I remember a story from Paul Harvey, twenty years ago, about a guy on an aircraft carrier during the Great Typhoon of 1945 (a storm that struck the US Seventh Fleet causing immense damage and sinking three destroyers). A guy walking along the deck was caught by a shift in the wind and an unexpected roll in the titanic waves, and wound up getting swept and falling down the slanted deck toward the sea below. His shoe caught a two-inch steel lip on the edge of the flight deck, and the sailor – an officer – held on until the ship righted itself.<\/p>\n
He was Lieutenant Gerald Ford, a navigation officer on carrier USS Monterey<\/em>, and of course the future president. I always thought the story was an able metaphor for his presidency; a fortuitous, even if slightly mundane, rescue from the brink. That single act, it was widely believed, contributed to Ford losing election to a term of his own in 1976. But it won praise in later years as a courageous act that allowed the nation to move on.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The Vietnam War ended in defeat for the U.S. during his presidency with the fall of Saigon in April 1975. In a speech as the end neared, Ford said: “Today, America can regain the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam. But it cannot be achieved by refighting a war that is finished as far as America is concerned.” Evoking Abraham Lincoln, he said it was time to “look forward to an agenda for the future, to unify, to bind up the nation’s wounds.”<\/p>\n Ford was in the White House only 895 days, but changed it more than it changed him.<\/p>\n Even after two women tried separately to kill him, his presidency remained open and plain.<\/p>\n Not imperial. Not reclusive. And, of greatest satisfaction to a nation numbed by Watergate, not dishonest.<\/p>\n Even to millions of Americans who had voted two years earlier for Nixon, the transition to Ford’s leadership was one of the most welcomed in the history of the democratic process – despite the fact that it occurred without an election.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I was too young to really understand much about Gerald Ford when he was president; I was 12-13 years old at the time. His importance has only resonated in the time since Chevy Chase’ impression ceased to be my major impression of him. But his job – bringing the nation down from the nightmare of Watergate – was a huge one. Others might have done it better; Ford did it well enough.<\/p>\n
\n Ford died yesterday at age 93<\/a>, most known perhaps for his pardon of Nixon:<\/p>\n