Vice President
‘Confidence in His Bearing’
He was an unassuming man, our 38th president, and few have ever risen so high with so little guile or calculation. Even in the three decades since he left office, he was not the sort to ponder his legacy, to brood over his place in history. Jerry Ford was always a striver–never working an angle, just working. He was a believer in the saying that in life you make your own
luck. The achievements added up all his life, yet he was known to boast about only one. I heard it once or twice myself–he said he was never luckier than when he stepped out of Grace Episcopal Church in Grand Rapids, Mich., with a beautiful girl named Betty as his bride.
He was modest and man-ful; there was confidence and courage in his bearing. In judgment, he was sober and serious, unafraid of decisions, calm and steady by nature, always the still point in the turning wheel. He assumed power without assuming airs; he knew how to treat people. He answered courtesy with courtesy; he answered discourtesy with courtesy.
This president’s hardest decision was also among his first. And in September of 1974, Gerald Ford was almost alone in understanding that there can be no healing without pardon. The consensus holds that this decision cost him an election. That is very likely so. The criticism was fierce. But President Ford had larger concerns at heart. And it is far from the worst fate that a man should be remembered for his capacity to forgive.
He was not just a cheerful and pleasant man–although these virtues are rare enough at the commanding heights. He was not just a nice guy, the next-door neighbor whose luck landed him in the White House. It was this man, Gerald R. Ford, who led our republic safely through a crisis that could have turned to catastrophe. We will never know what further unravelings, what greater malevolence, might have come in that time of furies turned loose and hearts turned cold. But we do know this: America was spared the worst. And this was the doing of an American president. For all the grief that never came, for all the wounds that were never inflicted, the people of the United States will forever stand in debt to the good man and faithful servant we mourn.
