Gerald Ford, the 38th President, succeeded Richard Nixon 51 years ago, and saved the Presidency.
Appointed Vice President under the 25th Amendment, and approved by both houses of Congress in a bipartisan manner, Gerald Ford was the right person to be next in line after the resignation of the corrupt Spiro Agnew in October 1973, in the midst of the crisis of the Watergate Scandal, that eventually brought Richard Nixon to resign from the Presidency.
Ford was a 25 year member of the House of Representatives, and Republican House Minority Leader for nine years, when he was elevated to the Vice Presidency.
Ford handled himself in an appropriate manner, in his 8 months as Vice President, and he represented basic decency and honesty as the successor to Richard Nixon.
His wife Betty stands out as the most outstanding Republican First Lady in her public role in modern times, and while Ford was only President for less than two and a half years, he elevated the office for the future.
We could only wish that Mike Pence in the first Donald Trump term, or JD Vance now in the second Trump term, had the principles, decency, and ethical and moral standing that Gerald Ford presented.
Ford was not perfect, of course, and two of his young aides at the time, later, sadly, became highly controversial, under President George W. Bush. Dick Cheney as Vice President, and Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense, did not do appropriately by their offices, with both seen as abusing power. But this was a quarter century after they were aides under Ford.
Ford also took the controversial action of pardoning Richard Nixon, still a center of debate as to the wisdom of such action. Certainly, it helped to lead to Ford’s defeat by Jimmy Carter in the Presidential Election Of 1976.
At the same time, Ford appointed one of the best modern Associate Justices of the Supreme Court, with Justice John Paul Stevens, who served the third longest on the Court in its history at 35 years, and retiring at the age of 90, second oldest in retirement. Unfortunately, present Republican appointments, all six of them, by Presidents George H W Bush, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump, have been major tragedies and disappointments.
Ford also signed the Helsinki Accords in 1975 with the Soviet Union, marking a move toward detente in the Cold War.
Overall, this author and blogger would say that Ford was the most decent modern Republican President, since the time of Dwight D. Eisenhower.
His historical reputation, and that of his wife, as a decent Presidential couple, shines a half century later.