A President with a Purpose
Leadership lessons from Gerald R. Ford
by Roger B. Porter
As 2007 began, and several aspirants prepared to announce their candidacies for our nation’s highest office, Americans paused to celebrate the life of Gerald R. Ford, our only chief executive never elected either president or vice president (his predecessors in both offices having resigned). His presidency was, in that sense, accidental. It was, nonetheless, purposeful and filled with leadership lessons worthy of emulation by his successors.
Ford was by all accounts a good and decent man, born without privilege, hard-working and determined, serious as a student, and gifted on the football field. He earned a law degree, served with honor in the U.S. Navy during World War II, and, in his first bid for public office, defeated an isolationist incumbent for his party’s nomination. For a quarter-century, the voters of Grand Rapids returned him as the representative from Michigan’s fifth congressional district, always with more than 60 percent of the vote. He served longer in Congress than any other U.S. president. His great ambition was to serve as Speaker of the House.
By the time I left my interview with then Vice President Ford in July 1974—I was a newly selected White House Fellow, making the rounds for my placement—I had a glimpse of his qualities. He had immediately set me at ease by inquiring about my interest in public service. He was genuinely interested in education and asked how I would compare my experiences as a student at Brigham Young, Oxford, and Harvard. He listened intently and, before our meeting ended, offered to answer any questions I might have. My first question concerned the qualities he valued most in his staff, and how he organized those around him. His answer was revealing. Like most leaders he looked for intelligence, loyalty, and trustworthiness (he was, after all, an Eagle Scout). But he added that he liked a staff filled with some youth and much energy as well as those with experience and judgment. He sought to surround himself with those who had fresh eyes and new ideas to be mentored by those with greater maturity. Though he viewed his staff very much as a team, he worried about groupthink and a circle-the-wagons mentality. I left his office encouraged, even inspired. I little knew, when I accepted his subsequent offer, that I would begin work on August 9, the day he was sworn in as our thirty-eighth president, nor that the subsequent experiences would inform my academic work decades later.
Less than three months after Ford became president, the 1974 mid-term elections dealt his party a devastating blow: the Democrats gained 49 seats in the House, while Republican candidates won barely 40 percent of the national vote. Yet two years later, after defeating Ronald Reagan for the Republican nomination, Ford came from 31 percentage points behind to almost defeat Jimmy Carter, losing by less than 2 percent of the popular vote.
Now, nearly 30 years after he left office, we can assess more clearly Ford’s presidency and the legacy he left. We measure presidents in part by how they mold and shape the circumstances they inherit. With the exception of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt, no president has inherited a situation as difficult as that Ford faced when he took the oath of office. The United States was mired in an unpopular war that had divided the country and produced much anger, resentment, and mistrust. For the first time, a president had resigned, in the wake of the worst political scandal in our history. National confidence and Americans’ trust in their political leaders had eroded.
Less remembered but equally threatening was a deeply troubled economy. During the three months before Richard Nixon resigned, the wholesale price index was rising at an average annual rate of 37 percent, the most explosive outburst of inflation in U.S. history. Unemployment was also increasing, prompting economists to coin a new phrase to describe the phenomenon: “stagflation.” The year before, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries had imposed an embargo on oil shipments to the United States, illuminating the danger of our rising dependence on uncertain foreign sources to meet our energy needs. Everything assumed to be nailed down seemed to be coming loose.
Unlike Lincoln and Roosevelt, who had a full four months to prepare between election in November and inauguration on March 4 the following year, Ford received only one day’s formal notice that he would become president. He had never aspired to the presidency. But he came to the office with more than his considerable experience in the ways of government. He brought three defining qualities that would characterize his stewardship: a driving purpose, a willingness to eschew political expediency, and a deep commitment to principle.
The touchstone of his years in the White House, his driving purpose, was a sustained effort to heal—to heal the divisions over Vietnam, to heal the people’s distrust of government officials, to heal the destructiveness of inflation. Ten days into office, he addressed the annual Convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars and courageously announced an amnesty program for the more than 50,000 Vietnam War draft evaders. Characteristically, his program called for an “earned” amnesty that gave young Americans in whom he had so much confidence a second chance.
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Courtesy Gerald R. Ford Library |
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Gerald R. Ford |
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Three weeks later, he stunned the nation by issuing a full and unconditional pardon to Richard Nixon for any offenses he had committed during his years in the Oval Office. Ford could foresee that without such a pardon, the indictment, prosecution, trial, probable conviction, and lengthy appeals process would consume the nation’s attention and energy for the next three to five years. He realized that his action would offend many Americans’ sense of justice. He recognized the personal political damage he would suffer. But political expediency was never his guide. Many who once opposed his decision to pardon Nixon have come to recognize its wisdom.
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