Ford's presidency was one of the great accidents of American history.
>
> In October 1973, Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned after pleading no
> contest to tax evasion. President Nixon, ensnared in the rising Watergate
> scandal, asked the well-respected Ford to leave Congress to replace Agnew,
> and he accepted.
>
> By August 1974, with impeachment looming and his GOP support in Congress
> crumbling, Nixon became the first, and so far only, president to resign --
> making Ford the only person to become president without having been first
> elected as president or vice president.
>
> Ford's wife and four children, then young adults, brought a more
> contemporary air to the White House, after the more staid Nixons. Betty Ford
> was particularly popular, although her candor occasionally caused
> controversy, such as her admission that her children had probably smoked
> marijuana and she would have, too, if she were still young.
>
> Just a month after her husband assumed the presidency, she was diagnosed
> with breast cancer. Her decision to be upfront and forthcoming about her
> ordeal drew unprecedented public attention to the disease. She later sought
> treatment for alcoholism and founded the Better Ford Center in California,
> which treats addiction.
>
> In September 1974, Ford granted Nixon a pardon, sparing the former president
> from the prospect of going to prison. The public and political backlash was
> angry and bitter, with Ford accused of making a tawdry deal with Nixon to
> secure the White House for himself.
>
> Ford always denied that any deal had been struck. But the pardon colored the
> rest of his presidency.
>
> "It was a tough decision," Ford told USA Today in an interview in 2000. "We
> needed to get the matter off my desk ... so I could concentrate on the
> problems of 260 million Americans and not have to worry about the problems
> of one man."
>
> The pardon was just the beginning of the challenges Ford faced in office. He
> inherited stubborn inflation, a recession, high unemployment and an energy
> crisis. As U.S. involvement in Vietnam wound down, North Vietnamese forces
> eventually overran South Vietnam, triggering a chaotic evacuation of U.S.
> loyalists from the country in 1975.
>
> Ford, despite his athletic background, also developed a reputation as being
> accident-prone, stumbling while exiting Air Force One, bumping his head
> getting into a helicopter and once beaning a spectator on a golf course --
> all of which prompted regular spoofing from comedian Chevy Chase on
> "Saturday Night Live."
>
> Even though he hadn't sought the presidency, Ford decided he wanted to stay
> in the White House and sought a full term in 1976. It was an uphill battle
> from the start.
>
> He only narrowly won the GOP nomination, after a hard-fought campaign
> against Ronald Reagan, and started the general election campaign far behind
> the Democratic nominee, former Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter.
>
> But Ford stormed back by election day, carrying 27 states and coming to
> within a whisker of beating Carter in the Electoral College. A shift of just
> 23,000 votes in two states, Ohio and Wisconsin, would have given Ford the
> win.
>
> After leaving the White House, Ford kept a generally low profile, limiting
> his appearances largely to golf tournaments and splitting his time between
> homes in Rancho Mirage, California., and Beaver Creek, Colorado. He built a
> presidential library and museum in Michigan.
>
> His only foray back into the political fray came at the Republican National
> Convention in Detroit in 1980, when Reagan, the party's nominee, briefly
> considered putting Ford on the ticket in what was billed as a
> "co-presidency." But the plan was quickly dropped.
>
> During the 2000 Republican convention, Ford suffered a mild stroke. He was
> hospitalized again in 2003 after suffering a dizzy spell while playing golf
> in 96-degree heat.
>
> In January 2006, he spent 11 days in a hospital near his home in Rancho
> Mirage being treated for pneumonia. Then in late July, he was admitted to a
> hospital in Vail, Colorado, for two days after suffering shortness of
> breath.,
>
> Jerry L. Schutz
>
> - Before you can do something, you must be something.
>
>                             - Goethe
>
>
> =======================================================
>  List services made available by First Step Internet,
>  serving the communities of the Palouse since 1994.
>                http://www.fsr.net
>           mailto:Vision2020 at moscow.com
> =======================================================
>


-- 
"Intolerance betrays want of faith in one's cause." -- Mahatma Gandhi