An Ordinary Man
The Surprising Life and Historic Presidency of Gerald R. Ford
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- ¥2,400
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Wall Street Journal Top 10 Best Books of 2023
“Richard Norton Smith had brought a lifetime of wisdom, insight, and storytelling verve to the life of a consequential president—Gerald R. Ford. Ford’s is a very American life, and Smith has charted its vicissitudes and import with great grace and illuminating perspective. A marvelous achievement!” -- Jon Meacham
From the preeminent presidential scholar and acclaimed biographer of historical figures including George Washington, Herbert Hoover, and Nelson Rockefeller comes this eye-opening life of Gerald R. Ford, whose presidency arguably set the course for post-liberal America and a post-Cold War world.
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.
Illustrated with sixteen pages of black-and-white photos, this definitive biography, a decade in the making, will change history’s views of a man whose warning about presidential arrogance (“God help the country”) is more relevant than ever.
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Historian Smith (On His Own Terms), the former director of the Gerald R. Ford Museum and Library, delivers an exhaustive account of Ford's life and presidency. Painting his subject as someone "who thought for themselves, did his homework," Smith tracks Ford's rise from the only child of an abusive marriage that ended just weeks after his birth in 1913, to standout college football player, freshman congressman from western Michigan, Minority Leader of the House of Representatives, replacement for disgraced vice president Spiro Agnew, and president following Richard Nixon's resignation in 1974. Devoting the bulk of the book to Ford's presidency, Smith meticulously details key moments, including the behind-the-scenes maneuvering to secure Nixon's resignation, negotiations over the 1975 Helsinki Accords with the Soviet Union ("Widely denounced at the time... now regarded as an important milestone on the road to European liberation," Smith contends), and the hard-fought battle to secure the 1976 Republican presidential nomination over Ronald Reagan. Though Smith makes a convincing case that Ford's affability and bipartisanship made him the right person to replace Nixon, the narrative sometimes sags under the weight of its voluminous detail. Still, this is a solid and revealing biography of an underestimated president.
