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Publisher’s Comments
The 38th president of the United States died at the age of 93 at his home in California last week. Decent, unassuming, caring and compassionate have all been used to describe the only man to ever serve as vice president or president without having been elected to the office. Former President George H. W. Bush at the funeral at the National Cathedral in Washington Tuesday called him a “Norman Rockwell painting come to life.” Grove Hill native David Mathews, who served as Ford’s Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare from 1975 until 1977, remembered him as a “man from Main Street and a Main Street president” who helped the nation recover from the nightmare of Watergate in the 1970s. Gerald Ford was a congressman from Grand Rapids, Mich. whose highest ambition was to be Speaker of the House when he was tapped by President Nixon to be vice president when Spiro Agnew resigned in 1973, charged with tax evasion. Hardly a year later, as the Watergate scandal came crashing down with Richard Nixon aboard, Nixon resigned the presidency and Ford was propelled into the high office without having ever sought it. Perhaps because he had been a longtime congressman and had worked closely with presidents and other leaders...perhaps because he had not sought the office, he was not in awe of it and he was not consumed by the prestige and the trappings that those who had lusted after it were. Ford’s pardon of Nixon hardly a month after he became president angered the nation but Ford always insisted that he did it for the good of the nation so that we could get past Watergate. In hindsight, most historians now agree that he was probably correct in his actions but at the time it set off a firestorm and likely cost him the presidency when the Georgia peanut farmer Jimmy Carter beat him in 1976. Personally, I think there should have been some requirement for an admission of guilt from Nixon but Ford’s answer to that was a Supreme Court ruling in 1915 that a pardon implies guilt and the acceptance of one implies confession. Ford’s body lay in state in the rotunda of the Capitol in Washington, D.C. over the weekend. I was especially moved by Ford’s children standing in line to shake hands with common Americans as they came to pay their respects to their father. It made me realize that these were ordinary “Main Street” citizens and the scene was much like the ones we see in our local churches and funeral homes when a family member or neighbor dies. The only difference here was the grandeur of the setting of the soaring rotunda, the military honor guard and the fact that the man in the flag-draped coffin had once been the leader of the greatest nation in the world. Still, the children chose to honor those who came to honor their father. I have never seen such before at the funeral of any former president or other high leader. I was touched. David Mathews said Ford’s greatest contribution as president was his determination to “give the country back to the people” after Watergate and to restore trust in the presidency and the national government. Ford barely lost the presidency to Carter in 1976. History can turn on such little things. Had Ford been re-elected, Ronald Reagan may not have come along to be president, George H. W. Bush may not have been vice president and then president. And without that background, George W. Bush might still be in the oil or baseball business in Texas.
At any rate, I salute President Ford’s service to his nation and his family’s class performance during the past week.
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