American presidents (3): Gerald Ford
This week, I was back at the City Lit to resume the course on post-war American presidents. For Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, our lecturer was Paul Hadjipieris (his parents are Cypriot and his wife is American).
His approach was rather different from the lecturers on Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. He focused very much on their time as president rather than give a lot of biographical background and, more than the other lecturers, he made comparisons with other post-war presidents.
Gerald Ford was the 38th president who served from 1974-1977. In fact, he was in the White House for a mere 816 days – the shortest term in modern times.
In spite of media images of Ford as president stumbling or falling, in his younger days he was an all-star athlete before becoming a lawyer. Most of his political career was spent in the House of Representatives where he served a total of almost 25 years for a district in Michigan, finally becoming Minority Leader for the last eight of those years. He hoped that he would be chosen by Richard Nixon to be his Vice-Presidential partner but Nixon instead went for Spiro Agnew.
When Agnew had to resign as Vice-President over bribery charge unrelated to the Watergate scandal, Nixon finally had to turn to Ford and make him the new unelected Vice-President and someone who showed great loyalty during the Watergate affair. When Nixon became the first president in US history to resign the office, Ford became the first – and, so far, only – unelected president in the nation’s history,
Although he was an uncharismatic leader and a dull speaker, Ford entered the White House with a lot of good will which he immediately lost when he pardoned Nixon a month after taking the oath of office and then issued a clemency for Vietnam draft dodgers. Furthermore he had a strained relationship with Congress: he was a Republican president and Congress was Democrat-controlled, resulting in Ford exercising the presidential veto no less than 77 times. In turn, Congress blocked his efforts at legislation.
Domestically Ford faced the economic impact of the oil price increases of 1973 and the combination of inflation and unemployment on his watch resulted in a period of stagflation. He launched a WIN (Whip Inflation Now) campaign. On the international front, Ford’s request for more aid for South Vietnam was turned down by Congress and the North Vietnamese subsequently overran the south. However, he progressed the SALT II negotiations and signed the Helsinki Accords.
When Ford sought the Republican nomination for the presidential race of 1976, he was opposed by Ronald Reagan who ran him a close second. A weakened Ford was then narrowly beaten in the general election by Jimmy Carter.
You can read more about Gerald Ford here.