Ambition, Pragmatism, and Party: A Political Biography of Gerald R. Ford by Scott Kaufman

Abstract

138 The Michigan Historical Review The Rieveschl and Girard Houses no longer exist. But the McLucas House remains, and gets its own chapter. Kawsky expertly weaves together the history and design of the house with excellent images, including drawings and photographs that make it easy to understand a visitor’s experience of this unique house. Although Kawsky can offer only a small portion of Girard’s “artistic mastery,” it is a dense one, told in an elegant and informative manner. Alexander Girard, Architect is a thin but lively and richly illustrated book with an engaging design that incorporates Girard’s color schemes and fonts. Readers interested in the growing literature on Michigan’s important midcentury design scene will find it a welcome addition to their libraries, while scholars will use the book as a basis for future studies of Girard’s architecture. Dale Allen Gyure Lawrence Technological University Scott Kaufman. Ambition, Pragmatism, and Party: A Political Biography of Gerald R. Ford. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2017. Pp. 448. Bibliography. Illustrations. Index. Notes. Cloth: $34.95. In Ambition, Pragmatism, and Party, his deeply researched political life of Gerald R. Ford, Scott Kaufman credits Ford’s presidency with unappreciated achievements in foreign policy and finds Ford himself to have been an able, honest, and effective leader. His attention to Ford’s many years representing Michigan’s Fifth Congressional District is a strength of this study, half of which is devoted to his career before August 8, 1974, when Richard Nixon resigned from office and Ford became the first unelected president of the United States. Born Leslie King, Jr., in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1913, Ford moved east with his mother, who was fleeing his abusive father. They settled in Grand Rapids with her parents. She married Gerald Ford, a paint salesman. Leslie began to be known as Jerry Ford, taking his stepfather’s name officially when he was twenty-two. Both parents instilled conservative values of character and hard work, reinforced by the Boy Scouts, which Ford loved, and football, at which he excelled, playing for the University of Michigan and receiving professional offers upon graduation. Kaufman organizes his book around three constitutive elements of Ford’s character: ambition, partisanship, and pragmatism. Of the three, the most striking was ambition, displayed when Ford challenged and Book Reviews 139 defeated Republican incumbent Bartel Jonkman, who was backed by the local Frank McKay machine, in 1948. Ford’s drive for success is startling. He delayed announcing his engagement to the divorcée Betty Bloomer for political purposes and showed up at his wedding in muddy shoes after a day of campaigning. Over the course of their marriage, he was frequently absent, in one year alone spending 280 days on the road, while Betty suffered through alcoholism and addiction to pain killers, spurred in part by the pressures of raising four kids on her own. His hard work paid off; by 1964, he had become the Republican House majority leader. Ford excelled not as a legislator but as a party leader, adept at winning the support of powerful mentors and mediating among contending factions. His career peaked during President Johnson’s second term, when he sharply attacked Johnson’s Vietnam War policy from the right, demanding the unshackling of air and naval power. “Americans wonder why North Vietnam has not been totally destroyed,” Ford declared, as had Berlin and Tokyo in World War II (p. 120). Ford presents a paradox, so agile and tough-minded in his opposition to Johnson, yet easily caricatured as a bumbling president—deemed by many to be “incompetent, indecisive, and unorganized,” with “no idea where he wanted to take the country” (p. 267). Plucked to be vice president after the resignation of Spiro Agnew, Ford assumed the top office promising healing, declaring that “our long national nightmare is over” (p. 178). His decision to pardon Nixon of all crimes relating to Watergate one month into his presidency, however, soured the good will many Americans held toward him. Ford was no bumbler. His limits lay in his wholly partisan worldview. He was unable to master the rhetorical formulas of conservatism that Ronald Reagan used so well, even as he espoused an...