Gerald Ford: America’s Only Unelected President

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In the entire history of the United States, there has only ever been one unelected president: Gerald Ford. He neither won a presidential election nor was elected vice president when he reached the Oval Office. The only electorate Ford had ever faced were the voters of Michigan’s 5th district. A 12-term representative and minority speaker of the House, Ford seemed destined to go down in history as a mere footnote, a man who had a solid career before retiring to a life of golf and afternoon naps. In 1973, he even told his wife that he was ready to call time on his career. Instead, fate threw a curveball that would change American history.

That October, the abrupt resignation of Spiro Agnew left Richard Nixon desperate for a new vice president. Barely had he settled on Ford when Nixon himself was toppled by the Watergate scandal. Thrust into the White House, Ford took over a bitterly divided nation that was tearing at the seams. His attempts to fix it would have consequences to this very day.

As a congressman, Gerald Ford was famous among his colleagues for his genial disposition, for never seeming to be phased by anything. But there was one subject that caused Ford visible discomfort: his early life. Born Leslie Lynch King Jr. in Omaha on July 14, 1913, Ford spent the first two miserable years of his life carrying his father’s name. Leslie King was a mean drunk who regularly beat Ford’s mother, Dorothy. When she finally fled for the safety of Grand Rapids, Michigan, the wealthy Leslie refused to send a penny in child support. It’s no wonder that Dorothy re-christened her little boy Jerry after her new husband, Gerald Rudolph Ford, a midwesterner to his core. Gerald was a paint salesman who believed in virtues like hard work, patriotism, and loyalty. He also believed in family. In 1916, he officially adopted young Jerry, raising the boy as his own.

As a teenager, Ford idolized his stepfather and tried to emulate him in every way. As soon as he was old enough, he legally changed his name to Gerald Ford. The similarities with his stepdad went beyond just his name. Like Gerald Ford, he believed in loyalty to your kin. When the Great Depression threatened to kill his stepdad’s business, Ford worked long hours waiting tables to help pay the bills. Much later, he’d say that the experience taught him one essential truth: the harder you work, the luckier you are.

It would be while working that Ford suffered one of the nastiest shocks of his life. By now a strapping lad of 17, Ford was clearing tables one day when he saw a customer looking at him strangely. At first, he thought nothing of it, but then that customer stood up, came over, and said, “Leslie, I’m your father.” That moment was one of the few events that ever threw Ford off balance. He later told people he felt like this intrusion was trying to destroy the relationship he had forged with his stepdad. After that meeting, he never spoke to his biological father again.

Despite such painful moments being rare in his life, by senior year, he was a star football player who’d been voted most popular in his class. Still, even at this tender age, he couldn’t translate being well-liked into electoral success. That year, he ran for class president on the progressive ticket and lost. Not that this bothered Jerry at the time. Awarded a football scholarship to the University of Michigan, he excelled so well on the team that both the Detroit Lions and the Green Bay Packers dangled contracts before him. But Ford could never quite trust that his dream career might work out. Instead, he took a job coaching football at Yale and, after three years of pestering the faculty, was allowed to enroll in law classes. The dual workload of training and studying was crushing, but if there’s one thing Ford never lacked, it was work ethic. He graduated in January 1941 in the top third of his class.

Back in Grand Rapids, he opened a law firm with an old friend and began to flirt with Republican politics. Like everyone in the community, Ford in 1941 was a staunch isolationist, believing that the United States should stay aloof from the cares of the world. But something was about to happen that would completely transform the young man’s perspective, setting him on the path to Washington. Gerald Ford was about to go to war.

On December 7, 1941, America’s isolationists found themselves catapulted into a terrifying new reality. Images of fire engulfing ships at Pearl Harbor dominated the newspapers. In the wake of the atrocity, Gerald Ford enlisted in the Navy. Because of his background, the Navy assigned him a post putting new recruits through a grueling fitness program. Ford basically said he wanted to go to fight. It took a while, but at last, after enough pestering, the Navy assigned him to the Pacific, where he finally saw the action he craved. Over the course of the war, he earned himself 10 battle stars and came within an inch of losing his life—not via a Japanese bullet, but by a typhoon that almost swept him overboard. By the time Ford returned to Grand Rapids in the fall of 1945, he was a changed man. The war had transformed him into an ardent internationalist, certain that America needed to take its place on the world stage.

It had also turned his interest in Republican politics into an obsession. For the first three years after returning to Michigan, Ford lived a regular middle-class life, working in a law firm, making money, and playing golf. He even found time to woo Betty Ann Bloomer, a former dancer he adored. Beneath this comfortable surface, though, something was awakening: an ambition Ford never knew he harbored. He wanted to get into politics. At the time, Michigan’s reliably Republican 5th district was represented by an ardent isolationist. This bothered Ford, just as it bothered plenty of other young Republicans. Together, they decided to primary the incumbent. It was an audacious move, one Ford quietly told Betty he thought would fail. Still, he brought his tireless work ethic to the task, canvassing all up and down the district, going door to door, talking to any voter who’d listen. It was a tactic that worked. Ford won his primary by 10,000 votes. In such a red-leaning district, that could only mean one thing: Gerald Ford was going to Washington.

In the fall of 1948, Ford and Betty married. Just months later, the pair moved to D.C., and Ford entered the House for the first of 12 consecutive terms. Not that he’d get very far at first. Ford’s political progress was less like someone riding a rocket ship to the top and more like a balloon lazily rising into the afternoon sky. For his first two terms, the new representative did almost nothing of note aside from making friends with a promising young lawmaker from California named Richard Nixon. It was only in 1953, by which time his Californian friend had already risen to vice president, that Ford joined a subcommittee. For the next eight years, Ford slowly built a reputation based on three things: fiscal conservatism, anti-communism, and a borderline insane loyalty towards Nixon. Even though he was only VP at this stage, Nixon was already living up to his nickname, forging a reputation as an unstable, vindictive sociopath. Yet Ford defended his old buddy unconditionally, even if his friend seemed to have more or less completely forgotten that he existed.

Ford was doing pretty well—well enough that he began to nurture a new dream to become Speaker of the House. It was a hell of an ambition. Starting in 1954, the House saw a Democrat winning streak that would last until Bill Clinton was in the Oval Office. Even before this, the House had only gone Republican twice since Herbert Hoover had been voted out. For a Republican like Ford dreaming of becoming Speaker was a little bit like dreaming of becoming America’s next top model. Still, Ford tried his hardest, joining forces with the GOP faction that called themselves the Young Turks. He managed to topple the Republican old guard after the party’s dismal 1964 election, becoming minority speaker. Now all he needed was one big Republican win in the House, and he’d fulfill his dream of holding the Speaker’s gavel. Sadly for Ford, that win would never come. But that didn’t mean his career was destined to stall out as minority speaker. In just nine years, he would go from historical also-ran to president of the United States.

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Now, back to Ford. Here it is at last—the part that would have seemed like fiction to Ford’s colleagues back in 1964: the part where Ford becomes president—not by running in an election or even by getting on the ticket as VP for a president doomed to die. No, Ford was destined to become president through sheer luck. The 1970s dawned with Ford seemingly having passed his career high watermark. In 1968, he watched as House Republicans came within an inch of a majority, only to just fall short. Still, he’d returned to Congress full of hope. His old California buddy was now president, and he felt sure Nixon would work closely with him on passing legislation. In reality, Nixon’s team thought Ford was a clown of the highest order. In private, they agreed with Lyndon Johnson’s withering assessment that “Jerry Ford is so dumb that he can’t fart and chew gum at the same time.”

As Nixon was re-elected in 1972, Ford privately began to admit to Betty that he was getting worn out. Being minority leader wasn’t cutting it anymore. He promised her he’d take just one more shot at the Speaker’s gavel in the 1974 midterms, and if that failed, he would bow to politics, knowing that he’d tried his best. In the end, though, Ford would never compete in the midterms. That’s because the biggest scandal of the 20th century was about to blow through Washington like a hurricane. Back in 1972, people connected to Nixon’s campaign to re-elect the president, pleasingly abbreviated to CREEP, were caught burglarizing the Democratic National Committee’s offices in the Watergate building. Days after the story broke, Ford sought out Nixon’s advisers to ask if the president was involved. They told him no, presumably while crossing their fingers behind their backs because Nixon was already up to his neck in Watergate, and it wasn’t the only scandal rocking his administration.

On October 10, 1973, Vice President Spiro Agnew appeared in court to answer corruption charges. Before giving testimony, he resigned his post that evening. Ford was at home, trying to unwind after a stressful day. Just as he was thinking about heading to bed, he got a call. A White House aide asked how Ford would feel about becoming vice president. I suspect if I was asked, Ford replied, characteristically calm, I would accept it. Knowing what we do today, the phone call can seem inevitable—just one more step on the 38th president’s path to office. But the reality is that it only happened due to a kaleidoscope of coincidences.

The first of these is that Nixon needed a new vice president at all. Just a decade earlier, the U.S. had been without a VP for over a year after Johnson took over from Kennedy. For ages, there had been no mechanism to actually replace a fallen VP. It had only been since 1967 that the 25th Amendment allowed presidents to nominate a new VP in emergencies. Ford was the first person ever nominated in this way. The second factor was the lack of other candidates. Although Nixon had presented a list, he was told that none would be confirmed by the Democratic Congress. The genial Ford was just about the only Republican who would want the job and survive the nomination process. Finally, there was Watergate itself. There’s evidence Nixon could see impeachment coming and wanted to make sure the alternative was even worse than letting him stay in office by offering a choice between removing him from power and getting President Khan or just allowing Nixon to stay. Tricky Dick was banking on Congress choosing the devil they knew.

On December 6, 1973, Gerald Ford became Vice President of the United States. He told Betty the post would be a nice conclusion to his career. In his first speech, he indicated he would simply serve out the rest of Agnew’s term and then leave alongside Nixon in January of 1977. But that wasn’t how history was going to roll. In less than a year, Nixon would be gone, and Ford would be making history.

“Our long national nightmare is over,” he declared. Before VP Ford had even been confirmed, the wheels were coming off the Nixon administration. The Saturday Night Massacre on October 20, 1973, saw Nixon fire the special prosecutor investigating Watergate, setting off a storm in D.C. By the summer of 1974, the Supreme Court was ordering him to turn over the tapes he’d recorded of private conversations related to the scandal. It was closing time on the Nixon presidency. Yet even now, Ford didn’t seem to grasp the enormity of what was happening. As solid and reliable as ever, the new VP simply continued to defend his old friend, even as the red flags transformed into urgent signals screaming, “Do not trust this dude.” It was only when the audio transcript showing Nixon’s involvement in the Watergate cover-up was released that Ford finally heeded them.

On August 6, 1974, Nixon called a cabinet meeting to declare that he’d never resign if Ford took him in the eye and told him the cabinet could no longer defend him. By now, it was almost certain Ford had realized that he was going to be president. There was no way Nixon could remain in power until January 1977. But even Ford didn’t realize how soon Tricky Dick would be gone. On August 8, Nixon abruptly went on TV to announce his resignation effective noon the next day. It was all the warning Ford got to prepare himself for the presidency. The very next day, Richard Nixon clambered into a helicopter and flew off into ignominy. As he vanished over the horizon, the accidental vice president took the oath of office and became the accidental president. Addressing the cameras, Ford, still looking like he couldn’t quite believe what was happening, declared, “My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over. Our Constitution works. Our great republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here, the people rule.” It was a nice sentiment, well expressed. In response, Ford’s approval ratings soared. It would be the only time America ever fully supported its new leader.

One month later, on September 8, President Ford issued perhaps the most infamous pardon in U.S. history, absolving Nixon of any crimes he may have committed. Ford intended to draw a line under Watergate to let the nation move on with the healing. Instead, he pressed the self-destruct button on his own presidency. In the media, Ford was accused of making a corrupt bargain with Nixon. He was called to testify before a House committee, and his poll numbers cratered. It was the sharpest drop in public opinion since polling began. Less than a month into his first term, Gerald Ford had already torpedoed any chance he had at re-election.

While Ford was struggling, there were still two years until Americans could deliver their verdict at the ballot box—two years in which Ford would stumble on, wounded, hemorrhaging support, trying to make his mark in the face of a hostile Congress. As we’re about to see, it was not going to be a pretty sight.

The presidency Ford inherited was the ultimate poison chalice. Inflation and unemployment were soaring, oil prices were high, there were riots in big cities, New York City was about to go bust, and America was just months away from comprehensively losing the Vietnam War. Even given the mess Nixon left him, it’d be hard to say Jerry Ford rose to the challenge. Take the economic nightmare known as stagflation. In the fight against inflation and unemployment, Ford’s advisers initially convinced him to tackle inflation. In the fall of 1974, the White House printed 12 million badges bearing the acronym WIN for “Whip Inflation Now,” part of a drive to hike taxes and slash government spending. But barely had the first 100,000 badges been distributed than Ford discovered the U.S. was in recession and immediately pulled a massive U-turn by instead cutting taxes. The whiplash was jarring and became even more so when the Democrat-controlled Congress forced through government spending increases.

While the economy would eventually improve under Ford, it never really felt like it. In the spring of 1975, for example, New York City went bust. Although the GOP’s moderate wing urged Ford to bail out the nation’s largest city, the fiscally conservative Ford just couldn’t bring himself to do it. The result? The infamous newspaper headline: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” Eventually, after months of wrangling, Ford did agree to release federal funds, but this was just as bad. Having alienated moderate Republicans before, now he severely pissed off the conservative wing by caving to public pressure.

Then there was busing. Lost in the bombshell of Nixon’s resignation had been the order of a Boston judge to use busing