Gerald R. Ford was the 38^th president of the United States. He was president for 3 years. Ford was the only president elected neither president nor vice president. He attempted to restore the nation’s confidence in a government which was tarnished by the Watergate scandal and an economy suffering from inflation and unemployment.

When Ford was born in the year 1913, in Omaha, Nebraska, his name was Leslie Lynch King, Jr. The next year his mother, Dorthy, divorced and soon met Gerald R. Ford, whom she married in 1916. Although he never formally adopted Dorthy’s son, Ford gave her son his name. As he was growing up he worked in his stepfather’s paint and varnish store. He also achieved the rank of Eagle Scout, and became star center for the South High School football team. Ford’s skill as a football player won him a scholarship to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 1931.

After he graduated from Michigan in 1935, both the Detroit Lions and Green Bay Packers offered him a contract. Instead of becoming a National Football League player, he went to Yale University to study law. A few years later Ford enlisted in the U.S. Navy as an ensign, he was assigned to active duty.

In January 1965, Ford was elected the minority leader of the House of Representatives, making him one of the most influential Republicans in Congress. Two political scandals changed Ford’s life. The first one was on October 10, 1973, when Vice President Spiro T. Agnew resigned rather than face trial on charges of bribery and income-tax evasion. The second scandal was to change Ford’s career was the Watergate affair. On June 17, 1972, five men had been caught after breaking into the Democratic National Committee Offices at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. Their arrest eventually uncovered a plan, which was to spy on political opponents. An investigation revealed that many people in the Nixon Administration had been involved.

Ford deliberately avoided any appearance that he was waiting for Nixon’s resignation so that he could become president. On August 9, 1974,

after Nixon’s resignation became official, Ford addressed the nation from the East Room of the White House, and announced, "Our long national nightmare is over." Soon, Ford finally became president. For the first month, both the press and the public seemed to enjoy the new president and his family.

Ronald Reagan, who opposed the Helsinki Accords, announced his bid for the Republican presidential nomination in the fall of 1975. Hoping to win favor from Reagan supporters. Ford then asked Nelson Rockefeller to withdraw from consideration for the vice presidency in the 1976 campaign,

which Rockefeller did. However, the episode angered Republican moderates. Ford’s primary fight with Reagan divided the Republican Party. The Democratic candidate, Jimmy Carter, a former governor of Georgia, held a huge early lead in public opinion polls.

Ford’s campaign sputtered from the start, and he never decided on the message he wanted to send to the voters. The campaign also suffered from Ford’s blunder in the second presidential debate. Ford insisted that there were no Soviet troops in Poland; when offered the chance to correct himself, he refused to do so. It took Ford almost a week to issue a clarification, which fed the perception that Ford might not be competent to be president. A record low voter turnout made the 1976 election the closest in decades. Carter won 50.1 percent of the vote to Ford’s 48 percent.

In 1977, when Ford left office, he briefly served as an adjunct professor of government at the University of Michigan. He was a founding member of the American Enterprise Institute, an organization in Washington, D.C., devoted to studies on public policy, and has served on several corporate boards. He briefly returned to politics in 1980, when Republican presidential nominee Ronald Reagan approached Ford about serving as his vice president.

Bibliography

1. The American Nation Textbook

2. "Ford, Gerald R(udolph), "Microsoft(R) Encarta(R) 97 Encyclopedia.

3. (F) Encyclopedia