Gerald Ford (1913-2006)
Filed under the name Gerald · February 14, 2026
Gerald Ford became president right after Watergate and gets credit for helping restore some public trust in government at a moment when the country genuinely needed it, which strikes me as a specific, unglamorous kind of leadership — not the kind where you build something new and exciting, but the kind where you steady something that's shaking so bad it might not hold otherwise. I've driven through the town where he grew up, actually, on a route years back, and it's the kind of unremarkable Midwestern place that makes a person like that seem a little more understandable, less like a monument and more like somebody's actual neighbor who ended up in an extraordinary job. I hold two feelings reading about any president, honestly — respect for the weight of the job, and a trucker's healthy suspicion of anybody in that much power. But steadying a country instead of shaking it further, at the exact moment it needed steadying, that's a form of service that doesn't always get its due.