Jan. 2, 2007
 
BAYHAM ON POLITICS: Farewell to Gerald R. Ford
 
By Mike Bayham
Special to Huntington News Network
 
South Louisiana -- I have always had mixed feelings about former president Gerald Ford.
 
As a conservative Republican, I was not happy that Ford had appointed arch-liberal John Paul Stevens to the US Supreme Court in addition to his long-standing hostility towards the party’s right flank.
 
Ford was the last of the unabashed “Tom Dewey-Nelson Rockefeller Republicans” to win the GOP nomination (the others at least attempted to sing from the right’s hymnal in public) and his duel with Ronald Reagan in the 1976 presidential primaries was as much about setting the future mold of the GOP as it was a contest between candidates.
 
Ford won the battle, but his small margin over the California insurgent was an omen of the inevitable rise of the right four years later. When Ford ran in the general election, it was the relatively more conservative Bob Dole and not Vice-President Rockefeller who was on the bottom-half of the ticket. The party platform more reflected the candidate who fell a few delegates short at the Kansas City convention and not its winner.
 
However, as a president, I find him to have been a man of remarkable political courage if only for stopping the radical left’s lynching of Richard Nixon.
 
The Democrats’Watergate investigations were more about avenging their humiliation in the 1972 presidential election than the pursuit of justice and Ford was right to intervene in what was to be a veritable public execution of Nixon.
 
One of the worst slanders cast upon Ford was that he had cut a deal with Nixon in which the latter would resign from office in exchange for a future pardon that would protect the embattled president from criminal prosecution.
 
Many an opportunist politician would have not have hesitated to send Nixon off to the proverbial gallows regardless if a deal had been made. Ford was well aware that by pardoning his vilified predecessor, he was eradicating any hope of being elected to the White House in his own right. Yet he still invited the terrible wrath of the political furies upon him.
 
Ironically in the time between the resignation of Spiro Agnew and the final days of the Nixon presidency, Democrats had hoped to install the Speaker of the House as president by blocking the confirmation of anyone nominated to the vice-presidency, no matter how reasonable the selection, while pursuing impeachment charges against Nixon.
 
There was indeed a coup attempt being made during Watergate, but it was by the other side.
 
Sensing this, Nixon passed on appointing his favorite, ex-Texas Governor John Connally, to the vacated office of vice-president and instead turned to the less radioactive Ford in order to secure a quick confirmation.
 
After losing to Jimmy Carter in the general election, the ex-president quietly retired to the exile of the desert golf links, confident that he would be judged more fairly by future generations than he was by his contemporaries.
 
In glaring contrast to his successor, Ford did not spend every waking moment of post-White House life trying to rehabilitate the legacy of his administration.
 
What few political forays he made after leaving office was to loyally support his party with which he was no longer in synch philosophically.
 
In terms of pre-White House background, Ford stands out in the presidential club between Franklin Roosevelt and George W. Bush.
 
Roosevelt, Kennedy and Bushes 41 and 43 had the advantages of wealth or pedigree.
 
Johnson, Nixon, Carter and Clinton, had unquenchable ambition while Eisenhower and Reagan radiated brilliant star-power.
 
Because Ford lacked birthright, glamour or a willingness to do anything to win, he probably could not have won the presidency on his own, though he along with fellow “accidental” president Harry S. Truman were more like average Americans than eight of the last ten presidents.
 
Ironically, it took abnormal circumstances to bring forth common men like Ford and Truman to the pinnacle of power.
 
If only Nixon could go to China, then the task of soothing the nation’s frayed political nerves could only be done by a man who never really aspired to occupy the Oval Office.
 
Though his time as president was brief, Gerald Ford’s success in keeping the country stable during turbulent times should not be discounted.
 
Though coming thirty years late, it seems that the man who was a better president than he was a Republican is finally getting his just reward from history and the media en route to receiving his heavenly one.