Gerald Ford

Gerald Rudolph Ford, Jr. (born Leslie Lynch King, Jr.; July 14, 1913 — December 26, 2006) was an American politician who had served as the 38th president of the United States from 1974 to 1977. Before becoming president, he was the 40th vice president from 1973 to 1974 under Richard Nixon. As a member of the Republican Party, he was also a member of the House of Representatives from 1949 to 1973, becoming its minority leader in 1965. He is the only president who elected to neither office as vice president or president.^[1]

Ford was born in Omaha, Nebraska. He attended the University of Michigan and Yale Law School. After Pearl Harbor was attacked in 1941, he joined the U.S. Naval Reserve and served from 1942 to 1946.

Ford began his career in politics in 1949 as the U.S. Representative from Michigan's 5th congressional district. In 1965, he became the House Minority Leader. In December 1973, he became the vice president of the United States to replace Spiro Agnew, who had resigned two months warlier. That made Ford the first person to become vice president due to the 25th Amendment. In August 1974, Ford became president after Richard Nixon resigned.

As president, Ford signed the Helsinki Accords, which were to ease tensions between the Western world and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. In 1975, South Vietnam collapsed after it was invaded by North Vietnam. The event ended US participation in the Vietnam War.

Domestically, Ford had to work with economic downturn. Growing inflation and a recession happened during his presidency.^[2] Ford also gave a presidential pardon to Nixon for his role in the Watergate scandal. The pardon was one of his most controversial things as president. Foreign policy was characterized in procedural terms by the larger role that Congress began to play and by its restraining of presidential powers.^[3]

In 1976, Ford ran for reelection and defeated former California Governor Ronald Reagan for the Republican nomination. He narrowly lost the presidential election to the Democratic candidate, the former Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter.

After his presidency ended in 1977, Ford remained active in the Republican Party. However, his views on some social issues caused disagreement with conservative members of the party in the 1990s and early 2000s, and he was regarded as a moderate. He is ranked average in presidential opinion polls.^[4][5][6]

Ford died at home on December 26, 2006, after he had faced a series of health problems, at the age of 93.

He was born on July 14, 1913, at 3202 Woolworth Avenue in Omaha, Nebraska, where his parents lived with his paternal grandparents. His birth name was Leslie Lynch King, Jr. His mother was Dorothy Ayer Gardner, and his father was Leslie Lynch King, Sr., a wool trader and son of prominent banker Charles Henry King and Martha Alicia King (born Porter). Dorothy separated from King just 16 days after her son's birth. She took her son with her to the Oak Park, Illinois, where her sister, Tannisse, and brother-in-law, Clarence Haskins James, lived. Then, she moved to the home of her parents, Levi Addison Gardner and Adele Augusta Ayer, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Dorothy and King divorced in December 1913; she got full custody of her son. Ford's paternal grandfather, Charles Henry King, paid child support until shortly before his death in 1930.^[7]

Ford later said that his biological father had a history of hitting his mother.^[8] James M. Cannon, a member of the Ford administration, wrote in a Ford biography that the Kings' separation and divorce were sparked when, a few days after Ford's birth, Leslie King threatened Dorothy with a butcher knife and threatened to kill her, Ford, and his nursemaid. Ford later told confidantes that his father had first hit his mother on their honeymoon for smiling at another man.^[9]

After two and a half years with her parents, on February 1, 1916, Dorothy married Gerald Rudolff Ford, a salesman in a family-owned paint and varnish company. They then called her son Gerald Rudolff Ford, Jr. The future president was never formally adopted, however, and he did not legally change his name until December 3, 1935; he also used a more conventional spelling of his middle name.^[10] He was raised in Grand Rapids with his three half brothers from his mother's second marriage: Thomas Gardner Ford (1918–1995), Richard Addison Ford (born 1924), and James Francis Ford (1927–2001).

Ford also had three half-siblings from his father's second marriage: Marjorie King (1921–1993), Leslie Henry King (1923–1976), and Patricia Jane King (born 1925). They never saw one another as children, and he did not know them at all. Ford was not aware of his biological father until he was 17, when his parents told him about the circumstances of his birth. That year, his father, Leslie King, whom Ford described as a "carefree, well-to-do man who didn't really give a damn about the hopes and dreams of his firstborn son," approached Ford while he was waiting tables in a Grand Rapids restaurant.

Ford said, "My stepfather was a magnificent person and my mother equally wonderful. So I couldn't have written a better prescription for a superb family upbringing."^[11]

Ford was involved in the Boy Scouts of America and earned that program's highest rank, the Eagle Scout.^[12] In his later years, Ford received the Distinguished Eagle Scout Award in May 1970 and Silver Buffalo Award from the Boy Scouts of America. He is the only U.S. president who is an Eagle Scout.^[12] He played football when he was in high school and college.

Ford served 25 years in the United States House of Representatives and was Minority Leader for many years. When Richard Nixon was President, his first Vice President was Spiro Agnew, but Agnew resigned in 1973 because he took bribes while he was Governor of Maryland in the late 1960s. Nixon then chose Ford to be his next Vice President. Ford had to be approved by Congress since there was no presidential election that year. Because he had been in Congress for a long time, other Congressmen knew him well and were happy to approve him as vice president because they thought that he was honest.

However, Ford was not Nixon's first choice. Some of his first choices were John Connally, the former governor of Texas; Nelson Rockefeller, the Governor of New York; and Ronald Reagan (the former Governor of California). However, Nixon was worried that those other men might have trouble getting approved by Congress. All of them had also run for president already or were planning to run soon. Nixon did not want to help pick who would be the top Republican candidate in 1976, and Ford promised him that he was not interested in being President. Ford always told reporters that he always dreamed of being Speaker of the House instead.

Because of the Watergate scandal, Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974. Ford became the President. He was inaugurated at the White House by Chief Justice Warren E. Burger. He is the only President of the United States to be elected as neither President or Vice President. Once he became President, he realized that he could do a good job and decided to run for a full term in 1976. He ran against the popular conservative Reagan for the Republican nomination in 1976. Ford won by a small number of votes against Reagan.

In 1975, Ford was nearly assassinated in Sacramento, California.

Ford had pardoned Nixon for his crimes in 1974. Many experts say that is one of the reasons that Ford lost to Jimmy Carter in the 1976 election, which was very close. Other reasons for the loss were a bad economy that had high inflation and two international incidents in 1975: the Mayagüez incident of the Khmer Rouge capturing a U.S. ship in Cambodia; and the last U.S. Vietnam War soldiers leaving Vietnam, followed by Saigon and the rest of South Vietnam being taken over by North Vietnam, both in 1975.

With his somewhat-short presidency (895 days) lasting less than a full term, he was often seen as a place holder in between Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter. He handled the Watergate scandal in a way that changed people's view of him. While critics felt that pardoning Nixon was unfair, his supporters felt that his term provided a sense of healing and comfort to a country that was morally divided.

He was also a more liberal Republican than the more conservative Ronald Reagan.

Ford was adopted at a young age. His birth name was Leslie King, Jr. He married Betty Ford in 1948.

Ford died in his home in California from cerebrovascular disease and arteriosclerosis at the age of 93 years and 165 days. Until then, no other president had lived to be that old since Reagan in 2004. George H. W. Bush became the oldest living former president in November 2017.^[13] On March 22, 2019, Jimmy Carter gained the distinction of being the nation's longest-lived president.^[14]

• White House biography about Ford. Archived 2009-01-17 at the Wayback Machine