Ford, Gerald R.

in full Gerald Rudolph Ford, Jr. orig. Leslie Lynch King, Jr.

(born July 14, 1913, Omaha, Neb., U.S.—died Dec. 26, 2006, Rancho Mirage, Calif.) 38th president of the U.S. (1974–77). While he was still an infant, his parents were divorced; his mother later married Gerald R. Ford, Sr., who adopted the boy and gave him his name. He received degrees from the University of Michigan (1935) and Yale Law School (1941). He joined the Navy during World War II and served in the South Pacific, attaining the rank of lieutenant commander. He served in the U.S. House of Representatives for 25 years (1948–73), becoming Republican minority leader in 1965. After Spiro Agnew resigned as vice president in 1973, Richard Nixon nominated Ford to fill the vacant post. When the Watergate scandal forced Nixon to resign, Ford became the first president who had not been elected to either the vice presidency or the presidency. A month later he pardoned Nixon; to counter widespread outrage, he voluntarily appeared before a House subcommittee to explain his action. His administration gradually lowered the country's high rate of inflation by slowing down the economy, though at the cost of a severe recession (1974–75) and high unemployment. Ford had a tense relationship with the Democrat-controlled Congress, vetoing more than 50 bills (more than 40 were sustained). In September 1975 he was twice the target of assassination attempts. In the final days of the Vietnam War, he ordered an airlift of 237,000 anticommunist Vietnamese refugees, most of whom came to the U.S. The public's revulsion at the events of Watergate contributed to his narrow defeat by Jimmy Carter in 1976.

Ford, Gerald R. (Rudolph, Jr.) (1913– ) thirty-eighth U.S. president; born in Omaha, Nebr. He grew up in Grand Rapids, Mich., and graduated from the University of Michigan (1935) and Yale Law School (1941). He began to practice law in Michigan but enlisted in the U.S. Navy during World War II. Elected to the U.S. House of Representatives (Rep., Mich.; 1949–73), he became a minority leader in 1965 and was regarded as a moderate if routine politician. On the resignation of vice-president Spiro Agnew in 1973, he was named Nixon's vice-president. When Nixon resigned in 1974 due to the Watergate scandals, Ford became president. A Democratic Congress resisted Ford's economic initiatives in a time of recession; weakened by that, his pardon of Nixon, and a general desire by Americans to put Watergate behind them, Ford lost the 1976 election to Jimmy Carter and retired from politics.