Gerald R Ford 1913-2006

When Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan died, I felt nothing. No sadness, no nostalgic recollection, no sense of loss. If anything, I thought the televised mourning of Reagan was well and truly over-the-top. I couldn’t stand his presidency, so there was no way I was going to pretend that I was saddened by his death, though I felt sympathy for Nancy in particular. As for Nixon, I only thought about how completely he’d screwed up without ever acknowledging it.

With the death of former president Gerald Ford, it’s different for me this time.

Gerald Ford provided America with “a time to heal,” as he called it in his autobiography. It was what America needed after the height of corruption by the Nixon White House during the Watergate scandal. Ford, while far from perfect, was what America needed at the time.

It’s almost impossible to remember now what things felt like in August, 1974, but at the time it seemed there was no way Americans could ever respect the president again. Ford went a long way toward changing that. It was enough to make me support him in 1976, despite pardoning Nixon.

Henry Kissinger, himself no saint, summed it up when he said in his 1999 book Years of Renewal:

“With Ford, what one saw was what one got. Providence smiled on Americans when—seemingly by happenstance—it brought forward a president who embodied our nation's deepest and simplest values.”

Ford could never be president these days. For one thing, he wasn’t conservative enough for the far right that now controls the Republican Party (which is ironic for me because I would now find him too conservative to support).

But the main trouble is that this is an age in which focus groups and media handlers determine everything. It’s difficult to imagine Ford putting up with all that nonsense, much less succeeding. For all his faults, Ford was too “real” to succeed today.

It’s been said many times about many different people, but it’s nevertheless true: We’ll not see his kind again. Perhaps that’s the real loss.