Gerald Rudolph Ford was our 38th president from 1974 to 1977. He was born on July 14, 1913 in Omaha, Nebraska as Leslie King Junior. His parents were divorced and his mother moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan. She married a man named Gerald R. Ford who adopted her son and changed his name to Gerald R. Ford Junior. He entered the University of Michigan in 1931. He was on the varsity football team through 1932 and 1933 which they were undefeated, and in 1934 he was MVP. He attended Yale Law School, where he practiced law in Grand Rapids for a few months, and then he enlisted in the Navy.
He was discharged from the Navy in 1946. During his 47 months of service, he was awarded 10 battle stars in the South Pacific. In 1948 he was elected to U. S. House of Representatives in which he won reelection 12 times. He married a woman named Elizabeth Bloomer, who was a professional model and dancer. They were married on October 15, 1948. They had 3 sons and a daughter. One son, Jack Ford, was an actor on a day time soap opera called The Young and The Restless. In 1963, he was elected chairman of House G. O. P. conference.
He was named by President Johnson to serve on the Warren Commission. The official investigation into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, then in 1965, he successfully challenged Charles A. Halleck for the post of House Minority leader. In 1970, he led an unsuccessful attempt to impeach the liberal Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. Under the terms of the 25th amendment took the oath of vice-president on December 6, 1973. Following the resignation of President Nixon, he was inaugurated as the 38th chief executive on August 9, 1974. One of his first nd most controversial acts was to pardon Richard M. Nixon for all of the federal crimes he might have committed in office. In the April of 1975, South Vietnam surrendered to the Communists ending the war in South-east Asia. In 1976, led the nation in marking its 200th birthday. He was defeated by Jimmy Carter, and lost the election by a margin of 241 electoral votes to 297. Ford, although he was the first incumbent president to be defeated since President Herbert Hoover. He had a presidential library named after him in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and it was dedicated on April 27, 1981.
He died at the age of 93 on December 26, 2006, and was laid to rest in Grand Rapids, Michigan. My person al opinion of Gerald is that he was a great man for all of the things he had done, like help the nation recover from the Watergate scandal and he got South Vietnam to surrender, thus ending the Vietnam War.
Reference
- Gerald R. Ford, President by Sallie Randolph Funk and Wagnall’s New Encyclopedia #10 and The New Lexicon Webster’s Dictionary of the English Dictionary
