Today, December 26, is a shared death date of two courageous Presidents, often criticized in office endlessly.
These two Presidents were Harry Truman who died in 1972, and Gerald Ford, who died in 2006.
Harry Truman was incessantly attacked on all sides, by Republicans who thought he would be easy to defeat in 1948, and were surprised by his upset victory over Thomas E. Dewey; and who later bitterly attacked his strategy on the Korean War. But also, liberal Democrats were disappointed in him, seeing him as a poor replacement for Franklin D. Roosevelt, who he succeeded in 1945. So he faced the opposition of former Vice President Henry A. Wallace and the Progressive Party of 1948. But he also faced the opposition of Southern Democrats, led by Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who ran for President in 1948 as a “Dixiecrat” on the States Rights Party line, because of Truman’s brave stand ending segregation in Washington, DC, and in the armed forces, by executive order.
Truman had twenty years in retirement, and grew in stature as the years went by.
Gerald Ford, not even elected Vice President, ended up succeeding Richard Nixon, when he resigned due to the Watergate scandal in 1974.
Ford gained criticism because of the pardon of Nixon one month later, and because of the economic recession that had already begun, and was the worst economic downturn since 1939.
Ford also had to battle for the GOP nomination against conservatives who backed former Governor Ronald Reagan, who nearly defeated Ford in the Republican National Convention of 1976, and this forced Ford to drop Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, and replace him with Kansas Senator Bob Dole. He came close to the defeat of Democratic nominee Governor Jimmy Carter, losing in Ohio and Hawaii by very small margins, enough to have defeated Carter if only he had gained a few thousand votes.
Ford came to be regarded with respect and admiration, even by Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, who in 1999 said he had been wrong to attack Ford for the Nixon pardon 25 years earlier.
Ford lived on for 29 years after the Presidency, and is looked at kindly now, much like Truman.
These were two men who had in common that they came across to average Americans as being “one of us”! May they rest in peace!