Opinion: Gerald Ford: Our uncrown’d king is dead; national Rushmore watch begins. Cornhusker Leslie Lynch King tangled with assassins throughout lowkey, encyclopedic career

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

Robert L. Jackson gives a masterful rundown of President Gerald Ford’s life and career on page 1 of today’s Los Angeles Times. It’s worth picking up a hard copy just for a lovely jump-page portrait of Ford signing legislation—lefthandedness being of the few reasons to remember the accidental president with any affection. The Times editorial reminds us of a few more reasons, including his honest and merciful nature. I’ll give one more: He was a skier.

Though easily dismissed and lazily forgotten, Ford was a central figure in the creation of modern neoconservatism. Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney both served as chief of staff in the Ford Administration, while Paul Wolfowitz headed up nonproliferation issues at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Ford’s peak came in service to the founding father of post-ideological Republicanism, President Richard M. Nixon. Significantly, his political career began with the sacrifice of a paleocon: Rep. Bartel J. Jonkman, a geezer isolationist in Michigan’s fifth district whom Ford beat in a party primary in 1948.

From there, Ford’s dedication to demonstrating that government is good never waivered, no matter how much evidence piled up against him. His service on the Warren Commission produced a book called Portrait of the Assassin, co-written with John R. Stiles and available starting at $4.55. (Dedicated collectors of Fordiana can get an inscribed copy for $1,250.) As leader of a tiny House minority, Ford was on the front lines of the GOP’s surrender to the Great Society and reeducation as a party of big government.

Ford’s most controversial act, the pardon of Nixon, has had an ironic history. Public opinion polls at the time indicated outrage over the pardon, but history has since decided it doesn’t really care about the pardon. It should be the other way around. Pardoning Nixon was the right thing to do for the American people circa 1974; but the longterm health of the nation suffered from passing up this opportunity to break the taboo against sending presidents to prison. What a laugh that Ford at the time justified his decision by saying: ‘I do believe the buck stops here and I cannot rely on public opinion polls to tell me what is right.’

Maybe too much has been made of the pardon issue. Too much has certainly been made of Ford’s odd position as the only president not elected to either the presidency or the vice presidency. Our exaggerated notions about the meaning and importance of voting have created a myth that Ford was uniquely hamstrung by his lack of a ‘mandate.’ This weakness has been blamed for both his failure to come to the rescue of South Vietnam in 1975—an inaction from which newly elected Sen. Jim Webb (D-Virginia) is still smarting—and for his inability to get anything done with the strongly Democratic Congress. In fact, no president could have gotten the appropriations to dive back into the Vietnamese civil war, and Ford maneuvered quite well against the Congress, delivering a heroic 66 vetoes during his brief time in office.

Caretaker presidents are my favorite presidents, and those veto numbers may be enough to outweigh the fact that Ford’s place was always at the get-along-go-along end of the Goldwater-Rockefeller continuum of Republicanism. In my opinion, they’re not enough; your mileage may vary.

So rest in peace, and let the Squeaky Fromme death watch begin.

More to the moment, let the watch for phoned-in tributes by editorial cartoonists commence: Will we see Jerry Ford tripping at the pearly gates? Mt. Rushmore briefly moved? Maybe St. Peter telling the former prez, ‘You’ve been given a pardon...into Heaven!’ No reasonable guess will be refused.