Gerald R. Ford Ford took office at a time when “we didn’t need to look into the future but assure ourselves we had one.” And though biographer Richard Norton Smith argues that Ford was not a visionary, he did recognize the “long-term consequences of a public sector growing faster than the private economy that sustained it.” We surely could use that very recognition today.
An Ordinary Man: The Surprising Life and Historic Presidency of Gerald R. Ford, by Richard Norton Smith (814 pages, HarperCollins, 2023)
The director of five presidential libraries, Richard Norton Smith has made a second career of chronicling the lives of, shall we say, somewhat less than universally acclaimed Republican presidents and presidential pretenders. Among those captured (but far from pilloried) by Mr. Smith are a once-defeated president (Herbert Hoover in 1932), a twice defeated presidential candidate (Thomas Dewey in 1944 and 1948), and a frequent and forever spurned aspirant for the presidency (Nelson Rockefeller).
Mr. Smith has now added Gerald Ford to his list of rejected GOP standard bearers, actual or potential. A double entry, Ford was at once an accidental president and a defeated president. Could one of the following one-and-done GOP losers, namely Alf Landon or Bob Dole or John McCain or Mitt Romney, possibly be next on the author’s list? Or will he revert to the Hoover pattern of winner and loser by turning to William Howard Taft, George H. W. Bush, or Donald Trump?
Of course, there is always the possibility of the reverse of the Hoover political trajectory. That would be Richard Nixon, loser first and then winner twice before finally losing by resigning, thereby making way for his unelected vice-president, who by his own description was a “Ford not a Lincoln.”
Actually, and not surprisingly, Richard Nixon figures prominently in many of these many pages. At least two explanations for that featured role become readily apparent. Far more often than not, the presence—or memory—of Nixon invariably reflects positively on Ford. At least that seems to be Mr. Smith’s intention. And in all likelihood the pardon of Nixon by Ford cost the pardoner the 1976 election. At least that is the author’s best guesstimate.
So who was this young fellow from Grand Rapids, Michigan? Born Leslie King in Omaha, Nebraska, “Junie” Ford was raised by his mother and adoptive stepfather, Gerald Ford, senior. While there was much that was ordinary about the life and circumstances of this slightly-below-the-middle of this middle class family, there was clearly something beyond ordinary, if not exactly extraordinary, about Gerald Ford, Eagle scout, or Gerald Ford, University of Michigan student athlete (which in his case would be an accurate description rather than athletic department boilerplate puffery).
The same might be said of Gerald Ford, World War II navy veteran, Gerald Ford, Yale Law School graduate, and Gerald Ford, successful politician and congressional mainstay, not to mentioned Gerald Ford, aspiring Speaker of the House. “Ordinary” doesn’t really capture it. “Decent,” however, does.
Marrying a divorced Betty Bloomer Warren in his mid-thirties, Ford was a faithful, if often absent, husband and a good, if not always present, father who lived a solidly upper middle class life in suburban Washington, DC, rather than anywhere close to his withering roots in western Michigan.
A creature of Congress, which he often called his true home, Ford’s supreme ambition was to one day ascend to Speaker of the House. In diligently working toward that highest of his goals, Congressman Ford was always the model of “modern,” meaning Eisenhowerish, Republicanism.
If this young midwestern congressman had a Michigan model, it was another native of Grand Rapids, Senator Arthur Vandenberg. Having spurned his isolationist past, Vandenberg supported both the American entry into World War II and the prosecution of the Cold War. In doing so, Vandenberg also spurned another potential Mr. Smith biographical subject, namely Ohio Senator Robert Taft who was rejected by GOP delegates at their national conventions in both 1940 and 1952.
It was once said of Taft that his foreign policy was so isolationist that it could be summarized in two words: beat Michigan. Ford’s field of vision and Cold War list of potential foreign enemies was a good deal more extensive, but beating Ohio State was somewhere in sight and never to be ignored.
Mr. Smith devotes many chapters to Ford’s lengthy congressional career, a career which included any number of domestic rivals, but no domestic enemies of any consequence or importance. To Gerald Ford, enemies were exclusively foreign, but never domestic.
Ford’s congressional career unfolded when the Cold War was both very intense and occasionally quite hot. Witness his support for what 1976 GOP vice-presidential candidate Robert Dole called “Democrat wars” in Korea and Vietnam.
Supportive of the foreign policies of Truman, Kennedy and Johnson, Ford always saw himself as a member of the “loyal opposition.” The same can be said of his approach to and dealings with a House leadership that was controlled by Democrats for the entirety of Ford’s tenure, save for the two years following the election of 1952. During those many years the political career of a decent Jerry Ford could, in fact, be characterized as ordinary, maybe even all too ordinary.
Reading those chapters, for that matter reading the chapters devoted to Ford’s brief presidency, offer an extended glimpse into a time that is now long gone. That would be a time of genuine, if uniquely defined, bipartisanship. More precisely, it was a time when Democrats were essentially dominant, as well as a time when most Republicans were, shall we say, not all that uncomfortable with Democratic dominance. That list of Republicans would surely include one Gerald R. Ford.
A moderate modern Republican, Ford seems to have had better personal relations with leading liberal Democrats, including Tip O’Neill and Hubert Humphrey, than with leading conservative Republicans, including Ronald Reagan. The same might be said of Ford’s post-presidential career and his occasional, but always cordial, dealings with fellow post-presidents named Carter and Clinton—and Bush, who was also on Nixon’s short list of potential replacements for one Spiro Agnew in 1973.
In what must have been both a labor of love and yet one of some frustration, Mr. Smith spends only a few pages evaluating a political career that he treats with sympathy, but not celebration. He is content to explain, rather than defend or criticize, such matters as the Nixon pardon, the final withdrawal from Vietnam, the Helsinki accords, the failure to meet with Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, the 1976 nomination tussle with Reagan, and the debate mis-step with Carter over Soviet control of eastern Europe.
Mr. Smith’s overall evaluation is at once concise and fair-minded. He opens that evaluation with a quite telling line: “Ford wanted his Washington funeral more Trumanesque than Reaganesque.” There would be no “riderless horse or caisson-led procession.” After all, Harry Truman was not just a fellow Midwesterner, but a fellow war veteran, as well as an accidental president. More than that, he was also a Cold Warrior, who may have been a Ford rival, but never a Ford enemy.
Mr. Smith returns to the Nixon pardon in his brief evaluation. While contending that the new president had hoped to “clear the national palate of Watergate’s foul aftertaste,” the author concedes that that was “not… how it appeared at the time.” As a result, Ford did not just lose the 1976 election, but his decision to pardon Nixon “fostered a view of himself as Nixon Lite.”
Mr. Smith, however, proceeds to make a case for Gerald Ford as the “Un-Nixon,” whether he was “practicing” a kind of “Cabinet government” or “depoliticizing” judicial selections, or “fumigating” the Justice Department, or “tearing up” enemies lists.
If Mr. Smith regards it as mistaken to regard Ford as “Nixon Lite,” he also dissents from the view that Ford’s presidency was “essentially reactive.” His Gerald Ford may not have been a Lincoln, but he was an able, and not simply a reactive, decision-maker.
In truth, Ford, like Truman, was “better at making decisions than communicating them to the public.” When it came to speechifying, the difference between the former congressman from Michigan and the former senator from Missouri may have come down to this: Ford knew that he was a poor public speaker, and his “somewhat improbable role model” didn’t.
Mr. Smith also seems to agree with columnist David Broder, who once speculated that Ford and the country might well have benefited had he possessed a “large ego,” which he didn’t, as well as a “larger ambition-slash-vision” which he lacked. But would either have been consistent with his essential decency?
No doubt the biographer would not dissent from any attempt to refer to his subject as anything other than the decent man that he was. That said, for better or for worse, it’s also the case that, as an unnamed Ford “admirer” once put it, the congressman-turned-president was “not a visionary.” Not surprisingly, Mr. Smith once again essentially agrees.
Finally, he also agrees with that same admirer, who added that Ford took office at a time when “we didn’t need to look into the future but assure ourselves we had one.” And yet Richard Norton Smith’s Gerald R. Ford was a visionary to this extent: He recognized the “long-term consequences of a public sector growing faster than the private economy that sustained it.” We surely could use that very recognition today.
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