Gerald Ford: The Unelected President from Grand Rapids
Near Grand Rapids, Michigan
The Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum sits on the west bank of the Grand River, and the man buried here had one of the stranger paths to the presidency in American history.
Ford was born in Omaha, Nebraska in nineteen thirteen. His mother left an abusive marriage when he was a newborn and brought him to Grand Rapids to live with her parents. A few years later, when he was three years old, she married a local paint salesman named Gerald R. Ford, who adopted the boy and gave him his name. The legal name change did not happen until nineteen thirty-five. Before that, the future president's birth name was Leslie Lynch King, Junior.
He grew up in Grand Rapids, starred at South High School in football, attended the University of Michigan on an athletic scholarship, and earned his law degree from Yale in nineteen forty-one. He served in the Navy during World War Two, then returned to Grand Rapids and entered politics. He was elected to Congress from Michigan's Fifth District in nineteen forty-eight and served there for twenty-five years.
What came next was unprecedented. Under the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, ratified in nineteen sixty-seven, a president could nominate a replacement for a vacant vice presidency, subject to congressional confirmation. When Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned in October of nineteen seventy-three, facing criminal charges for tax evasion and bribery, Richard Nixon nominated Ford. Congress confirmed him. Ford became Vice President without receiving a single popular vote.
Less than a year later, Nixon resigned over the Watergate scandal, and Gerald Ford became the thirty-eighth President of the United States, the only person in American history to serve as president without having been elected to either the presidency or the vice presidency.
His most controversial act came a month after taking office: a full and unconditional pardon of Richard Nixon for any crimes he might have committed as president. Ford said he did it to spare the country a prolonged trial and let the nation move on. His approval ratings collapsed. He lost the nineteen seventy-six election to Jimmy Carter.
Ford died in two thousand six. He and Betty Ford are buried on the museum grounds, beside the Grand River.
