Gerald R. Ford: An Honorable Life by James Cannon (review)

An embattled President Nixon addressed the nation on the evening of August 8, 1975. He was resigning from office amid the unfolding evidence against him in the Watergate scandal. “I shall resign the Presidency effective at noon tomorrow. Vice President Ford will be sworn in as President at that hour.” The second greatest constitutional crisis in our country’s history had ended with that short sentence, and the reins of government transferred to a former congressman who was tapped to replace a vice president who had also resigned in disgrace. For the next 895 days, Gerald Ford, a man who never aspired to be President, healed many of the nation’s wounds from Watergate to the fall of Saigon.

This is the opening of James Cannon’s Gerald R. Ford: An Honorable Life, a cradle-to-grave biography of our nation’s thirty-eighth president. From those dramatic days of August 8 and 9, 1974, Cannon explores the early life of the man from Michigan (actually born in Omaha, Nebraska), his upbringing, college days, military service, romance, and twenty-five year career as congressman from West Michigan before being placed on the world stage as president.

James Cannon was a journalist with the Baltimore Sun, Time and vice president at Newsweek before leaving the field to enter government as an advisor to top policy makers in Washington, including Gerald Ford. Cannon stated he wanted to “get out of the grandstand and go down to the playing field.” In the 1980s and ‘90s, Cannon frequently interviewed Ford and many others for Time and Chance: Gerald Ford’s Appointment with History (1994), an in-depth look at Ford’s early life up to his assumption of the Presidency. It was anticipated that Cannon would produce a second volume dealing with the Ford presidency.

Instead this book evolved into the definitive biography to date on Gerald Ford. The narrative, frequently eloquent, particularly when detailing young Jerry’s life, is crisp while capturing the essence and personality of Ford, a product of the deep midwestern values ingrained in the man who helped heal the nation’s wounds caused by Watergate and Vietnam.

Ford was originally named Leslie Lynch King Jr. (after his birth father) and was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1913. But the father was abusive to the mother, even threatening her with a butcher knife, while she recovered from a difficult childbirth. The infant’s mother, Dorothy, quickly left town with the baby and divorced her abusive spouse. She settled in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she met Gerald R. Ford, a paint salesman. In Cannon’s words, “In Grand Rapids, mother and son had not only found the right man; they had found the right city . . . Grand Rapids was America at its best.”

Regarding the mother and stepfather, Cannon observed, “[t]hey, and others in Grand Rapids, had set down like a granite plinth stone the foundation of young Jerry’s character; confidence, trustworthiness, fair play, honesty, loyalty, tolerance, determination, reliance on self. The qualities they instilled would endure for all his days.”

Those character traits were evident in his success on the football field, at Yale law school and in the Pacific theater during World War II. They became more evident when he began his career as the Representative for West Michigan in Congress. His hard work and perseverance in poring through budgets and bills earned him high marks from his colleagues and presidents.

And it was no coincidence that after twenty-five years in the House building a reputation as an honest, hardworking congressman, he was the choice by both party’s leaders to fill the vacant seat of the vice presidency. Many on Capitol Hill believed that whoever filled that post might be president if Nixon were impeached and convicted. They knew that the strength of Ford’s character would help him sail through confirmation hearings.

But those midwestern traits never shined brighter than when he tackled his most difficult decisions as president—pardoning...