Dankdude
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Washington, Dec.27 : America's 38th President Gerald Rudolph Ford Jr. is dead. He was 93, his wife ,Betty said in a statement.
"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 life was filled with love of God, his family and his country," Mrs. Ford said in a brief statement issued from her husband's office in Rancho Mirage, California.
The statement did not say where Ford died or list a cause of death. Ford had battled pneumonia in January 2006 and underwent two heart treatments, including an angioplasty -- in August at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.
In his condolence message sent to the bereaved family members at midnight, President George W. Bush described "President Ford as a great American who gave many years of dedicated service to our country. . . .He assumed the Presidency in an hour of national turmoil and division. With his quiet integrity, common sense, and kind instincts, President Ford helped heal our land and restore public confidence in the Presidency."
"The American people will always admire Gerald Ford's devotion to duty, his personal character, and the honorable conduct of his administration. We mourn the loss of such a leader," Bush added.
Ford was the only occupant of the White House never elected either to the presidency or the vice presidency. A former Republican congressman from Grand Rapids, Michigan., he always claimed that his highest ambition was to be the Speaker of the House of Representatives. He had declined opportunities to run for the Senate and for Governor of Michigan.
He was sworn in as president on August 9, 1974, when Richard M. Nixon resigned as a result of the Watergate scandal.
"The long national nightmare is over. I believe that truth is the glue that holds government together, not only our government, but civilization itself. That bond, though strained, is unbroken at home and abroad," ," Ford said in his inaugural address.
Ford became the Vice President of the United States on December 6, 1973, two months after Spiro T. Agnew pleaded no contest to a tax evasion charge and resigned from the nation's second highest office. The former Maryland Governor was under investigation for accepting bribes and kickbacks.
In the two-and-half-years of his presidency, Ford ended the U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam, helped mediate a cease-fire agreement between Israel and Egypt, signed the Helsinki Human Rights Convention with the Soviet Union and traveled to Vladivostok in the Soviet Far East to sign an Arms Limitation Agreement with Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet General Secretary.
Ford also sent the Marines to free the crew of the Mayaguez, a U.S. merchant vessel that was captured by Cambodian communists.
On the domestic front, he faced some of the most difficult economic conditions since the Great Depression, with the inflation rate approaching 12 percent. Chronic energy shortages and price hikes produced long lines and angry citizens at gas pumps.
In the field of civil rights, the sense of optimism that had characterized the 1960s had been replaced by an increasing sense of alienation, particularly in the inner cities. The new president also faced a political landscape in which Democrats held large majorities in both the House and the Senate.
But Ford's overriding priority was ending the constitutional and political crisis known as Watergate. It had begun June 17, 1972, when five operatives of Nixon's reelection campaign were caught breaking into Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate office building.
The White House denied any involvement. But as the situation unfolded, the central question was whether Nixon had tried to obstruct the subsequent investigation. A special prosecutor sought answers on tapes Nixon had made of his Oval Office conversations.
The president resisted turning them over on the ground that this would violate executive privilege, but in July 1974, a unanimous Supreme Court ruled against him.
Within days, prosecutors found a tape on which Nixon apparently ordered a cover-up.
The House Judiciary Committee approved three articles of impeachment. Faced with the virtual certainty of a trial by the Senate, Nixon resigned.
Ford believed that his signal achievement was healing the national divisiveness caused by the "poisonous wounds" of Watergate, as he put it in his inaugural speech.
"There is no question that this is the thing I contributed," Ford said 30 years later in an Aug. 25, 2004, interview with The Washington Post at his summer home in Beaver Creek, Colorado.
When he assumed office, Ford immediately made clear his intention to change what historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. called "the imperial presidency."
He was "acutely aware," Ford said in his inaugural address, that he had not been elected to the position he held, and he asked Americans "to confirm me as your president with your prayers." He said he had neither sought the presidency nor made any "secret promises" to attain it.
"In all my public and private acts as your president, I expect to follow my instincts of openness and candour with full confidence that honesty is always the best policy at hand," he said.
". . . Our Constitution works; our great republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule. But there is a higher power, by whatever name we honor Him, who ordains not only righteousness but love, not only justice but mercy.
"As we bind up the internal wounds of Watergate, more painful and more poisonous than those of foreign wars, let us restore the Golden Rule to our political process, and let brotherly love purge our hearts of suspicion and hate."
On September 8, 1974 Ford granted Nixon a full pardon for all federal crimes he had "committed or may have committed" when he was in the White House.
The only acknowledgement he received in return was a six-paragraph statement from Nixon in San Clemente saying that "I can see clearly now . . . that I was wrong in not acting more decisively only in dealing with Watergate, particularly when it reached the stage of judicial proceedings and grew from a political scandal into a national tragedy."
Ford said the pardon was necessary to bring Watergate to a close, that he would have had to pardon Nixon sometime in any case, and that it was easier to do it sooner than later.
The response was a tidal wave of criticism. Every opinion poll showed a large majority of Americans opposed the pardon. It was denounced in Congress, including by members of Ford's own party.
It was widely assumed that Ford had doomed his political career. By January 1975, his approval rating had plummeted to 36 percent. Not even two assassination attempts, both in California in 1975, generated significant popular support.
In mid-1975, Governor Ronald Reagan of California announced his intention to seek the Republican presidential nomination in 1976.
Ford beat back the Reagan challenge, but he narrowly lost the general election in November 1976, to the Democratic candidate, former governor Jimmy Carter of Georgia.
Asked in his 2004 interview with The Washington Post if the pardon had hurt him in the 1976 election, Ford replied: "It probably did. It was a close election, as you know .
. . there is a group of bitter people who never forgave me and probably voted against me, and the net result is that they probably helped that I didn't win."
When he retired from the White House, Ford wrote his memoirs, established his presidential library at the University of Michigan, served on the boards of various corporations, gave hundreds of speeches, played golf and divided his time between homes in Rancho Mirage, California, and Beaver Creek, Colorado.
"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 life was filled with love of God, his family and his country," Mrs. Ford said in a brief statement issued from her husband's office in Rancho Mirage, California.
The statement did not say where Ford died or list a cause of death. Ford had battled pneumonia in January 2006 and underwent two heart treatments, including an angioplasty -- in August at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.
In his condolence message sent to the bereaved family members at midnight, President George W. Bush described "President Ford as a great American who gave many years of dedicated service to our country. . . .He assumed the Presidency in an hour of national turmoil and division. With his quiet integrity, common sense, and kind instincts, President Ford helped heal our land and restore public confidence in the Presidency."
"The American people will always admire Gerald Ford's devotion to duty, his personal character, and the honorable conduct of his administration. We mourn the loss of such a leader," Bush added.
Ford was the only occupant of the White House never elected either to the presidency or the vice presidency. A former Republican congressman from Grand Rapids, Michigan., he always claimed that his highest ambition was to be the Speaker of the House of Representatives. He had declined opportunities to run for the Senate and for Governor of Michigan.
He was sworn in as president on August 9, 1974, when Richard M. Nixon resigned as a result of the Watergate scandal.
"The long national nightmare is over. I believe that truth is the glue that holds government together, not only our government, but civilization itself. That bond, though strained, is unbroken at home and abroad," ," Ford said in his inaugural address.
Ford became the Vice President of the United States on December 6, 1973, two months after Spiro T. Agnew pleaded no contest to a tax evasion charge and resigned from the nation's second highest office. The former Maryland Governor was under investigation for accepting bribes and kickbacks.
In the two-and-half-years of his presidency, Ford ended the U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam, helped mediate a cease-fire agreement between Israel and Egypt, signed the Helsinki Human Rights Convention with the Soviet Union and traveled to Vladivostok in the Soviet Far East to sign an Arms Limitation Agreement with Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet General Secretary.
Ford also sent the Marines to free the crew of the Mayaguez, a U.S. merchant vessel that was captured by Cambodian communists.
On the domestic front, he faced some of the most difficult economic conditions since the Great Depression, with the inflation rate approaching 12 percent. Chronic energy shortages and price hikes produced long lines and angry citizens at gas pumps.
In the field of civil rights, the sense of optimism that had characterized the 1960s had been replaced by an increasing sense of alienation, particularly in the inner cities. The new president also faced a political landscape in which Democrats held large majorities in both the House and the Senate.
But Ford's overriding priority was ending the constitutional and political crisis known as Watergate. It had begun June 17, 1972, when five operatives of Nixon's reelection campaign were caught breaking into Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate office building.
The White House denied any involvement. But as the situation unfolded, the central question was whether Nixon had tried to obstruct the subsequent investigation. A special prosecutor sought answers on tapes Nixon had made of his Oval Office conversations.
The president resisted turning them over on the ground that this would violate executive privilege, but in July 1974, a unanimous Supreme Court ruled against him.
Within days, prosecutors found a tape on which Nixon apparently ordered a cover-up.
The House Judiciary Committee approved three articles of impeachment. Faced with the virtual certainty of a trial by the Senate, Nixon resigned.
Ford believed that his signal achievement was healing the national divisiveness caused by the "poisonous wounds" of Watergate, as he put it in his inaugural speech.
"There is no question that this is the thing I contributed," Ford said 30 years later in an Aug. 25, 2004, interview with The Washington Post at his summer home in Beaver Creek, Colorado.
When he assumed office, Ford immediately made clear his intention to change what historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. called "the imperial presidency."
He was "acutely aware," Ford said in his inaugural address, that he had not been elected to the position he held, and he asked Americans "to confirm me as your president with your prayers." He said he had neither sought the presidency nor made any "secret promises" to attain it.
"In all my public and private acts as your president, I expect to follow my instincts of openness and candour with full confidence that honesty is always the best policy at hand," he said.
". . . Our Constitution works; our great republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule. But there is a higher power, by whatever name we honor Him, who ordains not only righteousness but love, not only justice but mercy.
"As we bind up the internal wounds of Watergate, more painful and more poisonous than those of foreign wars, let us restore the Golden Rule to our political process, and let brotherly love purge our hearts of suspicion and hate."
On September 8, 1974 Ford granted Nixon a full pardon for all federal crimes he had "committed or may have committed" when he was in the White House.
The only acknowledgement he received in return was a six-paragraph statement from Nixon in San Clemente saying that "I can see clearly now . . . that I was wrong in not acting more decisively only in dealing with Watergate, particularly when it reached the stage of judicial proceedings and grew from a political scandal into a national tragedy."
Ford said the pardon was necessary to bring Watergate to a close, that he would have had to pardon Nixon sometime in any case, and that it was easier to do it sooner than later.
The response was a tidal wave of criticism. Every opinion poll showed a large majority of Americans opposed the pardon. It was denounced in Congress, including by members of Ford's own party.
It was widely assumed that Ford had doomed his political career. By January 1975, his approval rating had plummeted to 36 percent. Not even two assassination attempts, both in California in 1975, generated significant popular support.
In mid-1975, Governor Ronald Reagan of California announced his intention to seek the Republican presidential nomination in 1976.
Ford beat back the Reagan challenge, but he narrowly lost the general election in November 1976, to the Democratic candidate, former governor Jimmy Carter of Georgia.
Asked in his 2004 interview with The Washington Post if the pardon had hurt him in the 1976 election, Ford replied: "It probably did. It was a close election, as you know .
. . there is a group of bitter people who never forgave me and probably voted against me, and the net result is that they probably helped that I didn't win."
When he retired from the White House, Ford wrote his memoirs, established his presidential library at the University of Michigan, served on the boards of various corporations, gave hundreds of speeches, played golf and divided his time between homes in Rancho Mirage, California, and Beaver Creek, Colorado.
