[Vision2020] 38th President, Gerald R. Ford Dies

[Jerry Schutz]

(CNN) -- Gerald Ford was the unlikeliest of presidents, a man brought to
power by unprecedented circumstances without seeking the office, at a time
when Americans -- reeling from the Watergate scandal -- were disillusioned
and weary.

But in his very first speech as president in August 1974, after taking the
oath of office, Ford vowed he would "not shirk" what appeared to be a
thankless task. And he tried to set a tone of reconciliation and renewal by
telling his countrymen that "our long national nightmare is over."

"This is an hour of history that troubles our minds and hurts our hearts,"
Ford said. "I am acutely aware that you have not elected me as your
president by your ballots, and so I ask you to confirm me as your president
with your prayers."

Over the next 2½ years, Ford tried to bind up the nation's wounds in his
plain-spoken, Midwestern manner, reminding Americans that "I'm a Ford, not a
Lincoln" and providing a steady hand on the wheel during a turbulent time.

Yet, the enormously controversial decision he made in his first month in
office to pardon his predecessor, Richard Nixon, is widely blamed for
costing him an election in his own right in 1976, in one of the closest
presidential elections in U.S. history.

Ford, 93, the oldest surviving former U.S. president, died Tuesday, his
wife, former first lady Betty Ford said.

The nation's 38th president spent several days in the fall of 2006 at
Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage, California, for medical tests.
At the time of his release, on October 16, his chief of staff, Penny Circle,
said he would "resume normal activities."

In August, he was discharged from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota,
after undergoing an angioplasty procedure to reduce or eliminate blockages
in his coronary arteries. Doctors also implanted a pacemaker to improve his
heart performance.

He is survived by his wife, Betty, 88; three sons, Michael, Jack and Steven;
and a daughter, Susan.

Ford was born Leslie Lynch King on July 14, 1913, in Omaha, Nebraska. When
he was just 2 years old, his parents divorced, and his mother moved to Grand
Rapids, Michigan, where he grew up. His mother remarried, and he was adopted
and renamed after his stepfather, Gerald Rudolff Ford.

After playing football at the University of Michigan and serving on an
aircraft carrier in the Navy during World War II, Ford was elected to the
U.S. House in 1948 as a Republican, representing a district centered on his
hometown of Grand Rapids.

He spent 25 years in Congress, working his way up to minority leader in
1965. His ambition was to be speaker of the House, not president. Indeed,
Ford's presidency was one of the great accidents of American history.

In October 1973, Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned after pleading no
contest to tax evasion. President Nixon, ensnared in the rising Watergate
scandal, asked the well-respected Ford to leave Congress to replace Agnew,
and he accepted.

By August 1974, with impeachment looming and his GOP support in Congress
crumbling, Nixon became the first, and so far only, president to resign --
making Ford the only person to become president without having been first
elected as president or vice president.

Ford's wife and four children, then young adults, brought a more
contemporary air to the White House, after the more staid Nixons. Betty Ford
was particularly popular, although her candor occasionally caused
controversy, such as her admission that her children had probably smoked
marijuana and she would have, too, if she were still young.

Just a month after her husband assumed the presidency, she was diagnosed
with breast cancer. Her decision to be upfront and forthcoming about her
ordeal drew unprecedented public attention to the disease. She later sought
treatment for alcoholism and founded the Better Ford Center in California,
which treats addiction.

In September 1974, Ford granted Nixon a pardon, sparing the former president
from the prospect of going to prison. The public and political backlash was
angry and bitter, with Ford accused of making a tawdry deal with Nixon to
secure the White House for himself.

Ford always denied that any deal had been struck. But the pardon colored the
rest of his presidency.

"It was a tough decision," Ford told USA Today in an interview in 2000. "We
needed to get the matter off my desk ... so I could concentrate on the
problems of 260 million Americans and not have to worry about the problems
of one man."

The pardon was just the beginning of the challenges Ford faced in office. He
inherited stubborn inflation, a recession, high unemployment and an energy
crisis. As U.S. involvement in Vietnam wound down, North Vietnamese forces
eventually overran South Vietnam, triggering a chaotic evacuation of U.S.
loyalists from the country in 1975.

Ford, despite his athletic background, also developed a reputation as being
accident-prone, stumbling while exiting Air Force One, bumping his head
getting into a helicopter and once beaning a spectator on a golf course --
all of which prompted regular spoofing from comedian Chevy Chase on
"Saturday Night Live."

Even though he hadn't sought the presidency, Ford decided he wanted to stay
in the White House and sought a full term in 1976. It was an uphill battle
from the start.

He only narrowly won the GOP nomination, after a hard-fought campaign
against Ronald Reagan, and started the general election campaign far behind
the Democratic nominee, former Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter.

But Ford stormed back by election day, carrying 27 states and coming to
within a whisker of beating Carter in the Electoral College. A shift of just
23,000 votes in two states, Ohio and Wisconsin, would have given Ford the
win.

After leaving the White House, Ford kept a generally low profile, limiting
his appearances largely to golf tournaments and splitting his time between
homes in Rancho Mirage, California., and Beaver Creek, Colorado. He built a
presidential library and museum in Michigan.

His only foray back into the political fray came at the Republican National
Convention in Detroit in 1980, when Reagan, the party's nominee, briefly
considered putting Ford on the ticket in what was billed as a
"co-presidency." But the plan was quickly dropped.

During the 2000 Republican convention, Ford suffered a mild stroke. He was
hospitalized again in 2003 after suffering a dizzy spell while playing golf
in 96-degree heat.

In January 2006, he spent 11 days in a hospital near his home in Rancho
Mirage being treated for pneumonia. Then in late July, he was admitted to a
hospital in Vail, Colorado, for two days after suffering shortness of
breath., 

Jerry L. Schutz

- Before you can do something, you must be something.

                            - Goethe