5740. Gerald R. Ford, by Douglas Brinley (read 12 Mar 2021) This book, published in 2007, is part of the American President Series organized by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and is the first in that series I have read. I have now read one or more biographies of every American president except the Bushes and Trump and the current president This book is only 158 pages but really does a good job and I found every page good reading. I was never a fan of Ford while he was alive, and this book tells of his good and bad aspects but does a good job showing some of the good things about him, and of course what we have had since his time of Republican presidents it is clear Ford had some admirable qualities. In fact I suppose many Republicans today would say he was a RINO. He died in Rancho Mirage, Calif. on Dec 26, 2006, having been born July 14, 1913, in Omaha--I visited the place where he was born, though the house where he was born no longer exists. ( )

Kind of like his Presidency, this bio was short and to the point. I got in, got out and no one got hurt—with the added bonus that I didn’t have to wade through 1000+ pages to learn everything I needed to know about the only President that no one voted for. Most interesting to me was the cast of characters he surrounded himself with, men who would continue to haunt the halls of government for decades to come: George H.W. Bush as the Director of the CIA; Donald Rumsfeld as his White House Chief-of-Staff, then Secretary of Defense; and Dick Cheney as Chief-of-Staff. Washington D.C. is, indeed, a small town and our government an elite club. ( )

It's a tough assignment to write an interesting account of a presidency which most people consider very uninteresting, yet Brinkley succeeds handsomely. His narrative is a good reminder of just how tumultuous the Ford years were. His portrait of Ford is the familiar one; good-hearted, honest, hard-working, moderate everyman who was thrust into an impossible situation. Brinkley's larger theme is that Ford wanted the Republican Party to be a broad coalition in the Eisenhower-Nixon mode rather than the ideological party advocated by Goldwater and Reagan, though he does point out that during his congressional years Ford was a vehement defender of the Vietnam war and masterminded the quixotic campaign to impeach Justice William Douglas. As good as Brinkley's narrative is, his objectivity is belied by his final chapter, a dogged hagiography capped by the laughable assertion that Ford was a near-great president. Little in Brinkley's own narrative suggests that the Ford administration was anything more than a clique-ridden improvisation lurching from crisis to crisis under too much guidance from ambitious, contentious power players such as Don Rumsfeld, Henry Kissinger, James Schlesinger, George Bush, and Alexander Haig who were more interested in turf than helping Ford build coalitions.. ( )

This is a very clear and honest short appreciation of an important American life. ( )