Gerald Ford

Gerald Rudolph Ford Jr. (born Leslie Lynch King Jr.; July 14, 1913 – December 26, 2006) was the 38th president of the United States, serving from 1974 to 1977. A member of the Republican Party, Ford assumed the presidency after the resignation of Richard Nixon, under whom he had served as the 40th vice president from 1973 to 1974 following the resignation of Spiro Agnew. Prior to that, he served as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1949 to 1973.

Ford was born in Omaha, Nebraska, and raised in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He attended the University of Michigan, where he played for the university football team, before eventually attending Yale Law School. Afterward, he served in the U.S. Naval Reserve from 1942 to 1946. Ford was elected to the House of Representatives in 1948 from Michigan's 5th congressional district. He served in this capacity for nearly 25 years, the final nine of them as the House minority leader. During his career in the House, he was also part of the Warren Commission, which investigated the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In December 1973, two months after the resignation of Vice President Agnew, Ford became the first person appointed to the vice presidency under the terms of the 25th Amendment. After President Nixon resigned in August 1974, Ford immediately assumed the presidency.

Domestically, Ford presided over the worst economy in the four decades since the Great Depression, with growing inflation and a recession. In one of his most controversial acts, he granted a presidential pardon to Nixon for his role in the Watergate scandal. Foreign policy was characterized in procedural terms by the increased role Congress began to play, and by the corresponding curb on the powers of the president. Ford signed the Helsinki Accords, which marked a move toward détente in the Cold War. With the collapse of South Vietnam eight months into his presidency, U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War essentially ended. In the 1976 Republican presidential primary, he narrowly defeated Ronald Reagan for the Republican nomination, but narrowly lost the presidential election to the Democratic candidate, Jimmy Carter. Ford remains the only person to serve as president without winning an election for president or vice president.

Following his years as president, Ford remained active in the Republican Party, but his moderate views on various social issues increasingly put him at odds with conservative members of the party in the 1990s and early 2000s. He also set aside the enmity he had felt towards Carter following the 1976 election and the two former presidents developed a close friendship. After experiencing a series of health problems, he died in Rancho Mirage, California, in 2006. Surveys of historians and political scientists have ranked Ford as a below-average president, though retrospective public polls on his time in office were more positive.