Summary of An Ordinary Man by Richard Norton Smith: The Surprising Life and Historic Presidency of Gerald R. Ford

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Summary of An Ordinary Man by Richard Norton Smith:The Surprising Life and Historic Presidency of Gerald R. Ford


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Richard Norton Smith's book is an eye-opening biography of Gerald R. Ford, whose presidency set the course for post-liberal America and a post-Cold War world. Smith recreates Ford's hardscrabble childhood in Michigan, his early anti-establishment politics, and his lifelong love affair with Betty Bloomer. Ford's administration bridged the Republican pragmatism of Eisenhower and Nixon and the more doctrinaire conservatism of Ronald Reagan. His introduction of economic deregulation and his embrace of the Helsinki Accords hastened the collapse of the Soviet Union.

• Language: English
• Publisher: XinXii
• Release date: Apr 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9783989110274

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Part I

Secrets

The Grand Rapids River divides the city it divides, with rival entrepreneurs of faith and commerce staked their claims to opposite shores. In 1825, a Baptist missionary named Isaac McCoy established an outpost on the west side of the stream called Owashtanong by a long-vanished tribe of Indian mound builders. In 1847, the first wave of Dutch émigrés reached West Michigan, practicing agricultural innovation and spiritual orthodoxy in a New Holland on the shores of Lake Michigan. The newcomers had a profound influence on the area’s civic culture, placing strict limits on government and taxes that underwrote it. In 1850, Grand Rapids boasted three thousand inhabitants, board sidewalks and a mayor paid $1 a year.

The Dutch insularity of Grand Rapids was expressed in a separate, faith-based school system and fierce resistance to cultural amalgamation. Prosperity in the furniture industry attracted a variety of nationalities, including Poles, Germans, Lithuanians, Italians, Greeks, Irish, Scandinavians and Syrians. The Great Flood of 1904 was the most dangerous season along the Grand, with heavy rains and fluctuating temperatures shattering the river's icy crust. Eight thousand workers lost their jobs due to the demand for Grand Rapids' signature product. Theodore Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, and Gerald Ford were all inspired by the Furniture City in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

At its peak, 85 percent of the local workforce was employed in cutting, gluing, painting and polishing furnishings for home and office. In April 1911, workers in sixty factories walked off the job, and order was restored when the Christian Reformed Church declared union membership incompatible with the true faith. Ford harbored deep personal motivations towards middle-class respectability, having been forced to drop out of school five years before his father's death. George R. Ford was a gifted tinkerer who invented a cleaning device for locomotive boilers. He moved to St. Louis in 1898 to defend his patent claims and chartered the Ford Automatic Boiler Cleaning Company.

His family remained in Grand Rapids. In 1909, George R. Ford was run down by a train in Granite City, Illinois. Mrs. Emma Tutton Loheide, half his age, had been posing as his wife and had been cohabiting for several months. The Ford family intervened to prevent the bogus bride from burying her soul mate in a local cemetery. Gerald Ford's father's adulterous conduct and the shame and hardship inflicted on his mother by a faithless mate led to his father's betrayal and the ironic consequence of his father's betrayal was to involve him with a divorcée reminded of her own dubious past.

Miss Dorothy Gardner, the daughter of Levi Gardner, had a penchant for ancestor worship and a belief in the value of educating women. She attended St. Mary's College in Galesburg, Illinois, where she made friends easily and impressed classmates with her unusual energy. Dorothy Gardner was introduced to Leslie Lynch King, the brother of her college roommate. He made a compelling first impression and boasted of his $6,000 salary as general manager of the Omaha Wool and Storage Company. His father, Charles Henry King, had moved to the Sand Hills of northwest Nebraska in 1884 and was a millionaire several times over.

He purchased a fifteen-room mansion at 3202 Woolworth Avenue and brought Dorothy Gardner following their wedding on September 7, 1912. The mother of the groom expressed displeasure with her new daughter-in-law and set the tone for a painful voyage of discovery. Dorothy King was accused of speaking to a strange man in a Portland hotel on September 27, 1912, and returned to her new home in Omaha pregnant. This raises the question of whether Leslie forced himself upon a bride who could hardly wait to leave her husband and seek refuge under her parents’ roof. In November 1912, a penitent Leslie persuaded her to rejoin him in Omaha, which only intensified her feelings of betrayal when Leslie broke his promise to provide a home of their own, away from Dorothy’s hateful mother-in-law.

King supplemented his salary by leeching funds from his father’s business, adding to the domestic tensions in the King household. In December 1912, Dorothy King left Omaha for Oak Park, Chicago, where her married sister Tannisse called home. On New Year's Day 1913, the couple attempted a reconciliation, but Leslie was still in a rage. On July 28, Leslie appeared in Dorothy's room waving a butcher knife and making threats against mother and child. King fought back, obtaining a court order requiring his inlaws to vacate the Woolworth Avenue premises by the first week of August.

In the end, King got more than he bargained for. Leslie King Jr. was born on July 30, 1913 in Omaha, Nebraska. His father, C. H. King, filed for divorce in district court and Dorothy countersued for alimony. At the hearing, C.

H. King accepted more responsibility than his son, paying $25 monthly child support and raising it to $100 in 1931. Leslie changed his residence to Wyoming and eloped to Reno, Nevada, with a woman he met at a New Year's Eve party in Los Angeles. On the subject of his earlier marriage, C. H. King observed a strict silence. Dorothy Gardner was remarried to Levi Gardner in December 1913, and her divorce settlement included custody of her infant son, Junie King.

When Levi was diagnosed with Bright's disease, Adele Gardner reached out to Dorothy and they were invited to share the Gardners' bungalow in Grand Rapids. Junior's short fuse earned him a reputation as naughty Junior Ford, and his playmates recalled him singlehandedly preventing a group of older children from scaling a backyard cherry tree. Junie compensated for his possessiveness by offering children rides in a wagon, often under the noses of their teachers. The most important details in this text are that Gerald Ford's mother, Dorothy King, taught him self-restraint and self-reliance through Scouting and competitive athletics. Ford also learned to govern himself before he governed others, and his animus was of the impersonal kind.

At a church social in 1915, he met Dorothy King, who was a regular attendee of St. Mark's Episcopal Church. At a church social in 1921, he met Leslie King, who was also a regular attendee of St. Mark's Episcopal Church. Gerald Ford was a practical joker and enthusiastic outdoorsman who regarded his civic obligations as seriously as his spiritual ones. He reached out to Dorothy's infant son, Junior King, with whom he established an emotional bond. After Levi Gardner's death in May 1916, Dorothy and Gerald exchanged vows and embarked on an extended trip east.

In July 1918, Thomas Ford was born, followed by Richard and James who came along three years later. As an infant, Tom contracted scarlet fever and was misdiagnosed as appendicitis, but recovered quickly. Junie Ford was encouraged by his father, Gerald Ford Sr., to pursue his athletic pursuits. His father, Leslie King, rejected Dorothy's request for an increase in monthly child support and threatened to have the boy half the time. The adult Ford attributed the latter to his ambidextrous nature and persistent efforts by his parents and teachers to make him exclusively right-handed.

It is possible that this condition, reported in less than 1 percent of the population, may have affected the adult Ford. The Fords lived in a three-story frame house at 649 Union Street for seven years until Junie was a senior in high school. His parents encouraged him to be a reader, and he read from the Oz books and Horatio Alger novels. Life on Union Street routinely tested his formula for success, as he had to shovel snow-covered sidewalks and driveways, mow lawns, and clean out garages. Year-round, he took his turn washing dishes and tidying up the kitchen.

Dorothy Ford was the wellspring of Gerald Ford's drive and unflagging energy. She was a doer, a faithful member of the Grand Rapids Collectors Club, and had charisma and a force of character. Her early defiance of convention gave him the chance to emulate Alger's boyish strivers, but left her vulnerable to neighborhood gossip. Dorothy set an example of broad-mindedness, implanting the generosity of spirit that was to find ultimate expression in her son's pardon of his White House predecessor. Gerald Ford's forgiveness was a quality he learned from his mother, Dorothy.

The Fords were regular churchgoers, praying to a loving God whose intervention in human affairs did not end on a Jerusalem hillside two thousand years ago. On the Sunday morning he announced the Nixon pardon, Ford attended a service at nearby St. John's Church. Dorothy also made sure no visitor to the Ford home left without a slice of pie, angel food cake or her locally famous molasses cookies. On Christmas Eve, she and Jerry Sr. invited everyone to their place for steaming cocoa and Christmas cookies.

Luck and Pluck

Gerald Ford was born into a wealthy family in East Grand Rapids, Michigan. His parents chose three high schools, Central, Ottawa Hills, and South High. Ralph Conger, Central's basketball coach, urged his parents to enroll their son at South High, which had a patchwork quilt of ethnic and racial diversity. Ford took an immediate liking to Don Penny, an irreverent Hollywood writer and humorist brought onto the White House staff to enliven the presidential speaking style. He ascribing the anti-Semitism around him to ignorance and resentment of classmates whose academic gifts inspired envy.

Junie Ford was a hardworking student who excelled in English, history, math, science, French, and spiritual pursuits. He was inspired by the Boy Scouts of America and was inducted into Grand Rapids Troop 15. His 1927 induction as an Eagle Scout was a turning point in his life, and he was publicly reintroduced as Gerald R. Ford Jr., despite no formal adoption or legal change of name. Jerry Ford was an unpaid assistant at Camp Shawondossee in Muskegon, Michigan. In 1929, he was named to the Honor Guard at Fort Mackinac, where he and seven other Eagle Scouts spent the summer.

Grand Rapids was entering its own twilight, with out-of-town buyers still crowded the Pantlind Hotel for the Furnishing Market. The automobile craze had begun to weaken Dutch Calvinism, and by the time Ford entered South High, three-quarters of Grand Rapidians owned a car. His automotive knowledge was on par with his musical gifts, but he threw a blanket over his overheated engine instead of the radiator. Jerry Ford was drawn to bipartisan foreign policy as a high school student, and was assigned the task of selecting a Cabinet for Herbert Hoover. His interest in athletics, especially football, was dwarfed by his political activity.

South High football coach Clifford Gettings had more influence on the adolescent Ford than his parents, and their relationship began casually on a grassless school playground one spring day in 1927. The game as played by Ford and his teammates required stamina and versatility as much as size and speed. There were no special teams reporting to Coach Gettings. Jerry Ford was a football player at South High School in Michigan. His coach, Coach Gettings, was known for his punishing work ethic and discipline.

He recognized a kindred spirit in Ford and encouraged him to think for himself and for his teammates. Ford's approach to the game reflected Gettings's philosophy of a team without stars and his collegial, grindit-out approach to politics. After a dropped pass cost South High the first game of the 1929 season, Ford organized a weeklong training camp in advance of his senior year. The fall of 1930 saw the worst economic downturn in Grand Rapids history. City Manager George Welsh launched a public works program that earned Grand Rapids a national reputation as "the city where everyone has a