Gerald Ford

Gerald Ford led the country during a brief, but crisis-ridden period. The Watergate Scandal had acted as a wrecking ball, smashing trust in the presidency to a thousand pieces. The economy was being eaten away at by a terrifying combination of rising unemployment and increased prices. The US was being humiliated abroad by its failure in Vietnam. It was a terrible time to be an American. And yet, Ford proved to be a decent leader. In only 17 months in the White House, Ford diligently sojourned through the depressing problems staining his era and managed to do numerous great things, especially in terms of foreign policy.

Ford took office on August 9, 1974, amidst the ongoing Watergate Scandal. On May 28, 1972, an organization called the Committee to Reelect the President, founded by then-President Richard Nixon in 1970 to boost his odds in the 1972 election, sent burglars to an office in the Watergate complex owned by the Democratic Party. There, they were instructed to bug the office's phones. In doing this, the group hoped to be able to spy on phone calls exchanged by DNC officials and obtain incriminating information on them that could be used in the election. However, the bugging failed. So, the burglars returned on June 17, 1972, in an attempt to fix the issue. During this second break-in, a security officer named Frank Wills caught them and called the police, at which point they were arrested.

Many of the burglars were discovered to own address books containing the contact information of numerous White House and law enforcement officials. Two Washington Post journalists named Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein spent the summer and autumn of 1972 routinely urging additional investigation into this detail. Mark Felt, the deputy director of the FBI, then reached out to Woodward and Bernstein and informed them, using the pseudonym "Deep Throat", that numerous significant figures were involved in the break-in. The officials listed by Felt were then arrested.

One of the officials indicted by Felt - Alexander Butterfield - testified in court that Nixon himself had kept devices in the White House that recorded everything said there. In these recordings, Butterfield said, there was irrefutable proof that Nixon was involved in efforts to stifle investigations into the 1972 break-in. On July 24, 1974, following a brief Supreme Court case entitled Nixon v. United States, the judicial branch ordered Nixon to release the tapes. He complied on August 5 of that year and resigned 4 days later. With this, Gerald Ford became president.

He, Ford, entered the presidency as a despised figure. In fact, Ford wasn't even Nixon's original vice president. Spiro Agnew was Nixon's first vice president. However, in October of 1973, Agnew resigned amidst revelations about a series of financial scandals surrounding his time as governor of Maryland. Afterward, Ford was made vice president. On September 8, 1974, Ford pardoned Nixon, resulting in rumors that Nixon made Ford his vice president with the promise that he, Nixon, would resign and make Ford president in the process. In exchange, Ford would pardon Nixon.

While I obviously don't believe in the aforementioned rumors (they were debunked a long time ago), I do disagree with Ford's decision to pardon Nixon. Nixon needed to be punished for what he did. He suppressed investigations into an attempt to subvert democracy, which is one of the most abhorrent things a president has ever done. Not only did Nixon deserve to be prosecuted and imprisoned, but pardoning him also may have further damaged faith in the government. Nixon acting on his own would be devastating enough. But other politicians coming to his aide made it seem like the entire government was that corrupt and depraved. It was terrible for America's morale and cultural spirit. However, outside of that, Ford was a pretty good president.

Around the time that Ford took office, a separate scandal surrounding the CIA spying on US citizens. In response to this, Ford established a committee to help reduce this issue, something that he clearly deserves credit for.

Yet another crisis Ford inherited was the continual impact of the Oil Shock. On October 6, 1973, Anwar el-Sadat, the president of Egypt, worked with the Syrian military to invade Israel and spark a war that would show the Israeli government that continued tensions with Egypt were unsustainable. With this, the Yom Kippur War began. During the conflict, Nixon decided to support Israel. In retaliation, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, an organization of mostly-Arab countries with large oil reserves, stopped shipping oil to the US on October 17, 1973. Now, OPEC did lift the embargo, known as the Oil Shock, on March 18, 1974, but it continued to impact the economy.

Ford believed that the Oil Shock demonstrated how dangerous it was to have a US entirely reliant on foreign oil. So, Ford spent much of his presidency working to make the US more energy independent. While I dislike some of the methods he used to resolve this issue, such as repealing several regulations on the oil industry, I generally support this endeavor. Not only is the goal noble and important, but I support certain policies Ford implemented as part of his effort to decrease America's dependence on foreign oil, mainly the increase in tariffs.

In 1977, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty was set to expire. Signed by Nixon and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, this agreement limited the US and the Soviet Union to merely 2 missile launchpads. One could protect the capital, while the other could protect a storage facility containing other missiles. I actually consider this one of Nixon's greatest achievements. To prevent this statute from expiring, Ford met with Brezhnev in Vladivostock in late November of 1974. There, they brokered the Vladivostock Accord, which extended the 1972 treaty's terms to December 31, 1985. From there, the document required Soviet and American officials to meet after the 1985 expiration and draft a more permanent, over-arching arms limitation deal.

Similarly, Ford met with Brezhnev - alongside several other European and North American leaders - and signed the Helsinki Accords on August 1, 1975. This treaty was meant to create a shared set of values between the two sides of the Cold War, reducing tensions in the process. In the agreement, the signing countries pledged to work with one another on goals relating to science, humanitarianism, and economic development.

On May 12, 1975, troops affiliated with the military of Pol Pot's Cambodia attacked and captured an American ship called the USS Mayaguez. Ford then sent American forces to liberate the ship, successfully breaking Cambodian authority over the vessel on May 15, 1975.

Pushing aside his deregulation of the oil industry and decision to pardon Nixon, Ford had one other issue: His response to the Boston Busing Crisis. In the late summer of 1974, a judge in Boston, Massachusetts, implemented a policy to desegregate the city's schools. The judge's policy was to have black students who rode the bus taken to previously all-white schools and vice versa. The decision was extremely inflammatory and sparked riots across the city. Ford did nothing to quell these riots, fearing any federal action would violate states' rights.

Though Ford certainly had flaws, he was a good president. He extended the terms of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, signed the Helsinki Accords, liberated the USS Mayaguez, worked to reduce America's influence on foreign oil, and created a committee to purge spying from the CIA. Ford was a competent leader who did a lot of wonderful things for America in one of its darkest hours.