George Will: In ‘ordinary man,’ a certain greatness emerges of Gerald Ford

Published 12:00 am Thursday, May 11, 2023

In December 1944, a Category 2 typhoon slammed Adm. William F. “Bull” Halsey’s Third Fleet, which included the USS Monterey, a small, improvised aircraft carrier so unstable that tons of cement had been poured into its port side to make it less so. Tossed like a cork in the nighttime tempest by 90-knot winds and 60-foot waves, the carrier frequently had its flight deck underwater and its enormous propellers out of water. One sailor lost his footing, slid more than 100 feet toward the sea and was saved from drowning by a 2-inch rail at the deck’s edge. The sailor was Gerald Ford.

Three decades later, he would survive two assassination attempts while attempting to calm political waters roiled by a presidential resignation, the concluding humiliation of a lost war and demoralizing inflation. Ford’s remarkable navigation of all this — and his clawing to within a handful of votes of becoming an elected president — is scintillantly told in Richard Norton Smith’s timely and revelatory 832-page biography that partly confirms and partly refutes its title: “An Ordinary Man.”

Ford’s preternatural niceness coexisted with an athlete’s (University of Michigan football) fierce competitiveness and an unsleeping ambition: He won his Grand Rapids, Mich., congressional seat by deposing an incumbent in the 1948 Republican primary; in 1965, he was central to the coup that overthrew the GOP’s House leadership.

“In popular memory,” Smith writes, “Ford is wedged between three Shakespearean predecessors — the idealized JFK, tormented LBJ and self-destructive Nixon — and the transformative figure of Ronald Reagan.” Ford’s reputation as “the genial embodiment of a decade recalled more for polyester and platform shoes than as an incubator of meaningful change” is, eight presidencies later, untenable. Smith’s nuanced treatment refutes the snarky title of John Updike’s 1992 novel, “Memories of the Ford Administration,” which implied there were none.

In 1960, Ford, known as “a congressman’s congressman,” wanted to be Vice President Richard M. Nixon’s running mate. In 1973, when Nixon’s scandal-plagued vice president, Spiro Agnew, resigned — Ford wanted the job, and got it. Eight months later, he occupied a recently transformed presidency, for which he seemed singularly unsuited.

Presidential power, Smith observes, had become “personalized,” many of its wielders — both Roosevelts, John F. Kennedy — “judged as public performers” capable of “spellbinding, agenda-setting domination of Congress and the national conversation” in “the theater of politics.” Yet a weary nation was ready for someone restful.

Ford’s first consequential presidential decision, to pardon Nixon for his Watergate crimes, sliced 22 points off Ford’s job approval, history’s most abrupt plunge. Ford assumed that would doom his 1976 election hopes. Today, Americans should ponder Ford’s statesmanlike decision to prevent an inflammatory prosecution of a former president.

Smith says Ford was the first president since Herbert Hoover “to preside over a period of declining expectations.” When Americans’ post-Watergate cynicism was exacerbated by revelations of the CIA’s domestic surveillance activities, Ford’s manner — what writer John Hersey called “a stubborn calm at the center” and “a glacial caution” — became a balm, and almost a political philosophy. Ford brought to the presidency what Smith calls “the transactional ethos of Capitol Hill.”

His welcoming of Vietnamese refugees contrasted with the crabbed spirit of some sunshine humanitarians, such as California’s Gov. Jerry Brown: “We have enough people in California and we don’t need any Vietnamese.” Soon California’s high school valedictorians included many named Nguyen, the most common Vietnamese surname.

Before Reagan continued Jimmy Carter’s deregulation of entire economic sectors (e.g., airfreight, interstate trucking), Ford initiated the process: “I don’t understand why we have an Interstate Commerce Commission.” We don’t anymore. New York City’s revival from its 1975 insolvency began because Ford insisted: Heal thyself.

In 1976, a switch of 9,246 votes in Hawaii and Ohio would have made Ford the first president since Rutherford B. Hayes 100 years earlier to win the electoral vote by a whisker while losing the popular vote. His 895 days as the only chief executive never elected president or vice president remains symbolized by two helicopters, one whisking Nixon into retirement, the other lifting off a Saigon rooftop the remnants of a debacle. But as Smith writes, “Drawing off the accumulated poisons of Vietnam and Watergate was no mean accomplishment.”

“It is,” said Calvin Coolidge, “a great advantage to a president, and a major source of safety to the country, for him to know that he is not a great man.” Given the egomania fomented by today’s president-centric politics, there was greatness in Ford’s amiable insistence, “I’m a Ford, not a Lincoln.”

George Will’s email address is georgewill@washpost.com.