Gerald Ford, RIP

My favorite Fun Ford Facts:

1. Ford's reputation as a klutz was, we all know now, completely false. Ford was, in fact, almost certainly the most athletic President of the twentieth century. Perhaps only Teddy Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Reagan, Bush and Clinton come close, and not very. (Taft was morbidly obese; Wilson, Coolidge, Hoover, Truman, Nixon and Carter were all bookworms; Harding was sedentary; FDR was an upper-class dandy; LBJ was a slob; and Kennedy failed to earn his football letter at Harvard and was ghastly, and constantly, ill right up to the invention of cortisone, which in 1960 allowed him to gain weight and fill out that famous face of his, just in time for the first debate with Nixon.) As John J. Miller recounts, Ford was a lineman on two National Champion Michigan teams, this when colleges collected brutes and bullies for the football team, and didn't even require them to put up the appearance of going to class. Five Michigan jerseys have been retired; Ford's #48 is one of them.

2. Ford remains the only sitting President ever to appear before a Congressional Committee. He did so in 1975, to beg Congress to reinstate military aid to the South Vietnamese. However, the Democrats--who in the shadow of Watergate had added 75 seats to an already standing majority--were feeling their oats. Vietnam, which Kennedy had entered, where Johnson had fought and which Nixon had left, had become Nixon's war. No money, no arms--and so we got Boat People and genocide as a consequence. (The parallels to this very moment are clear, I think.)

3. Ford is the only man to become President without first appearing on a national ticket.

4. Ford's re-election was probably the most half-hearted modern (read: television era) Presidential campaign waged by someone who had a decent chance of winning. (Dole's odd little 1996 endeavor vs. the Clinton Machine may be tucked away in history.) He ran reluctantly, only as a means of pushing forward the legislation he thought necessary: whipping inflation and all that. (Anyone remember WIN? Whip inflation now?) He had reason to suspect his wife's difficulties, and--as recounted by his former Chief of Staff, Dick Cheney--ran the last week of his campaign, in a razor-thin match, on cruise control, while Jimmy Carter was putting in 18-hour days to stave of Ford's last-minute rise in the polls.

5. Every President has a legacy. Lincoln: saved the union. That sort of thing. Ford will be remembered for (and this was no small task) restoring some degree of confidence in the Executive Branch after Nixon shattered it. This is the popular myth, and it has the benefit of being true.