Gerald R. Ford Signed Photograph.

Gerald Rudolph Ford (1913–2006), the thirty-eighth President of the United States, occupies a singular and instructive place in the history of the American presidency — a man of unimpeachable personal integrity and institutional loyalty who assumed the nation's highest office under circumstances of constitutional crisis and discharged its responsibilities with a steadiness and decency that history has increasingly recognized as precisely what the moment required. Ford excelled as a center on the University of Michigan football team, graduating in 1935 and turning down professional football offers to attend Yale Law School, from which he graduated in the top third of his class in 1941. He served with distinction in the United States Navy in the Pacific during the Second World War before winning election to the House of Representatives in 1948, where he served for twenty-five years — rising to House Minority Leader in 1965 and earning a reputation across the aisle as one of the most honest and collegial members of Congress of his generation. Appointed Vice President following Spiro Agnew's resignation in 1973 under the provisions of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, Ford became President upon Nixon's resignation in August 1974, telling the nation that our long national nightmare is over. His unconditional pardon of Nixon one month later — almost certainly the most consequential and costly decision of his presidency — destroyed his approval ratings and contributed substantially to his narrow defeat by Jimmy Carter in 1976, though the judgment of history has moved decisively toward the view that the pardon, whatever its political price, spared the country a prolonged and divisive criminal proceeding and allowed the essential work of democratic governance to resume. Ford died in December 2006 at the age of ninety-three, then the longest-lived president in American history, and was mourned across party lines as a figure whose public life embodied the civic virtues — modesty, decency, transparency, and a genuine subordination of self to institution — that the American presidency at its best demands and too rarely receives.