It sounds strange, but President Ford never seemed like an entirely substantial figure in my personal perceptions. I don’t mean in the sense of credibility or political weight, but in the literal sense of being a real person. I happened to have been living in Brussels as a student worker during the second half of 1974 and missed those supposedly multi-orgasmic constitutional spasms of the day that everyone else can usually describe in great detail. As a result, the culmination of the Watergate crisis has always felt to me like a hazy historical event, and, by extension, the 38th President like a big pretend creature from a B movie, as though one of Ian’s old Frankenstein drawings had been put in charge of the government.
They didn’t consider us “interns” back then. The term was reserved for medical trainees and I was called a “co-op,” just like Mombo was back in the early 40s. As I’ve probably described before, I remember listening to the Nixon resignation speech as it was piped by loudspeaker into the morning streets of Amsterdam, while I leaned sleepily from the open window of a youth hostel, during one of my weekend forays into that Dutch shrine of “70s-ness.” So when I returned to the States before Christmas and finally took stock of President Ford weeks later, it was like, “who the heck is this guy?”
Fast forward through the remaining two years of the Ford administration. Back then it didn’t take much to get me miffed about the national scene. I was still angry at Ford for endorsing mass inoculations to counter a Swine-Flu boogeyman, for his apparently feeble attempts to turn around the lousy economy that I faced as a university graduate, and his cold shoulder to the supreme Russian dissident of the century. I don’t remember what I thought about his pardon of Nixon—one more ghostly act from another dimension. I’d voted against Ford in ’76 while living in Chicago. Not really in favor of Carter (it was hard for me to take Jimmy seriously), I’d lost my enthusiasm for the campaign after neither of my two favorites, Eugene McCarthy and Ronald Reagan, had managed to prevail into the home stretch. As unfocused as they were, you can tell that my political attitudes tended toward the radical, and that was the one thing Gerry Ford indisputably was not. When Carter began to “self-destruct in five seconds,” I took an odd measure of pride in the fact that Ford had carried Illinois.
Fast forward again to a newly minted 2007 with one less Former President. Clearly it’s time to reflect on his rightful place in history, and I’ve softened my viewpoint considerably. I should have liked him more. He deserved it. Nevertheless, I can’t help but think that all the kind and appreciative things being said about Gerald R. Ford would still be equally true if he had not sought to retain the Presidency beyond his short stewardship, and, as confirmation of his quintessential unselfishness and towering decency, had stepped aside with the same dignity with which he had taken office—to have recognized his unique distinction as Healer among our chief executives, to have recognized the ascendancy of national conservatism over his frayed brand of Republican establishmentarianism, and to have recognized it was time to decisively pave the way for the next necessary phase of post-Nixonian resurgence—a fresh and bold style of visionary leadership for America.