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Ford set tone of integrity, self-sacrifice in White House

Former president was a dose of sanity after Watergate

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The right man for the right job at the right time was honored this week, finally getting his due decades after it was owed.

Gerald R. Ford, our 38th president, was a man who put his country ahead of his own self-interests. Americans remember him as a man who brought integrity to the White House instead of the pretensions and duplicity that had crippled his predecessor, Richard M. Nixon.

The essence of the difference between these two men could be summed up in this Ford remark on Nixon's infamous enemies list, "Anybody who can't keep his enemies in his head has too many enemies."

Henry Kissinger, who served Nixon and Ford as secretary of state, said Ford "did his duty as a leader, not as a performer playing to the gallery." And he noted that many of the former president's achievements often were overlooked. The modest man provided key leadership in nuclear arms control with the Soviet Union, in the first political agreements between Israel and Egypt and in helping bring majority rule to South Africa.

Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm said of Ford, "You were a paradoxical gift of remarkable intellect and achievement wrapped in a plain brown wrapper."

But perhaps we should listen most closely when former adversaries speak highly of a person. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts said in 2001 that President Ford was right in 1974 to pardon Nixon for any offenses in the Watergate scandal. The occasion was the ceremony to present a Profile in Courage award to the former president. Kennedy's outspokenness and liberalism was a stark contrast to Ford's understated quietness and conservatism.

But make no mistake. His decision to pardon the former president was unpopular with most Americans who wanted accountability -- if not a pound of flesh -- from Nixon.

And just as Ford brought needed courage and forgiveness to the Oval Office, a trait that cost him the 1976 presidential election, his family, particularly his wife, Betty, too showed great courage over the years. At the funeral in the National Cathedral, former NBC newsman Tom Brokaw spoke of Betty Ford's willingness to give voice to thousands -- if not millions -- of women who suffered illness in silence. After her bout with addiction, she established the Betty Ford Center, a drug and alcohol rehabilitation facility in Rancho Mirage, Calif.

Ford and his family were bedrock America -- people without pretense -- and the nation was fortunate that events put him a heartbeat away from the presidency when his country needed him most.