Michael: Alright Kevin, quick thought experiment. I say "President Gerald Ford." What's the first thing that comes to mind? One sentence. Kevin: Oh, that's easy. The accidental president. The guy who pardoned Nixon and seemed to trip over every rug in the White House. A nice, kinda boring placeholder between the chaos of Nixon and the charisma of Carter. Michael: That is the perfect, textbook answer. It's also, according to the book we're diving into today, almost completely wrong. Kevin: Wait, really? I feel like that's the universally accepted version of the story. He was the Chevy Chase character on Saturday Night Live. Michael: He was, and that caricature stuck. But we're talking about Gerald R. Ford: An Honorable Life by Richard Norton Smith. And this isn't just some fan biography. Smith is a top-tier presidential historian, and this book is widely considered the definitive work that completely reframes Ford's legacy. It was even named one of the Wall Street Journal's Top 10 Books of 2023. Kevin: Okay, a definitive biography from a major historian. That's a heavy claim. So you're telling me the guy from Grand Rapids, Michigan, was some kind of secret political genius? You've got a high bar to clear today, Michael. Michael: I think the book clears it. It argues that Ford's perceived "ordinariness" was a mask for a shrewd, ambitious, and surprisingly bold leader. And the evidence is in the moments where he did the absolute last thing anyone expected.

Kevin: Alright, I'm listening. Where do we start? What's the first piece of evidence that shatters the 'clumsy placeholder' myth? Michael: We have to start with the decision that defined his presidency and, for a time, destroyed his popularity: the pardon of Richard Nixon. It was September 1974, barely a month after Ford took office. The country was baying for Nixon's blood. Kevin: And pardoning him was political poison. It looked like a corrupt backroom deal. Like, "I'll make you Vice President, and you pardon me when I get caught." Michael: Exactly. The public perception was that it was either corrupt or incompetent. But Smith uncovers Ford's private thinking. He told a White House visitor, and this is a direct quote, "Nixon really fucked up the pea patch." He then added, "It will cost me the '76 election, but I had to do it." Kevin: Whoa. Hold on. He knew it would cost him the election? He said that out loud? Michael: He knew. He was a creature of Congress, a man who lived and breathed polls and public opinion. He saw the numbers. And sure enough, after the pardon, his approval rating dropped 22 percentage points overnight. It was the single largest drop in the history of public opinion polling. He knowingly committed political suicide because he believed the country couldn't withstand the trauma of a former president on trial for years. Kevin: That's... not the action of a bumbling fool. That's a cold, calculated decision based on a principle, consequences be damned. That's a completely different kind of strength. It’s not about winning; it’s about ending the game. Michael: It's the ultimate "capacity for surprise," as the book's introduction calls it. And this wasn't a one-off. He was constantly doing things that defied his "nice guy" image. In 1975, he invited Senator George McGovern, the anti-war Democrat who had been basically blacklisted by previous presidents, to a White House dinner. Kevin: McGovern must have been floored. He was the arch-nemesis of the Nixon administration. Michael: He was. He told Ford, "Mr. President, I'm surprised you invited me. Neither Lyndon Johnson nor Richard Nixon ever did." And Ford's response is just perfect. He says, "That's why I asked you. The house belongs to everyone." Kevin: That's a power move disguised as a welcome mat. He's not just being nice; he's making a statement about his presidency being the opposite of the paranoid, enemies-list-keeping White House that came before him. Michael: Precisely. But my favorite story, the one that truly reveals the complex man behind the mask, involves his own campaign strategist, a blunt Californian named Stu Spencer. It's 1976, Ford is running for president in his own right, and he's just not a great campaigner. He's a bit stiff, a bit plodding. Kevin: The "un-exciting" factor. I can see that. Michael: Spencer tries to give him advice diplomatically, but it's not working. Finally, in the Oval Office, he just lets it rip. He says, "Forgive me, Mr. President, as a campaigner, you're no fucking good." Kevin: To the sitting President of the United States? In the Oval Office? Spencer must have been packing his bags. Michael: You'd think so. But Ford doesn't get angry. He doesn't fire him. He just calmly takes it. But here's the twist. A while later, the story appears in a journalist's book. Spencer is furious, thinking someone in the room leaked his incredibly crude remark. It turns out, Ford leaked the story himself. He thought it was hilarious and a great example of the kind of blunt advice he needed. Kevin: That's incredible. That's a level of self-awareness and security that is almost unheard of. He was so comfortable in his own skin that he was willing to be the punchline of his own story. He was in on the joke about his own public image. This is a much, much more interesting person than I thought.

Michael: Right? And that unique character, that blend of toughness and humility, didn't just appear when he became president. Smith argues it was forged over decades of public service. To understand why he could make those hard calls, the book takes us back to a single, seemingly ordinary week in June 1972. Kevin: This is just before the Watergate dam breaks, right? The calm before the storm. Michael: The absolute eye of the hurricane. Ford is the House Minority Leader. His life's ambition isn't to be president; it's to become Speaker of the House. He's working 70-hour weeks, constantly on the road, living by a simple credo he once gave as career advice: "I made everyone else's problems my problems." Kevin: So he's the ultimate constituent service guy. The man of the people. Michael: To an almost unbelievable degree. Smith tells this amazing little story from early in his career. A woman from the Daughters of the American Revolution was visiting D.C., fell, and broke her ankle. She had no way to get home. So Jerry Ford, a sitting Congressman, personally drove her all the way back to Michigan. Kevin: That's the 'nice guy from Grand Rapids' we all know. But how does that guy, the one driving injured old ladies home, square with the hard-nosed operator who pardoned Nixon? Michael: Because his integrity was deeply personal and pragmatic, not abstract or ideological. He believed in solving problems for people, one handshake at a time. His entire political world was built on trust and personal relationships. And then, on June 17, 1972, five men are arrested for breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate hotel. Kevin: And the first reports start trickling out. Michael: Ford hears that one of the burglars, James McCord, has ties to Nixon's reelection committee. So he does what he always does: he goes straight to the source. He meets with John Mitchell, Nixon's former Attorney General and current campaign chief, and asks him point-blank if the campaign had anything to do with it. Kevin: And what does Mitchell say? Michael: He looks Ford right in the eye and says no. A complete, bald-faced lie. Ford recalled it years later with this raw sense of anger, saying, "I was standing this far away from John Mitchell and he looked me right in the eye and he lied to me. That damn guy lied to me." You can feel the personal betrayal. Kevin: Wow. So his entire worldview, built on this foundation of personal trust and dealing straight, just collides head-on with this deep, systemic, cynical corruption. That must have been a profound shock for him. Michael: It's the central collision of the book. It's the honest man from Grand Rapids confronting a level of deceit he can barely comprehend. And it casts a shadow over the entire political landscape he inhabited. It even helps us understand one of the most tragic and bizarre footnotes of his presidency: the story of Oliver Sipple. Kevin: I saw that name. The book is dedicated to him. What's that story? Michael: It's absolutely heartbreaking. In September 1975, a woman named Sara Jane Moore points a gun at Ford in San Francisco. Out of the crowd, a man named Oliver Sipple, a decorated former Marine, instinctively lunges and deflects her arm as the gun goes off. He saves the president's life. A true, unambiguous hero. Kevin: An amazing act of bravery. He should have gotten a medal and a parade. Michael: He was hailed as a hero, for about 48 hours. Then the media, led by a prominent columnist, started digging. They discovered that Sipple, who was a respected figure in San Francisco's gay community, was gay. And they 'outed' him to the world. Kevin: Oh no. In 1975, that was a huge deal. Michael: A devastating one. His conservative, Midwestern family had no idea. They learned about his sexuality from the national news and promptly disowned him. His life spiraled. The heroism was completely forgotten, replaced by this sensationalized invasion of his privacy. He sued the newspapers but lost. The courts ruled his sexuality was 'newsworthy'. He died years later, alcoholic and alone, a man broken by the very media glare that should have celebrated him. Kevin: That's just brutal. To save a president's life and have your own life destroyed for it. It speaks volumes about the viciousness of the world Ford was operating in.

Michael: It does. And when you put all these pieces together—the tough Nixon pardon, the self-deprecating humor, the old-school integrity, the collision with Watergate, the tragic story of Oliver Sipple—you get this incredibly nuanced portrait. The book's central argument is that Ford's 'ordinariness' was actually his superpower. Kevin: How so? That sounds like a contradiction. Michael: In an era of imperial, paranoid, and criminal presidencies, the last thing America needed was another 'visionary' or a charismatic ideologue. It needed a reset. It needed a fundamentally decent man. A man whose first instinct was to solve problems, not create enemies. A man who could absorb a 22-point hit to his own approval rating because he thought it would heal the country. Kevin: He wasn't a placeholder; he was a national reset button. A constitutional circuit breaker. The book's title, An Honorable Life, really lands now. His honor wasn't about being flawless or exciting. It was about his willingness to do the hard, unpopular, and necessary thing when it mattered most. Michael: That's it exactly. He was the bridge back to normalcy. He cleaned up, as he once put it, "another man's dog." And he did it without fanfare and with a quiet dignity that, in hindsight, looks like profound strength. Kevin: It really makes you reconsider what we value in our leaders. We're so often drawn to charisma and bold promises, but maybe what we really need in a crisis is just... decency. Competence. A person who sees public service as a job to be done, not a throne to be won. Michael: That's the big, resonant question Richard Norton Smith leaves you with. What does true political courage look like? Maybe it's not the grand speech. Maybe it's the quiet, difficult decision that no one will thank you for. It's a powerful, essential read for understanding not just a forgotten president, but a pivotal moment in American history. Kevin: It's a fantastic reminder that sometimes the most compelling figures are the ones we think we already have figured out. We'd love to hear your thoughts. Does this change your view of Gerald Ford? Find us on our social channels and join the conversation. Michael: This is Aibrary, signing off.