Buried: Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum, Grand Rapids, Michigan
Thirty-eighth President - 1974-1977
Born: July 14, 1913, in Omaha, Nebraska
Died: 6:45 p.m. on December 26, 2006, in Rancho Mirage, California
Age at death: 93
Cause of death: heart disease
Final words: Unknown
Admission to Gerald R. Ford Museum: $7.00
Gerald Ford is the only man in American history to have reached the Oval Office without being elected as either president or vice president. He stood for election in 1976; after narrowly losing, Ford attended Jimmy Carter’s inauguration, then said good-bye to his staff. Setting out for the warm temperatures of Palm Springs, California, and a game with legendary golfer Arnold Palmer, he told reporters, “The presidency was hard, but I had anticipated it would be. I had seen presidents before. I had seen the tough jobs they had, the difficult decisions they had to make. So I knew it would be tough. But I have always liked long hours.”
Even before his presidency ended, Gerald Ford considered his legacy. On December 13, 1976, Ford wrote to the president of the University of Michigan, his beloved alma mater, and offered to give all his papers to the federal government, with the understanding that they would be housed in a campus library. He became the first president to donate his papers while still in office. On the last day of his presidency, nine vans filled with 8,500 cubic feet of Gerald Ford’s papers headed for Ann Arbor, Michigan.
The Ford Museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan opened its doors in 1981
The library opened in April 1981; the Gerald R. Ford Museum, located in Ford’s hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan, opened in September that same year. Today the library provides researchers with over 20 million documents relating to Ford’s presidency. The Ford Museum profiles the former president’s life and career with exhibits ranging from a 1970s disco-style theater and full-scale replica of the Oval Office, to the tools used in the Watergate break-in and a holographic White House permitting visitors to go “inside” rooms of the presidential residence. President and Mrs. Ford decided that they would be buried on the museum grounds.
This astronaut at the museum’s entrance represents Ford’s commitment to America’s space program
Gerald Ford continued to lead an active life after leaving the White House. He completed his memoirs, frequently contributed to the nation’s op-ed pages, and remained involved in Republican Party politics. In August 1999, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his inauguration, President Ford was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in a ceremony at the White House. Presenting the medal to President Ford, President Bill Clinton said, “When he left the White House after 895 days, America was stronger, calmer, and more self-confident. America was, in other words, more like President Ford himself.”
Mr. Ford died at his home in Rancho Mirage, California, on December 26, 2006, at the age of ninety-three, as our longest-living former president. Only Herbert Hoover had a longer post-presidential life. Mr. Ford’s official funeral ceremonies took place over five days, beginning with a public viewing in Palm Desert, California. A national day of mourning was declared by President George W. Bush as Gerald Ford’s body lay in state in the U.S. Capitol. A memorial service attended by the four living presidents—Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush—at Washington’s National Cathedral honored the former president with cannon and pealing bells. President Ford’s body was then flown to his presidential museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where 10,000 mourners stood in line for an all-night viewing of the presidential casket. A final memorial service was held at nearby Grace Episcopal Church, where he and Betty had been married, followed by internment at the museum.
Touring the Gerald R. Ford Museum or Library
The Gerald R. Ford Museum is located on the west bank of the Grand River in Grand Rapids, Michigan and is open to the public daily. The Ford Museum is open daily from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., except Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Day. Admission to the museum is $7.00 for adults, $6.00 for senior citizens, and free for children under age sixteen.
To reach the museum from Cadillac or Muskegon: Take Interstate 296/U.S. 131 South and exit at Pearl Street. Turn left on Pearl at the light to the museum entrance. Turn left into the parking lot.
From Lansing: Take Interstate 196 West, also known as the Gerald Ford Freeway. Take the Ottawa/Downtown exit and continue to Pearl Street. Turn right on Pearl Street and right into the parking lot.
From Kalamazoo: Take U.S. 131 North and exit at Pearl Street. Turn right onto Pearl to the museum entrance and north into the parking lot.
The Gerald R. Ford Library is situated on University of Michigan’s North Campus in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It is open Monday through Friday, 8:45 a.m. to 4:45 p.m., except federal holidays.
To reach the library: Exit U.S. 23 onto Geddes Road heading west. Geddes Road becomes Fuller Road. Follow Fuller until you reach Beal Avenue. Make a right turn onto Beal Avenue. The first driveway on the right is the entrance to the parking lot. The library has free parking but visitors need to obtain a permit from the front office.
For additional information
Gerald R. Ford Museum
303 Pearl Street NW
Grand Rapids, MI 49504-5353
Phone: (616) 254-0400
Fax: (616) 254-0386
www.ford.utexas.edu
Gerald R. Ford Library
1000 Beal Avenue
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
Phone: (734) 205-0555
Fax: (734) 205-0571
www.ford.utexas.edu
This piece of the Berlin Wall was given to Gerald Ford
“ . . . Ford had prided himself on seeking common ground. ‘It’s all right to be a partisan,’ he told one youthful White House aide, ‘but not a zealot.’”
—Richard Norton Smith
In the penultimate years of his life, Gerald Ford often decried the loss of civility poisoning American politics. During his years on Capitol Hill and, subsequently, as president grappling with the demons released by Vietnam and Watergate, Ford had prided himself on seeking common ground. “It’s all right to be a partisan,” he told one youthful White House aide, “but not a zealot.” In part this was generational; like his youthful House colleagues Jack Kennedy and Dick Nixon, Ford’s pragmatic outlook was shaped by his World War II experiences, and by the subsequent Cold War consensus that subordinated domestic differences to the superpower rivalry. Ironically, when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, so did many of our self-imposed restraints. The Cold War gave way to Culture Wars, more intensely waged than disputes over economic or foreign policy, if only because the ground being contested involved values rather than numbers. Against this increasingly polarized backdrop, presidents as dissimilar as Bill Clinton and George W. Bush found their legitimacy disputed in terms bordering on the apocalyptic.
This wasn’t Gerald Ford’s style. His funeral would serve to remind his countrymen of a time, not so distant, when success in politics was defined as narrowing differences, not exploiting them. First things first. “Keep it simple,” Mrs. Ford remarked at an early planning meeting I attended, “and remember the family.” The Fords selected favorite verses of scripture to be read, and hymns that had special meaning for them. The marvelous mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves accepted an invitation to perform The Lord’s Prayer at Washington’s National Cathedral. Penciled in for the Grand Rapids church service was the Army Chorus. Though generally amenable to the program outlined by military planners, Ford was adamantly opposed to a horse drawn caisson on Constitution Avenue, or anywhere else. Efforts to change his mind met with a predictable stone wall of resistance. Not only did we remember the family; the family had its own defining memories. In lieu of the aforementioned caisson, the hearse carrying the former president’s remains would drive through Alexandria neighborhoods in which the Fords had once lived. Later it would pause at the recently completed World War II Memorial, affording veterans an opportunity to salute their colleague and former commander-in-chief.
Again breaking with tradition, at the Capitol the casket would enter the building on the House side, this in recognition of Ford’s quarter century pursuit of the one Washington job he really wanted—Speaker of the House. Once the period of public viewing concluded, he would leave by way of the Senate, a symbolic tribute to his unique status as a Man of the House who also presided, however briefly, over The Other Body. Among his Washington eulogists, Ford counter-intuitively wished to include a journalist. His original choice, Time’s Hugh Sidey, died before he could carry out his assignment. A worthy replacement was identified in Tom Brokaw, whose career as a White House correspondent coincided with the Ford presidency. By the time these plans were actually implemented, they seemed almost eerily prescient; rarely had Americans been so divided as at the end of 2006. The ceremonies attending the death of a president long out of office, and not much in the public eye of late, provided an opportunity to come together.
Michigan was to be a homecoming, with Air Force One flying low over the Ann Arbor football stadium where young Junie Ford had attracted notice from pro scouts. Greeting the plane’s arrival in Grand Rapids, the Wolverine band offered a solemn rendition of Hail to the Victors, the Michigan fight song that had briefly displaced Hail to the Chief in the autumn of 1974. That night over 60,000 people braved the January cold, in lines stretching two miles from the Ford Museum where the town’s favorite son passed his final night. Don Rumsfeld spoke at the concluding church service on January 3, but so did Jimmy Carter, recalling in moving words his unlikely friendship with the man he defeated in the 1976 election. (Anyone questioning the depth of feeling between this political odd couple should have seen President Carter pacing the aisles of Air Force One while cradling Gerald Ford’s infant great-grandchild in his arms.)
In my own concluding remarks, I recalled the 2001 presentation to Ford of the John F. Kennedy Profiles in Courage Award in recognition of his politically-suicidal decision to pardon Richard Nixon. Eight years later, Ted Kennedy’s generous words on that occasion came back to me as Americans marked the senator’s passing and reflected on yet another historical chapter closed. More than mere bipartisanship, such linkages attest not only to the democracy of death, but to the lifeblood of democracy. They invite reflection on what is transitory and what is timeless. Can you think of a better definition of perspective?
—RNS
Richard Norton Smith at the Ford Museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan