Gerald Ford, 1913 - 2006.

Former President Gerald R Ford, who was thrust into the presidency in 1974 in the wake of the Watergate scandal but who lost his own bid for election after pardoning President Richard M Nixon, has died.

James M Naughton and Adam Clymer in the New York Times.

Updated through 12/30.

(Sex still had a good name during the Ford Administration. Betty Ford had been a footloose dancer for Martha Graham and announced at the outset of the administration that she and Gerald intended to keep sleeping in the same bed.... The paradise of the flesh was at hand. What had been unthinkable under Eisenhower and racy under Kennedy had become, under Ford, almost compulsory. Except that people were going crazy, as they had in ancient Rome, either from too much sex or from lead in the plumbing. Ford, a former hunk, got to women in a way Nixon hadn't. Twice, I seem to remember, within a few weeks' time, a female went after him with a gun; Squeaky Fromme was too spaced to pull the trigger, and Sara Jane Moore missed at close range...)...

In that dear dying movie house, whose name was Rialto, with its razored plush seats and flaking gilt cherubs, my three fuzzy-headed cherubs and I saw The Godfather: Part II and Jaws. Both terrified me and Daphne, though the boys pooh-poohed us. By the time of Jaws, Andrew was big enough, with a driver's license, to be humiliated by going to the movies with his father. And though Jaws packed them in, up into the raised loge seats and the precipitous balcony, the Rialto's fate was sealed; within months it went X-rated.

John Updike's narrator, Alfred Clayton, in Memories of the Ford Administration.

Update, 12/29: Mr Fish: "Pardon Envy."

Update, 12/30: Writing in Slate, both Christopher Hitchens and Timothy Noah (twice) call for an end to the hagiography.

Posted by dwhudson at December 27, 2006 2:28 AM