History > 2006 > USA > Politics (VI)

The flag-draped coffin was surrounded

by military personnel in the rotunda of the Capitol.

Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

 Ford Honored at Elaborate Funeral        NYT        2.1.2007

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/02/business/02cnd-ford.html

The president and first lady joined thousands of other mourners

in paying their respects to former president Gerald R. Ford at the Capitol.

Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

Ford Honored at Elaborate Funeral        NYT        2.1.2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/02/business/02cnd-ford.html?hp&ex=
1167800400&en=9a7622cb543cf7ad&ei=5094&partner=homepage


 

Military personnel carrying the coffin of Mr. Ford at the Capitol Saturday night.
Mr. Ford’s body will lie in state until his funeral at the National Cathedral on Tuesday.

Todd Heisler/The New York Times

 Ford Honored at Elaborate Funeral        NYT        2.1.2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/02/business/02cnd-ford.html?hp&ex=
1167800400&en=9a7622cb543cf7ad&ei=5094&partner=homepage

1/2/2007 (January 2, 2007)

STATE FUNERAL

The casket of former President Ford is carried

past President George W. Bush and first lady Laura Bush

during Ford's state funeral in Washington, D.C., Jan. 2, 2007.

Defense Dept. photo by U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. D. Myles Cullen

http://www.defenselink.mil/HomePagePhotos/HomePagePhotos.aspx
http://www.defenselink.mil/

R: President George W. Bush and First lady Laura Bush.
 

Tributes to Ford Begin in California

December 29, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 4:28 a.m. ET
The New York Times

PALM DESERT, Calif. (AP) -- The formal mourning of Gerald R. Ford begins with a public viewing at a church pulpit just feet from where he and his wife sat every Sunday after their White House years -- ''The President's Pew.''

Ford's family was to have a private prayer service at St. Margaret's Episcopal Church on Friday before the start of a public viewing expected to draw thousands of people to the desert resort town 110 miles east of Los Angeles.

Former first lady Betty Ford, 88, and her four grown children were to receive his casket from a military honor guard at the church, where the couple began worshipping in 1977. Former President George H.W. Bush and his wife, Barbara, among others, joined the Fords there over the years.

Mrs. Ford will then accompany her husband's body across the nation for a series of ceremonies that includes two funeral services in Washington, D.C., and another in Grand Rapids, Mich., where he will be entombed Wednesday.

Ford died Tuesday at age 93 with his family at his bedside.

He assumed the presidency when Richard Nixon resigned in 1974 amid the Watergate scandal, but was defeated by Jimmy Carter in the 1976 election. The Fords began attending St. Margaret's after retiring to Rancho Mirage.

Tight security was planned at the church, with the entire campus locked down for Secret Service sweeps and surrounding residential streets blocked off. In a nod to Ford's Navy service, a sailor was deputized to fly the presidential seal from an ebony staff as Ford's casket is taken from the hearse.

People hoping to pay their respects to the nation's 38th president during the public repose will be shuttled to the church from a tennis center several miles away, and will not be allowed to bring personal items including cameras, cell phones, purses or flowers with them.

After arriving at Andrews Air Force Base on Saturday, the coffin will be taken to the Capitol in a funeral procession, then carried up the steps of the East Front of the House by a military escort.

It will then lie in repose in front of the House chamber and be carried into the Rotunda for a ceremony and public viewing before being moved to the National Cathedral on Tuesday for funeral services there.

Some of the most regal touches of a full state funeral are being bypassed, by request of his family and, most likely, according to Ford's own wishes.

In Washington, a hearse rather than a horsedrawn caisson will drive Ford's casket to the Capitol. Fighter jets will do a flyover with a ''missing man'' maneuver only in Grand Rapids, where Ford will be interred on a hillside north of his presidential museum. He spent most of his childhood and practiced law in the city before representing the area in Congress for 25 years.

------

Associated Press writers Jeff Wilson in Rancho Mirage, Calif., and Calvin Woodward and Laurie Kellman in Washington contributed to this report.

------

On the Net:

Gerald Ford Memorial: http://geraldfordmemorial.com/

    Tributes to Ford Begin in California, NYT, 29.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Gerald-Ford.html

For Ford,

Pardon Decision Was Always Clear-Cut

December 29, 2006
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON, Dec. 28 — President Gerald R. Ford was never one for second-guessing, but for many years after leaving office in 1977, he carried in his wallet a scrap of a 1915 Supreme Court ruling. A pardon, the excerpt said, “carries an imputation of guilt,” and acceptance of a pardon is “a confession of it.”

Mr. Ford’s decision to pardon Richard M. Nixon for any crimes he might have been charged with because of Watergate is seen by many historians as the central event of his 896-day presidency. It also appears to have left him with an uncharacteristic need for self-justification, though friends say he never wavered in his insistence that the pardon was a wise and necessary act and that it had not resulted from any secret deal with his disgraced predecessor.

“I must have talked to him 20 times about the pardon, and there was never a shred of doubt that he’d done the right thing,” said James Cannon, a Ford domestic policy adviser and author of a 1994 book about his presidency. During one of their discussions, Mr. Ford pulled out the 1915 clipping, from Burdick v. United States. “It was a comfort to him,” Mr. Cannon said. “It was legal justification that he was right.”

Over the last three decades, as emotions have cooled, many who were initially critical of the pardon have come to share Mr. Ford’s judgment that it was the best way to stanch the open wound of Watergate. In 2001, a bipartisan panel selected Mr. Ford as recipient of the Profile in Courage Award from the John F. Kennedy Library, singling out for praise his pardon decision, which Mr. Ford later said he believed was a major factor in his failure to win election to the presidency in 1976.

In a 2004 interview with Bob Woodward, reported Thursday night on The Washington Post’s Web site, Mr. Ford offered another, less lofty motive for the pardon: his friendship with Nixon, which lasted for two decades after the pardon and which letters show was closer than publicly understood.

“I had no hesitancy about granting the pardon,” Mr. Ford told Mr. Woodward, “because I felt that we had this relationship and that I didn’t want to see my real friend have the stigma.”

Few dramas in American political history remain more riveting than that of Nixon’s exit and Mr. Ford’s reaction, at first halting and then decisive, to the looming possibility of a former president on criminal trial for months on end.

“At the time, I thought this was going to cause a problem with the public and the press, and of course it did,” said Robert T. Hartmann, a former Ford aide. “I thought he was right. But it’s also important to be seen as right and remembered in history as having done the right thing.”

Since the Ford years, the tradeoff between exacting justice and political peace has repeatedly arisen around the world, as Chile, East Germany, South Africa and other countries have confronted dark periods in their histories. The crimes have been bloodier and their scale far greater than those of Watergate, but the question has echoed the one posed to the Ford White House in 1974.

The contradictions posed by the pardon were evident when Mr. Ford announced it on Sept. 8, 1974. “I deeply believe in equal justice for all Americans, whatever their station or former station,” Mr. Ford said. A moment later he made clear that Nixon would not face equal justice.

“My conscience tells me clearly and certainly that I cannot prolong the bad dreams that continue to reopen a chapter that is closed,” he said, though the major Watergate trials for Nixon aides were still weeks away. In the resulting firestorm, many Americans asked why, in return for a pardon, Mr. Ford had not at least demanded an admission of wrongdoing from Nixon.

The pardon drama had begun six weeks earlier, with a visit to then-Vice President Ford from Alexander M. Haig, Nixon’s chief of staff.

Mr. Haig told Mr. Ford that White House tapes would soon prove Nixon’s role in the Watergate cover-up and outlined several possibilities for Nixon’s departure. He handed Mr. Ford two pieces of paper: a description of the presidential power to pardon and a blank pardon form.

Mr. Ford later said he had given no definitive answer. But when he described the meeting to his aides, they were alarmed at the implication: that Nixon, through Mr. Haig, might be offering Mr. Ford the presidency in return for a pardon.

“We didn’t want a situation where he’d agreed to a pardon and there would be an appearance of a quid pro quo,” said John O. Marsh, a former Virginia congressman who had become a top aide to Mr. Ford.

Mr. Haig has often denied that he was making any kind of a “sleazy approach,” as he put it in an appearance on CNN on Wednesday night. “You know, the president never, never was offered a deal.”

Mr. Ford, too, in his memoir and in interviews, said he did not believe that Mr. Haig had explicitly offered a trade of the presidency for a pardon. But his aides feared the meeting would be viewed that way.

“There was a strong naïve streak in Jerry Ford,” Mr. Cannon said. “He didn’t always see the danger in things.” Mr. Ford later told him that he had destroyed the two papers Mr. Haig had given him, Mr. Cannon said.

Nixon resigned a week after Mr. Haig’s visit, and Mr. Ford was sworn in as president on Aug. 9. An accumulation of policy troubles confronted the president, Mr. Marsh recalled.

“We were coming out of the Arab oil embargo,” Mr. Marsh said. “The economy was going sour. We were in the wind-down of the Vietnam war, and that was a bad situation.” Meanwhile, he said, “Watergate was affecting everything.”

At his first news conference, on Aug. 28, reporters pressed Mr. Ford on Nixon’s fate, and his answers were ambiguous. Until any charges were filed against Nixon, he said, “I think it is unwise and untimely for me to make any commitment.”

Afterward, Mr. Ford was angry that he had not prepared better for Nixon questions, Mr. Cannon said.

“He felt he’d bungled it royally,” Mr. Cannon added. “He told me he just sat there fuming for two days, and then he decided on the pardon.”

In the office of Leon Jaworski, the Watergate special prosecutor, news of the pardon divided the staff, said Richard J. Davis, then a 28-year-old assistant to Mr. Jaworski who had written legal memorandums outlining the criminal case against Nixon for obstruction of justice.

“Some people were furious,” Mr. Davis said Thursday. “But I was very torn.” If Nixon were to face charges, “we would have been living with Watergate every day for two or three more years,” he said.

What upset Mr. Davis and some colleagues even more than the pardon, he said, was Mr. Ford’s agreement to turn over the White House tapes and other documents to Nixon, appearing to extend the cover-up. The decision was reversed in December 1974, when Mr. Ford signed a law assuring government control over Watergate-related materials.

By then, Mr. Ford had visited the House, where he had served for 25 years, to defend the pardon. His toughest questioner was Elizabeth Holtzman, 31, a New York congresswoman, whose turn to question the president came last. The pardon, she said, created “very dark suspicions” that “made people question whether or not in fact there was a deal.”

Mr. Ford cut off her question, declaring, “There was no deal, period, under no circumstances.”

In an interview Thursday, Ms. Holtzman acknowledged the public affection being expressed for Mr. Ford, but she declined to join the chorus of praise for the pardon.

“I felt it set up a dual standard of justice, one for the president, and one for everyone else,” Ms. Holtzman said. “I haven’t changed my view.”

Despite his experience with others second-guessing him, Mr. Ford offered a critique of President Bush’s invasion of Iraq in an interview in May with Thomas M. DeFrank of the Daily News and the one in July 2004 with Mr. Woodward of The Washington Post.

He included in his criticism Vice President Dick Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, both of whom had served him as chief of staff.

“Rumsfeld and Cheney and the president made a big mistake in justifying going into the war in Iraq,” Mr. Ford said, The Post reported Thursday. “They put the emphasis on weapons of mass destruction. And now, I’ve never publicly said I thought they made a mistake, but I felt very strongly it was an error in how they should justify what they were going to do.”

    For Ford, Pardon Decision Was Always Clear-Cut, NYT, 29.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/29/washington/29pardon.html?hp&ex=1167454800&en=1812738a448ad1a8&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Ford Arranged His Funeral to Reflect Himself and Drew in a Former Adversary

December 29, 2006
The New York Times
By ANNE E. KORNBLUT

WASHINGTON, Dec. 28 — As he helped in recent years arrange the details of his own funeral, Gerald R. Ford reached out to an old adversary: Jimmy Carter, who defeated him for the presidency in 1976.

Mr. Ford asked whether his successor might consider speaking at his funeral and offered, lightheartedly, to do the same for Mr. Carter, depending on who died first.

The invitation was decades in the making, associates of Mr. Ford’s said. And, they said, it was typical for Mr. Ford, who came to his own funeral-planning sessions adamant that his coffin not be carried to the Capitol in an elaborate horse-drawn caisson but a motorcade instead.

During services for Mr. Ford, the 38th president, over the next few days, the simplicity he sought will be on display in Washington and, later, in Michigan, where he will be interred. His coffin is expected to be carried into the Capitol through the House of Representatives, where he served for 25 years, rather than up the sweeping front staircase. A band will play a somber version of the University of Michigan fight song, a Ford favorite from his undergraduate alma mater, and a song he preferred to “Hail to the Chief” while he was president.

There will be plenty of pomp, to be sure. Vice President Dick Cheney, who was President Ford’s chief of staff, is planning to attend virtually all of the services, meeting his former boss’s family at Andrews Air Force Base on Saturday, serving as an honorary pallbearer and delivering a eulogy at the Capitol.

On Tuesday, after services at the National Cathedral, Mr. Cheney will accompany the Ford family to Grand Rapids for a final farewell, aides to the vice president said.

Yet the service is expected to have the distinct feel of Mr. Ford, emphasizing his service in Congress and his desire to heal the country when he assumed the presidency after President Richard M. Nixon resigned.

“It’s a memorial, an appreciation, a celebration more than anything else,” said James Cannon, who wrote a biography of Mr. Ford.

Shari Lawrence, a spokeswoman for the Joint Force Headquarters for the Capital Region, which organizes state funerals, said, “It’s an honor that we pay the past president, it will be a solemn affair, with everything that President Ford and his family had asked for.”

“They kept it pretty basic, which was a reflection of him,” Ms. Lawrence said.

The Ford family has not released all the details of the services, which begin in California and end in Michigan, with the former president lying in state in the Capitol for two days in between.

Advisers to Mr. Carter did not return calls seeking comment about his plans for Mr. Ford’s funeral. But according to associates of Mr. Ford, Mr. Carter is expected to play a role in the service, as are several other high-profile guests, including former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger and the news anchor Tom Brokaw.

The two ex-presidents developed a friendship soon after Mr. Carter left office, starting with a long-haul flight together from Cairo after the funeral of the Egyptian president, Anwar el-Sadat, in 1981. They found a mutual interest in the presidential library system, and agreed to work on projects at each other’s institutions. They compared notes on public policy and their families, and over time, their wives became friends.

And they shared a mutual rival: Ronald Reagan.

Theirs, Mr. Cannon said, was “an open and complementary friendship, no question about it.”

“I think part of the reason for the bond was, both of them had been defeated by Reagan, and they shared a disregard for Reagan,” Mr. Cannon said, alluding to Republican primaries in 1976 as well as the 1980 presidential election. But the friendship went even deeper, he said: “It was sincere, no question about that. Both of them had been there, and both of them had a continuing interest in what other presidents did.”

Richard Norton Smith, the presidential historian and a friend of the Fords, said: “There was that kind of comfortable back and forth. It extended to the wives and the families, and it became this very nice, autumnal reconciliation, which blossomed into a real friendship.”

President Bush and Laura Bush will pay their respects to Mr. Ford on Monday afternoon, after returning from their Texas ranch. Scott Stanzel, a White House spokesman, declined to say whether Mr. Bush had considered returning home on Saturday to participate as Mr. Ford is laid in state at the Capitol.

Mr. Bush was originally scheduled to return on Monday evening. He is leaving Texas a few hours earlier so he and Mrs. Bush can pay tribute to Mr. Ford in the Capitol.

The White House has provided the use of the presidential plane to the Ford family, Mr. Stanzel said, the same accommodation made to the Reagan family. The plane, a 747, will fly Mr. Ford’s body to Washington from California.

Jeff Zeleny contributed reporting from Crawford, Tex.

    Ford Arranged His Funeral to Reflect Himself and Drew in a Former Adversary, NYT, 29.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/29/washington/29funeral.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Back Home, Ford Is Proudly Remembered for His Service, Not for His Pardon

December 29, 2006
The New York Times
By NICK BUNKLEY

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich., Dec. 28 — Here, Gerald R. Ford is not known as the “accidental president.” People in this city say he was “our president.”

Some had to be reminded by news reports about Mr. Ford’s death that he is best remembered in most other parts of the United States for pardoning his predecessor, Richard M. Nixon. They have always known him as the athletic Eagle Scout who lost his bid to be president of South High School’s senior class before serving them in Congress for 25 years, ascending to the White House and helping to heal a nation scarred by the Watergate scandal.

That Mr. Ford, the only president from Michigan, was never elected to that office does not matter in Grand Rapids, where he spent much of his boyhood and got his start in politics. What matters to people here is that this city bore a president who followed his values and beliefs, even though his actions were unpopular at the time.

“I always looked up to him,” said one resident, John Frey, 47. “I wish we had more people like him in power.”

Mr. Frey was among the thousands of people who have visited the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum, on the western bank of the Grand River, since Mr. Ford’s death on Tuesday to pay respects and reflect on the loss of this city’s de facto royalty.

The museum is closed so Christmas decorations can be replaced with black bunting, but the lobby, where there is a large portrait of Mr. Ford and a table with two condolence books, will remain open around the clock until Mr. Ford’s body arrives Tuesday.

Outside the museum, where a metal sculpture depicting Mr. Ford in his University of Michigan football uniform belies the “Saturday Night Live” skits portraying him as a klutz, mourners left campaign buttons and bumper stickers from Mr. Ford’s unsuccessful 1976 presidential campaign, Michigan football mementos and Boy Scout patches.

“Grand Rapids loves you, Jerry!” read one poster-size sign left in the grass near the museum’s sign. Another took one of Mr. Ford’s most famous quotes — “I’m a Ford, not a Lincoln” — a step further: “You were named Ford: a member of the party of Lincoln but a Cadillac among presidents.”

“He was the most truthful president I think we ever had,” said Roberta Clinton, 78, of Grand Rapids.

There is actually a rivalry between Grand Rapids and East Grand Rapids, a leafy suburb just up the hill from its big-city neighbor, over which can claim Mr. Ford as its own. East Grand Rapids declares itself on its Web site and on signs around town to be the hometown of Mr. Ford, who spent time in both places.

In the years since he left office, Grand Rapids has honored Mr. Ford by naming its airport, a downtown freeway, the federal courthouse and the local Boy Scout Council for him. Likewise, although he had not lived here since 1978, Mr. Ford made clear his affinity for the city on numerous occasions, ultimately choosing to be buried on a grassy hillside north of his museum.

“It will be a very emotional homecoming,” said David G. Frey, treasurer of the Gerald R. Ford Foundation, who will be one of Mr. Ford’s honorary pallbearers. “It’s a remarkable bond between this man and the people of west Michigan.”

Mr. Ford’s friends say he never got caught up in Washington politics, despite spending the better part of three decades there as a congressman, vice president and president.

“He had this sense of values that never left him that he took from Grand Rapids,” said Marty Allen, chairman emeritus of the Gerald R. Ford Foundation. “When he came back to visit, I’d always say, ‘Welcome home, Mr. President,’ and he’d say, ‘It’s good to be home.’ ”

In 1994, Mr. Ford arranged to revisit the grayish-blue house in the Heritage Hill historic district where he lived from about the time he was 8 until he was 17. Tim England, its current owner, recalls seeing Mr. Ford’s eyes light up while touring the home and the carriage house in its backyard that the former president had used as a neighborhood clubhouse.

“You’ll never know what this means to my Jerry,” Mr. England recalls Betty Ford telling him.

When Mr. England learned early Wednesday of Mr. Ford’s death, he immediately hung a huge American flag across the front porch. Within half an hour, he saw cars start to pull up in front of the house.

“People take great pride in the fact that this city produced a president, no matter how he ascended to that office,” Mr. England said. “For him to be president during such a difficult time, he did the state of Michigan and the city of Grand Rapids proud.”

It is that sentiment that drew people from all parts of Michigan to the museum Wednesday and Thursday. Many had personal stories to share.

Evelyn Thompson treasures a campaign potholder that Mr. Ford gave to her mother when he first ran for Congress, and Helen Skinner’s son was awarded his Eagle Scout designation by Mr. Ford.

Sharon Knight carried a thick album filled with articles about Mr. Ford and has a collection of mugs, plates and other memorabilia bearing his name and picture at home.

Rhonda Mort, 38, who lives in Covert, about an hour southwest of Grand Rapids, brought her 3-year-old son, Noah, to the museum and intends to return next week for Mr. Ford’s funeral.

“We’ll wait in line, spend the night — whatever we have to,” Ms. Mort said.

Michilene Maynard contributed reporting for this article.

    Back Home, Ford Is Proudly Remembered for His Service, Not for His Pardon, NYT, 29.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/29/washington/29michigan.html

Chevy Chase as the Klutz in Chief, and a President Who Was in on the Joke

December 29, 2006
The New York Times
By MARK LEIBOVICH

WASHINGTON, Dec. 28 — While the events leading to Gerald Ford’s ascent to the White House tarred him as an accidental president, he will also be remembered as an accident-prone president.

And for this he could thank the comedian Chevy Chase, or blame him, or (as he would eventually choose) laugh along.

No one did more to solidify Mr. Ford’s unfortunate, and perhaps unfair, standing as the nation’s First Klutz than Mr. Chase, the “Saturday Night Live” cast member who routinely portrayed the president committing all manner of trips, flails and lurches.

Mr. Ford’s cheerful reaction to the sendup included doing a cameo for “Saturday Night Live” from the Oval Office; sending his press secretary, Ron Nessen, on the show; and appearing with Mr. Chase at a political dinner. That type of reaction became a benchmark of what would come to be an essential presidential image-making skill: an ability to laugh at oneself.

People in the political and entertainment worlds recall Mr. Ford as a contemporary hero in this regard.

“He was just so incredibly decent and good-natured about the skit,” said Lorne Michaels, the longtime producer of “Saturday Night Live.” Mr. Ford sent a signal, Mr. Michaels said, that it was all right to be lighthearted about the presidency after the ordeal of the Watergate years.

“You couldn’t imagine Nixon signaling that this was O.K.,” Mr. Michaels said. In a sense, he added, Mr. Ford was telling the country that “we could all move on from this.”

“This” referred to Watergate, and Mr. Ford, who was acutely aware of the public mood, was adept at using humor as a balm.

“At the time,” Mr. Ford wrote in his book “Humor and the Presidency,” “the media and general public still resented any hint of ‘imperial’ trappings in connection with the presidency or the White House.”

Mr. Ford avoided any evidence of magisterial bearing with his understated manner and game efforts in the fledgling realm of presidential stand-up. At the Radio and Television Correspondents’ Association dinner in 1975, he surreptitiously grabbed the tablecloth on the way to the podium and sent silverware flying toward Mr. Chase.

“Ford looked back with this great look of wonderment at what had happened,” recalled Robert Orben, a television comedy writer who became a top aide to Mr. Ford. “He was someone who was not afraid to have fun at his own expense.”

Mr. Ford was an accomplished football player, skier and golfer and was not considered unusually awkward by those around him. But he contributed to his own boneheaded persona in a few ill-timed episodes of camera-range clumsiness, like stumbling down the steps of Air Force One in Austria, wiping out on the slopes in Vail, Colo., and getting zonked on the head by a passing chairlift.

Mr. Chase whacked home the clumsy caricature on a weekly basis, in a way that became indelibly affixed to Mr. Ford’s legacy.

The parody “just absolutely stuck in the public consciousness,” said Landon Parvin, who has written humorous speeches for Presidents Bush and Ronald Reagan.

It became so ingrained that Mr. Ford had no choice but to play along.

“He was very smart about trying to get out ahead of the joke,” said Mark Katz, a speechwriter who specialized in preparing President Bill Clinton for appearances at lighthearted Washington affairs, like the Gridiron and the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner.

“Now, every politician is lining up to make fun of themselves on Letterman and Jon Stewart’s couch,” Mr. Katz said.

Mr. Ford was hardly the first president to mock himself publicly. Even Richard M. Nixon was open to the ritual, once appearing on “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In” to solemnly utter the show’s catchphrase, “Sock it to me.” Nor was Mr. Chase the first comedian to impersonate a president on television. The impersonator Vaughn Meader lampooned John F. Kennedy on “The Ed Sullivan Show” multiple times.

But Mr. Chase was the first comedian to make fun of a president in what would become television’s signature forum for that, “Saturday Night Live.”

“Ford is so inept that the quickest laugh is the cheapest laugh, and the cheapest is the physical joke,” Mr. Chase told Time magazine in 1976. (A spokesman for Mr. Chase, who was skiing in Colorado on Thursday, said he would not be available for comment.)

In “Humor and the Presidency,” an exploration of the role comedy has played in American presidencies, namely his own, Mr. Ford wrote, “It wouldn’t surprise me if there was a measurable correlation between humor in an administration and the popularity of that administration’s policies.”

He also admitted he was stung at first by Mr. Chase’s parody, but acknowledged its effectiveness. “The portrayal of me as an oafish ex-jock made for good copy,” Mr. Ford wrote. “It was also funny.”

Mr. Chase made no effort to look, dress or talk like Mr. Ford. He merely fell, with lurching exaggeration, “giving the sense that he was someone who wasn’t in control of his limbs,” Mr. Michaels, the producer, said.

His fall complete, Mr. Chase would then open the show with the signature line, “Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night.”

    Chevy Chase as the Klutz in Chief, and a President Who Was in on the Joke, NYT, 29.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/29/washington/29chevy.html

Washington Memo

Latest Blue-Ribbon Panel Awaits Its Own Fate

December 28, 2006
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON, Dec. 27 — For every impossible problem that official Washington faces, there is a blue-ribbon panel, and for every panel there is a predictable life cycle, which the Iraq Study Group has so far followed to a fault.

First, the unrealistic expectations, fueled by feverish news coverage, including speculation and leaks about just what might be proposed. Next, the report’s grand unveiling, complete with White House photo op, this time featuring President Bush with the co-chairmen, James A. Baker III and Lee H. Hamilton.

And then, inevitably, the letdown.

Remember, for example, the Social Security commission of 2001? Neither do most Americans. The question now is whether a similar demise awaits the report of the Iraq Study Group — impeccably researched, comprehensive, bipartisan and having no legal authority beyond that of friendly advice.

One of its main proposals, the idea of talking to Iran and Syria, was swiftly brushed off by Mr. Bush. Now the administration seems to be leaning toward a temporary increase in American troops, an option the group said it “could support” if requested by commanders but did not endorse.

But whether this group, too, ends up as a footnote to history, or becomes the framework for a new war policy, is unlikely to be settled until well into the new year.

“I don’t think it’s dead at all,” said Warren B. Rudman, the former Republican senator from New Hampshire and a veteran of such panels himself. “Whether its recommendations will ultimately be followed is another question. But with the Democrats in charge of Congress, its findings will certainly get a hearing.”

National commissions have been a staple of Washington tradecraft since at least 1908, when the National Monetary Commission began setting out proposals that led to the Federal Reserve System. Others, too, have had substantive results. The National Screw Thread Commission of 1925 helped solve a problem that now seems obscure but once was quite critical — the mismatch of nonstandard hardware, including hoses with fire hydrants and nuts with bolts.

In more recent years, commissions have investigated presidential assassinations, space shuttle disasters and intelligence failures. Robert A. Dallek, the presidential historian, has studied how President Lyndon B. Johnson ignored the recommendations of his own commission on the urban riots of the 1960s. In the current debate over Iraq, Mr. Dallek sees that history repeating itself.

“The impression I have is the Iraq Study Group’s report is slowly being eclipsed, fading to the margins, because there’s no indication that President Bush will accept its recommendations,” he said.

Unlike many such panels, the Iraq Study Group was appointed not by the president but by Congress; the White House only later lent its support, offering additional government financing for the group’s visit to Iraq in August.

Mr. Baker’s status as a top adviser to Mr. Bush’s father has led to speculation that the current president may not want to appear too eager to accept the group’s recommendations, particularly on Iran and Syria, which have been roundly criticized on the Republican right.

On Tuesday, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. , the Delaware Democrat who will become chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee next month, repeatedly cited the Iraq Study Group as a touchstone for Iraq hearings he plans beginning Jan. 9. But the study group rejected Mr. Biden’s central idea for the Iraqi future, a division of the country into separately administered Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish regions. Still, it is too early to write an obituary for the panel.

Mr. Bush, who will preside over a National Security Council meeting on Iraq at his Texas ranch on Thursday, has promised to announce a new war strategy next month. Even if he rejects the most prominent of the group’s 79 proposals, they may remain relevant options for the future.

Mr. Rudman keenly understands that possibility. He served as co-chairman with former Senator Gary Hart of Colorado of a commission on national security whose 1999 report predicted terrorist attacks, saying “Americans will die on American soil, possibly in large numbers.” Its recommendations were duly ignored — until the 2001 attacks, when many were put into effect.

Daniel P. Serwer, the former diplomat who served as the Iraq Study Group’s executive director, argues that whatever Mr. Bush decides, the panel has already had a profound effect on the policy debate, particularly by declaring its candid judgment that the situation in Iraq is “grave and deteriorating.”

“The government went from saying, ‘We’ve got this under control,’ to ordering new assessments left, right and center,” said Mr. Serwer, vice president for peace and stability operations at the United States Institute of Peace.

He said the administration was likely to accept dozens of the 79 recommendations, including “milestones” it sets for the Iraqi government over the next year.

“I’m quite convinced that when you get the administration’s new assessments, along with Congress’s hearings and evaluations, what you come up with may be very much like the Iraq Study Group’s recommendations,” Mr. Serwer said.

The national 9/11 commission had perhaps the greatest impact of any such inquiry in recent years, producing a best-selling book and recommendations that have reshaped the government. Emulating the 9/11 report, the Iraq Study Group issued a commercial paperback of its report that has topped nonfiction best-seller lists this month.

Between the book, with 250,000 copies in print, and more than 1.5 million downloads of the report from the group’s main Web site and many thousands elsewhere, staff members estimate that at least three million Americans have seen the report. But there are no plans to campaign for the proposals as the 9/11 commission did, said Ian Larsen, a spokesman for the study group.

“No sales job, no road show,” Mr. Larsen said.

Still, the group’s work has been far more public than that of the so-called Wise Men who advised President Johnson at a similar crisis in the conduct of the Vietnam War. A dozen distinguished elder statesmen and military commanders who were gathered by Clark M. Clifford in March 1968, just after he was named secretary of defense, they gave their advice largely in private.

In a parallel move, Mr. Bush has also switched defense secretaries at a critical moment in a war that many Americans believe has gone wrong. His choice was a member of the Iraq Study Group, Robert M. Gates, who, Mr. Serwer recalled, “did a whole lot of reading” on Iraq in the months he served on the panel.

    Latest Blue-Ribbon Panel Awaits Its Own Fate, NYT, 28.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/28/washington/28capital.html

Op-Ed Contributor

Becoming the President

December 28, 2006
The New York Times
By DAVID HUME KENNERLY

I TOOK this photograph of President Gerald Ford in the White House Cabinet Room on May 14, 1975, as he met with his National Security Council about the Mayagüez crisis. The cargo ship Mayagüez had been captured by Khmer Rouge rebels, and it was up to the president to try to get the American crew released safely.

After diplomacy failed, Mr. Ford, who had been president for nine months, waved off one of the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s recommendations, which involved a B-52 strike on Phnom Penh, and instead ordered a strong but limited military action that ultimately secured the crew’s freedom. Tension was thick in that meeting, but the president’s hand was firmly on the controls. In my mind this incident was the fulcrum of his presidency, the point at which he came of age as commander in chief, and the photo shows that.

In some of the Mayagüez meetings, the president’s advisers offered up hypotheticals on how certain decisions might “play.” They wanted to make sure the world knew that America might still use overwhelming force in achieving its ends. Mr. Ford didn’t want to hear that. He had no bloodlust. He knew Vietnam was a debacle; it had been his painful duty to oversee the end of that horrible chapter of American history. But he refused to make innocent Cambodians pay for America’s mistakes in Vietnam.

For me, 30 years later, this photo is emblematic of Gerald Ford’s finally making the presidency his own. If I had to describe him in one word, it would be “resolute.”

The man I came to know and admire had a quiet and very powerful sense of self. He had the least guile of anyone I’ve ever met and a total lack of vanity. There were no “two Gerald Fords,” there was no other agenda, no secret life. An avid golfer to the end, he would never move his ball to improve his lie when no one was looking. To me that was the central theme of his character. I will miss him profoundly.

David Hume Kennerly, winner of a Pulitzer Prize in photography, was President Gerald Ford’s personal photographer.

    Becoming the President, NYT, 28.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/28/opinion/28kennerly.html

Editorial

Gerald R. Ford

December 28, 2006
The New York Times

Gerald R. Ford was an accidental president, his tenure brief, his legacy limited. Yet he was the right man summoned at the right time to begin the necessary process of healing a country exhausted by war abroad and scandal at home. Elevated to the nation’s top job when Richard Nixon was forced by threat of impeachment to resign, he was everything his predecessor was not — transparent and largely content with life as he found it. His many friends saw him as plain old “Jerry,” a get-along, go-along product of the House of Representatives whose self-assurance and modest ambitions perfectly suited a country that wanted little more than a few months’ rest.

Mr. Ford’s unplanned and largely unsought rise up the American political ladder was assisted not once but twice by scandal. In 1973, when Spiro Agnew resigned the vice presidency after a scandal unrelated to Watergate, Mr. Nixon sought advice from senior Congressional leaders about a replacement. The advice was unanimous. “We gave Nixon no choice but Ford,” House Speaker Carl Albert recalled later.

Which was fitting, because Mr. Ford was in essence a creature of Congress — more precisely, of the House of Representatives, a place of perpetual compromise that encourages neither the vision that sometimes attaches to the Senate nor the managerial skills that come with being a governor. Michigan voters elected Mr. Ford 13 times, and of his 25 years in the House, he served eight as minority leader. He saw himself as a negotiator and a reconciler, and the record shows it: he did not write a single piece of major legislation in his entire career.

As president, Mr. Ford would have had little room in which to pursue lofty ambitions even if he had them. Domestically, he was bedeviled by inflation and then recession, and his effort to cure both embroiled him in constant combat with his old friends in Congress. Abroad, he had his hands full maintaining American power and sustaining détente with the Soviet Union, in the aftermath of the collapse of Vietnam and Cambodia.

But he judged, correctly, that his primary mission was to quiet national passions inflamed by war and Watergate — to end, as he put it, “our long national nightmare” — and in so doing to restore a measure of respect to the presidency itself. To that end he made several small gestures largely forgotten now but symbolically important at the time. He announced that he would be lenient to draft resisters, he opened the White House to people on Mr. Nixon’s “enemies list,” and he crisscrossed the country endlessly, speaking to groups large and small in an effort to open up an office that Mr. Nixon had all but closed to public inspection.

Yet his wish to heal led him to do something that reopened the very wounds he was trying hard to close. On Sept. 8, 1974, barely 30 days into his presidency, Mr. Ford announced his decision to give Mr. Nixon a “full, free and absolute pardon.” The reaction was immediate, intense and largely negative. Mr. Ford had expected criticism, but not the outrage that erupted in Congress, in many newspapers and among the public at large.

This page, for example, condemned the pardon as “a profoundly unwise, divisive and unjust act” that in a stroke had destroyed the new president’s “credibility as a man of judgment, candor and competence.” The critics’ fundamental point was that a nation in which the law applies equally to rich and poor, the meek and the powerful, cannot exempt anyone, least of all a president, from the requirements of justice.

History has been more sympathetic to Mr. Ford’s argument that to allow Mr. Nixon’s prosecution to go forward, perhaps all the way to a trial, would have been profoundly destabilizing to a nation that was already in shaky health. In 2001, the trustees of the John F. Kennedy Library honored Mr. Ford with its Profile in Courage Award for the decision, which Senator Edward Kennedy, a onetime critic, described as essential to the restoration of national unity. When Senate and House leaders bestowed on Mr. Ford and his wife, Betty, a Congressional Gold Medal in 1999, President Clinton — who had his own experiences with prosecutors — said the critics had been “caught up in the moment,” and that Mr. Ford’s decision had helped “keep the country together.”

Our own bottom line continues to be the same: that the nation is strong enough to endure almost anything but burying the truth. Still, Mr. Ford deserves to be remembered for more than the pardon. Marking the end of a national nightmare is no small thing.

    Gerald R. Ford, NYT, 28.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/28/opinion/28thur1.html

After Ford’s Death, Tributes Are Set for Capital

December 28, 2006
The New York Times
By DAVID STOUT and JEFF ZELENY

WASHINGTON, Dec. 27 — The body of former President Gerald R. Ford will lie in the Capitol this weekend amid tributes marked by considerably less pageantry than the funeral of former President Ronald Reagan in 2004, Congressional officials said Wednesday.

Services for Mr. Ford, the 38th president, who died late Tuesday, will begin Friday in Palm Desert, Calif., with private prayers for the family at St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church, Gregory D. Willard, a Ford family spokesman, said at a news conference.

The next day, his body will be flown to Washington. The hearse is to pause at the World War II Memorial on the National Mall in recognition of Mr. Ford’s naval service in the Pacific. His state funeral is to be conducted on Saturday evening in the Capitol Rotunda, after which the public will be allowed to file by the coffin.

A service will be held next Tuesday in the Washington National Cathedral.

After the cathedral service, Mr. Ford’s body will be flown to Grand Rapids, Mich., where he got his start in national politics. The next day, after services at Grace Episcopal Church there, he will be interred on a hillside near his presidential museum. (Mr. Ford’s presidential library is at Ann Arbor, Mich.)

Two senior Congressional officials familiar with the plans for the services said these would include the full military honors that accompany a state funeral. But the officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the plans called for a less elaborate ceremony inside the Capitol and leading up to the service than the proceedings for Reagan.

In an unusual feature meant to highlight Mr. Ford’s long service in Congress, his body is to lie in repose outside the main door of the House of Representatives and, later, outside the main door of the Senate, said Mr. Willard, the family spokesman.

“I know personally how much those two tributes themselves meant to President Ford,” Mr. Willard said. Mr. Willard and Terry O’Donnell, who both worked in the Ford White House and remained close to the former president, are organizing the services.

More than most presidents, Gerald Ford was a man of the Congress. He was Republican leader in the House, denied his dream of being speaker by his party’s long minority status decades ago. As vice president, he was the president of the Senate.

Like Reagan, who never served in Congress, Mr. Ford was a son of the Midwest. But by personal inclination and design, Mr. Ford was less a performer than Reagan, and he seemed far more comfortable with plain language and a minimum of trappings.

Public officials and politicians of all persuasions were united Wednesday in praising Mr. Ford as a man who could be partisan without being polarizing and as a throwback, in a way, to a time when Republicans and Democrats battled during the day and afterward enjoyed one another’s friendship.

“The American people will always admire Gerald Ford’s devotion to duty, his personal character and the honorable conduct of his administration,” President Bush said at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., as he ordered American flags at the White House and “all buildings, grounds, and naval vessels of the United States” flown at half-staff for 30 days.

It was not clear Wednesday evening whether Mr. Bush intended to fly to Washington from his Texas ranch to attend the Saturday evening service at the Capitol. The president’s schedule was to be announced Thursday.

Democrats, too, remembered Mr. Ford with affection.

“To his great credit, he was the same hard-working, down-to-earth person the day he left the White House as he was when he first entered Congress almost 30 years earlier,” former President Bill Clinton and his wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, said in a joint statement.

Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, called Mr. Ford “a healer” who unified the nation after the ordeal of Watergate. “But we in Michigan hold Jerry Ford in affection and esteem for his lifetime of service, including 13 terms in the House of Representatives,” Mr. Levin said. “We take particular pride in this son of Michigan and the manner in which he always treasured his West Michigan roots.”

“Over time,” Mr. Levin added, “we will honor his memory in many ways, but one immediate way is to return the Gerald Ford quality of civility to the nation’s capital.”

The state funeral for Mr. Ford, details of which were still being worked out, will be only the third in 34 years. Reagan’s state funeral in Washington was the first since former President Lyndon B. Johnson’s in January 1973.

And Harry S. Truman was laid to rest in his native Missouri in 1972 after a minimum of pomp. For those who like presidential trivia, Truman also died on Dec. 26. Like Mr. Ford, Truman was a man of Middle America who inherited the presidency, was unpopular for a time and was willing to let history be the final judge.

Presidents, former presidents and presidents-elect are entitled to a state funeral, which include military pallbearers, military music, gun salutes, a flag-covered coffin and other embellishments. They are typically attended by kings, queens, prime ministers and other high foreign officials. Perhaps the most famous state funeral in United States history — and an indelible memory for those of a certain age — was that for President John F. Kennedy in 1963.

Some presidents and their families have chosen less elaborate farewells. Richard M. Nixon, driven from office by the scandals that vaulted Mr. Ford to the White House, was buried in a simple ceremony at his presidential library in Yorba Linda, Calif., in 1994. The rites for Franklin D. Roosevelt were held at the family home in Hyde Park, N.Y.

Justice John Paul Stevens, whom Mr. Ford nominated for the Supreme Court in 1975, called him “a wise president who had the courage to make unpopular decisions that would serve the country’s best interests in the long run.”

“Time has proved that his decision to pardon Richard Nixon was such a decision,” Justice Stevens said in a statement issued by the court. “We mourn his passing but remember his all-American career with admiration, affection and total respect.”

Justice Stevens’s “all-American” allusion was to Gerald Ford’s football prowess at the University of Michigan. Mr. Ford was the frequent butt of jokes about his supposed clumsiness, even though he was among the most athletically gifted of presidents.

Justice Stevens is the only member of the Supreme Court to be chosen by Mr. Ford, and he is now the longest serving. Vice President Dick Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld both served as chief of staff to President Ford.

“President Ford was a man of great decency and towering integrity,” Mr. Rumsfeld said Wednesday. “He was a patriot who left a budding law career to join the United States Navy in World War II. I was privileged to serve with him in the Congress and saw firsthand his pride in our country and his deep respect for our system of government.”

    After Ford’s Death, Tributes Are Set for Capital, NYT, 28.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/28/washington/28funeral.html?hp&ex=1167368400&en=d1669142c01627c2&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Infamous ‘Drop Dead’ Was Never Said by Ford

December 28, 2006
The New YorkTimes
By SAM ROBERTS

Gerald R. Ford and Marie Antoinette did not have much in common, but being misquoted cost both of them their jobs.

In Hollywood’s latest biography of the French queen, she denies having callously suggested that breadless peasants eat cake instead. “I never said that,” the actress Kirsten Dunst pouts. “I wonder why people keep saying I did.”

Mr. Ford, on Oct. 29, 1975, gave a speech denying federal assistance to spare New York from bankruptcy. The front page of The Daily News the next day read: “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.”

Mr. Ford never explicitly said “drop dead.” Yet those two words, arguably the essence of his remarks as encapsulated in the immortal headline, would, as he later acknowledged, cost him the presidency the following year, after Jimmy Carter, nominated by the Democrats in New York, narrowly carried the state.

“It more than annoyed me because it wasn’t accurate,” he recalled years later. “It was very unfair.”

That view is echoed in an evolving version of historical revisionism. Only two months after saying or meaning or merely implying “drop dead” — or, perhaps, resorting to tough love by holding the city’s feet to the fire — Mr. Ford signed legislation to provide federal loans to the city, which were repaid with interest.

Gov. Hugh L. Carey, among others, argues that Mr. Ford’s public recalcitrance bought time for the city to make its case to an even more reluctant Congress. (“He told me he didn’t have the votes,” Mr. Carey recalled Mr. Ford saying.)

Moreover, the speech spurred New York’s civic, business and labor leaders to rally bankers in the United States and abroad, who feared their own investments would be harmed if New York defaulted on its debt.

Mr. Ford was also an unlikely whipping boy. His resolve against profligacy was stiffened by more inviting villains, especially his treasury secretary, William E. Simon, whom even the president referred to as “hard-nosed.”

Mr. Simon warned that bailing out the city would amount to nationalizing municipal debt and rewarding local officials who lacked the will to stanch the inevitable hemorrhaging inflicted by bankrupt liberalism. (The investment banker Felix G. Rohatyn, recruited by Mr. Carey to rescue the city, would liken default to “someone stepping into a tepid bath and slashing his wrists — you might not feel yourself dying, but that’s what would happen”).

The Ford administration’s politically suicidal demands to city officials — raise transit fares, abolish rent control, scrap free tuition at the City University — prompted Victor Gotbaum, the municipal labor leader, to complain that Mr. Simon barely believed in government at all, except for police and fire protection, “and he’s not sure about fire.”

David R. Gergen, an assistant to Mr. Simon at the time and later a presidential adviser, recalled that Mr. Ford himself “was one of those moderate Republicans who actually liked New York” — he chose Nelson A. Rockefeller as his vice president — but that “he was offended by the city’s profligate spending.”

“The president’s speechwriters whipped up one draft, and I was asked by the White House chief of staff to write an alternative version,” Mr. Gergen said. “I wrote a hard-hitting piece, assuming that if it ever saw the light of day, the White House would, in the normal course, invite me to smooth the rough edges. Instead, someone plopped a few of my rough, unedited paragraphs into the final text.”

In the speech, the president said: “The people of this country will not be stampeded. They will not panic when a few desperate New York officials and bankers try to scare New York’s mortgage payments out of them.”

The speech had a powerful impact, Mr. Gergen said. “It was a doozy of a speech, but events caught both sides by surprise,” Mr. Gergen remembered. “New Yorkers had not foreseen how tough the president would be, and Republicans in Washington had not anticipated how angry the response would be.”

Howard J. Rubenstein, the public relations executive who was an adviser to Mayor Abraham D. Beame, recalled that the speech “galvanized New York like I’ve never seen before.” Mr. Rubenstein still has a framed copy of the headline on his office wall.

With 30 years’ hindsight, some of the players say that if Mr. Ford had acquiesced to the city’s appeals months or even weeks earlier, New York might never have recovered.

“Ford was good for New York, because he made us clean up our act,” said Henry J. Stern, a former parks commissioner and city councilman.

On balance, Mr. Rohatyn said, “I think he was a plus,” he said. “Ford did change his mind, and you can’t say that about every president.”

Edward I. Koch, who succeeded Mr. Beame, said of Mr. Ford: “Obviously he was persuaded his original position was wrong, and that shows a great man open to change. I hold nothing against him. And there are very few people, even when they’re dead, that I hold nothing against.”

Not long ago, Mr. Ford was interviewed for a tribute to Lewis Rudin, the New York real estate magnate and civic booster who fought mightily for federal help from the Ford administration in 1975. Praising Mr. Rudin’s relentless lobbying, Mr. Ford once again returned to the famous headline that had haunted him for decades.

“It was totally untrue,” he said, adding with a weak smile, “We burned all those papers.”

    Infamous ‘Drop Dead’ Was Never Said by Ford, NYT, 28.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/28/nyregion/28veto.html

Former president Gerald Ford dies

Wed Dec 27, 2006 3:27 AM ET
reuters
By Steve Gorman

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Former U.S. President Gerald Ford, who was swept into office after the Watergate scandal and later pardoned Richard Nixon, died at age 93, his widow said on Tuesday.

"My family joins me in sharing the difficult news that Gerald Ford, our beloved husband, father, grandfather and great-grandfather, has passed away at 93 years of age," Betty Ford said in a statement.

"His life was filled with love of God, his family and his country."

A former Republican congressman, Ford took office vowing, "Our long national nightmare is over." He served for 2 1/2 years with a style often mocked as bumbling until he lost the 1976 U.S. presidential election to Democrat Jimmy Carter.

Ford, the oldest living U.S. president, had been ailing and largely out of the public eye for several years.

He was the only U.S. president who was not elected to either the presidency or vice presidency. He was appointed vice president in 1973 after Nixon's vice president, Spiro Agnew, resigned to avoid prosecution on corruption charges.

When Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974, to avoid impeachment in the scandal over a politically motivated burglary of Democratic Party offices in the Watergate complex in Washington, Ford became president.

One month later, on September 8, 1974, Ford stunned the nation and stirred enduring controversy by granting Nixon "a full, free and absolute pardon" for any crime he may have committed in office.

That set the paradoxical pattern for the fill-in presidency of this rough-hewn politician who had served 26 years as a congressman from Michigan.

"President Ford was a great American who gave many years of dedicated service to our country," President George W. Bush said in a statement. "With his quiet integrity, common sense, and kind instincts, President Ford helped heal our land and restore public confidence in the presidency."

Ford's pastor, Rev. Robert Certain, said the former president died Tuesday at home in Rancho Mirage, where his wife and three sons had celebrated Christmas the day before.

"They gathered for Christmas but it was anticipated it would be soon," he said in an interview. "I wouldn't be surprised if President Ford chose to exit after Christmas."

Ford's death leaves three living former presidents including George H.W. Bush, Carter and Bill Clinton. Bush is oldest at 82, a few months senior to Carter.

TWO ASSASSINATION ATTEMPTS

Ford's mini-term as 38th president included two assassination attempts; the fall of Vietnam; Cambodian seizure of a U.S. freighter, which prompted him to "send in the Marines;" constant fights with Congress; and a penchant for stumbling, head-cracking clumsiness that made him a butt of jokes.

Critics ridiculed his occasional clumsiness with barbs such as "he can't walk and chew gum at the same time."

Ford revived questions about his intellect and grasp of issues with a notorious gaffe in a televised campaign debate against Carter in 1976. He asserted in defense of his foreign policies that "there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe."

He fell just short in his fight to overcome a 30-point Carter polling lead and lost one of the closest elections in U.S. history.

Gerald Rudolph Ford was born in Omaha, Nebraska, on July 14, 1913. His name then was Leslie King but his parents were divorced soon after his birth and he later took the name of his stepfather, Gerald Ford Sr.

A Navy officer in World War II, Ford married Betty Bloomer in 1948. Mrs. Ford became a national figure in her own right, first as an outspoken first lady and then as a crusader against drug and alcohol addiction.

Certain said funeral arrangements would be finalized on Wednesday, but that Ford's body would be sent to Washington before burial in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

(Additional reporting by Doina Chiacu in Washington and Adam Tanner in San Francisco)

    Former president Gerald Ford dies, R, 27.12.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=newsOne&storyID=2006-12-27T082712Z_01_N26411374_RTRUKOC_0_US-FORD.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C1-TopStories-newsOne-2

FACTBOX-Facts about ex-President Gerald Ford

Wed Dec 27, 2006 12:43 AM ET
Reuters

(Reuters) - Gerald Ford, who died on Tuesday, took office as America's first appointed president on August 9, 1974, following Richard Nixon's resignation in the worst U.S. political scandal. Here are some facts about Ford's life and presidency.

* Ford pardoned Nixon on September 8, 1974, for any crime he may have committed in office, an act that stunned the nation and stirred enduring controversy. He denied making any deal with Nixon.

* He escaped two assassination attempts in a 17-day span in 1975, and served on the Warren Commission which investigated the 1963 assassination of President John Kennedy.

* At the Helsinki summit of 1975, Ford and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev signed agreements in effect swapping Western acknowledgment of post-war Soviet domination in central Europe for Moscow's vows to liberalize human rights and ease border restrictions.

* Ford declared the Vietnam War "finished as far as America is concerned" on April 23, 1975, and the U.S.-backed Saigon government fell one week later. Congress had rejected Ford's last-ditch efforts to boost military aid to Saigon.

* Ford represented Michigan in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1949 and rose through Republican ranks to become House minority leader in the 1960s. Nixon named him vice president in 1973 after Spiro Agnew resigned the post in a corruption scandal.

* He was the only U.S. president to have assumed office without winning a national election as either president or vice president. He lost to Democrat Jimmy Carter in his 1976 bid for a full term, in one of the closest U.S. elections in U.S. history.

* Ford played on the University of Michigan's national championship football teams in 1932 and 1933 and turned down offers to play with the Detroit Lions and Green Bay Packers in the National Football League. Instead he went to Yale University, where he went to law school and served as boxing coach. Two of his trainees were future U.S. senators Robert Taft Jr. and William Proxmire.

* Ford was born Leslie Lynch King Jr. on July 14, 1913, but his parents divorced when he was a toddler. When his mother married Gerald R. Ford in 1916, the family began calling the future president Gerald R. Ford Jr. but his name was not legally changed until 1935, according to the Ford Presidential Library and Museum.

    FACTBOX-Facts about ex-President Gerald Ford, R, 27.12.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=newsOne&storyid=2006-12-27T054335Z_01_N16201585_RTRUKOT_0_TEXT0.xml&WTmodLoc=NewsArt-L1-RelatedNews-1

Gerald R. Ford, 38th U.S. President, Dies

December 27, 2006
The New York Times
By JAMES M. NAUGHTON and ADAM CLYMER

Former President Gerald R. Ford, who was thrust into the presidency in 1974 in the wake of the Watergate scandal but who lost his own bid for election after pardoning President Richard M. Nixon, has died, according to a statement issued late last night by his wife, Betty Ford.

He was 93, making him the longest living former president, surpassing Ronald Reagan, who died in 2004, by just over a month.

The statement did not give a cause, place or time of death, but Mr. Ford, the 38th president, had been in and out of the hospital since January 2006 when he suffered pneumonia, most recently in October at the Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage, Calif., for medical tests. He returned to his home in Rancho Mirage after five days of hospitalization.

“My family joins me in sharing the difficult news that Gerald Ford, our beloved husband, father, grandfather and great grandfather has passed away at 93 years of age,” Mrs. Ford said in a statement issued from her husband’s office in Rancho Mirage, also the location of the Betty Ford Center. “His life was filled with love of God, his family and his country.”

President Bush praised Mr. Ford for his contributions to the nation “in an hour of national turmoil and division,” in a statement released early today from his ranch in Texas.

“With his quiet integrity, common sense, and kind instincts, President Ford helped heal our land and restore public confidence in the presidency,” Mr. Bush said. “The American people will always admire Gerald Ford’s devotion to duty, his personal character, and the honorable conduct of his administration.”

Mr. Ford, who was the only person to lead the country without having been elected as president or vice president, occupied the White House for just 896 days — starting from a hastily arranged ceremony on Aug. 9, 1974, and ending after his defeat by Jimmy Carter in the 1976 election. But they were pivotal days of national introspection, involving America’s first definitive failure in a war and the first resignation of a president.

After a decade of division over Vietnam and two years of trauma over the Watergate scandals, Jerry Ford, as he called himself, radiated a soothing familiarity. He might have been the nice guy down the street suddenly put in charge of the nation, and if he seemed a bit predictable, he was also safe, reliable and reassuring. He placed no intolerable intellectual or psychological burdens on a weary land, and he lived out a modest philosophy. “The harder you work, the luckier you are,” he said once in summarizing his career. “I worked like hell.”

Gerald Rudolph Ford was born on July 14, 1913, in Omaha to Leslie Lynch King and Dorothy Ayer King. He rose to House minority leader in 1963 and served in the House until 1973, when Vice President Spiro T. Agnew resigned, and President Nixon appointed Mr. Ford to succeed Mr. Agnew.

When Mr. Ford took the oath of president in 1974, the economy was in disarray, an energy shortage was worsening, allies were wondering how steadfast the United States might be as a partner and Mr. Nixon, having resigned rather than face impeachment for taking part in the Watergate cover-up, was flying to seclusion in San Clemente, Calif.

There was a collective sense of relief as Mr. Ford, in the most memorable line of his most noteworthy speech, declared that day, “Our long national nightmare is over.”

Two years later, as he accepted the Republican presidential nomination and began a campaign that would end in his first failure in an election, Mr. Ford scarcely seemed to be indulging in hyperbole as he recalled what it had been like to take office as Mr. Nixon’s heir.

“It was an hour in our history that troubled our minds and tore at our hearts,” he said. “Anger and hatred had risen to dangerous levels, dividing friends and families. The polarization of our political order had aroused unworthy passions of reprisal and revenge. Our governmental system was closer to stalemate than at any time since Abraham Lincoln took that same oath of office.”

The pardon, intensely unpopular at the time, came to be generally viewed as correct. In May 2001, Mr. Ford was honored with a “Profile in Courage” Award at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. Senator Edward M. Kennedy spoke and said he had originally opposed the pardon. “But time has a way of clarifying past events,” he said, “and now we see that President Ford was right.”

Mr. Ford’s decision to back the 1975 Helsinki Accords was furiously criticized in 1976 by both Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. They complained that it had legitimized the post-World War II borders in Europe. But in his book “The Cold War: A New History” (Penguin, 2005), John Lewis Gaddis of Yale wrote that the pact’s commitment to “human rights and fundamental freedoms” became a trap for the Soviet Union, which was facing ever-bolder condemnations by dissidents.

“Thousands of people who lacked the prominence of Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov began to stand with them in holding the U.S.S.R. and its satellites accountable for human rights,” Mr. Gaddis wrote. The Helsinki process, he added, became “the basis for legitimizing opposition to Soviet rule.”

Mr. Ford also advanced negotiations for a new treaty to turn over control of the Panama Canal to Panama, though he slowed the process during the 1976 campaign and left it to Mr. Carter, his victorious Democratic opponent, to complete.

Both inflation and unemployment fell while he was in office. And he vigorously tried to control federal spending with vetoes of spending bills, starting his first week in office. In a matter of months, however, after the Democratic landslide in the 1974 elections, Congress began overriding his vetoes.

But that did not stop him from threatening to veto a measure, sought by Mayor Abraham D. Beame and Gov. Hugh Carey, offering a 90-day $1 billion line of credit to nearly bankrupt New York City in October 1975. “Ford to City: Drop Dead” was the front-page headline in The Daily News. The next month, the New York leaders went to Washington with a new plan with new controls on the city budget, and they got the short-term loans they needed.

Mr. Ford brought to his duties an indomitable self-assurance.

“I can recall no incident, either in the Congress, vice presidency or presidency, where I didn’t feel that I was prepared,” he said in retirement. “I felt more secure, more certain of myself in the presidency than at any other time.”

His steadiness showed through as a timely presidential attribute, but it was always that way with Gerald Rudolph Ford Jr. He was a man more fundamental than flashy, more immutable than immodest. He served undefeated through 13 elections to the House of Representatives and rose to be its Republican leader, yet in 25 years in Congress he did not write a major piece of legislation. He was overwhelmingly confirmed as vice president, the first to be appointed under the 25th Amendment, yet he owed his selection by Mr. Nixon to the likelihood that he would prove inoffensive in the job.

As president, he was quick to assert to Congress, in a play on words that nobody misunderstood, “I am a Ford, not a Lincoln.” If it was true, as was often said, that the Oval Office shaped the occupant, Mr. Ford resisted the temptation of the imperial. On an early trip as president to South Korea, he called American enlisted men “sir.” His prose was so pedestrian and his tongue so unreliable — he referred on one public occasion to the noble American “work ethnic” and on another to the disease of “sickle-cell Armenia” — that he became a favorite target of comedians.

Acts of Forgiveness

“I think it’s progress that the presidency has been humanized,” Mr. Ford remarked a few days before he left the White House. It might easily have been an epitaph.

He had sought to bind up the nation’s wounds as much by instinct as by design. One of his earliest acts, combining courage with forgiveness, was to announce before a convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars that he favored leniency for Vietnam-era draft resisters.

When Congressional Democrats suggested that he had obtained Mr. Nixon’s resignation by promising to pardon him, Mr. Ford did something presidents do not do: he went to Capitol Hill and testified, telling a House subcommittee, “There was no deal, period, under no circumstances.”

He invited to the White House individuals who had been excluded as political “enemies” in the lists kept by the Nixon administration. When Mr. Ford heard, as a Republican in Congress, that Mr. Nixon kept such a list, he said to an aide, “Anybody who can’t keep his enemies in his head has too many enemies.”

His decision to grant a full and absolute pardon to his predecessor stunned the nation. After going to church the morning of Sept. 8, 1974, Mr. Ford went on national television to announce that there would be no formal judicial retribution against Mr. Nixon. Then, apparently untroubled by his decision, he played golf.

“I felt then, and I feel now, if I was going to do it, it had to be clean, sudden,” Mr. Ford said months after he had left office. “It was a part of the healing process.” He paused a moment, smiled, and added, “It didn’t turn out to be quite as much of a healing at the time.”

Revulsion and disillusion exploded in editorial comments and angry telegrams to the White House. Mr. Ford’s biographer and friend, J. F. terHorst, resigned as White House press secretary rather than defend the pardon. For the rest of his term, Mr. Ford had to do the defending.

Those who were critical of the pardon, he said, “haven’t thought through what would have happened over the next 18 months, 24 months, 36 months; that whole episode would have been on the front page.”

He had expected some public criticism, he said, but it proved “far worse than I anticipated.” He insisted, however, in his 1979 autobiography, “A Time to Heal” (Harper and Row), and in conversations in retirement, that had Mr. Nixon been required to face indictment and trial over the many months of the Ford presidency, “all of the healing process that I thought was so essential would have been much more difficult to achieve.”

Hard Work, Honesty, Punctuality

Mr. Ford’s early circumstances made him an unlikely future president. He was born July 14, 1913, in Omaha to Leslie Lynch King and Dorothy Ayer King. Not for 17 years was he to learn that he had been christened Leslie Lynch King Jr.

When he was 2 years old, his mother divorced Mr. King and moved to Grand Rapids, Mich. She remarried, and her husband, Gerald Rudolph Ford, a paint salesman with an eighth-grade education, gave the boy his name in formally adopting him.

Gerald considered his mother “a human dynamo in a womanly way” and said she “probably had more friends than any woman I ever knew.” He revered his stepfather. Later in life, even in the White House, he would confront difficulty by wondering, “Now, how would he have done this?” It was perhaps the ultimate symptom of Mr. Ford’s uncommon commonness that he would try to approach the presidency after the fashion of a Grand Rapids merchant. What he respected in his stepfather’s manner was common sense.

His closeness to his stepfather was deepened, if anything, by the discovery that he was adopted and in particular by a brief encounter with his father.

It occurred at the age of 17, when he was a star on the state champion South High School Trojans football team, a 6-foot, blue-eyed blond with a husky voice and an infectious laugh. His mother and stepfather had told Mr. Ford that he was the product of a broken home, and the information did not appear to disturb him unduly. Mr. Ford went on with his schooling and, because the Ford Paint and Varnish Company was struggling to survive the Depression, with a job waiting on tables at Bill Skougis’s Restaurant. One day a patron in the restaurant stared at him and then told him, “Leslie, I’m your father.”

He was stunned.

Nearly half a century later, recalling the episode in an interview, Mr. Ford’s words remained drenched in bitterness: “It was shocking, in that he would intrude on a happy family life after he had neglected my mother and me by his refusal to pay what the court ordered him to pay as child support.”

In his 1994 biography of Mr. Ford, “Time and Chance” (HarperCollins), James Cannon wrote that Mr. King never paid the monthly child support ordered by an Omaha court after it found that he had beaten his wife, but that Mr. King’s father did pay the money his son owed. Those payments stopped when the elder Mr. King died, Mr. Ford wrote in his autobiography.

His father, Mr. Ford said in the interview, had “abandoned me for 6, 8, 10 years — I have forgotten how long; then he would seek to intrude on my family life, which was a happy one with my stepfather.”

“I really never forgave my father in a sense of totally forgiving,” Mr. Ford said.

Traditional Values

The home in which the future president was brought up, along with his three stepbrothers, was imbued with the values of family loyalty, thrift and patriotism.

On May Day one year, Mr. Ford and other students at South High saw another group of youths painting anti-American slogans on the steps leading to the school building. The group Mr. Ford was in, mostly football players, dashed over, grabbed the paint cans and, by one account, splashed the paint on the others.

Mr. Ford ran for president of the senior class in 1931 on, as he later used to recall with a laugh, the Progressive ticket. He lost, but he was never to lose another election until he sought a different presidency 45 years later as more of a conservative.

His basic philosophy involved fiscal prudence, strong national defense, suspicion of alien lands and a belief that citizens should earn a living rather than be given one. This, he said, was a legacy “from both my stepfather and my mother — hard-working, typical Middle Western individuals who had themselves been brought up in families that had comparable philosophical views.”

“It was that environment plus, I think, my own instincts, which go back, I believe, to the fact that I always felt you had to work like hell,” he continued. “I did. Whether I worked in the restaurant, whether I worked in scouting or whether I worked in school, I was always very conscientious.”

He did well enough to win a scholarship to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He applied himself with equal diligence to his studies and to football, and he worked as a dishwasher at the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity to help pay his room and board.

To Law School, Then to War

In those days, both his professional and athletic ambitions were mixed. He said decades later that “one of my great ambitions was to be captain of the Michigan football team,” the Wolverines, in his senior year. But someone else was chosen as captain. Mr. Ford, a center, was instead selected by his teammates as the most valuable player; he was gratified, though he often joked of having been named most valuable member of a losing team.

After he graduated in 1935 from the University of Michigan, he had offers to play professional football for either the Detroit Lions or the Green Bay Packers (at $110 per game). Mr. Ford remained fascinated with sports, but he chose the law, a subject that had appealed to him since high school. He enrolled at Yale Law School.

Political opponents would ultimately fasten on Mr. Ford’s sports background as a source of ridicule. President Lyndon B. Johnson, angered at a legislative development inspired by Representative Ford, cracked once that he had played football too long without a helmet. And despite his real skill at skiing and golf, a tumble on the slopes or a tee shot drive into a golf gallery would be seized on by the comedy show “Saturday Night Live” as a metaphor for a clumsy presidency.

If Mr. Ford’s mental cast was more often instinctive than imaginative and his approach to issues more tactical than conceptual, he was no intellectual slouch. At Yale, Prof. Myres MacDougal wrote in interview notes on the young student: “Very mature, wise person of good judgment. Informational background not the best but interesting, mature and serious of purpose.”

Initially, because he needed the income of an assistant football coach and a head boxing coach, Mr. Ford was so busy that he was not allowed to take law classes full time. He kept insisting he was capable of the dual schedule and was so persistent that he was allowed to become student and coach simultaneously in 1938. He finished in the top third of the class of 1941, with a B average.

He returned to Grand Rapids, and with a friend, Philip W. Buchen, who would later become his White House legal counsel, he set about establishing a practice specializing in labor-management matters. Shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he joined the Navy as an ensign.

The war, more than anything else, was responsible for altering his outlook and inspiring him to pursue a career in public life.

At first, the Navy assigned him as a physical training officer to work with recruits on the grounds of the University of North Carolina. Mr. Ford kept applying for a transfer to a combat zone and kept being refused. Ever persistent, he applied anew and after a year of rejection was sent to the Pacific as a physical education officer on the U.S.S. Monterey, a light aircraft carrier.

By war’s end he had risen to lieutenant commander and won 10 battle stars for participating in engagements at places including Okinawa, Wake, Taiwan, the Philippines and the Gilbert Islands. Just before Christmas in 1944, he nearly lost his life when a typhoon struck the Third Fleet and, topside on the carrier, he came within inches of being swept off the deck.

An Internationalist Takes Office

Mr. Ford never adopted the domestic liberalism of a Roosevelt or, later, a Johnson. But the war experience broadened his view, changing him “from a passive isolationist to an ardent internationalist,” as he put it.

Having re-established himself in a comfortable law practice in Grand Rapids, Mr. Ford had a limited ambition at first. “I was 33, single, working and having a great time, playing lots of golf,” he said later. “All I was interested in was enjoying life and getting on with my law practice.”

But he kept reading a new magazine, World Report, to which he was a charter subscriber, and became an ever firmer advocate of the Marshall Plan of postwar assistance to Europe and an internationalist in a community of Dutch-origin conservative isolationists. He came to the attention of two forces: Republican reformers bent on taking control of the local party, and internationalists allied with Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg, the Republican leader, who was also from Grand Rapids.

The incumbent representative from the Fifth District of Michigan was Bartel J. Jonkman, who seemed tailored to the district — of Dutch descent, Republican, conservative, isolationist.

“I knew I was meeting a formidable incumbent,” Mr. Ford later recalled, “who for many reasons should have won. And I shouldn’t have expected to win.” Typically, Mr. Ford did expect to win, though, and with but a smidgen of apprehension that the challenge might be taken up, he dared Mr. Jonkman to debate. “Fortunately, he did not,” Mr. Ford said.

Aided by President Harry S. Truman’s disputes with Congress, which kept Mr. Jonkman in Washington, Mr. Ford worked tirelessly and won the Republican primary in 1948 by nearly 10,000 votes. Then he easily won his first term in the House. He never received less than 60 percent of the vote during a quarter-century as the Representative from Michigan’s Fifth District.

A Candid Helpmate

Shortly before the 1948 election, Mr. Ford paused from his campaigning to march down the aisle of Grace Episcopal Church in Grand Rapids — by local legend, wearing one black shoe and one brown shoe — with Elizabeth Bloomer Warren, who had been divorced and was generally regarded as the most attractive single woman in the city.

Betty Ford had been a model and a fashion coordinator. For two years, in New York City, she had danced in Martha Graham’s troupe. She was, and remained throughout Mr. Ford’s public career, a remarkably open and candid woman, given to strong opinions on abortion, feminism and other issues and willing to talk about the radical mastectomy she underwent while in the White House. She encouraged the same outspokenness in the four Ford children: Michael Gerald, John Gardner, Steven Meigs and Susan Elizabeth.

Mrs. Ford also battled drug dependency, which began in the 1960s with prescriptions for pills to relieve pain from a neck injury, and alcoholism, which grew with her loneliness during Mr. Ford’s increasingly heavy travel schedule. In 1978, her family confronted her about her addictions, and, after initial denials, she finally admitted herself for treatment. Four years later, she helped dedicate the Betty Ford Center for Drug and Alcohol Rehabilitation in Rancho Mirage, Calif., on the campus of Eisenhower Medical Center.

While Mrs. Ford reared their children, Mr. Ford rose doggedly from the obscurity of the House to the leadership of its minority. In his second term he won assignment to the Appropriations Committee, where he and other fiscal conservatives worked to curb government spending. By 1953 he was on such influential subcommittees as those dealing with funds for foreign aid and national defense; throughout the Korean and Vietnam Wars he was a stalwart supporter of American military intervention in Asia.

In the House

Bud Vestal, a reporter for The Grand Rapids Press, distressed Mr. Ford by noting in a biography that Mr. Ford “never authored a major program of legislation on his own.”

Mr. Ford’s explanation was that as a member of the Appropriations Committee, he “was pretty preoccupied with very important matters” and “didn’t have time, just as a pragmatic thing, to get involved in all the other pieces of legislation that others were writing or sponsoring or working for.”

His legislative activity more often than not involved fealty to Republican Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon or obstruction of the liberal New Frontier and Great Society proposals of Democratic Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. For instance, Mr. Ford voted against a major housing assistance act in 1961 and fostered opposition to the Medicare program in 1965.

In a Congress that often seemed akin to a fraternity, he was nearly everyone’s friend. He was thus an ideal prospect for minority leadership. When younger Republicans were casting about in 1963 for a point man in their rebellion against their aging leaders, they settled on Jerry Ford.

The group installed Mr. Ford as chairman of the House Republican Conference, the third-ranking post in the minority hierarchy. His name came to more prominent attention later that year when President Johnson appointed Mr. Ford to the Warren Commission to investigate the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In 1965, after the huge loss that came with Senator Barry Goldwater’s landslide defeat for the presidency the year before, the younger Republicans deposed Charles A. Halleck of Indiana as their House leader, supplanting him with Mr. Ford.

‘I Need Your Vote’

With the exception of an ill-conceived effort in 1970 to impeach Associate Justice William O. Douglas, a liberal member of the Supreme Court, after Senate Democrats had twice rejected President Nixon’s nominations of Southern conservatives to the court, Mr. Ford generally enlarged his circle of friends by establishing an amicable style of leadership.

When one or another Republican voted against the leadership’s wishes, some party stalwarts sought to persuade Mr. Ford to discipline the offender. There were methods that might have been used: transfer to a minor committee, elimination of funds for overseas travel, loss of campaign money. Mr. Ford said no.

“That’s counterproductive,” he insisted. “That person knows that he disappointed you. To rub it in makes it, the next time, literally impossible to get his cooperation. You can lose one battle, but the most important thing is to win the war.”

A leading House Democrat of the era, Representative Joe D. Waggoner Jr. of Louisiana, confirmed the technique’s success. “It’s the damnedest thing,” Mr. Waggoner said. “Jerry just puts his arm around a colleague or looks him in the eyes and says, ‘I need your vote,’ and gets it.”

An Elusive Dream

Visionary or not, Mr. Ford, as Republican House leader, worked to enlarge the minority, always pursuing the elusive dream of a Republican majority and, with it, the realization of his greatest political ambition, to be speaker of the House.

Asked in his retirement why he had coveted the speaker’s post, he replied:

“I thought, as a member of Congress, that would be the ultimate achievement. To sit up there and be the head honcho of 434 other people and have the responsibility, aside from the achievement, of trying to run the greatest legislative body in the history of mankind, I think, in an efficient and effective way, to tend to the people’s business, both domestic and foreign, to make sure, whatever legislation was required, to see that it was done. I think I got that ambition within a year or two after I was in the House of Representatives.”

For a decade he crisscrossed the country, downing chicken dinners in 200 or so cities each year, extolling this or that prospect for a House seat and trying diligently to build a majority. But the closest the Republicans came in his years as leader was the 192 seats they held after the 1968 elections. That was still 16 short of the majority that would have made him speaker.

Apparently destined to be the perennial leader of a minority, Mr. Ford promised his wife in 1973 that he would make one more effort, however forlorn, in 1974 at winning a majority and would then retire from politics in 1976.

“I don’t want to be a minority leader in perpetuity,” he told friends.

‘A Nice Conclusion’

On the night of Oct. 10, 1973, a few hours after Vice President Spiro T. Agnew rose in a federal courtroom in Baltimore to plead no contest to a charge of federal income tax evasion and simultaneously resigned the vice presidency, Mr. Ford was at his home in Alexandria, Va., trying to relax. The telephone rang; it was his old House ally Melvin Laird, now a White House counselor. Would Mr. Ford be interested in the vice presidency if it could be arranged, Mr. Laird asked.

“I suspect if I was asked, I would accept it,” Mr. Ford replied.

He turned from the phone, he later recalled, and told Mrs. Ford that “well, that would be a nice conclusion” for his career.

The next night President Nixon was the one who telephoned Mr. Ford’s home. He offered the vice presidency.

It was the first time that anyone had been nominated for the office under the terms of the 25th Amendment, which made the appointment subject to confirmation by both the Senate and the House. Much as Republicans had fixed on Mr. Ford as leader in 1965 because of his general acceptability, so Mr. Nixon chose him in 1973 to be vice president.

At the time, in late 1973, Mr. Nixon was locked in a legal duel with the Watergate special prosecutor and the Senate Watergate committee, refusing to yield documents and tape recordings that had been subpoenaed. Indeed, a few days after Mr. Ford was nominated for the vice presidency, Mr. Nixon dismissed Archibald Cox, the first special prosecutor, for insisting on pursuing legal remedies to gain access to the White House evidence, and accepted the resignation of Attorney General Elliot L. Richardson, who declined to carry out the order to dismiss the prosecutor.

‘I Believed What I Was Told’

There were Nixon allies who thought Mr. Ford might, as vice president, serve as a buffer against the efforts to impeach Mr. Nixon that were precipitated by the events of that “Saturday night massacre” in October 1973. Mr. Nixon remarked once to former Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York, “Can you see Gerald Ford sitting in this chair?”

Mr. Ford accepted the nomination. “I thought,” he later reminisced, “well, if I could be helpful, I knew I could be confirmed. And it was a nice way to end a career. I wasn’t going to be speaker.”

He took it on faith, because he had been told privately by Mr. Nixon and others that the president was innocent of any involvement in the burglary at the Democratic Party offices in the Watergate complex on June 17, 1972, or of complicity in the attempt to cover up the extent of the conspiracy.

Three days after the break-in, Mr. Ford had asked John N. Mitchell, the former attorney general and the 1972 Nixon campaign chairman, if the break-in had been authorized. As Mr. Ford recalled it, Mr. Mitchell “looked me right in the eye and said neither he nor the White House was involved.”

“I believed what I was told,” Mr. Ford once said, referring to the belief that Mr. Nixon was not involved in Watergate wrongdoing, “so my whole conduct as vice president was predicated on that personal trust.”

Because it was the first such occasion, Mr. Ford’s vice-presidential nomination prompted an extensive investigation of his background by as many as 400 agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. His nomination was confirmed, 92 to 3 in the Senate and 387 to 35 in the House. At dusk on Dec. 6, 1973, to the thunderous applause of those with whom he had served in Congress, he strode down the center aisle in the House of Representatives to stand at the lectern, not as speaker but as vice president.

Mr. Ford took it upon himself as the heir apparent to try, initially, to make certain that Mr. Nixon would remain in office. In the eight months of his vice presidency he traveled more than 130,000 miles to speak up for Mr. Nixon.

As the House Judiciary Committee painstakingly assembled evidence on which its members would ultimately recommend three articles of impeachment, Mr. Ford proclaimed confidence in Mr. Nixon’s blamelessness, but privately he grew increasingly uncertain.

Growing Skepticism

The doubt was slow to take hold. In January 1974 Mr. Ford told an audience in Atlantic City that the impeachment movement was the work of “extreme partisans” who were trying to “crush the president” and in the process increase the Democratic majority in the Congress.

Alarmed, Mr. Buchen, Mr. Ford’s old friend from Michigan, and Senator Robert P. Griffin, another longtime Michigan ally, privately counseled Mr. Ford to be careful lest his faith be unrewarded and his loyalty further divide the country.

Thereafter, Mr. Ford loyally defended the president, but in his own words. The Nixon staff kept sending proposed texts to Mr. Ford’s office, but Mr. Ford’s aides toned them down.

Instinctively, too, Mr. Ford continuously and openly urged the president to demonstrate his innocence by yielding to Congress and the courts the Watergate tape recordings and documents that were being sought. When Mr. Nixon continued to “stonewall,” as the resistance came to be known, “it certainly began to raise some reservations” in Mr. Ford’s mind, he said, although he kept them to himself.

Gradually, even Mr. Ford’s defense of Mr. Nixon began to take a skeptical tone. At a Republican Party conference in Chicago, Mr. Ford explicitly attacked for the first time the attitude of the 1972 Nixon campaign organization, saying it had been led by “an arrogant, elite guard of political adolescents.”

‘A Good Night’s Sleep’

At the end of July 1974, Gen. Alexander M. Haig Jr., then the White House chief of staff, made an urgent call to the vice president. General Haig advised him that a tape recording under subpoena by the special prosecutor — one of several that the Supreme Court had ruled could not be withheld by Mr. Nixon — would show conclusively that Mr. Nixon had tried to curb the Watergate investigation as early as June 23, 1972, six days after the break-in.

“That was the first concrete evidence that I had contrary to the assurances I’d had before,” Mr. Ford remembered.

For three days, as Mr. Nixon’s aides sought to persuade the president to make public the transcript of the June 23 tape, Mr. Ford continued to travel, saying nothing of the evidence.

The president did publish it. Although Mr. Ford was unaware that Mr. Buchen and others had begun making secret preparations for a Ford presidential transition, he began to wonder in the first days of August 1974 how soon he might be president.

On Aug. 6, Mr. Nixon assembled his Cabinet at the White House and declared that he would not resign. Mr. Ford, seated opposite the president across the massive Cabinet table, told Mr. Nixon, “I no longer can publicly defend you.” It was, for Mr. Ford, the loyal friend of the president, one of the most difficult things he had ever done, but, he told an interviewer, “with the development of the evidence, I had no other choice.”

Two nights later Mr. Nixon announced on national television that he would resign the presidency at noon on Aug. 9.

Mr. Ford and his wife watched the Nixon statement on the television set in the family room of their home in Alexandria. Then, despite the looming accumulation of pressures, Mr. Ford went to sleep.

That he could do so, with no particular difficulty, on the eve of the nation’s most unusual presidential transition, was illustrative. “My feeling is you might as well get to sleep” whatever the circumstances, Mr. Ford had said. “You’ll feel better the next day. If you’ve got a problem, you are better prepared to deal with it tomorrow. You sure can’t do much about it that night. It’s a blessing, really.”

The nation’s torment was on his mind as he spoke that next day, Aug. 9, 1974, of the import of his sudden inauguration as the 38th president of the United States, the first person never elected president or vice president to become president.

“I am acutely aware that you have not elected me as your president by your ballots,” he said to the dignitaries in the East Room of the White House and to the millions of Americans watching on television. “I have not sought this enormous responsibility, but I will not shirk it.”

With an empathy that came as a relief after months of White House aloofness, the new president said: “This is an hour of history that troubles our minds and hurts our hearts. Therefore, I feel it my first duty to make an unprecedented compact with my countrymen. Not an inaugural address. Not a fireside chat. Not a campaign speech. Just a little straight talk among friends.”

He urged his countrymen to help him “bind up the internal wounds of Watergate” and then added:

“My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over. Our Constitution works. Our great republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here, the people rule.”

The Man in the White House

Mr. Ford’s presidency was an extension of his own political personality: reactive rather than activist, instinctive instead of intellectual, humanistic but within the fiscal limits of conservative dogma.

Mr. terHorst, the biographer, puzzled over the seeming contradiction between the president’s personal and professional philosophies: “The problem with him — he doesn’t like to be kidded about it — but the fact is, this guy would, if he saw a schoolkid in front of the White House who needed clothing, if he was the right size, he’d give him the shirt off his back, literally. Then he’d go right in the White House and veto the school lunch bill.”

John Hersey, after spending a week in close observation of the president, wrote in The New York Times Magazine of April 20, 1975: “What is it in him?”

“Is it an inability to extend compassion far beyond the faces directly in view?” Mr. Hersey wrote. “Is it a failure of imagination? Is it something obdurate he was born with, alongside the energy and serenity?”

The answer seemed to be a belief — one Mr. Ford was schooled in if not born with — in the essential dignity of human struggle. “Everything didn’t turn to gold just because I did it,” he remarked. “I had this foundation, and I had been brought up with the training that — and this is an oversimplification, but I think it’s indicative — the harder you work, the luckier you are. And whether it was in such things as the Boy Scouts or athletics or academics, I worked like hell.”

There were those who contended, as did Richard Reeves, the author of a critical biography, that Mr. Ford had a “tragic gap” in his understanding of such crucial matters as the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal. More common was the assessment of Mr. Ford as “innately decent.”

Executive Decisions

Mr. Ford disputed the notion that it required forceful, even harsh, character to meet the tests of the White House. He was asked once if a nice guy should be president, and answered: “Those who allege that you’ve got to be a mean, sinister, devious person to be president are just dead wrong. I don’t see how a president in his conscience could be that.”

He, too, could be forceful. He resented the accident of fate that had made him president as the nation watched South Vietnam and Cambodia — where so much of America’s human and economic treasure had been spent by three predecessors — fall to the Communists in 1975. Rebuffed by Congress when he sought a last-minute $972 million in aid to Saigon, Mr. Ford made it possible for 130,000 or more refugees to come to the United States.

When the Cambodian Communists seized the American merchant ship Mayaqüez in May 1975, Mr. Ford reacted with uncharacteristic emotion, sending United States military forces to recapture the ship.

The order was motivated in part by concern for national image. “We had just pulled out of Vietnam, out of Cambodia,” Mr. Ford said later, “and here the United States was being challenged by a group of leaders who were bandits and outlaws, in my opinion, and I think their subsequent record has pretty well proved it. And it was an emotional decision to tell the Defense Department we had to go in there and do something.”

Mr. Ford’s economic policies were traditional for Republican conservatives. He proclaimed, amid considerable White House ballyhoo, a campaign to “Whip Inflation Now,” complete with “WIN” buttons. Scarcely had it begun than mounting joblessness and the worst recession since the 1930s caused Mr. Ford to abandon the anti-inflation program and propose tax cuts to stimulate the economy instead of tax increases to dampen it.

Congress, meanwhile, reflected its dominance by the Democratic Party in a steadily increasing number of spending programs and expansion of the federal deficit.

Difficult Dismissals

In what may have been his most difficult personal decision — because it went against the grain of his personality — the genial man from Michigan also acted forcefully in his dismissal of Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger.

There were no known policy differences of consequence between Mr. Ford and Mr. Schlesinger. But their styles and characters never quite proved compatible, and the defense secretary, a bookish and occasionally dogmatic intellectual who later became secretary of energy to President Jimmy Carter, got on the president’s nerves.

“There was a tension,” Mr. Ford acknowledged later. “There was a personality problem.” Mr. Schlesinger, he emphasized, “is an honorable, decent person, but our chemistry doesn’t fit.” He did not need to add but did, “I’m not one that likes to fire people.”

Nonetheless, Mr. Ford did make another central personnel decision that troubled him: jettisoning Vice President Rockefeller from his 1976 campaign ticket. Mr. Ford did so even though he had declared, in nominating the former New York governor to be his vice president, that there was no one else in the country so well equipped to stand next in the line of presidential succession.

Mr. Ford eventually decided to seek a full term as president, something he had intimated in his testimony to Congress as nominee for vice president that he would be loath to do. He decided that a lame-duck president could not be effective in a political role. Besides, although he did not like to admit it, Mr. Ford and his wife, Betty, had grown to like the perquisites of the White House.

As a candidate to succeed himself — and, he hoped, thus legitimize his accidental presidency — Mr. Ford grew politically timid. It was apparent that he would be challenged for the Republican nomination by Mr. Reagan, the former governor of California and a politician far more conservative than Mr. Ford.

On the Campaign Trail Again

Mr. Ford responded by becoming ever more conservative in his political statements and by undertaking the same sort of aggressive, energetic campaigning as an incumbent that had marked his campaigns as a member of the House of Representatives. From early 1975 until the summer of 1976, Mr. Ford traveled from one corner of the country to another. Even two attempts on his life by unbalanced women in California in 1975 did not deter him.

On one of those trips, to Sacramento on Sept. 5, he narrowly escaped an assassination attempt by Lynette (Squeaky) Fromme, who had been a follower of the convicted killer Charles Manson. Mr. Ford was moving through a crowd in Capitol Park, shaking hands and waving, when a Secret Service agent saw Ms. Fromme’s arm and the pistol. She was subdued, and it turned out that while the gun was loaded there was no bullet in the chamber. She was convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to life in prison.

The other attempt, by Sara Jane Moore, took place in San Francisco. A former Marine, Oliver W. Sipple, knocked a pistol out of Ms. Moore’s hand as she fired.

By the time Mr. Ford narrowly won the Republican nomination in Kansas City, Mo., in August 1976, he seemed to many of his political advisers to have diminished the value of his incumbency by traveling so extensively as to seem only another candidate. He was more than 25 percentage points behind the Democratic nominee, Mr. Carter, in the opinion polls. The economy was improving but not good. The Republicans’ identification with Mr. Nixon remained.

Mr. Ford reassessed the situation with his advisers. Together they altered his political strategy and style. He spent most of the campaign period hunched over his desk or greeting guests in the Rose Garden of the White House, trying to reinforce the image of incumbency and to stress his claims to having achieved “peace, prosperity and trust.”

Strides, Then a Stumble

In one of the most remarkable political comebacks in presidential campaign history, Mr. Ford nearly overcame adversity and odds. One late stumble, insisting in a debate that “there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe” and that Poland was not “dominated by the Soviet Union,” halted the Ford surge.

In the end, his loss to Mr. Carter, the former Georgia governor, was narrow, by only 1,682,970 votes. Mr. Ford had 48 percent and Mr. Carter 50.1 percent.

But neither Poland nor a last-minute bit of bad economic news was central to his defeat. The Nixon pardon was.

Stuart Spencer, his campaign manager, said that polling data about the pardon had made it clear that “it cost him the election.” He said 7 percent of Republicans had either voted for Mr. Carter or stayed home because of the pardon, and it hurt with Democrats and independents, too.

Robert S. Strauss, who was Democratic National Chairman in 1976, agreed. He said Mr. Ford “was never forgiven for it.”

“People always assumed there was a deal, even though there was no evidence of one,” Mr. Strauss said.

Even so, Mr. Ford’s political recovery, although incomplete, reflected a positive aspect of his brief presidency. It indicated the extent to which he seemed to have re-established a sense of trustworthiness in the nation’s most visible and symbolic office.

One political aide said of those who voted for Mr. Ford, “They’re voting for something solid — a simple, honest, decent man.”

After the White House

In the years after he left the White House, Mr. Ford took on two new roles, senior statesman and newly arrived millionaire, with his characteristic easygoing manner and energy. He had become something of a one-man academic, political and business enterprise, and by 1983 his income was estimated to be more than $1 million a year.

Mr. Ford frequently criticized President Carter on economic and defense matters, but the attacks on his successor never grew bitter or personal. On some foreign policy issues, like the Panama Canal treaties, which his own administration had quietly sought, he supported his successor.

For three years Mr. Ford contemplated another race for the presidency. In 1975, he had told aides in the White House that “Reagan would be a disaster” as president. After Mr. Reagan won the 1980 New Hampshire primary, Mr. Ford told The New York Times that it would be “impossible” for Mr. Reagan to win a general election, and he cautiously invited Republicans to ask him to run again.

But the draft he invited never came, and Mr. Reagan cruised to the nomination. When the Republicans gathered in Detroit in 1980 to nominate Mr. Reagan, he asked Mr. Ford to be his running mate.

For hours, representatives of the two men, with former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger acting for Mr. Ford, negotiated the outlines of a possible Reagan-Ford Administration, in which Mr. Ford would have been given extensive authority in making appointments and managing the executive branch. But the negotiators were unable to reach a formula that satisfied Mr. Ford’s desire to be more than a traditional vice president while also giving Mr. Reagan a free hand to govern as chief executive.

Mr. Ford nevertheless worked on the 1980 campaign trail for Mr. Reagan and his running mate, George Bush. Two months after the inauguration, Mr. Reagan sent Mr. Ford as his representative to China to reassure leaders there that Washington wished to continue improving relations.

The next October, after President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt was assassinated, Mr. Ford represented the United States at the funeral along with the two other living former presidents, Mr. Carter and Mr. Nixon.

For many years after he left office, Mr. Ford campaigned for Republican candidates. In the first few years, those appearances had to be accompanied by hefty charitable donations to his library and museum. He also continued to warn, “If we get way over on the hard right of the political spectrum, we will not elect a Republican President,” as he put it in a Times interview in 1998. He singled out the abortion issue, saying he was disappointed that his own “strongly pro-choice” views no longer seemed welcome in his party.

In August 2000, Mr. Ford appeared at the Republican convention in Philadelphia but was hospitalized for a week after a stroke.

As a result of Mr. Ford’s new income, the Fords enjoyed a way of life that contrasted with their modest existence when he was a congressman, establishing homes in Rancho Mirage, in the California desert, and at Vail, in the Colorado mountains.

In addition to attending fund-raising functions, teaching at the University of Michigan and giving 30 paid speeches a year, Mr. Ford bought interests in two Colorado radio stations and served on the boards of at least eight corporations.

He also supervised and participated in sporting events, mostly golf, including an invitational golf tournament bearing his name in Vail; promoted a Southern California real estate development; and helped advertise a commercially minted coin set commemorating the presidency. He even made his acting debut at the age of 70, portraying himself on an episode of the nighttime television soap opera “Dynasty.”

Asked in a 1978 interview about his life in retirement, Mr. Ford said that he was having trouble with chipping and putting in his golf game, but otherwise, “everything is wonderful.”

    Gerald R. Ford, 38th U.S. President, Dies, NYT, 27.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/27/washington/27webford.html?hp&ex=1167282000&en=8487a0b616667267&ei=5094&partner=homepage

8am

Former US president Gerald Ford dies at 93

Wednesday December 27, 2006
Associated Press
Guardian Unlimited

Gerald Ford, who picked up the pieces of Richard Nixon's scandal-shattered White House as the 38th and only unelected president in America's history, has died. He was 93.

"My family joins me in sharing the difficult news that Gerald Ford, our beloved husband, father, grandfather and great grandfather has passed away at 93 years of age," his wife, Betty, said in a brief statement issued from her husband's office in Rancho Mirage. "His life was filled with love of God, his family and his country."

President George Bush paid tribute, praising Ford's "integrity and common sense".

Ford had battled pneumonia in January 2006 and underwent two heart treatments - including an angioplasty - in August at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.

He was the longest living president, followed by Ronald Reagan, who also died at 93. Ford had been living at his desert home in Rancho Mirage, California.

Ford was an accidental president, Nixon's handpicked successor, a man of much political experience who had never run on a national ticket. He was as open and straightforward as Nixon was tightly controlled and conspiratorial.

He took office minutes after Nixon flew off into exile and declared, "our long national nightmare is over". But he revived the debate a month later by granting Nixon a pardon for all crimes he committed as president. That single act, it was widely believed, cost Ford election to a term of his own in 1976, but it won praise in later years as a courageous act that allowed the nation to move on.

The Vietnam war ended in defeat for the US during his presidency with the fall of Saigon in April 1975. In a speech as the end neared, Ford said: "Today, America can regain the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam. But it cannot be achieved by refighting a war that is finished as far as America is concerned." Evoking Abraham Lincoln, he said it was time to "look forward to an agenda for the future, to unify, to bind up the nation's wounds."

Ford also earned a place in the history books as the first unelected vice-president, chosen by Nixon to replace Spiro Agnew who also was forced from office by scandal.

Even to millions of Americans who had voted two years earlier for Richard Nixon, the transition to Ford's leadership was one of the most welcomed in the history of the democratic process - despite the fact that it occurred without an election.

After the Watergate ordeal, Americans liked their new president - and first lady Betty, whose candour charmed the country.

They liked her for speaking openly about problems of young people, including her own daughter; they admired her for not hiding that she had a mastectomy - in fact, her example caused thousands of women to seek breast examinations.

And she remained one of the country's most admired women even after the Fords left the White House when she was hospitalised in 1978 and admitted to having become addicted to drugs and alcohol she took for painful arthritis and a pinched nerve in her neck. Four years later she founded the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, a substance abuse facility next to Eisenhower Medical Center.

Ford slowed down in recent years. He had been hospitalised in August 2000 when he suffered one or more small strokes while attending the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia.

The following year, he joined former presidents Jimmy Carter, George Bush and Bill Clinton at a memorial service in Washington three days after the September 11 attacks. In June 2004, the four men and their wives joined again at a funeral service in Washington for former President Ronald Reagan. But in November 2004, Ford was unable to join the other former presidents at the dedication of the Clinton presidential library in Little Rock, Arkansas.

In January, Ford was hospitalised with pneumonia for 12 days. He was not seen in public until April 23, when President George Bush was in town and paid a visit to the Ford home. Bush, Ford and Betty posed for photographers outside the residence before going inside for a private get-together.

The intensely private couple declined interview requests and were rarely seen outside their home in Rancho Mirage's gated Thunderbird Estates, other than to attend worship services at the nearby St Margaret's Episcopal Church in Palm Desert.

    Former US president Gerald Ford dies at 93, G, 27.12.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,1978906,00.html

Pork No Longer Paves the Road to Re-election

December 25, 2006
The New York Times
By TIMOTHY EGAN

PLEASANTON, Calif. — Until this year, Richard W. Pombo, the seven-term Republican congressman from the Central Valley, had never caused much fanfare about bringing home earmarks, the special local projects that circumvent the normal budgeting process. He was far better known for his work fighting environmental regulations.

All that changed in the closing months of this year’s surprisingly tight re-election campaign, when Mr. Pombo began trumpeting the money he had directed to his car-bound district — particularly $75 million for highway expansion, a gift for one of the most congested areas of California.

But it was not enough to persuade voters like Alex Aldenhuysen, a self-described independent, just out of the Navy and voting for the first time in two years. He said he was turned off by Mr. Pombo’s earmark talk. And in the end, Mr. Pombo lost his seat to a Democrat in one of the year’s most significant upsets.

A timeworn bit of political wisdom has been that larding one’s district with pork projects can act as an incumbency protection program. And the Republican leaders in Congress ardently followed that principle.

“The leadership talked all the time about how we’ve got to use earmarks to help these vulnerable members,” said Representative Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona, who has become one of Washington’s loudest opponents of earmarking. “But what this election showed was that earmarks just aren’t that important to voters.”

The powers of incumbency could not outweigh far more pressing issues, this year, like the war in Iraq — which became the central point of most of the Democratic campaigns — or the scandals that tarnished the Republican Party as a whole. The abuse of earmarks itself became an issue in several races with some of their biggest users, including two senators and four House members who served on the appropriations committees that oversee federal spending, losing their seats.

It would be premature to write off the power of earmarks. Even in a highly unfavorable year for Republicans, some of the biggest pork-style spenders handily won re-election. And though Democrats have vowed to strip earmarks from unfinished spending bills, the practice is such an oft-used political tool that it may prove too tempting to eliminate.

“When you’re talking about institutional change, you need something sweeping to happen in an election,” said James D. Savage, a professor of political science at the University of Virginia and the author of a book on earmarks. “I think the incentive to use earmarks is still there because it’s one of the few tools a member of Congress can use.”

The number and total cost of earmarks reached record highs over the last two years, but they seemed to offer little help to some members.

Representative Anne M. Northup, a Kentucky Republican who was a member of the House Appropriations Committee, was defeated after five terms despite bringing earmarks to her district, which includes Louisville, that were worth more than five times that of two other districts without competitive races. Mr. Flake identified her as one of the Republican leaders who pushed for earmarks to help troubled incumbents.

“Anne Northup was in there saying we’ve got to have these earmarks to help certain members,” Mr. Flake said. “She was always saying how valuable they are.”

In an interview, Ms. Northup defended earmarks as a flexible budget tool for members of Congress, and she took issue with Mr. Flake’s conclusion that voters rejected politicians who relied on them.

Instead, she singled out one of the most notorious earmarks of the last budget cycle — $230 million to build a bridge from a small town in Alaska to an island with fewer than 50 people — as an anchor that dragged down other Republicans. Representative Don Young, an Alaska Republican who served as chairman of the Transportation Committee, guided a bill loaded with a record amount of earmarks, including his bridge project in his district.

“How do you explain to voters a $230 million bridge to nowhere?” Ms. Northup asked. Mr. Young, who has been chairman of the Transportation Committee since 2001, did not respond to interview requests.

A few weeks before the end of his re-election campaign, Senator Conrad Burns, Republican of Montana, issued an unusual news release. He added up all the earmark projects he had delivered to his state, boasting of bringing home $2 billion to a state with fewer than a million people.

Montana, Mr. Burns said, had been awarded a huge range of federal projects, from $597,000 for the Montana Sheep Institute to $8 million to encourage private space travel.

“That money is going to be spent somewhere,” Mr. Burns said in a debate at Montana State University, where the Burns Technology Center is named for him. “I want Montanans to get first share.”

Mr. Burns, a three-term senator who was considered one of the Senate’s most vulnerable incumbents, lost by about 3,000 votes.

“These vulnerables were literally screaming at the top of their lungs about what they’ve been able to deliver,” said Steve Ellis, a vice president at Taxpayers for Common Sense, a budget watchdog group.

Representative Mike Sodrel, Republican of Indiana, was put on an influential transportation committee two years ago specifically so he could increase the amount of financing for his swing district, he said in a news release.

For Mr. Sodrel’s district, it paid off. He boasted that he had been able to increase transportation spending there by $220 million, or 37 percent, from the previous spending bill. Mr. Sodrel still lost his seat in November.

There were several races in which the ability to bring home hundreds of federal projects might have made enough of a difference to withstand a Democratic tide.

Representative Deborah Pryce of Ohio, the fourth-ranking Republican in the House, issued dozens of news releases over the last 18 months boasting of the projects she brought home to a district that is considered evenly divided between the two parties.

There was $2.27 million to convert a mountain of garbage into a green energy center, $1.1 million to help keep residents of a fast-growing suburb from having to pay more in user fees for a new sewage system, and the latest installment in $2.7 million in federal disbursements to “evaluate freeze-dried berries for their ability to inhibit cancer.”

In a spending bill that never passed the most recent session of Congress, Ms. Pryce’s district stood to get the largest single earmark in Ohio — $1.75 million for a health research institute. In total, the Columbus area lined up about $4.5 million in special money.

By comparison, Portland, Ore. — a similar-sized metropolitan area with no contested Congressional seats — was to receive $625,000 in earmarks.

Ms. Pryce won by barely a thousand votes.

But she was in some ways an exception this year. Several Republican incumbents who tried a similar strategy of touting their earmarks were unsuccessful. Representative Charles Taylor, an eight-term Republican from North Carolina who lost his race, set up an interactive map on his re-election Web site to show the largess that he had directed to every county in his district.

“Click on the map to see how many of your taxpayer dollars Congressman Taylor has returned to your county,” it said, going on to detail items like $1 million for the creation of an Appalachian wine institute, $2 million to an astronomy center deep in the forests of Transylvania County and $3 million to a local school “to promote healthy childhood development and prevent violence.”

Mr. Taylor was chairman of the appropriations panel on the interior and environment, making him a spending “cardinal” in the House. His position may have led him to be caught off guard, said Mr. Ellis said.

“I think being an appropriator makes people lazy,” Mr. Ellis said. “They think they don’t have to do all the other important things for their district. It makes them feel bulletproof — ‘The voters wouldn’t be so stupid as to vote me out of office.’ ”

Mr. Taylor, who refused interview requests, lost his seat to Heath Shuler, who made excessive federal spending one of his campaign themes.

While people who oppose earmarks saw last month’s election as a rejection of the growing volume of special projects, others say that is the wrong way to interpret the results.

“Bringing federal projects home to a district helps an incumbent — period,” said Carl Forti, a spokesman for the National Republican Campaign Committee. “Jeff Flake is totally misreading the results.”

He said Mr. Taylor and another member of the Appropriations Committee, Don Sherwood, Republican of Pennsylvania, had lost because of personal problems. Ms. Northup, he said, “was just in a bad district — it’s always been tight.”

He attributed Indiana’s three losses to poorly run campaigns.

But Mr. Flake cited his own state as proof that that pork does not ensure re-election. A fellow Arizona Republican member who had embraced earmarks, Representative J. D. Hayworth, lost his seat.

“In the end, the voters saw through it,” Mr. Flake said.

Mr. Forti attributed Mr. Hayworth’s loss to running a single-issue campaign, against immigration.

Still, Mr. Flake cites his own experience to back his point. Two years ago, Mr. Flake drew a strong opponent in the primary who rounded up several mayors in his district and made an issue of his refusal to tag earmarks for the home district.

Mr. Flake still won. This year, he was unopposed.

    Pork No Longer Paves the Road to Re-election, NYT, 25.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/25/washington/25pork.html?hp&ex=1167109200&en=5b4460a88b08880e&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Changes Are Expected in Voting by 2008 Election

December 8, 2006
The New York Times
By IAN URBINA and CHRISTOPHER DREW

By the 2008 presidential election, voters around the country are likely to see sweeping changes in how they cast their ballots and how those ballots are counted, including an end to the use of most electronic voting machines without a paper trail, federal voting officials and legislators say.

New federal guidelines, along with legislation given a strong chance to pass in Congress next year, will probably combine to make the paperless voting machines obsolete, the officials say. States and counties that bought the machines will have to modify them to hook up printers, at federal expense, while others are planning to scrap the machines and buy new ones.

Motivated in part by voting problems during the midterm elections last month, the changes are a result of a growing skepticism among local and state election officials, federal legislators and the scientific community about the reliability and security of the paperless touch-screen machines used by about 30 percent of American voters.

The changes also mean that the various forms of vote-counting software used around the country — most of which are protected by their manufacturers for reasons of trade secrecy — will for the first time be inspected by federal authorities, and the code could be made public. There will also be greater federal oversight on how new machines are tested before they arrive at polling stations.

“In the next two years I think we’ll see the kinds of sweeping changes that people expected to see right after the 2000 election,” said Doug Chapin, director of electionline.org, a nonpartisan election group. “The difference now is that we have moved from politics down to policies.”

Many of the paperless machines were bought in a rush to overhaul the voting system after the disputed presidential election in 2000, which was marred by hanging chads. But concerns have been growing that in a close election those machines give election workers no legitimate way to conduct a recount or to check for malfunctions or fraud.

Several counties around the country are already considering scrapping their voting systems after problems this year, and last week federal technology experts concluded for the first time that paperless touch-screen machines could not be secured from tampering.

Having stalled for over two years, federal legislation requiring a shift to paper trails and other safeguards, proposed by Representative Rush D. Holt, Democrat of New Jersey, has a better chance of passing next session, several members of Congress and election officials say.

They say that fixing the voting system is viewed as a core issue by the new Democratic leaders, and the bill already has the bipartisan support of more than a majority of the current House. Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, who will be the new chairwoman of the Senate Rules and Administration Committee, said she planned to introduce a similar bill in January.

But it is also clear that the changes will not come without a struggle. State and local election officials are still reeling from the last major overhaul of the country’s voting system, initiated by the Help America Vote Act in 2002, and some say that the $150 million in federal aid proposed by Mr. Holt would not be enough to pay for the changes.

Advocates for the disabled say they will resist his bill, because the touch-screen machines are the easiest for blind people to use. And the voting machine companies say they will argue against making the software code completely public, partly out of concern about making the system more vulnerable to hackers.

Paul S. DeGregorio, the chairman of the federal Election Assistance Commission, which was created by Congress in 2002 to set voting standards, also cautioned against rushing to make changes, especially since some counties also ran into problems with printers in this year’s elections. “All of the implications have to be looked at carefully,” Mr. DeGregorio said in an interview.

Still, the changes are rapidly gaining momentum, partly because the Help America Vote Act did not go far enough in establishing clear guidelines for the type of machines that should be used, many critics have said. It took so long for the federal guidelines to be established that many local voting officials bought new equipment without the full benefit of federal research and standards.

“Everyone was getting intense pressure to comply by January 2006, and so they went ahead and bought,” said Alysoun McLaughlin, who was a lobbyist for the National Association of Counties at the time.

Now some local and state officials are paying the price as they shelve machines that have problems or that could soon be out of compliance.

In Maryland, legislators say they plan to replace the more than $70 million worth of touch-screen machines the state began buying in 2002 with paper optical scanners, which officials estimate could cost $20 million.

Voters in Sarasota, Fla., where the results of a Congressional race recorded on touch-screen machines are being contested in court, passed a ballot initiative last month to make the same change, at an estimated cost of $3 million. Last year, New Mexico spent $14 million to replace its touch screens. Other states are spending millions more to retrofit the machines to add paper trails.

New York has been slow to replace its old lever voting machines, and the state has required counties to buy screens with printers or optical scanners. New Jersey has passed a law requiring its counties to switch to machines with paper trails by 2008, and Connecticut is buying machines that can scan paper ballots.

This week, the Technical Guidelines Development Committee, a federal panel of technical experts that helps set voting standards, adopted a resolution that recommends requiring any new electronic voting systems to have an independent means of verification, a move that could eventually prevent paperless touch-screen machines from being federally certified.

Touch-screen machines with paper trails give voters a chance to check their choices on a small piece of paper before casting their ballots, while large rolls of paper keep a running tally and can be used to check the vote count made by the machine’s software. Localities can also use optical-scan systems, in which paper ballots marked by voters are counted by scanning machines and remain available for recounts.

Over the last two years, 27 states have passed laws requiring a shift to machines with paper trails, and 8 others do not have such laws but use the machines statewide. Some counties have attached rolls of paper to touch-screen machines, at a cost of $1,000 to $2,000 for each device, while others have bought optical-scanning devices.

Five states — Maryland, Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina and Delaware — still use only the paperless machines, and 10 states have counties that use them and have not made plans to change.

State and local election officials say they have been overwhelmed by the changes since 2002, and they are worried about how much they may have to pay to meet new requirements. Many have already spent millions in state and local money to buy and operate new machines, and Mr. Holt’s changes would require retraining poll workers as well as add the recurring costs of buying paper ballots and conducting election audits.

Because some printers malfunctioned last month, election commissioners in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, which includes Cleveland, said last week that they were considering scrapping their new $17 million system of touch-screen machines and starting over with optical scanning devices.

In Harris County, Tex., which includes Houston, electronic machines can print a paper tally, but do not give voters a paper record, meaning they would not comply with Mr. Holt’s bill. Beverly Kaufman, the county clerk, said she and other election officials elsewhere disliked the paper requirement.

“Every time you introduce something perishable like paper, you inject some uncertainty into the system,” Ms. Kaufman said. She said she was skeptical that Congress would come up with enough money for replacements by 2008. “You show me where you can pry the cold, bony fingers off the money in Washington, D.C., that fast,” she said.

Another significant change that will affect how votes are counted involves the recording and tallying software embedded in each electronic machine. Under changes approved by the Election Assistance Commission yesterday, voting machine manufacturers would have to make their crucial software code available to federal inspectors. The code is now checked mainly by private testing laboratories paid by the manufacturers. Mr. Holt would go even further, requiring the commission to make the code publicly available.

Computer experts and voting rights groups have long advocated such openness, arguing that the code is too important to be kept secret and would allow programmers to check for bugs and the potential for hacking. But manufacturers are resistant. Michelle Shafer, a vice president at Sequoia Voting Systems, said that while the industry was willing to give the source code to state and federal officials, “we feel that just putting it out there would give it to people with an intent to do something malicious or harmful.”

Because election technology is changing so quickly, it is not clear that the new requirements, particularly the demand for a paper trail, will stand the test of time, and advocates for change are already worried about a jury-rigged solution for 2008.

“We’re confident that the accuracy and integrity of voting is going to take some big steps forward with the legislation in Congress right now,” said Warren Stewart, policy director of VoteTrustUSA, an advocacy group that prefers optical scanners to touch screens. “But our big concern is to avoid replacing old problems with new ones.”

    Changes Are Expected in Voting by 2008 Election, NYT, 8.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/08/washington/08voting.html