500 S State St, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, United States
Ford during practice as a center on the University of Michigan football team, 1933.
Gallery of Gerald Ford
Eagle Scout Gerald Ford (circled in red) in 1929; Michigan Governor Fred W. Green at far left, holding a hat.
Career
Gallery of Gerald Ford
1974
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20500, United States
Gerald Ford is sworn in as the 38th President of the United States by Chief Justice Warren Burger in the White House East Room, while Betty Ford looks on.
Gallery of Gerald Ford
1974
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20500, United States
Ford and his golden retriever, Liberty, in the Oval Office, 1974.
Gallery of Gerald Ford
1974
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20500, United States
Ford in the Oval Office, 1974.
Gallery of Gerald Ford
1975
Ford meeting with his Cabinet, 1975.
Gallery of Gerald Ford
1975
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20500, United States
President Gerald R. Ford, and his wife, Betty Ford, pose for a portrait on the south lawn of the White House.
Gallery of Gerald Ford
1976
President Ford smiles as he acknowledges the reception given to him at the convention of the International Association of Chiefs of Police. Ford said if elected in November the first 100 days of his term will be spent rallying Americans in a battle against crime.
Gallery of Gerald Ford
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20500, United States
President Gerald Ford walking with his wife, Betty after accompanying Henry Kissinger to his car in preparation for a diplomacy trip to the Middle East; at the White House.
Gallery of Gerald Ford
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20500, United States
President Ford dances with Queen Elizabeth at a White House State dinner. (Photo by Wally McNamee)
Gallery of Gerald Ford
Richard Nixon, Barbara Bush, Gerald Ford, Nancy Reagan (Photo by Ron Galella)
Gallery of Gerald Ford
The five living United States presidents pose for a group photo at the dedication of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. From left, President George Bush, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, and Richard Nixon.
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20500, United States
Gerald Ford is sworn in as the 38th President of the United States by Chief Justice Warren Burger in the White House East Room, while Betty Ford looks on.
President Ford smiles as he acknowledges the reception given to him at the convention of the International Association of Chiefs of Police. Ford said if elected in November the first 100 days of his term will be spent rallying Americans in a battle against crime.
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20500, United States
President Gerald Ford walking with his wife, Betty after accompanying Henry Kissinger to his car in preparation for a diplomacy trip to the Middle East; at the White House.
The five living United States presidents pose for a group photo at the dedication of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. From left, President George Bush, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, and Richard Nixon.
Gerald R. Ford was the 38th President of the United States of America from 1974-1977. He was the only person to hold the presidential office without being elected. A congressional president whose historic role was to mop up the dregs of the two most damaging episodes in the history of the modern White House, the Watergate affair and the Vietnam War.
Background
Gerald Ford was born as Leslie Lynch King Jr., on July 14, 1913, Omaha, Nebraska, to Dorothy Ayer Gardner, and Leslie Lynch King Sr. His biological father was an alcoholic and an abusive man who used to beat his wife. Fearing for her safety and that of her newborn child, Dorothy left her husband and went to live with her relatives. Dorothy later married a salesman named Gerald Rudolff Ford who adopted her son and gave him his name. This marriage produced three more sons. Gerald’s step-father was a great person and Gerald received a loving upbringing along with his younger half-brothers.
Education
Gerald Ford grew up to be an athletic young boy and was the captain of his football team while attending the Grand Rapids South High School. He was also selected to the All-City team of the Grand Rapids City League.
He attended the University of Michigan where he continued playing football. A versatile player, he played center, linebacker, and long snapper for the school's football team. He graduated in 1935 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics.
In spite of being a great football player, he decided to pursue a legal career instead of a sporting one. He enrolled at Yale Law School in 1938 and graduated in 1941 with a Bachelor of Law degree and was admitted to the Michigan bar shortly thereafter.
After the war, Ford briefly practiced law, and in 1948 defeated an incumbent Republican and won election to the United States House of Representatives from Grand Rapids, Michigan. He served 12 terms in the House, never receiving less than 60 percent of the vote. In 1965, after the Republican party suffered a major defeat in the Presidential and congressional elections, House Republicans ousted Charles Halleck and elected the younger and more aggressive Gerald Ford as a minority leader. Ford proved an aggressive and successful leader who helped his party regain much of its lost stature.
Ford frequently sparred with President Lyndon Johnson, who once remarked that Ford had "played too much football with his helmet off." Ford opposed most of Johnson's Great Society programs, including aid to education and Medicare for the elderly.
In 1973, Vice President Spiro Agnew was convicted of accepting bribes and resigned from office. President Richard Nixon then appointed Ford as Vice President, both to rebuild his administration's crumbling relations with Congress and because the Senate would be likely to confirm him. This was the first time that the 25th Amendment was used to fill a Vice Presidential vacancy. Ford was sworn in, after receiving congressional approval, on December 6, 1973.
When Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974, Ford succeeded to the Presidency. "Our long national nightmare is over," he told a nation numbed by the Watergate scandal. On September 8 he gave Nixon a "full, free and absolute" pardon for all Watergate crimes.
Ford's popularity plummeted because of the pardon, and it never recovered. Many Americans believed there had been a secret deal between Nixon and Ford, that Ford would issue a pardon if he were appointed Vice President and later succeeded Nixon in the White House.
Ford recommended to Congress that Nixon be paid $850,000 in transition expenses, which also upset public opinion. Congress allocated only $200,000 to Nixon. Ford appeared before a congressional committee to discuss the pardon, becoming the first President ever to appear before Congress for questioning. In September 1974 Ford offered Vietnam War deserters Presidential clemency if they participated in a work program. The contrast with the unconditional pardon given to Nixon seemed outrageous to many people.
Ford's domestic program was stalled by the Democratic Congress. As a result of the 1974 midterm elections, Democrats gained 43 House and 3 Senate seats to provide them with almost veto-proof margins. One-quarter of Ford's vetoes were overridden, a figure much higher than the 7 percent that other Presidents averaged. His anti-inflation effort, called Whip Inflation Now (WIN), was ignored, although the inflation rate dropped from 12 to 5 percent. His energy conservation program was derailed. Democrats passed their own education, public works, and housing measures. Ford vetoed many Democratic spending measures on domestic programs in 1976, but the vetoes were unpopular with Democrats and independent voters.
In foreign affairs, Ford's most notable achievements included an arms agreement with the Soviet Union on strategic weapons. In addition, the Helsinki Conference of 35 nations signed a pact in 1975 that recognized the borders of all states in Europe. It conferred legitimacy on Soviet expansionism after World War II but also required all nations to adhere to universal standards of human rights. Possibly, the Helsinki Accord helped restrain the Soviet Union from intervening when citizens in communist countries overthrew their governments in 1989.
In October 1975 Secretary of State Henry Kissinger helped put in place an interim peace agreement between Egypt and Israel in the Sinai Peninsula.
In 1975 the North Vietnamese army overran South Vietnam and put an end to the Vietnam War. President Ford ordered the United States armed forces to evacuate Americans and South Vietnamese allies. Seven laws prohibited the use of the armed forces in Vietnam, and Ford went before a joint session of Congress to urge their repeal. After Congress deadlocked and did nothing, Ford ordered the evacuations anyway. He asked Congress to allocate almost half a billion dollars to settle 140,000 refugees from Indochina in the United States - one of his few legislative successes. Later, he sent the military to rescue crewmen of the merchant ship Mayaguez from Cambodian custody, losing 43 servicemen in the incident.
Ford's wife, Betty, broke fresh ground for a First Lady by her forthrightness on controversial and personal matters. She championed abortion rights and the Equal Rights Amendment; expressed uncommon understanding for some of the new norms of young people's behavior, including premarital sex and the use of marijuana; and went public about her mastectomy, her drinking problem, and her entry into psychiatric treatment.
On September 22, 1975, Ford was almost assassinated by Sarah Jane Moore as he emerged from the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. The pistol was deflected by a bystander and Ford was not hit by the bullet.
In 1976 Ford was challenged by Ronald Reagan in the Republican primaries and barely defeated him for the nomination. The Republican platform, however, was written by conservatives and repudiated much of the Ford-Kissinger foreign policy of Détente, or relaxation of tensions with the Soviet Union.
During the general election campaign, Ford made a major slip in a debate when he asserted that "there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe." Although he seemed to have meant that the Soviets could not crush the Polish, Hungarian, and Czechoslovak peoples' longing for freedom, his poor choice of words gave the Democrats a chance to argue that Ford simply did not have the brains to be President. Ford was defeated by Jimmy Carter in a close election, receiving slightly less than 49 percent of the vote.
After retiring from the White House, Ford wrote his memoirs and saw to the construction of his Presidential library in Ann Arbor and museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan. In 1980 there was an effort to put Ford on the Reagan ticket as Vice President, but Ford insisted on a virtual "co-Presidency" in which he would share Presidential powers, and the effort was aborted by the Reagan camp.
Gerald R. Ford died on December 26, 2006, at 93 years old, making him the longest-lived president in the history of the United States. He passed away in his home of Rancho Mirage, California.
Ford said: "As President, I have been cautioned to be very careful about what I say about religious matters. But the separation of church and state, although a fundamental principle to which I fully subscribe, was never intended, in my view, to separate public morality from public policy. It says that the power of government shall not be used to support or suppress any one faith, but in the same sentence protects the profession and the propagation of all faiths."
Politics
In 1946 Ford became active in Republican politics.
In the White House, Ford displayed a more consistently conservative ideology than ever before. While holding generally to the policies of the Nixon administration, he proved more unshakably committed than his predecessor to both a conservative, free-market economic approach and strongly nationalistic defense and foreign policies. In attempting to translate his objectives into policy, however, President Ford was frequently blocked by a Democratic Congress intent on flexing its muscles in the wake of Watergate and Nixon's fall. The result was a running battle of vetoes and attempted overrides throughout the brief Ford presidency.
Views
Ford was an outspoken supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment, issuing Presidential Proclamation no. 4383 in 1975: "In this Land of the Free, it is right, and by nature, it ought to be, that all men and all women are equal before the law. Now, therefore, I, Gerald R. Ford, President of the United States of America, to remind all Americans that it is fitting and just to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment adopted by the Congress of the United States of America, in order to secure legal equality for all women and men, do hereby designate and proclaim August 26, 1975, as Women's Equality Day."
As president, Ford's position on abortion was that he supported "a federal constitutional amendment that would permit each one of the 50 States to make the choice." This had also been his position as House Minority Leader in response to the 1973 Supreme Court case of Roe v. Wade, which he opposed. Ford came under criticism for a 60 Minutes interview his wife Betty gave in 1975, in which she stated that Roe v. Wade was a "great, great decision." During his later life, Ford would identify as pro-choice.
Quotations:
"Never be satisfied with less than your very best effort. If you strive for the top and miss, you'll still 'beat the pack.'"
"A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have."
"The political lesson of Watergate is this: Never again must America allow an arrogant, elite guard of political adolescents to by-pass the regular party organization and dictate the terms of a national election."
"I hope never to see the day that I cannot admit having made a mistake."
"I believe that truth is the glue that holds government together, not only our government, but civilization itself."
Membership
Ford was initiated into Freemasonry on September 30, 1949.
Order of DeMolay
,
United States
Masonic Lodge
Personality
By all accounts, Ford was open, friendly, forthright, honest, and considerate. He appeared to generally like people and, although a more than 30-year veteran of political wars, made remarkably few enemies along the way. "He never in his life tried to outsmart anybody," observed Bud Vestal, a Grand Rapids reporter and longtime Ford watcher. "But if from intellectual hubris a tormentor gave him a chance, Jerry would outdumb him, swiftly and deadpan. It might be days before the attacker would realize he’d been had."
Physical Characteristics:
Ford stood 6 feet tall and weighed about 195 pounds as president. He had blond hair, which he combed straight back, and small blue eyes. With age, he retained the trim, muscular figure of his youth. His handsome features were characterized by a square jaw, somewhat fleshy nose, and a generous mouth. His broad grin revealed large, straight teeth. Except for weak knees, the result of football injuries, his health generally was sound. Although he took a lot of kidding in the press and from comedians for lack of coordination, he described himself as "the most athletic president to occupy the White House in years." Ford was a right-handed sportsman but wrote and ate with his left hand. He dressed sporty.
Quotes from others about the person
"For myself, and for our nation, I want to thank my predecessor for all he has done to heal our land." - Jimmy Carter, inaugural speech, January 20, 1977
"More than any other president of this century, Ford was chosen for his integrity and trustworthiness: his peers in Congress put him in the White House because he told the truth and kept his word." - James Cannon, aide to Ford, as quoted in "Gerald R. Ford: A Healer of Wounds" - The Washington Post (27 December 2006)
Interests
Golf
Sport & Clubs
sailing, skiing, swimming, jogging
Connections
In 1948, Gerald Ford married Elizabeth Ann "Betty," a former dancer and fashion model. She had previously been married to and divorced from an abusive man. Gerald and Betty had a happy marriage that lasted 58 years until Gerald's death. They had four children.