Honoring President Gerald R. Ford
HONORING PRESIDENT GERALD R. FORD -- (Senate - February 15, 2007)
Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, like his hero, Abraham Lincoln, Gerald Ford helped heal our Nation. His calm leadership and fundamental decency helped hold our Nation together at a time when the forces of war and scandal threatened to tear it apart.
When he took the oath of office on August 9, 1974, President Ford declared, ``This is an hour of history that troubles our minds and hurts our hearts.' During his Presidency, he worked to ease our minds, comfort our hearts, and restore our faith in our government.
In his first official remarks as President, Gerald Ford promised America:
In all my public and private acts as your president, I expect to follow my instincts of openness and candor with full confidence that honesty is always the best policy at hand.
Those were not just words to Gerald Ford, as he proved on October 17, 1974, when he appeared voluntarily before Congress to give sworn testimony--the only time a sitting President has done so about his pardon of Richard Nixon.
Gerald Ford believed that pardoning Richard Nixon was the only way to end the long national nightmare of Watergate. He also believed that it might end his political career. And he did pay a high price at the time in lost public approval and public trust.
Over time, however, many people came to see the Nixon pardon not as an act of collusion, but of courage and conciliation. In 2001, the Kennedy Library Foundation awarded President Ford its John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award.
Gerald Ford believed in hard work and duty to one's country. At the University of Michigan, he washed dishes at his fraternity house to earn money for college expenses. After graduating in the top quarter of his class from Yale Law School, he returned home to Grand Rapids, MI, to practice law--but Pearl Harbor was attacked. Like so many young men of his generation, Gerald Ford put his life on hold. He enlisted in the Navy and spent the next 4 years in the service.
After the war, Gerald Ford decided to run for Congress and was supported by Michigan's legendary Senator Arthur Vandenburg, one of the architect's of American internationalism. His experience in World War II and his friendship with Senator Vandenberg helped turn him away from isolationism.
As President, he described himself as ``a moderate in domestic affairs, a conservative in fiscal affairs, and a dyed-in-the-wool internationalist in foreign affairs.' In the 2 1/2 years of his Presidency, he ended America's involvement in the war in Vietnam. He helped mediate a cease-fire agreement between Israel and Egypt, signed the Helsinki human rights convention with the Soviet Union and traveled to Vladivostok to sign an arms limitation agreement with Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet President.
But what earned Gerald Ford the respect and gratitude of our Nation was not only what he accomplished but how he accomplished those things. He was a master of consensus-building, cooperation, and honorable compromise.
It is notable that one of the first calls he made after becoming Vice President was to his old golfing buddy, Tip O'Neill. He set a standard for bipartisanship that we would all do well to follow.
He was a good and honorable man who served this Nation well. He will be missed.
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