Gerald Ford dies at 93

Gerald R. Ford Jr., the 38th president of the United States, whose earnest manner and manifest personal decency helped restore the confidence of a nation traumatized by the Watergate scandal, died yesterday, his wife, Betty, said.

"My family joins me in sharing the difficult news that Gerald Ford, our beloved husband, father, grandfather, and great-grandfather has passed away at 93 years of age," Mrs. Ford said in a statement issued from her husband's office in Rancho Mirage, Calif. "His life was filled with love of God, his family, and his country."

The statement did not say where Mr. Ford died or list a cause of death. He had battled pneumonia in January and underwent two heart treatments in August at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. He was the longest-living president, followed by Ronald W. Reagan, who also died at 93.

As he described it, Mr. Ford took office "under extraordinary circumstances never before experienced by an American." He succeeded the only man ever to resign the presidency and did so as the only president to gain the White House without benefit of selection by a national electorate. Though the 2 1/2 years of his presidency had few legislative or policy achievements, he could claim a much greater accomplishment: restoring the United States' belief in itself.

"Our long national nightmare is over," Mr. Ford said when sworn in as president on Aug. 9, 1974. Richard M. Nixon's resignation ended the nightmare, but it took the assumption of the presidency by someone of Mr. Ford's integrity to prevent the bad dreams from returning. "I'm a Ford, not a Lincoln," he had said with characteristic modesty when sworn in as vice president on Dec. 6, 1973. As had Lincoln during an earlier threat to the future of the republic, Mr. Ford proved to be the right man in the right place at the right time.

"With his quiet integrity, common sense, and kind instincts, President Ford helped heal our land and restore public confidence in the presidency," President Bush said in a statement. "The American people will always admire Gerald Ford's devotion to duty, his personal character, and the honorable conduct of his administration."

Mr. Ford began as neither a Ford nor a Lincoln. Christened Leslie Lynch King Jr., he was born in Omaha on July 14, 1913. His mother, Dorothy (Gardner) King, divorced Mr. Ford's father two years later and took him to Grand Rapids, Mich., where her parents lived. There she married Gerald R. Ford, whose name his stepson later took, as he once recalled, "out of respect for him and love for him."

Growing up in Grand Rapids, Mr. Ford demonstrated the Heartland virtues that he would display throughout his life: amiability, diligence, forthrightness, dependability. He also exhibited singular athletic abilities, which helped earn him admission to the University of Michigan.

In later years, when Mr. Ford was House minority leader, President Lyndon B. Johnson liked to say, "Jerry played football too many times without a helmet." Whatever headgear he may or may not have worn, Mr. Ford enjoyed an impressive gridiron career, first as a reserve center on the Wolverines' undefeated national championship teams of 1932 and 1933, then, in his senior year, as starting center and the squad's most valuable player.

After graduation, Mr. Ford served as assistant varsity football coach and boxing coach at Yale University, using those positions to support his studies at Yale Law School. An avid swimmer, golfer, and skier, Mr. Ford was among the most gifted athletes to grace the Oval Office. Nonetheless, several misdirected golf shots and well-publicized stumbles while president saddled him with an image of clumsiness.

Mr. Ford briefly practiced law in Grand Rapids before joining the Navy after the outbreak of World War II. He served aboard a carrier, the USS Monterey, during much of the conflict. He received 10 battle stars and rose to the rank of lieutenant commander.

Mr. Ford married the former Elizabeth (Bloomer) Warren in 1948. He had resumed his legal practice in Grand Rapids, but his sights were trained elsewhere. "I've wanted to be a congressman ever since I was in high school," Mr. Ford told a reporter in 1953. Encouraged by US Senator Arthur Vandenberg, a Republican from Michigan, Mr. Ford challenged an isolationist Republican incumbent in 1948, defeated him by a nearly 2-to-1 ratio, and handily won the general election. Running for reelection 12 times in the strongly Republican 5th Congressional District, Mr. Ford never faced a serious challenge.

On Capitol Hill, Mr. Ford began a steady rise. In 1960, he placed second in a Newsweek poll of Washington correspondents on the ablest member of Congress. He and the GOP presidential nominee that year, Nixon, had been friendly since serving together in the 81st Congress. Three years later, President Johnson appointed him to the Warren Commission, which investigated the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Ford was the last surviving member of the commission.

Mr. Ford's growing public prominence culminated in his election as House minority leader in 1965.

In 1970 Mr. Ford made one of his few missteps, calling for a panel to investigate possible grounds for impeachment against Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. The move was widely seen as having been instigated by the White House in response to the Senate's rejection of two Nixon Supreme Court nominees. Mr. Ford denied this, citing specific concerns about Douglas's professional behavior, but the attack on Douglas appeared to do more damage to his reputation than the justice's.

Mr. Ford's great ambition had been to serve as speaker of the House. "I envy Newt Gingrich," he confessed in a 1995 speech, of the first Republican speaker in more than four decades. When Nixon's landslide reelection in 1972 failed to produce a GOP congressional majority, Mr. Ford decided he would run for one more term and then leave politics. But just as the emerging Watergate scandal would undo the Nixon mandate, so, too, would it transform Mr. Ford's career.

The cause of Mr. Ford's ascent was the resignation of Vice President Spiro T. Agnew on Oct. 10, 1973, because of corruption charges. Democratic congressional leaders told Nixon that his first choice to succeed Agnew, former Treasury secretary John B. Connally, would be rejected, and they clearly indicated that Mr. Ford would be the most likely to be confirmed.

"To me," Mr. Ford later wrote in his autobiography, "A Time to Heal," "the Presidency and the Vice Presidency were not prizes to be won but a duty to be done."

He discovered how painful that duty could be on Sept. 8, 1974, when he granted Nixon "a full, free, and absolute pardon" for any involvement in the coverup of the break-in at Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate Hotel.

During the previous month, Mr. Ford had enjoyed widespread popularity. After the fortress mentality of the Nixon White House, the public warmed to the informality shown by a president who toasted his own English muffins and graced the dance floor with his wife after state dinners.

Yet the announcement of the pardon produced a firestorm of protest. Charges of a "secret deal" were heard, and Mr. Ford's popularity rating plunged from 71 percent to 49 percent.

Many observers thought that the pardon doomed any chance Mr. Ford might have had to be elected president in his own right in 1976. Even so, he never expressed any regret over his decision. "America needed recovery, not revenge," he later wrote. "The hate had to be drained and the healing begun."

Mr. Ford's honeymoon was over, and for all that congressional Democrats held him in high personal regard -- then-House majority leader Thomas P. O'Neill Jr., for example, was one of the president's golf partners -- Congress hindered any legislative ambitions he had. During Mr. Ford's first year in office, he used his veto power no fewer than 36 times. Making his position even more difficult was a Watergate-driven Democratic landslide in the 1974 elections, with Republicans losing 40 seats in the House and four in the Senate.

The burden of Nixon's legacy extended beyond Watergate. On Oct. 8, Mr. Ford unveiled his WIN program, "Whip Inflation Now," but it had little effect, and high unemployment as well as rising prices dogged his time in office. What was perhaps the administration's darkest hour came in April 1975 with the collapse of the US-supported regime in South Vietnam. The image of helicopters frantically evacuating refugees from the roof of the Saigon embassy symbolized declining US power.

Aware of the perception of US helplessness, Mr. Ford ordered on May 14 the rescue of the crew of a US merchant ship, the Mayaguez, which had been seized by Cambodia. The ship and its crew were recovered, though at the cost of 41 American lives. Mr. Ford regarded the rescue as one of the proudest moments of his presidency, and the ship's wheel is displayed at the Gerald R. Ford Museum in Grand Rapids.

Retaining Henry Kissinger as secretary of state, Mr. Ford continued Nixon's policy of detente with the Soviet Union. He held a summit with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev in Vladivostok in November. His refusal to meet with exiled Soviet author Alexander Solzhenitsyn drew widespread criticism in July 1975. A few weeks later, Mr. Ford attended in Helsinki the 35-nation Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, the largest gathering of European heads of state since the Congress of Vienna in 1815, and signed the Helsinki Accords on human rights. Mr. Ford also continued detente with China, journeying to Beijing in the late fall of 1975.

Mr. Ford's foreign policy made him unpopular with the right wing of his party, as had selecting former New York governor Nelson Rockefeller to succeed him as vice president. Former California governor Reagan announced he would oppose Mr. Ford for the 1976 Republican presidential nomination. At first, it seemed a futile quest, but Reagan's focus on the prospective "giveaway" of the Panama Canal energized his campaign. He came within 59 votes of denying Mr. Ford the nomination at the Republican Convention in Kansas City.

It was the end of an era in Republican politics: the last stand of the Midwestern-based party of the past, barely eking out a victory over the Sunbelt-based party of the future. Reagan's unenthusiastic support hindered Mr. Ford in the fall campaign.

Four years later, in an ironic coda to the '76 race, Reagan offered the vice presidential nomination to Mr. Ford, hoping to reassure moderate voters, only to be turned down by his former opponent.

A month before the Kansas City convention, Mr. Ford presided over the US bicentennial. The national birthday party was a high point of his time in office, and over the happily hectic course of the long Fourth of July weekend, Mr. Ford dedicated the new Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington, spoke at the National Archives, visited Valley Forge, gave an address at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, and viewed Operation Sail in New York harbor.

The pleasure of that last event notwithstanding, Mr. Ford was unpopular in New York City. His opposition in October 1975 to a federal bailout of the bankrupt metropolis led to the celebrated Daily News headline, "Ford to City: Drop Dead." Coming only a few weeks after two assassination attempts in California, the controversy over New York occurred at the end of a particularly trying time in Mr. Ford's presidency.

According to a Harris poll, Mr. Ford trailed the Democratic nominee, former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter, by nearly 30 points after the Kansas City convention. With little to lose, Mr. Ford agreed to debate his opponent, the first presidential-election debates since those in 1960 between Kennedy and Nixon and the first-ever involving an incumbent. The move backfired, however, when Mr. Ford said in the Oct. 6 debate, in defense of the Helsinki agreement, "there is no Soviet domination in Eastern Europe."

Even with that blunder, Mr. Ford almost managed to pull off one of the great electoral comebacks in US history. He visited 15 states, traveled nearly 16,000 miles in the final 11 days of the campaign, and left himself so hoarse Betty Ford had to read his concession speech.

In the end, Mr. Ford lost by fewer than 1.8 million votes out of 80 million cast.

Any rancor between Mr. Ford and his successor was dispelled when Carter began his inaugural address by saying, "For myself and for our nation, I want to thank my predecessor for all he has done to heal our land." He and Mr. Ford later became friendly, serving together on many panels and foreign missions.

Despite its brief duration, Mr. Ford's presidency had an impact still being felt in Washington today. Vice President Dick Cheney first rose to national prominence in the Ford White House, serving as chief of staff from 1975-77. Also Donald H. Rumsfeld had his first stint as secretary of defense, from 1975-77. He left the Bush administration this month.

In 1999, Mr. Ford was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor. In 2001, he was awarded the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award for pardoning Nixon.

"Gerald Ford saw our nation through one of its darkest hours and his straightforward leadership helped steady the country," Senator Edward M. Kennedy said in a statement this morning. "His life was a tribute to public service."

In addition to his wife, Mr. Ford leaves three sons, Michael , John, and Steven; and a daughter, Susan Bales.

Funeral arrangements are incomplete.