Gerald Ford and the Challenges of the 1970s

This book is a welcome study of an unusual American president. Elected neither to the presidency nor to the vice presidency, Gerald R. Ford held both offices between 1973 and 1977. It was a period of exceptional policy stress arising from political and intellectual turmoil, as Yanek Mieczkowski shows. The author organizes his study around consideration of federal policy responses to exceptionally high inflation coupled with high unemployment; the rapid rise in oil prices in 1973 before, during, and after the Yom Kippur war; and continuing crises in the Middle East, in Southeast Asia, and in relations with the Soviet Union. Ford's economic inheritance from Richard M. Nixon was fearfully bad: between Nixon's reelection to a second term in November 1972 and August 1974, he presided over an economy in which short-term interest rates rose from 4.77 percent to 8.0 percent and the rate of consumer price inflation rose from 3.41 percent to 10.95 percent. His second inheritance was much more positive: Ford began his term by expressing, in his vivid phrase about the ending of a long national nightmare, the relief of the nation that Nixon's presidency had ended and that a fresh start could be made under a politician unusual for having scarcely an enemy in government and for being in his character unusually close to middle America. Ford dissipated much of his support by pardoning Nixon just one month into his term. While in 1974 it seemed that Ford was unwisely attempting to protect Nixon, distance suggests that he was wisely attempting to protect the nation. Mieczkowski nonetheless argues that Ford's failing was less in his decision than in its manner and timing. Had it been delayed until congressional and popular opinion had been prepared, Ford might have been able to act seemingly in response to a gathering view that a pardon was necessary rather than (as it appeared even to some of his staff) peremptory. Poor timing and choreography damaged Ford, not least for risking his most valuable public resource—trust

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