Gerald R. Ford at 100: Many adversaries, not one enemy (Guest column)

Former President Ford, center, admires the Profile in Courage Award during a ceremony at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, Monday May 21, 2001. Ford was honored for pardoning former President Nixon. At left is Caroline Kennedy, daughter of President Kennedy. At right is Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., brother of President Kennedy. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)
MLive/Grand Rapids Press guest opinion By MLive/Grand Rapids Press guest opinion
on June 17, 2013 at 8:50 AM, updated June 17, 2013 at 11:14 AM

Yanek Mieczkowski, professor and History Department chair at Dowling College, is the author of “Gerald Ford and the Challenges of the 1970s.” His most recent book is “Eisenhower’s Sputnik Moment: The Race for Space and World Prestige.”

By Yanek Mieczkowski

July 14 marks the 100th anniversary of Gerald R. Ford’s birth. He lived long enough to become the nation’s oldest ex-president (officially, 93 years and 165 days when he died in 2006), having come a long way from modest middle-class roots to become the nation’s 38th and only unelected president.

Although Ford’s time in office was brief, he left legacies from which Americans—especially Washington politicians—can learn. He was determined to restore integrity to the Oval Office after the Watergate scandal and Richard Nixon’s resignation.

He decided on his most controversial act, the Nixon pardon, in the spirit of moving the country past Watergate, even though he later conceded it might have cost him the 1976 election.

Since then, many earlier critics of the pardon have praised Ford for his political courage. That act illustrated Ford’s ability to surmount partisan squabbling and act for the country’s sake, an instinct that seems nearly forgotten in the nation’s capital today.

First elected in 1948 as a Republican congressman from Michigan, Ford spent almost his entire career in the minority, frustrated by the Democrats’ grip on Congress.

Yet he deeply respected the legislative branch, and his goal was to be House speaker, a post he sought more fervently than the presidency.

On his last day as president, as he and his wife Betty left the White House for private life, he showed his reverence for Congress by asking his helicopter pilot to circle the Capitol dome. Gazing down at the building where he spent a quarter century, Ford said, “That’s my real home.”

But Congress disappointed Ford. After Watergate, the pendulum of power swung from the White House to Capitol Hill, and it nearly knocked Ford over, especially after the Nixon pardon mired his new administration in controversy and reduced his political strength.

In a backlash against Watergate, the 1974 midterm elections produced huge Democratic majorities in both houses, and the newly elected “Watergate babies” resisted the president.

Dick Cheney, the future vice president who served as Ford’s chief of staff, remarked that Ford “was capable, after he had been in the White House for a few months, of going behind the closed doors of the Oval Office and saying some very tough things about his former colleagues.”

Still, Ford wanted to work amicably with Congress. Where observers dubbed Nixon the “imperial president,” Ford was the congenial president, who enjoyed friendships with legislators of both parties and relished the give-and-take of lawmaking, knowing that this process formed the essence of government.

One of Ford’s favorite refrains was that “compromise is the glue that holds government together.”

Once, he drew interlocking circles to illustrate the president’s relations with lawmakers, saying that where the circles intersected, the two branches of government could work together and “get something done in there.”

(In diplomacy, Ford showed the same congeniality, helping to initiate the G-7 economic summits with U.S. allies and pursuing détente with the Soviet Union.)

Because he sought to find common ground with Congress, Ford had notable achievements. Energy policy was an instructive example. During the 1970s, energy was a polarizing issue, pitting Democrats against Republicans, the Northeast against the Gulf Coast, and consumers against oil companies.

After introducing an energy program in January 1975, Ford faced fierce congressional opposition, and he deployed both carrots and sticks.

He offered compromise measures and even took legislative leaders for a summer cruise on the presidential yacht, but he also gave a televised speech charging that Congress “did nothing on energy” and told reporters that the “toughest thing” he faced as president was inducing Congress to act on energy.

Yet in late 1975, Ford signed the Energy Policy and Conservation Act, still one of the few measures constituting a national energy policy.

Yanek-sm.jpgYanek Mieczkowski 

Its lasting provisions include right-on-red turns at traffic lights (to save the gas drivers waste while idling), corporate average fuel economy standards, and the strategic petroleum reserve, a vast oil stockpile in Gulf Coast salt mines that the president can tap during emergencies.

Presidents like Ford are easy to overlook; they labor in the shadow of charismatic chief executives who served longer or whose visionary leadership etched deep impressions in history’s bedrock.

Barack Obama, for example, has looked to Ronald Reagan as a “transformative” president, despite the political chasm separating their views.

But leadership involves more than stirring speeches and grand visions. It demands horse trades and communication between the government’s coequal branches.

Here Ford excelled, greasing the wheels of Washington’s political machine and inviting so many congressmen to the White House that humorist Art Buchwald joked that Ford mistook Nixon’s notorious “Enemies List” for a guest list.

Next time the president finds Congress frustrating, he might remember Gerald Ford, who said he had “many adversaries, but not one enemy” on Capitol Hill and promised “communication, conciliation, compromise, and cooperation” with legislators.

His legacy has a lasting, palpable reminder: Americans can think of it whenever they take a right-on-red—the result, really, of red working with blue.
