The Homegrown Decency of Gerald Ford

You could make too much of Ford's Midwestern upbringing -- as if someone were predestined by virtue of a Michigan or Ohio or Illinois birth with openness, candor and friendliness. That is a cliche burned into the nation's mind-set, along with notions that most Californians are supposed to be uber-hip and most New Yorkers fancy. What that upbringing might have given Ford was room to grow and little room to cry out. It gave him the cheeriness to do unexpected things, and he did them as simply as walking through someone's front door: He appointed William Coleman, a black man, as transportation secretary. It was not lost on blacks that Ford was the first Republican president to appoint a black as a Cabinet secretary, and it was not lost on blacks that the distinguished Coleman was not given the kind of job blacks usually got -- such as housing or health and human services. Coleman was the best individual Ford could find for the job. Ford presided over the swearing-in ceremony himself; it seemed a grandly decent and quietly historic thing to do.

He stood resolutely beside his wife, Betty, when she endured bouts with alcoholism. He encouraged her to talk about her disease. His family's demons, in time, rolled beyond the window. He blinked not an ounce of shame or embarrassment.

Politics, football, love, family. He warmed the bench at Michigan until he eventually won the job as starting center. There is a beautiful poem by James Wright, a Midwestern poet by way of Ohio. It speaks of things on the gridiron of Ford's life:

In the Shreve High football stadium,

I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,

And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,

And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,

Dreaming of heroes.

All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.

Their women cluck like starved pullets,

Dying for love.

Therefore, their sons grow suicidally beautiful

At the beginning of October.

And gallop terribly against each other's bodies.

The 38th president of the United States had galloped toward decency during his lifetime. Myths seemed to have meant little to him. In his memoirs, he recalled the afternoon he met his birth father during his teen years. It deeply affected him. The man had come through Grand Rapids with a pretty chippy; he idled into the small restaurant where his son was slapping burgers. They went for a ride. The words got in the way. "When I went to bed that night," Gerald Ford would come to write, "I broke down and cried."

A decent thing for a kid to do.