He settled us down
Rob Price

Where were you when Richard Nixon resigned and Gerald Ford became president?

What were you doing when Ford, who died this week, said, “Our long national nightmare is over”?

I remember I was spending the month at my family’s cabin in Canada, with my grandparents and an uncle and his family. When the month started, Richard Nixon was president. By the time the month was over, Gerald Ford had the job.

It was a difficult summer, and it had been a difficult year. To have a sense of what it felt like to have Gerald Ford as president, try to remember how bad everything had gotten. Start with Spiro Agnew, the tawdry crook who was Richard Nixon’s vice president. Spiro Agnew got caught, resigned in 1973, and over the following months we all watched as the greater corruption of the whole Nixon presidency gradually emerged. It was like a Greek tragedy, and everything kept getting worse and worse.

Nixon was darkness. Nixon was a scowl. Nixon was cursing and paranoia. Suddenly, he was gone, and this guy named Jerry Ford was smiling at the country from the covers of Time Magazine and Newsweek. Even if you were a Democrat, you wanted to like the guy, because Nixon had left the country feeling so jangled. Adults who were good friends with each other got into fights over Nixon. You went to a party expecting to have a good time, and the next thing you knew, someone was shouting at someone else about what a crook Nixon was. It was grim.

And then we suddenly had this president whose name was Jerry. He had kids whose hair was sort of longish, and his family looked exactly like most of the other families in your own neighborhood. It seemed like a cool family. They were so cool, George Harrison dropped in to visit them. Harrison said he got good vibes from the White House. When was the last time that had happened?

After six years of listening to Richard Nixon talk, the country got to listen to someone who sounded so refreshingly unlike Nixon, you wanted to applaud. “This is an hour of history that troubles our minds and hurts our hearts,” Ford said the day he was inaugurated. “Therefore, I feel it my first duty to make an unprecedented compact with my countrymen. Not an inaugural address. Not a fireside chat. Not a campaign speech. Just a little straight talk among friends.”

It had been a long time since the country had gotten a little straight talk, and Ford seemed to make an honest effort to keep it straight over the next two years. Strange things happened;

history was not kind to him. The economy tanked; two people tried to kill him, and even though he was a great athlete, he had the bad luck to trip a couple of times while the cameras were on him.

And, of course, he issued the presidential pardon that protected Nixon from any future prosecution. That action probably cost him the 1976 election, which he lost to Jimmy Carter by less than 2 million votes. But in retrospect, it was probably the right thing to do. It put the whole sorry Watergate mess in the past. It helped the country gets its collective legs back under itself and move on. “Time has a way of clarifying past events, and now we see that President Ford was right,” Sen. Edward Kennedy said in 2001. He was speaking at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, where Ford was awarded a “Profile in Courage” Award.

We can still argue about the pardon. We can argue whether Ford was, in retrospect, an average sort of president, or not exactly the brightest kid in the class. I think, though, in the end most of us would agree the country was lucky to have Ford as president, at least for the two years he served. He helped get everyone settled down. He helped people get over one of the worst political crises the country has faced.

We could use a little of that right now. We could use someone like Jerry Ford.