An Ordinary Man: The Surprising Life and Historic Presidency of Gerald R. Ford
It is the last Sunday of the month so it’s time for the next president, making this weeks book An Ordinary Man: The Surprising Life and Historic Presidency of Gerald R. Ford by Richard Norton Smith. The accompanying cocktail is going to be a classic Gin and Tonic, which was Ford’s second favorite cocktail behind a Martini….which I’ve already made one of so I went with his second, a Gin and Tonic, which is 2 oz of Gin, 4 oz Tonic Water and lime for garnish. So let’s do this.
Gerald R Ford was born Leslie Lynch King, Jr on July 14, 1913 to Leslie Lynch King, Sr. and Dorothy Ayer Gardner King. This was not a happy marriage as shortly after saying I do and leaving on their honeymoon, King Sr began abusing his young wife. She became pregnant shortly after an argument and the author speculates at marital rape. Regardless, Dorothy left her husband and they reconciled after that. The abuse did not stop and Dorothy left King for good two weeks after Leslie King Jr was born. King Sr sued for divorce citing spousal desertion on August 21 and Dorothy counter sued, seeking alimonty and legal fees.
Unfortunately for King, Sr., his abuse at the family residence in the Omaha, NE was well documented by local law enforcement and King Sr lost his suit, while Dorothy won hers, which was, yes, unusual for early 20th century divorce proceedings. Dorothy had taken up residence in her aunts house in a Chicago suburb and eventually relocated to Grand Rapids, MI with her parents, and it was there she would meet Gerald Rudolff Ford….Sr. Actually, he was not Sr; however, he fell quite in love with both Dorothy and her 3 year old son, and they married in 1917. However, the church they were a part of would not let them marry in church due to Dorothy’s status as a divorcee….not all things were awesome in the early 20th century.
But they married, and young King eventually took his step-father’s name in honor of the man who raised him. He did, eventually, meet his birth father, and….well, it was a fraught relationship. Ford would eventually get his mother a lawyer to sue for back alimony and child support. It’s fitting that he was President Ford and not President King.
Anyway, Ford was quite athletic as a youth, played football all through college and loved to ski and was so good he was drafted by two NFL teams….Green Bay Packers and Detroit Lions…the Lions after he played a demo game against the Chicago Bears. Now, here’s the thing. Most people think of Ford as JUST the dumb jock. I told my husband about Ford being offered positions with two NFL teams and he was like “oh yeah…I think of Ford I think “I play football….<goofy voice>”
Ford turned down those offers and accepted a position as assistant coach with the Yale Football team so that he could attend Yale law school, where he maintained a B average. This in a time when they did NOT grade on a curve. So yeah…he was not JUST a dumb jock. He was incredibly smart. And he knew he wanted to go into public service. After the war.
Ford graduated college in top third of his class in 1941 and was admitted to the Michigan Bar in May 1941. Of course, Pearl Harbor happened December 7, 1941, and the country was headed to war.
Now, he actually set out two feelers, one to the FBI, and one to the Office of Naval Intelligence. And while he was interviewed for he FBI and cut quite an impressive figure at 6 feet tall, peak physical health due to a continued fitness regime which included swimming a half mile a day, Hoover did not pick him up. Now, whether this was because of a knee injury he had sustained as a result of college football or as a result of his isolationist opinions expressed while in college is literally something we will never know…the Government does not actually give you a reason when they send you a politely worded fuck off letter.
Regardless, the ONI was happy to accept him and he joined the US Navy, where he was ultimately stationed on the USS Monterey, where he definitely saw action, and barely managed to survive a literal Typhoon, Typhoon Cobra.
And when he returned, he started returned to law with his longtime friend Philip Buchen. The two had started a practice prior to the war, and owing to a childhood bout with polio, Buchen was exempt from military service, and while Ford was service, Buchen joined another law firm, to which Ford was welcomed when he returned from active duty. And he worked as a lawyer until 1948 when he ran for a position with the US House of Representatives for Michigan’s 5th district, which he represented in Congress from 1949 when he was sworn in, until 1973 when he was tapped to be Vice President following the disgraced resignation of VP Spiro Agnew.
Sometime in I think 1947, he met Elizabeth Anne Warren…maiden name Bloomer. Betty was married when they met, but in the process of divorcing her first husband, which Ford would push for an eccliastical dissolution as well as legal so that when they married they could marry in a church. Betty was a trained dancer….like no joke, she trained under Martha Graham, but ultimately chose to move back to Michigan and I think it was help her mom out. And it was there she met her first husband and was going to divorce him when he fell into a diabetic coma. Being a decent human being, Betty instead nursed her first husband back to health before proceeding with the divorce.
When he returned from war and got himself set up in a new law practice, Ford asked friends of his if he had any recommendations for available young ladies, and this friend connected him with Betty Warren. And the rest was history. They would marry and have four children, three boys Michael, Jack, and Steven, and one daughter Susan.
Ford genuinely LIKED being a congressman, he liked representing the people of the 5th district, and he really aspired to be Speaker of the House…which would require the Republicans to be majority party in the House WHILE he held some seniority. In the 24 years he served, he made friends. Across the aisle. On his “side”. He was a friendly…CENTRIST….guy. But he was put on different committees, as congress critters are, including the House Appropriations Committee and the Defense Appropriations Committee. And in 1963, just days after the Assassination of JFK, who he held high regard owing to his general friendliness…like he was seriously friends with everyone….LBJ called him and asked Ford to sit on the Warren Committee investigating the JFK assassination.
And the author does a pretty good job explaining the reservations Ford had at the beginning of the commission and how ultimately Ford accepted the narrative, including Ford’s caveat that if more information came out, he’d be open to changing his mind, but as far as the information immediately available, JFK was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, who was in turn killed by Jack Ruby, and there was no grand conspiracy.
In 1965, Ford got as close as he would to his ambition, when he was elected House Minority Leader, a position he would hold until making the leap to the executive, which position he did NOT seek out. He was actually set to retire from all of it in 1976. Like truly, that was his ambition, was to have his last election be the 1974 congressional run, serve 1975 and 1976, then retire.
But then….Spiro Agnew. Agnew had been Nixon’s VP for his first term and was elected as VP for the second term, which began January 20, 1973. October 10, 1973 Agnew advised Nixon he would be retiring due to pending criminal charges filed against Agnew in his home state for tax evasion. And on October 20, 1973 Agnew pled guilty to tax evasion.
And due to the 25th Amendment, Nixon had to quickly replace Agnew, and picked Ford. This is not JUST because Ford was the house minority leader. The two of them were friends, they’d been friends for 25 years at this point, they’d worked together in the House of Representatives and on joint bills when Nixon was a Senator, and worked together then Nixon was VP under Eisenhower. So, Ford was tapped, and quickly flew through the required confirmation hearings. All of this while Watergate was heating up, and the author speculates that certain factions in the House might have tried to delay Fords’ confirmation because if Nixon is impeached with no VP on hand, then the Speaker of the House, Carl Albert, a Democrat, would have been boosted into the highest position in the land.
It's good speculation, but obviously didn’t happen, and Ford and Betty scrambled to make VP work from their three bedroom family home in Alexandria, VA. The Secret Service had fits with security.
And while the Ford’s did spend some time looking for a more suitable VP residence that the Secret Service could better secure, this all happened as Watergate was heating up. And since 1974 was an election year, Ford was busy campaigning for Republicans all across the country ahead of the November elections. And finally, on like August 1, 1974, chief of staff Alexander Haig told Ford he should start preparing for the presidency. And on I think it was August 8th, Nixon called Ford into his office, where he spent 70 minutes in a crash course bringing Ford up to speed on international politics and the state of the union, advising that he would be resigning the next day. And then he did. And as Betty Ford said, most presidents get three months to transition. They had 24 hours.
And with that the Fords moved into the White House, and Ford did an absolutely remarkable job restoring honor to the Presidency. And I’m not even joking about that. Of course he had to have a VP, per the requirements of the 25th Amendment, so he nominated Nelson Rockefeller, who was confirmed in December 1974. He was asked so frequently about Watergate, that he pardoned Nixon on September 8, 1974. This was such a controversial decision that when Ford lost the presidency to Carter in 1976, most people then and now blame his pardon of Nixon. It’s possible. It’s also possible that Nixon’s actions so sullied the Presidency that the nation wanted a shift.
Anyway, Ford was off and running. The pardon of Nixon WAS popular with hard-line Republicans and to kind of keep the balance, Ford proposed a conditional amnesty for draft dodgers and deserters. The condition being that, acknowledging that those who responded to the call died in droves in Vietnam, those who ran could earn their way back through public service. This was popular with some, not so much with other who believed it should have been an unconditional amnesty. Ford just wanted the nation to pull together on the oars of the ship of state, so we could stop going in circles.
The other thing that probably seriously dented Ford’s possible election in 1976 was April 1975. This is when American troop withdrawals completed in Vietnam and man….anyone who watched the shitshow in Afghanistan in August 2021on the news, that’s kind of a lot what it was like. Only Ford actually gave a shit and insisted on refugee status for those Vietnamese who managed to catch a ride out, ultimately settling 130,000 refugees…that number comes from Wikipedia because Smith did not provide a total number in the book, although the numbers were pretty damn high.
Ford then confronted an incident off the coast of Cambodia when Khmer Rouge forces seized a US merchant chip, the Mayaguez. This became an international clusterfuck as the Marines sent in to rescue the sailors landed on the wrong island and engaged in battle, while on another island, the sailors were being released.
Ford then redeemed his international chops with Operation Paul Bunyan, a measured response to North Korea’s murder of US troops in the DMZ when those troops went out to cut down a tree. This was addressed in Dear Reader, and for more details, The Fat Electrician did an outstanding video on just this incident, but the upshot is, Ford did good.
In September 1975, Ford survived TWO assassination attempts. No joke. TWO. Famously, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromm, a follower of Charles Manson, made an attempt outside the capital building in Sacramento, CA, failing when Secret Service managed to get his hand in the slide, preventing the firing pin from hitting the bullet in the Colt 1911 she had on her. She was in prison for this until 2009, being released after Ford’s death. The second attempt was a few weeks later in San Francisoc, CA by Sara Jane Moore, when she fired at Ford with a .38 revolver. This attempt was stymied by retired Marine Oliver Sipple, who was immediately shit on by the press, who outed him as homosexual.
Ford, for his part, was an absolute centrist. No joke. He was not racist, he was not sexist, he was not homophobic. The AIDS epidemic hit after he retired but he was part of like AIDS walks and believed in marriage equality well before this was a political hot button. He supported Betty when she came out in favor of Roe v Wade and supported the Equal Rights Amendment, and as far back as his college football days at University of Michigan, he was PISSED when the Wolverines were playing an away game in highly racist…Georgia? And Georgia refused to let one of Michigan’s black players on the field. Ford like…VIOLENTLY body checked the opposing team. A lot.
Ford did address Inflation as the number one issue domestically, and listened to economists who recommended cutting taxes AND spending. And the economy was on it’s way to recovery going into the 1976 election. It was during Ford’s administration that economist Arthur Laffer made his famed Laffer curve, and Ford certainly took this in to consideration when creating domestic financial policy. While recovery was happening, it was slow. On the other hand, Ford made an outstanding impression on the other world leaders, everyone from Canada, Germany, France, England, Russia, China, Egypt…all these world leaders got on quite well with Ford. Well enough that when Anwar Sadat was assassinated, then president Reagan asked Ford to be one of the US emissaries to his funeral.
Now, obviously Ford was disappointed when he lost in 1976 to Carter, but being the consummate professional and gentleman that he was, Ford was determined to leave Carter in a better position than he had been when he left. So, he began working closely with the transition team, preparing briefs for Carter on key issues and policies.
The Secret Service vetoed the Ford’s returning to their house in Alexandria for the same security reasons they wanted Ford the VP to find alternate residence, and so ultimately the Ford’s settled in CA with a summer residence in CO.
And it was after he retired, and life slowed a bit with room to breath, and Ford was no longer running from national crises to national crises, that the Ford kids addressed Betty’s substance use. Now, her addiction to pain killers can actually be traced to a specific incident on August 15, 1964, when she was trying to open a window in the Alexandria VA house and pinched a nerve. From that point on, she slowly began to develop a dependence on pain killers. Which mixed with alcohol. And it’s entirely possible that without this incident, there would have been no alcohol dependency. But anyone who has ever had a pinched nerve knows just how painful that is. And with the physical demands of a political wife, ESPECIALLY after becoming first lady….well, dependency happened. But following a family intervention, she got clean. And famously created the Betty Ford Clinic.
And true to form, once Betty stopped drinking, Ford stopped drinking. Because as busy as he had been with his political career, Ford always supported Betty, just as she had supported him. And when she could no longer drink, he just stopped. Equally telling is when his daughter Susan said she’d quit smoking cigarettes when he quit smoking pipes, a habit he’d had literally all his life, he said, ok, packed all his pipes and sent them to his presidential library in MI, and never smoked again. Basically, he had his pleasures, but no addictions. But he was immensely proud that Betty overcame hers.
This book…was well named. Ford was an ordinary man, who found himself in extraordinary circumstances. He had an outstanding sense of humor, laughed at himself, and when Chevy Chase, who famously caricatured him on Saturday Night Live, came through the Betty Ford Clinic, Ford sat and talked with him. He knew the media was going to take all the pictures, and when he slipped on the steps of Air Force One…well, he knew that would make headlines. And he just ran with it, apologized to the Chancellor of Germany, Helmut Schmidt, who he was meeting, and kept going.
Ford was an honest man. He believed that his mandate was to serve the people, first of the 5th district of Michigan, and then of the United States. And he did. To the absolute best of his ability. Apparently, there is a much shorter book about Ford, written by Donald Rumsfeld, who at the time served as Ford’s chief of Staff, and later Secretary of Defense, called “When the Center Held.” Now, obviously, I have not read this one. But I feel like the title says a lot. Ford WAS a centrist. So, on my journey to learn about the presidents, from here we enter my lived life time. And ok, I was born in 77, so I can’t claim to recall anything about Jimmy Carter as president, but I DEFINITELY have opinions about Reagan on. And after reading this book, I am pretty sure Ford was the last centrist president we had. Like, the country has become more and more divided since Ford left the White House, until we have this years current shit show.
Yeah.
So anyways, I liked this book. I enjoyed learning about Ford, and I feel like history has vindicated most if not all of the decisions he made while in the White House. He was outstanding at compromise and friends with…everyone. If they didn’t know him coming in, he made friends of them. He once said that he wanted adversaries that weren’t enemies. And he had them. Even people who didn’t necessarily like him, respected him. And came to like him. Joining him on his trip to Anwar Sadat’s funeral were Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon. While Ford, on that trip, made the comment that he regretted pardoning Nixon, he and Carter became good friends. So much so that Carter spoke at his funeral after he passed on December 26, 2006.
