Bill's Bulletin Board
By Bill Rea

As I've stated here before, I'm something of a casual student of the American presidency. In fact, I could name all 42 men who have held that office, something I do frequently because I do so enjoy showing off.

That being stated, I was saddened when I turned on CNN late Boxing Day evening and learned that Gerald Ford had passed away.

Political alignments and Canadian national parochialism notwithstanding, I always liked Ford, and have always maintained the feeling that he was not given a fair chance running the show, although the truth is I don't think a guy like that would have ever had any chance, fair or otherwise, of getting the job by conventional means. He was, after all, only a congressman who was appointed into his position of power, not elected to it.

Ford was the first president I saw being sworn in, and this was right on the heels of the resignation of Richard Nixon, which climaxed tons and tons of speculation. I had been glued to the TV for about a week, waiting for bulletins to cut in with the latest news of possible resignation. My father, who hated the thought of any teen frittering away summer vacation in front of what he called "the idiot box" (this was August remember), suffered with a certain amount of silence.

One of my strongest memories of that period was the actual swearing in, with the Chief Justice, Warren Burger, actually performing the official introduction of the new president. It took a couple of seconds for me to get my head around the fact that this guy really was the president, and from what I have subsequently read, I wasn't the only one with such feelings.

Ford never struck me as being especially statesmanlike. I remember some of his speeches, recalling his delivery was hard to take seriously. I think he did okay when he was reading from a text, but he seemed to stumble when he ad libbed.

I don't think the guy was a good verbal communicator, certainly not on a level with a Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton. It's political reality that if you can't effectively get your message across, you might as well forget about getting elected to high public office.

He was just a little better when it came to expressing himself in written words. It's been many years since I read his presidential memoirs. I remember they were informative, but not very well-written. But from other sources I've read, the man was superb at dealing with people one-on-one. He was also enough of an administrator to surround himself with a lot of very competent people, and yet not be intimidated by the talent pool surrounding him. How many of us have had many bosses we could say that about? Some people haven't even had one.

Needless to say, I believe Ford was probably the most underrated president of my lifetime.

Not counting the current guy, there have been 10 presidents since the end of the Second World War. My admittedly casual historical assessment rates these men according to tiers.

Two of them, Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan, I believe achieved greatness. I put Truman, one of my heroes from history, on top because I believe a person of his qualities and talents is always going to step up and be useful. I think Reagan was more of a man who answered a need of a particular time.

The next tier takes in the two men I believe performed ably in office despite being handed impossible situations. I put Ford into that group, along with Lyndon Johnson. I believe it was in the cards for some president to politically self-destruct over Vietnam, and Johnson just happened to be so positioned. The doves creamed him because he didn't pull out, and the hawks would have creamed him had he tried.

Ford found himself taking command of a situation that could have metaphorically been described as the political equivalent of the basement of an outhouse, especially from the point of view of a Republican. Added to the post- Watergate mess he had to clean up, the economy was tanking on his watch. Yet he found the gumption to step up.

Despite conventional wisdom, I'm inclined to think the pardon Ford granted Nixon did not cost him the presidency in 1976. I believe a lot of American voters who said they voted for someone else because of that carried votes that any Republican would have been hard pressed to get in light of the Watergate mess. Indeed, I'm inclined to think the pardon gave him a fighting chance in '76. What hope would any Republican have had if the chief figure of Watergate had still been before the courts?

Although there was a lot of anger at the time over that pardon, I think a lot of Americans (and others who watched the events unfold) have gone beyond it all. Indeed, I think there's a certain amount of shame being felt over the way people acted then.

"The law is the law and Nixon as the chief magistrate of the people was obligated to set a higher standard of behaviour yadda yadda yadda etc., and give me a break" was what people had to officially put on the record to make it all sound legalistic, when what many of them really wanted was to see Nixon out in some well-guarded field swinging a sledge hammer and breaking rocks.

By issuing the pardon, Ford was trying to put all this in the past and make a country and the rest of the western world move on.

Ford came along just as I was about to start Grade 11, arguably the happiest year I spent as a student. I also took a class in world politics that year. Needless to say, people in high public office, like Trudeau, Ford and Breshnev, provided a lot of the background material for one of the most enjoyable classes I ever took.

Ford took a lot of needling in those days, both from my classmates and the rest of the world. But he took it and moved on. So did the world.