Opinion | Gerald R. Ford (Published 2006)

Gerald R. Ford was an accidental president, his tenure brief, his legacy limited. Yet he was the right man summoned at the right time to begin the necessary process of healing a country exhausted by war abroad and scandal at home. Elevated to the nation’s top job when Richard Nixon was forced by threat of impeachment to resign, he was everything his predecessor was not — transparent and largely content with life as he found it. His many friends saw him as plain old “Jerry,” a get-along, go-along product of the House of Representatives whose self-assurance and modest ambitions perfectly suited a country that wanted little more than a few months’ rest.

Mr. Ford’s unplanned and largely unsought rise up the American political ladder was assisted not once but twice by scandal. In 1973, when Spiro Agnew resigned the vice presidency after a scandal unrelated to Watergate, Mr. Nixon sought advice from senior Congressional leaders about a replacement. The advice was unanimous. “We gave Nixon no choice but Ford,” House Speaker Carl Albert recalled later.

Which was fitting, because Mr. Ford was in essence a creature of Congress — more precisely, of the House of Representatives, a place of perpetual compromise that encourages neither the vision that sometimes attaches to the Senate nor the managerial skills that come with being a governor. Michigan voters elected Mr. Ford 13 times, and of his 25 years in the House, he served eight as minority leader. He saw himself as a negotiator and a reconciler, and the record shows it: he did not write a single piece of major legislation in his entire career.

As president, Mr. Ford would have had little room in which to pursue lofty ambitions even if he had them. Domestically, he was bedeviled by inflation and then recession, and his effort to cure both embroiled him in constant combat with his old friends in Congress. Abroad, he had his hands full maintaining American power and sustaining détente with the Soviet Union, in the aftermath of the collapse of Vietnam and Cambodia.

But he judged, correctly, that his primary mission was to quiet national passions inflamed by war and Watergate — to end, as he put it, “our long national nightmare” — and in so doing to restore a measure of respect to the presidency itself. To that end he made several small gestures largely forgotten now but symbolically important at the time. He announced that he would be lenient to draft resisters, he opened the White House to people on Mr. Nixon’s “enemies list,” and he crisscrossed the country endlessly, speaking to groups large and small in an effort to open up an office that Mr. Nixon had all but closed to public inspection.

Yet his wish to heal led him to do something that reopened the very wounds he was trying hard to close. On Sept. 8, 1974, barely 30 days into his presidency, Mr. Ford announced his decision to give Mr. Nixon a “full, free and absolute pardon.” The reaction was immediate, intense and largely negative. Mr. Ford had expected criticism, but not the outrage that erupted in Congress, in many newspapers and among the public at large.

This page, for example, condemned the pardon as “a profoundly unwise, divisive and unjust act” that in a stroke had destroyed the new president’s “credibility as a man of judgment, candor and competence.” The critics’ fundamental point was that a nation in which the law applies equally to rich and poor, the meek and the powerful, cannot exempt anyone, least of all a president, from the requirements of justice.

History has been more sympathetic to Mr. Ford’s argument that to allow Mr. Nixon’s prosecution to go forward, perhaps all the way to a trial, would have been profoundly destabilizing to a nation that was already in shaky health. In 2001, the trustees of the John F. Kennedy Library honored Mr. Ford with its Profile in Courage Award for the decision, which Senator Edward Kennedy, a onetime critic, described as essential to the restoration of national unity. When Senate and House leaders bestowed on Mr. Ford and his wife, Betty, a Congressional Gold Medal in 1999, President Clinton — who had his own experiences with prosecutors — said the critics had been “caught up in the moment,” and that Mr. Ford’s decision had helped “keep the country together.”

Our own bottom line continues to be the same: that the nation is strong enough to endure almost anything but burying the truth. Still, Mr. Ford deserves to be remembered for more than the pardon. Marking the end of a national nightmare is no small thing.