Gerald Ford dead at 93

It was with great sadness that I opened up the newspaper this morning and saw that President Gerald Ford had died. I know that my friends and I have been on a Gerry Ford death watch since January, when he was hospitalized for pneumonia, but it is always a bit shocking when a former president dies. After all, it is only the third presidential death that I remember, and for better or worse Ford was probably the most underrated of modern presidents.

Ford's presidency will most likely be remembered for two things, pardoning Richard Nixon after his disgraceful resignation and for being a klutz; falling down slippery steps while getting off of Air Force One and falling while skiing. It is too bad, because what most people forget is the sense of decency and normalcy he brought back to the office of the president after Nixon's stench.

In retrospect, Ford had to pardon Nixon to help the country move past Watergate. Without the pardon, the Congress, the press and the people would have continued to investigate and keep the scandal on the front pages for years to come. By pardoning Tricky Dick, we as a country were able to have some closure knowing that Nixon was being exiled, and it would be years before Nixon was essentially able to leave Elba to become a respected elder statesman and author that most of us remember towards the end of his life.

The clumsiness attributes are actually quite ironic, since Ford was probably the most athletically gifted president since Teddy Roosevelt. He was an All-American football player at the University of Michigan, leading them to two national championships. He passed up the opportunity to play professional football so he could obtain a law degree and move onto bigger things in life. At least he was able to laugh at the often harsh parodies and satire of this knowing that the media would often, even in 1975, make a national story out of some microscopic thing, and then not let it die until it was thoroughly beaten. It certainly looks like some things have not changed in 30 years.

During college, my friend Michael and I used to sit around and joke how we both wrote Gerald Ford in as our presidential candidate in the 1988 election. We both figured that Ford was a better man, more decent, more honest, more honorable than either George HW Bush or Michael Dukakis and never really got the chance to prove what he could do, since he was always stuck in Nixon's shadow and his mud. People should remember more about the 38th President.

Ford spent 26 years in the House of Representatives and worked his way up to be the minority leader. He was at the right place to be appointed Vice President in 1973, when Spiro Agnew resigned in disgrace. The following year, he became the first president not elected to either the president or vice-president when Nixon resigned. Some say that after Watergate, there is no way any republican could have won in 1976 and it was probably true. It is a shame that he only got 896 days in the White House, the 5th shortest presidential stint, and we will never know what the Ford legacy could have been, since he never got the chance to set his own policies and make his own mark. That is the true shame of the situation.

Goodbye President Ford, you will be missed!!

Added 12/28 - Here is another tribute from CounterPunch, it is worth a quick read, not like anything else I have seen on this man.