Gerald Ford

With the news of Gerald Ford's death, I was thinking of how he was one of the few presidents in my lifetime who were not despised by a number of Americans. I remember how many people in my hometown couldn't stand LBJ. A lot of people hated Nixon. A large number hated Reagan. Jimmy Carter, they didn't despise, but they had no respect for him. We know about how some people see Bill Clinton as the False Prophet and Bush 43 as the anti-Christ. But few people I knew during Ford's presidency had anything bad to say about him as a person or as a president.

The Nixon pardon outraged a lot of people I knew, but that didn't stick to Ford personally the way some acts by other presidents did. I was glad to hear about the pardon. I was ready to move on. Nixon was disgraced, and there wasn't much to accomplish by having a trial or whatever would have happened.