Bush and ex-presidents eulogize Gerald R. Ford - Americas - International Herald Tribune (Published 2007)

WASHINGTON — Gerald R. Ford was eulogized today as a president and a man who embodied the best of small-town American values and whose decency made him a player on the world stage.

"To know Jerry Ford was to know a Norman Rockwell painting come to life," former President George H. W. Bush told a gathering at the National Cathedral. Mr. Ford was a man of uncommon toughness when necessary, but possessed of a heart "as big and open as the Midwest plains on which he was born," Mr. Bush said.

The current President Bush agreed, calling the 38th president a man who stood for, and was, "the best of America," a man who made "the tough, and decent, decision" to pardon his disgraced predecessor, even though he knew it might cost him the White House.

"President Ford's time in office was brief, but history will long remember the courage and common sense that helped restore trust in the workings of our democracy," President Bush said.

And Henry A. Kissinger, Mr. Ford's secretary of state, said the late president was a man "unassuming and without guile," perfectly equipped to restore Americans' confidence in their values and institutions.

"Gerald Ford had the virtues of small-town America," Mr. Kissinger said, citing Mr. Ford's "absence of glibness and his artless decency." Nor were those qualities confined to restoring a collective feeling of content at home, Mr. Kissinger went on, declaring that Mr. Ford had done his best to see that the United States rescued as many people as possible "from the final agony of Indochina" after the Communist victory in Vietnam in 1975.