In a democracy, the public has a right to know not only what the government decides, but why and by what process.


While still a Representative, Gerald Ford was selected to be a member of the Warren Commission that was assembled by President Johnson to convince the American people that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone nut shooter in Dallas. From the beginning of his time in congress Ford was a supporter of J Edgar Hoover with one of his first speeches recommending a raise in salary for the man.

Later he would be tapped by President Nixon to replace Spiro Agnew when he resigned. Nixon believed Ford weakness would keep his enemies from attempting to remove him from office.

Part of Ford's function on the Commission was to unofficially look after the interests of the FBI and keep them informed. His compliant personality let him to alter the report from the president's autopsy to conform to the with the official story, much like Arlen Specter came up with the “magic bullet” theory to accommodate the three shots the official story demanded.

Ordinary Man, An: The Surprising Life and Historic Presidency of Gerald R. Ford
by Richard Norton Smith

For many Americans, President Gerald Ford was the genial accident of history who controversially pardoned his Watergate-tarnished predecessor, presided over the fall of Saigon, and became a punching bag on Saturday Night Live. Yet as Richard Norton Smith reveals in a book full of surprises, Ford was an underrated leader whose tough decisions and personal decency look better with the passage of time.

Drawing on hundreds of interviews and thousands of documents, Smith recreates Ford’s hardscrabble childhood in Michigan, his early anti-establishment politics and lifelong love affair with the former Betty Bloomer, whose impact on American culture he predicted would outrank his own. As president, Ford guided the nation through its worst Constitutional crisis since the Civil War and broke the back of the most severe economic downturn since the Great Depression—accomplishing both with little fanfare or credit (at least until 2001 when the JFK Library gave him its prestigious Profile in Courage Award in belated recognition of the Nixon pardon).

Less coda than curtain raiser, Ford's administration bridged the Republican pragmatism of Eisenhower and Nixon and the more doctrinaire conservatism of Ronald Reagan. His introduction of economic deregulation would transform the American economy, while his embrace of the Helsinki Accords hastened the collapse of the Soviet Union.

You can find more about Gerald Ford here.