Presidential Memories: Ford

President Ford believed in the power of forgiveness. He pardoned Richard Nixon when so many people just wanted to prolong Nixon's suffering because they hated him so much, and Ford took a lot of political heat for it. The act probably cost him the election of 1976 but it guaranteed him a place in history as one of the good guys. Even Ted Kennedy who criticized him for it loudly at the time has said that, in retrospect, it was the right decision.

I met Gerald Ford a full 30 years ago for the first time when he was campaigning in Oregon where I was going to school. Then, about 25 years ago, I literally got to see him up close and personal in his office at his Rancho Mirage home. I was covering presidential politics for CNN (I had to have been the youngest national correspondent working at the time), and Ronald Reagan had gone to visit the former President after his own nomination as the Republican standard-bearer. A few months later, Reagan would go on to do the thing that Ford could not do -- defeat Jimmy Carter and send him packing from Washington.

It was a pretty surreal photo op. I was with the "Boys on the Bus" (even though there were plenty of women, even then), the pack of political reporters following Reagan around Southern California. They crowded about twenty-five of us, including photographers, into Ford's modest sized office and he and Reagan exchanged pleasantries as we shouted questions at them. A political footnote to this meeting is that only a few days before Reagan had been nominated by the Republicans and there had been a very strong movement to nominate Ford to run as his vice-president.

This photo you see above was taken during that 1980 convention. It still amazes me that I met each of those men during that period. Besides the photo-op with Ford, I literally followed Reagan around for weeks, covering his news conference the day after his election at the Century City Plaza Hotel, and going up to his "Rancho Cielo" above Santa Barbara. I remember him getting on a horse, telling us that "The best thing for the inside of a man is the outside of a horse" and riding away with Nancy into the sunset like it was one of his movies.

Bush Sr. I met when I was given five minutes to interview him as a vice-presidential candidate that year. I remember him being out-of-sorts and kind of rude to me. I think he was wondering who this kid was who was wasting his time, and thinking that this CNN thing was a flash-in-the-pan that would never go anywhere.

Back to Ford, though. He was a decent man always, someone who was liked on both sides of the aisle, even by his political opponents. He could be partisan when he needed to be, but he was also a patriot in the true sense of the word. He knew he'd stepped into history big-time. Remember his words when he took over the day that Nixon resigned: "Our long national nightmare is over."

Gerald Ford died at 93, the oldest of any of our presidents. That's how long long Reagan lasted, actually longer by a month. It's a good, long life and he lived it well. He was a good guy, and he'll be missed.