Brent Colton is a retired CIA operations officer now in the employ of the Creighton Corporation, a privately owned think tank that advocates various opinions on world issues, but it’s his clandestine job to solve the dirty problems for their private clients for a million dollar fee with no questions asked. When recovering stolen technology from a Vietnamese industrialist, Colton obtains evidence that he secretly partnered with a U.S. Senatorto rig the recent presidential election and elect him to the nation’s highest office.

A REMEMBRANCE OF OUR 38TH PRESIDENT
by Terry Heath, 2006

Gerald Ford, the Thirty-eighth President of the United States who served in that capacity from 1974 to 1977 and was the longest living ex-chief executive in American history, has died at the age of 93 and unless you are over forty or a student of politics then his name and legacy as our leader is a dim memory in the passages of time. He never sought the presidency through campaigning but inherited it by his appointment to the vice-presidency, then acceding to the top job by the resignations of those two officeholders in political scandals in the early 1970’s.

Ford was first elected to the House of Representatives in 1948 after heroic service in the U.S. Navy during World War Two. He was a Republican Party leader in that body of Congress until December, 1973 when he was selected by President Richard Nixon to replace Vice-President Spiro Agnew who resigned from that office in a bribery and tax evasion scandal. Ford then became the nation’s chief executive nine months later in 1974 when Nixon resigned his own position in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal once he faced certain impeachment on several charges of corruption by the House of Representatives.

He was also the last surviving member of the Warren Commission that investigated the assassination of President John Kennedy. Ford had always been the commission’s biggest booster and supporter of its findings even though a large percentage of Americans never truly believed the conclusions that a lone gunman committed the political crime of the century. The then congressman even wrote a book defending their conclusions that was based on the evidence presented to the commission by the FBI which proclaimed Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole participant in the murder of the 35th president on November 22, 1963 in Dallas and that Jack Ruby acted alone when he killed Oswald two days later on national television in revenge.

One of the recommendations of the panel that Congress later enacted and the states ratified as the 25th Amendment to the Constitution allowed a president to nominate a vice-president when that office becomes vacant upon the death or resignation of the previous occupant or the ascension of that individual to the chief executive’s position.

So it’s with much irony that WC member Gerald Ford became the first and so far the only un-elected national officeholder when he replaced Agnew as vice-president when Nixon’s first deputy resigned as part of a plea agreement following charges that Agnew accepted bribes from contractors when he was the governor of Maryland in the mid-1960’s. Then it was on August 9, 1974 that Ford was elevated to the top spot when Nixon resigned from that office and this one-time obscure congressman from Michigan was now the President of the United States.

His tenure was spent dealing with the recession the country was in following America’s concluded participation in the Vietnam War, a lingering gas shortage after Arab countries refused to sell oil to the United States for our support of Israel during their 1973 war with Egypt and Syria and being at the helm of the nation when South Vietnam fell to the communist controlled north in April, 1975; some fourteen years after we first send advisors to that southeast Asian nation to assist them.

The new chief executive ably served out the remainder of Nixon’s term despite previously being an outsider on administration policy and got stuck with most of Nixon’s personnel during his two and a half years in office. Even though he was the Republican Party nominee in 1976, despite a primary challenge from former California governor Ronald Reagan, he was defeated by Democratic Party candidate Jimmy Carter in the November election in a somewhat surprisingly close race since Carter campaigned as an outsider to capitalize on the voter’s newfound distrust of Washington and Ford had to defend his pardoning of Nixon of any crimes his predecessor had committed over the Watergate Hotel burglary scandal that, ironically, cost Ford his chance at a full term.

Ford’s main weakness upon entering high office was that he seemed to be a nice guy who was in over his head as president.

His critics claimed he was a naïve Boy Scout when it came to politics which, ironically, Ford was as he attained the rank of Eagle Scout as a teenager. His predecessors in the Oval Office apparently didn’t think much of Ford as a potential leader either. Lyndon Johnson once quipped that Ford’s alleged slow-wittedness was due to playing too many college football games for the University of Michigan without a helmet. And when Nixon was enmeshed in the Watergate scandal just after Agnew resigned and was looking for a new vice-president he joked to a visiting Nelson Rockefeller, ‘can you imagine Jerry Ford sitting in this chair?’

Ford never publicly commented when not one but two separate assassination attempts were made against him in 1975 by two women several weeks apart in California just after Rockefeller became his vice-president. Did he wonder why the two were trying to eliminate him and put Rockefeller into the White House? We will never know but it is curious that when he ran for a full four-year term in 1976 he selected Kansas U.S. Senator Robert Dole as his running mate and dropped Rockefeller from the ticket. Was it an attempt to get the more conservative Reagan supporters at that convention on his side or a message to those elitists behind the scenes that a Rockefeller would never become president?

What’s interesting is that Rockefeller died as a private citizen in 1979 so one can speculate that if Ford had been elected to that four year term and Rockefeller remained on the ticket would he have died in that same timeframe and yet another vice-president would have been needed to be selected via the requirements of the 25th Amendment?

1973: Agnew resigns as VP. Ford appointed as new VP by Nixon and the selection is approved by both houses of Congress.

1974: Nixon resigns as president. Ford takes oath of office as the 38th chief executive. Nelson Rockefeller is appointed as new VP.

1975: Ford survives two assassination attempts by two different women, Squeaky Fromme and Sara Jane Moore in a three week time-frame while on separate trips to California.

1976: Nixon long gone, Ford potentially dead. Rockefeller as the new president? We faced the possibility of having three presidents in a fifteen-month time frame without the benefit of an election with an elected Rockefeller potentially dying three years later of natural causes.

Four presidents who died in the 19th century had their vice-presidents succeed to office yet none were to be nominated for another term on their own. In the 20th century, all four vice-presidents who succeeded to office following the death of their predecessor were then elected to their own four-year term.

Only Ford, who was promoted to the presidency by the resignations of Agnew and Nixon, did not get a full term as the chief executive when he ran for re-election in 1976. Was it the results of his pardon of his predecessor or his membership in the Warren Commission and its report on the death of another presidential officeholder that most Americans still don’t believe is accurate? Or was the public demanding a change in leadership at that time in the aftermath of the revelations of the many Washington scandals of the 1970’s?

Ford was a decent man who was at the right place and time to become a rather ordinary president after the country endured all of the controversy, scandal and death of the nation’s three previous chief executives before him. It’s obvious he could never have gotten the nomination for president on his own directly from his position in the House of Representatives. His ascension to the presidency was fortuitous to his place in history and he ably served as a caretaker chief executive the best he could.

May he rest in peace.

Terry Heath California E-Mail readermail@terryheathbooks.com