Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Gerald R. Ford by Douglas Brinkley Gerald R. Ford by Douglas Brinkley. Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property. What can I do to prevent this in the future? If you are on a personal connection, like at home, you can run an anti-virus scan on your device to make sure it is not infected with malware. If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or infected devices. Another way to prevent getting this page in the future is to use Privacy Pass. You may need to download version 2.0 now from the Chrome Web Store. Cloudflare Ray ID: 661859c169a94e14 • Your IP : 116.202.236.252 • Performance & security by Cloudflare. Gerald ford age at death. Gerald R. Ford (The American Presidents, #38) by Douglas Brinkley. The accidental president whose innate decency and steady hand restored the presidency after its greatest crisis. When Gerald R. Ford entered the White House in August 1974, he inherited a presidency tarnished by the Watergate scandal, the economy was in a recession, the Vietnam War was drawing to a close, and he had taken office without having been elected. Most observers gave him little chance of success, especially after he pardoned Richard Nixon just a month into his presidency, an action that outraged many Americans, but which Ford thought was necessary to move the nation forward. Many people today think of Ford as a man who stumbled a lot--clumsy on his feet and in politics--but acclaimed historian Douglas Brinkley shows him to be a man of independent thought and conscience, who never allowed party loyalty to prevail over his sense of right and wrong. As a young congressman, he stood up to the isolationists in the Republican leadership, promoting a vigorous role for America in the world. Later, as House minority leader and as president, he challenged the right wing of his party, refusing to bend to their vision of confrontation with the Communist world. And after the fall of Saigon, Ford also overruled his advisers by allowing Vietnamese refugees to enter the United States, arguing that to do so was the humane thing to do. Brinkley draws on exclusive interviews with Ford and on previously unpublished documents (including a remarkable correspondence between Ford and Nixon stretching over four decades), fashioning a masterful reassessment of Gerald R. Fords presidency and his underappreciated legacy to the nation. The Presidency: President Gerald Ford. Gerald Ford Fast Facts. Ford, the 38th president of the United States. Chat with us in Facebook Messenger. Find out what's happening in the world as it unfolds. United States President Gerald Ford and wife Betty Ford sitting in the back seat of a car smiling and holding hands in Personal: Birth date: July 14, Birth name: Leslie Lynch King Jr. Father: Leslie Lynch King Sr. Gerald R. Ford became President of the United States on August 9, , under extraordinary circumstances. Owing to the Watergate scandal, Ford's predecessor, Richard Nixon, had resigned under the threat of congressional impeachment. Ford assumed leadership of a nation whose domestic economy and international prestige—both seemingly sound in the decades after World War II—had deteriorated considerably. Just as important, Watergate, as well as the debacle of the Vietnam War, had profoundly shaken the American public's confidence in its leaders. Gerald Ford stepped into the breach opened up by these converging dynamics and achieved mixed results in addressing the twin problems of economic and geopolitical decline. Professor Greene is the Paul J. Quick Facts. A longtime Republican congressman from Michigan, Ford had been appointed vice president less than a year earlier by President Nixon. He is credited with helping to restore public confidence in government after the disillusionment of the Watergate era. Gerald Rudolph Ford Jr. His name at birth was Leslie Lynch King Jr. She then married Gerald R. Ford, a successful paint salesman who adopted her young son. Ford recalled in his memoirs that he learned about his biological father at the age of 12 and only met the man a couple of times. Super mario sunshine strategy guide pdf. Gerald R. Ford (The American Presidents, #38) by Douglas Brinkley. The accidental president whose innate decency and steady hand restored the presidency after its greatest crisis. When Gerald R. Ford entered the White House in August 1974, he inherited a presidency tarnished by the Watergate scandal, the economy was in a recession, the Vietnam War was drawing to a close, and he had taken office without having been elected. Most observers gave him little chance of success, especially after he pardoned Richard Nixon just a month into his presidency, an action that outraged many Americans, but which Ford thought was necessary to move the nation forward. Many people today think of Ford as a man who stumbled a lot--clumsy on his feet and in politics--but acclaimed historian Douglas Brinkley shows him to be a man of independent thought and conscience, who never allowed party loyalty to prevail over his sense of right and wrong. As a young congressman, he stood up to the isolationists in the Republican leadership, promoting a vigorous role for America in the world. Later, as House minority leader and as president, he challenged the right wing of his party, refusing to bend to their vision of confrontation with the Communist world. And after the fall of Saigon, Ford also overruled his advisers by allowing Vietnamese refugees to enter the United States, arguing that to do so was the humane thing to do. Brinkley draws on exclusive interviews with Ford and on previously unpublished documents (including a remarkable correspondence between Ford and Nixon stretching over four decades), fashioning a masterful reassessment of Gerald R. Fords presidency and his underappreciated legacy to the nation. One through Forty-Two or Forty-Three. Gerald Ford had a unique presidency. He was not elected to be vice president. He was not elected to be president. His vice president was not elected either. He was the first president to born with an entirely different first and last name than what he used while in office. He was a remarkably successful politician who never lost an election, until he ran for president on his own. But what will history remember Gerald Ford for? He was the man who pardoned Richard Nixon. And that one act, something which Ford did not regret, is like that big blemish on someone’s face that you just can’t help staring at. Douglas Brinkley, who has written a biography of Jimmy Carter among his many other books, writes the Gerald Ford obituary and does a good job of presenting the two sides of Ford. One side was the grandfatherly, pipe-smoking calm leader who led America out of the dark years of Watergate. The other side was the man who spent most of this adult life in politics and based many of his decisions based on what was feasible in a hostile political climate. Ford came into the world with the name Leslie King, but his mother took her son away from her abusive husband and moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she remarried a successful local business man, who adopted young Leslie King and renamed him Gerald R. Ford, Jr. The R stands for Rudolph, which was originally Rudolf, but Ford changed that spelling too. Ford was an All-America center for the University of Michigan’s football team in 1934. That Michigan squad went 1-7 and scored just 21 points. Eventually Ford went on to Yale Law School, served in the Navy in World War II, and then came back to Grand Rapids and started a law practice and went into politics and won a House seat in 1948 and held it until he resigned to become the replacement for Spiro Agnew as Vice President in 1973. Ford remained loyal to Nixon for as long as he could, but even he had his limits. When it became clear that Nixon had to resign, White House Chief of Staff Alexander Haig came to Ford with a series of scenarios. One of them was that Nixon would resign in exchange for a pardon from Ford. Did Ford agree to this? According to Brinkley, Ford didn’t. But he also didn’t explicitly say he wouldn’t pardon Nixon. And in such gray areas, Ford’s legacy was made. The rest of Ford’s presidency featured events such as an attempt to end inflation by getting people to wear WIN (Whip Inflation Now!) buttons and telling people that it was their patriotic duty to spend less, the signing of the Helsinki accords on human rights (which made Ford a pariah to the Republican right, aka Ronald Reagan), watching South Vietnam fall into the hands of Communists, sending Marines to rescue a captured U.S. freighter in Cambodia, and getting to look very presidential during the Bicentennial. One aspect of Ford’s presidency that Brinkley mentions is Ford’s role in East Timor. When the Timorese tried to break away from Indonesia, Ford, upon advice from his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, gave the Indonesians free rein to suppress the insurgency. Hundreds of thousands died in a conflict that lasted over 20 years. In his memoirs, Ford pointed to his actions in this matter as one of his biggest mistakes. Ford lost his chance to be elected in his own right in 1976. Reagan almost denied Ford the nomination and did little campaigning for him in the general election against Jimmy Carter. And despite having the stain of the Nixon pardon and making a huge gaffe in a debate (“There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.”), Ford narrowly lost in 1976, 50.1%- 40.8% 48.0%. Gerald Ford, unlike the other presidents with official libraries, opted to have the museum attached to it in a different city. Ford’s papers are at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, while a museum dedicated to his life is in his home town of Grand Rapids (I’ve been to it. TWICE!). Ford’s widow, Betty, is of course better known for the rehab clinic she and her husband helped to open in Rancho Mirage, California. Rancho Mirage is where Gerald Ford passed away on December 26, 2006 at the age of 93. Ford lived longer than any other President, 45 days longer than Reagan. Review of “Gerald R. Ford” by Douglas Brinkley. Published in 2007, “Gerald R. Ford” is Douglas Brinkley’s contribution to The American Presidents Series. Brinkley is a professor of history at Rice University and the author of about two-dozen books including biographies of Rosa Parks, Henry Ford, Walter Cronkite and Jimmy Carter (which I will be reading shortly). Given the format of books in this series, Brinkley’s 160-page biography of Ford is unsurprisingly crisp and often fast-paced. Only rarely does the narrative dwell on individual moments in Ford’s life for very long. And where the efficiency expected of books in this series can prove inadequate for particularly complex or multi-faceted presidents, it would seem well-suited to Gerald Ford’s life. The author’s review of Ford’s childhood is undeniably competent but far too brief. Just a dozen pages sweep Ford from birth to his election to Congress. But because his twenty-five year career in the House of Representatives was relatively dull and uneventful (certainly by LBJ’s standard), Brinkley’s description of this period is commendably concise. But if brevity can be a virtue, Brinkley’s choice of what to filter from the text is occasionally perplexing. Nowhere does the author discuss the historically thorough background investigation Ford endured as part of his confirmation as vice president. Yet the reader learns how the sailors on the Mayaguez (a U.S. ship seized during the final days of the Vietnam War) taught their captors to use the ship’s shower facilities. Given the limits imposed by the book’s format, the author is regrettably unable to tease out the often-fascinating interpersonal dynamics between President Ford and his top staff, including Donald Rumsfeld and Henry Kissinger. And Brinkley is able to provide only the sparest of insight into Ford’s inner-self, family life, retirement years or political legacy. But his analysis of Ford’s precarious political position within the Republican Party during the 1976 presidential campaign is excellent and he offers an interesting account of Ronald Reagan’s attempt to gain the Republican nomination at President Ford’s expense. And Brinkley sprinkles enough artful one-liners in the text to convince the reader that the full weight of his insight and expertise is not revealed in these pages. Overall, Douglas Brinkley’s “Gerald R. Ford” is an articulate, efficient and unquestionably competent review of the life of the 38th president. But while the author does a respectable job with a difficult format it seems that Gerald Ford, for all his bland decency, is surprisingly hard to capture in just 160 pages.