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Will: Gerald Ford deserves our nation’s respect

The Columbian

Published: June 3, 2018, 6:01am

Within 17 days in the autumn of 1975 — first in Sacramento, then in San Francisco — two separate handgun-wielding women attempted to assassinate the president. Had either succeeded, and each was close enough to have done so, the nation would have had a third president in 14 months, and a second consecutive one who had never been on a national ticket. Gerald Ford survived to continue with an 895-day presidency during which the nation regained its equilibrium after Watergate and Vietnam.

The only president never to appear on a ballot for either vice president or president, Ford became vice president when scandals forced Richard Nixon’s vice president, Spiro Agnew, to resign. Ford became president when Nixon resigned.

Today, with the nation seemingly more irritable and depressed than at any time since then, it is well to fondly remember the 38th president, which Donald Rumsfeld does in “When the Center Held: Gerald Ford and the Rescue of the American Presidency.”

Ford was the most accomplished athlete ever to hold the nation’s highest elective office: For three seasons he was the center (hence Rumsfeld’s title) on University of Michigan’s football teams, two of which were undefeated national champions. Yet because of a few public stumbles related to a football-weakened knee, he is remembered as awkward.

Dealt miserable hand of cards

When he was sworn in as president on Aug. 9, 1974, only 36 percent of Americans expressed trust in government, down from 77 percent in 1964. And the inflation rate was 10.9 percent, the highest since 1919: nothing destroys faith in government faster than its currency failing as a store of value. To cauterize the Watergate wound, Ford pardoned Nixon, an act both statesmanlike — it spared the nation additional years of rancor — and politically damaging: Ford’s job approval plunged 31 points.

That fate had dealt Ford a miserable hand of cards did not discombobulate him, largely because, as Rumsfeld says, he had not “come to the Oval Office with an outsized view of himself.” Never having campaigned other than in Michigan’s 5th Congressional District (Grand Rapids), he nevertheless won the 1976 GOP nomination, and probably would have won the election if, during a debate with Jimmy Carter, he had inserted the word “permanently” in his statement that Eastern European peoples did not “consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union.”

Rumsfeld, who calls Ford “the president we always wanted that we didn’t know we had,” tiptoes up to a comparison with today’s Washington when he says the city “can be a magnet for sizable personalities” and that Ford’s “saving grace” was that he was not like that: “His calm, thoughtful and steadfast nature was remarkable in Washington, D.C., even in his own day, and some might assert even more so now.” Do tell.

The current president’s contribution to America’s civic health might be to help cure the country of unreasonable fastidiousness regarding presidential aspirants. For a while, at least, many voters will be less inclined than they once were to measure candidates with a political micrometer that encourages voters to be excessively finicky, rejecting candidates for minor blemishes, only to wind up with one who is all blemish.

Dealt miserable hand of cards

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