gerald ford dead

Shot at by a Manson Kid, made fun of by Chevy Chase, a member of the Warren Commission and still a decent guy.

"Do you like beer? I like beer."

how was ford a "good guy," exactly?

xpost

http://static.flickr.com/12/17881729_f86aded77b_m.jpg

Former President Ford dies
1 minute ago

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.

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.

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.

I said decent, not good.

The down side? Many of the jackals (Cheney, GHW Bush, Rumsfeld, etc.) that plagued us now got their start in the Ford administration.

If only he just got rid of Kissinger though.

okay, first, thanks for the condescending flavor, that never gets old on the internets. really. second, he didn't really have a choice as to whether or not to be "the most liberal Republican ever to be president" since congress actually was doing what it was designed to do during his presidency. thirdly, abraham lincoln is chopped liver?

x-post.

Commit.

I'm happy to keep adding to your "pro/con" checkbox list.

hahahahahhaha omg roffle WHAT AN ACHIEVEMENT!

http://interocitor.com/images/fall_of_saigon1.jpg
http://www.cas.buffalo.edu/classes/eng/willbern/BestSellers/Images/SaigonFall.jpg

i'd call for the rofflecopter but that might be in poor taste.

Anyway, in the long run Ford will only be a Jepoardy answer. I still think he was a decent person, not necessarily a good President.

http://www-c.pbs.org/newshour/media/walker/images/1.jpg

http://gfx.filmweb.pl/p/4564/po.111194.jpg

r.i.p, ok fine. he had a long, comfortable life, and was briefly in an important place at an important time. worth noting, but not worth much more.

any thoughts on this? i certainly didn't get the impression when i read "the final days" that nixon was in any position to be demanding a pardon. he'd all but gone completely mad by that stage.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-89770458144460734

RIP to the most recent president that I have no direct memory of while in office.

?

(his wife made the great contribution, with her work on addictions)

Ha, i still vividly remember being on the school bus and all the repub kids yelling FORD! and the dem kids yelling CARTER! back and forth at each other! And being in the local paper with other neighborhood kids for drawing some election-related art in chalk on the road that involved Jaws the shark!

http://ec2.images-amazon.com/images/P/0385513801.01._AA240_SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

subtitle: the crisis that gave us the govt we have today.

the 76 election was the first I voted in (for Carter) though I temporarily registered Republican for the Ohio primary so I could vote against Reagan (for Ford) at my mom's insistence. Anticipating the future she was scared that a "bad actor" might be president.

apart from carter, ford was the least harmful president since 1945.

JD, arguably less harmful given that Carter began the ludicrous Defense budget inflation that became de rigueur under Reagan. or haven't you read Cockburn saying same?

also, Betty arguably best First Lady since Eleanor Roosevelt.

http://money.cnn.com/2006/05/18/commentary/wastler/wastler/win_button.jpg

that's what he said in an old larry king interview they ran last nite. he said he was even MORE sure he did the right thing now. er, in 1999, anyway, when the interview aired.

My dad photographed a Ford wedding. Can't remember which one. Obviously my closest brush with fame.

-- Michael (polyphoni...), December 27th, 2006.

otm

Yet these days only the most stubborn and unyielding Nixon haters still question whether the cleanse-the-air pardon was justified. America is simply not a banana republic in which former presidents should face the prospect of prison or ruinous civil judgments after leaving office.

The Bees (1978) (uncredited) .... Politician on float
... aka Abejas asesinas (Mexico)

also, completely off-topic, why is it Jerry Ford if his name is Gerald, shouldn't it be Gerry?

I thought it was banana republics where former presidents didn't have to face prosecution even if they've commited crimes during their presidency.

trying to string up the next democrat they could get their mitts on

ummmm, Carter? Clinton wasn't "next" by 20 years.

By Bob Woodward
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 29, 2006; A01

Months before Richard M. Nixon set a relatively unknown Michigan congressman named Gerald R. Ford on the path to the White House, Nixon turned to Ford, who called himself the embattled president's "only real friend," to get him out of trouble.

During one of the darkest days of the Watergate scandal, Nixon secretly confided in Ford, at the time the House minority leader. He begged for help. He complained about fair-weather friends and swore at perceived rivals in his own party. "Tell the guys, goddamn it, to get off their ass and start fighting back," Nixon pleaded with Ford in one call recorded by the president's secret taping system.

And Ford did. "Anytime you want me to do anything, under any circumstances, you give me a call, Mr. President," he told Nixon during that May 1, 1973, conversation. "We'll stand by you morning, noon and night."

This and other previously unpublished transcripts of their calls, documents and personal letters provide a portrait of an intensely personal friendship dating to the late 1940s but so hidden that few others were even aware of it. Until now, the relationship between the two presidents has been portrayed largely as a matter of political necessity, with Nixon tapping Ford for the vice presidency in late 1973 because he was a confirmable choice on Capitol Hill.

But the tapes, documents and two lengthy recent interviews with Ford before his death this week, conducted for a future book and embargoed until after his death, show that the close political alliance between the two men seriously influenced Ford's eventual decision to pardon Nixon, the most momentous decision of his short presidency and almost certainly the one that cost him any chance of winning the White House in his own right two years later. Ford became president on Aug. 9, 1974; he pardoned Nixon just a month later. "I think that Nixon felt I was about the only person he could really trust on the Hill," Ford said during the 2005 interview.

Ford returned the feeling.

"I looked upon him as my personal friend. And I always treasured our relationship. And I had no hesitancy about granting the pardon, because I felt that we had this relationship and that I didn't want to see my real friend have the stigma," Ford said in the interview.

That acknowledgment represents a significant shift from Ford's previous portrayals of the pardon that absolved Nixon of any Watergate-related crimes. In earlier statements, Ford had emphasized the decision as an effort to move the country beyond the partisan divisions of the Watergate era, playing down the personal dimension.

A key window into their close friendship and political alliance was that May 1973 call. It was the day after Nixon had gone on national television to announce the resignations of his two top aides, H.R. "Bob" Haldeman and John D. Ehrlichman, and the Watergate coverup was unraveling. The president knew it and was eager for Ford's reassurance that his political situation on Capitol Hill was not as grave as it seemed.

"You've got a hell of a lot of friends up here," Ford told him, "both Republican and Democrat, and don't worry about anybody being sunshine soldiers or summer patriots."

"Well, never Jerry Ford," Nixon replied. "But if you could get a few congressmen and senators to speak up and say a word, for Christ's sakes."

Ford was played a copy of that tape in 2005. Although the existence of Nixon's secret taping system had been publicly disclosed in 1973, no such tapes of Ford had come to public attention, and the former president seemed stunned. "I remember vividly that," he said, recalling how Nixon often turned to him to get things done on the Hill. He added that he considered himself to be Nixon's "only real friend."

At times, their friendship was the gossipy sort, as two longtime politicians sorted through the Washington rumor mill. They were so comfortable with each other that they openly traded nasty personal assessments of others.

On April 6, 1971, for example, Nixon called Ford to find out what was going on with House Majority Leader Hale Boggs (D-La.). Boggs had just taken to the House floor alleging that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was regularly wiretapping members of Congress, and Nixon wanted to know why Boggs was going public.

"He's nuts," Ford told Nixon in the call picked up by Nixon's secret taping.

"He's on the sauce," Nixon said, suggesting the majority leader was drinking. "Isn't that it?"

"Well, I'm afraid that's right, Mr. President."

"Or is he crazy?" Nixon asked.

"Well, he's either drinking too much or he's taking some pills that are upsetting him mentally," Ford replied.

In their personal correspondence, extending over decades, the two men conveyed a sense of personal bond that went beyond public niceties, demonstrated in dozens of letters in Ford's confidential files that he allowed a reporter to review and copy.

Two months before Nixon resigned, he sent Ford, by then his vice president, a personal thank-you. "Dear Jerry," he wrote on June 8, 1974, "this is just a note to tell you how much I appreciated your superb and courageous support over the past difficult months. How much easier it would be for you to pander to the press and others who desperately are trying to drive a wedge between the president and vice president. It's tough going now, but history will I am sure record you as one of the most capable, courageous and honorable vice presidents we have had."

Their friendly notes to each other continued until not long before Nixon's death in 1994. In 1978, for example, Nixon wrote to buck up Ford after Ford's former press secretary wrote a tell-all memoir, "It Sure Looks Different From the Inside," in which he gave details of Betty Ford's addiction to alcohol and various medications. "Dear Jerry, I thought Ron Nessen's comments on Betty were contemptible. Tell Betty her many friends won't believe him and for her few enemies -- The hell with them. Sincerely, Dick."

And in a handwritten letter on his personal stationery on June 1, 1990, Nixon wrote Ford urging him to attend the dedication of the Nixon library along with then-President George H.W. Bush and former president Ronald Reagan. Once Ford came, Nixon followed up with another note: "Our friendship goes back further than all the others and the event would not have been complete without you."

On June 28, 1993, Nixon wrote Ford again, this time thanking him for attending the funeral of Nixon's wife, Pat.

"As you undoubtedly noted, the emotion had caught up with me by the time we met after the services, and I did not adequately express my thanks to you then," Nixon wrote.

Then he turned back decades, to their own long friendship and a small gesture by Ford he had carried with him, not as momentous as the pardon that would come later but still vivid 31 years after it happened.

"One action of yours for which I will always be grateful was your going on a TV program when ABC had the bad manners to put Alger Hiss on to nail my coffin shut after my defeat for governor of California," Nixon wrote, remembering the sting of his 1962 loss.

"I have often said that when you win, you hear from everyone -- when you lose, you hear from your friends," he wrote. "You have always measured up in that respect, and I shall always be grateful."

Instead, there was endless talk about "healing," and of the "courage" that it had taken for Ford to excuse his former boss from the consequences of his law-breaking. You may choose, if you wish, to parrot the line that Watergate was a "long national nightmare," but some of us found it rather exhilarating to see a criminal president successfully investigated and exposed and discredited. And we do not think it in the least bit nightmarish that the Constitution says that such a man is not above the law. Ford's ignominious pardon of this felonious thug meant, first, that only the lesser fry had to go to jail. It meant, second, that we still do not even know why the burglars were originally sent into the offices of the Democratic National Committee. In this respect, the famous pardon is not unlike the Warren Commission: another establishment exercise in damage control and pseudo-reassurance (of which Ford was also a member) that actually raised more questions than it answered. The fact is that serious trials and fearless investigations often are the cause of great division, and rightly so. But by the standards of "healing" celebrated this week, one could argue that O.J. Simpson should have been spared indictment lest the vexing questions of race be unleashed to trouble us again, or that the Tower Commission did us all a favor by trying to bury the implications of the Iran-Contra scandal. Fine, if you don't mind living in a banana republic.

Not exactly. I'd say that would be Bush #1. I'd say any stong conservatism he showed signs of were due to his new southern base pushing him that way. In fact Republicans are convinced he didnt win in 92 because he wasn't conservative enough.

LOL @ HITCH (professional W apologist)

I hope he's having a bbq w/ Saddam.

also, Tom Brokaw go fuck a duck.