The political deal that brought Gerald Ford to the Oval Office was a good one, and cynically sure-handed: a pardon in exchange for the Presidency. That Ford only served two years before a Watergate-weary nation elected a born again reformer and sent the unelected chief executive into a golf-laden retirement was beside the point: the man from Michigan was a political deal-maker, hardly the bumbler Chevy Chase made him into on Saturday Night Live to great comedic advantage.
Indeed, the deal to get Nixon to San Clemente was the capstone on a legislative career built on something that many pundits believe is impossible these days - bipartisan compromise, which is, you must understand, the exact opposite of nonpartisan surrender.
Ford represented Grand Rapids in the House from 1949 till he became Vice President after Spiro Agnew's disgrace. Little remembered is that he gave up significant political power to serve Richard Nixon in his last year of power: Ford was the minority leader for a decade, and he opposed LBJ's Great Society programs in public, while cutting deals to approve them in private. He described himself as "a moderate in domestic affairs, an internationalist in foreign affairs, and a conservative in fiscal policy" - the kind of description that would fit any number of ambitious Democrats these days.
Ford's Presidency began with one of the seminal political speeches of the last 50 years, clearly the moment he will best be remembered for; I remember listening to it by my Dad's old portable radio in our rental on Cape Cod that August. But in the end, his White House tenure was one of necessary and painful defeat - the pull-out in Vietnam, the comic Whip Inflation Now campaign, the Swine Flu epidemic, "Ford to City: Drop Dead," the Mayaguez incident, and the two weird assassination attempts.
He was at the center of what was popularly viewed as a failed institution in the 1970s just as we view it here in the 2000s. Gerald Ford made the deal, took the hits, and lit out for the links. Somebody had to. May as well have been a deal-maker from Michigan.
