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Warm Eulogies On a Windy Winter's Day
Gerald Ford's body was taken from the Capitol yesterday morning. Several hundred bundled-up spectators gathered there to see him off.
(By Gerald Martineau -- The Washington Post)
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Alma Powell described Ford as a man "of great decency and kindness. He was a good man. That says it all about him."
Former vice president Walter Mondale paused on a cathedral sidewalk to say that Ford "was a wonderful man, wonderful president. Old friend of ours. We wanted to be here to honor him."
Former House speaker Newt Gingrich, looking warm in a black overcoat, said Ford "personified the Grand Rapids, Michigan, world. I think he never left that world. He really very much enjoyed serving his country. He enjoyed politics. But he was never too pretentious, never saw himself as bigger than the guy that Grand Rapids sent to Washington."
Former Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney also seemed unfazed by the weather. Ford "was a great friend of Canada's," he said. "On a personal level, he was a delight to be with."
Bundled in a top coat, retired Army Gen. Alexander M. Haig Jr., who was Ford's chief of staff, said of Ford: "I loved him dearly and respected him immensely."
Ford served 25 years as a Republican congressman from Michigan before he became Richard Nixon's vice president in 1973, succeeding the disgraced Spiro T. Agnew, who had resigned. He became president in 1974 when Nixon was forced to resign in the wake of the Watergate scandal. In one of his early acts as president, he issued a pardon absolving Nixon of any Watergate-related crimes -- a decision that helped cost him the 1976 election.
Across the street from the main entrance to the cathedral, Gladys Lanier, a military chaplain assigned to the 980th Engineer Battalion in Austin, brought a half-dozen roses for the man she called a "beloved commander in chief."
They were bright yellow, for the golden years of the Ford presidency, said Lanier, who was in town visiting injured soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
"He was a man who represented grace in a time when we were not very forgiving," the chaplain said.
Moments later, the face of Betty Ford, from the back of a limousine, flashed by Lanier and hundreds of other onlookers assembled behind steel barricades.
Waving the bouquet at the motorcade, Lanier watched as Ford and other members of the Ford family were whisked past. "I wish I could give it to them," she said.
Nearby stood Joyce Buchanan, 63, a London-based flight attendant for United Airlines who spent the last hours of a Washington layover waiting in the cold for a glimpse of the Ford motorcade.
