Before They Were President, Day 4: Gerald Ford
Gerald Ford holds a unique distinction in American history — he is the only person to serve as both vice president and president without being elected to either office. But long before the Watergate scandal thrust him into the Oval Office, Ford lived one of the more quietly remarkable pre-presidential lives of anyone to hold that office.
He Wasn’t Born Gerald Ford
Ford came into the world on July 14, 1913, in Omaha, Nebraska, as Leslie Lynch King Jr. After his parents divorced, his mother remarried a paint salesman named Gerald Rudolff Ford, and young Leslie began going by Gerald Rudolph Ford Jr. — even though he was never formally adopted. At 22, in 1935, he made it official and legally changed his name, a tribute to his stepfather.
Eagle Scout, Football Star, and Rejected by the NFL
Ford earned the rank of Eagle Scout in August 1927, and to this day remains the only Eagle Scout to have become president of the United States. He went on to attend the University of Michigan, where he played center and linebacker well enough to attract the attention of two NFL franchises — the Detroit Lions and the Green Bay Packers both came calling with offers. Ford turned them both down.
Instead, he took a job as boxing coach and assistant varsity football coach at Yale University, where he also applied to law school. It was during his Yale years that Ford picked up a surprising side gig: modeling. He signed with two different agencies and landed on the cover of Cosmopolitan in 1942 — not a detail that typically comes up in history class.
Naval Service and a Quarter Century in Congress
After graduating from Yale Law School, Ford served in the U.S. Naval Reserve from 1942 to 1946. He then returned to Michigan and won election to the House of Representatives in 1948, where he would remain for nearly 25 years. His colleagues regarded him so highly that they took to calling him a “Congressman’s Congressman” — a reputation built on steadiness and integrity rather than flash. He spent the final nine of those years as House Minority Leader, and along the way served on the Warren Commission, investigating the assassination of President Kennedy.
From the House to the White House, Without a Single Vote
When Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned in late 1973 after pleading no contest to income tax evasion, President Nixon used the 25th Amendment to appoint a replacement. He chose Ford specifically for his reputation for honesty and openness. Ford was sworn in as vice president on December 6, 1973 — and then served only nine months in that role before Nixon became the first president in U.S. history to resign, making Ford president.
His presidency was defined by difficult circumstances: a struggling economy, the long shadow of Watergate, and his deeply controversial decision to pardon Nixon, which many historians believe cost him the 1976 election against Jimmy Carter.
The Klutz Who Wasn’t
Despite his extraordinary athletic background — the man turned down two NFL teams — Ford became famous in the public imagination as clumsy. A single stumble exiting Air Force One in Austria in 1975 was enough. Chevy Chase turned it into a recurring Saturday Night Live bit, and the caricature stuck. Henry Kissinger perhaps captured the contradiction best, describing Ford as “as close to a normal human being as we’ll ever get in that office” — meant as a compliment, even if history has often treated it as damning with faint praise.
Gerald Ford died on December 26, 2006, at his home in Rancho Mirage, California. He was 93 years and 165 days old — the longest-lived president at the time of his death, a record since surpassed by George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter. It was a fittingly understated final chapter for a man who stumbled into history and handled it with more grace than he was ever given credit for.