Gerald Ford Obituary

August 19, 1976, deservedly, was a landmark date in recent Republican Party history. On this day, in Kansas City, Kansas, Ronald W. Reagan came excruciatingly close to accomplishing the unthinkable—he almost took the party nomination from a one-term incumbent president, Gerald Ford. Snatching up 47.4 % of the delegates’ votes (1070 out of 2257), Reagan still came away empty-handed. But the nation would not forget this former movie star and governor of California. Four years later, Reagan not only received the GOP’s nomination for president; he also unseated the incumbent Jimmy Carter, who had defeated Ford in 1976.

Now, President Reagan died over two years ago, so you may be wondering why I began an obituary for the recently deceased President Ford—who passed away on December 26, 2006, at the ripe age of 93—by describing the circumstances that almost resulted in his abandonment by the Republican Party. My reason is simple—though Gerald Ford was a good man, full of honor and decency, I am disappointed by the fact that he won that nomination. Ford was a pragmatist, a dealmaker, a consensus-builder, but not in a wholly good way. He was a realist when the world cried out for an idealist.

Perhaps I am merely biased because one of my ancestral homelands, Lithuania, was left out to dry longer than needed because Ford lacked the vision to end the craven détente. The Iron Curtain survived far longer than it should have due to Ford’s lack of foreign policy vision and courage. And though President Carter was far worse in the realm of spreading democracy, Ford was no warrior himself. The people of Eastern Europe continued to live in bondage when America could have intervened on his orders. If military action were deemed imprudent, Ford could have, at the very least, initiated a military buildup that demonstrated our commitment to throw communism into the wastebasket of historically malevolent ideologies.

Supposing that Reagan had defeated Ford in the primary, it is likely that the Watergate scandal still would have secured a Democratic presidency, but the maelstrom of anti-communist, anti-totalitarian fervor that marked the Reagan years might have been sparked sooner. Who knows?—maybe that fervor would have pressured President Carter to actually respond to Soviet aggression in Afghanistan and Islamist turmoil in Iran. Regardless, it was not until President Reagan took office that the anti-communist spirit of Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy once again thrived in the White House.

Foreign policy flaws aside, Ford certainly did some good for the world, though I might add that this good was horribly shortsighted. The Helsinki Accords, signed in August 1975 by the United States and the Soviet Union, as well as 33 other countries, were accurately described by Reagan as a “human-rights farce” and a “propaganda plus” for the Reds. Supposedly, the Helsinki Accords elicited from the Soviet Union a commitment to certain inviolable human rights. But to me, it was reminiscent of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returning from Munich and claiming that Hitler was dedicated to peace. For, in both instances, legitimacy was granted to territorial aggressiveness on the part of history’s two most horrible totalitarian states. Concerning Chamberlain and his “peace for our time” drivel, legitimacy was granted to Hitler’s claim that Austria and the Czechoslovakian Sudetenland were rightfully Germany’s. Concerning Ford, Kissinger, et al, and their Helsinki Accords, legitimacy was granted to the territorial claims that the USSR made for its Eastern European satellites states.