Gerald Rudolph Ford Jr.

Former President Gerald R. Ford, who picked up the pieces of Richard Nixon's scandal-shattered White House but may have doomed his own chances of election by pardoning his disgraced predecessor, has died. He was 93. The nation's 38th president, and the only one not elected to the office or to the vice presidency, died at his desert home at 6:45 p.m. Tuesday. "His life was filled with love of God, his family and his country," his wife, Betty, said in a statement. Ford was the longest-living former president, surpassing Ronald Reagan, who died in June 2004, by more than a month. Ford's office did not reveal the cause of his death, which followed a year of medical problems. He was treated for pneumonia in January and had an angioplasty and pacemaker implant in August. Funeral arrangements were to be announced Wednesday. "President Ford was a great man who devoted the best years of his life in serving the United States," President George W. Bush said in a brief televised statement to the nation Wednesday morning. "He was a true gentleman who reflected the best in America's character." Former President Jimmy Carter described him as "one of the most admirable public servants and human beings I have ever known." Ford was an accidental president. A Michigan Republican elected to Congress 13 times before becoming the first appointed vice president in 1973 after Spiro Agnew left amid scandal, Ford was Nixon's hand-picked successor, a man of much political experience who had never run on a national ticket. He was as open and straightforward as Nixon was tightly controlled and conspiratorial. He took office moments after Nixon resigned in disgrace over Watergate and went into exile. "My fellow Americans," Ford said, "our long national nightmare is over. Our Constitution works. Our great republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule." And, true to his reputation as unassuming Jerry, he added: "I am acutely aware that you have not elected me as your president by your ballots. So I ask you to confirm me with your prayers." He revived the debate over Watergate a month later by granting Nixon a pardon for all crimes he committed as president. That single act, it was widely believed, contributed to Ford losing election to a term of his own in 1976. But it won praise in later years as a courageous act that allowed the nation to move on. The Vietnam War ended in defeat for the U.S. during his presidency with the fall of Saigon in April 1975. In a speech as the end neared, Ford said: "Today, America can regain the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam. But it cannot be achieved by refighting a war that is finished as far as America is concerned." Evoking Abraham Lincoln, he said it was time to "look forward to an agenda for the future, to unify, to bind up the nation's wounds." Ford became the first vice president appointed under the 25th amendment to the Constitution. He assumed the office on Aug. 9, 1974. The next morning, he still made his own breakfast and padded to the front door in his pajamas to get the newspaper. After the Watergate ordeal, Americans liked their new president _ and first lady Betty, whose candor charmed the country. At a joint session after becoming president, Ford addressed members of Congress as "my former colleagues" and promised "communication, conciliation, compromise and cooperation." But his relations with Congress did not always run smoothly. He vetoed 66 bills in his barely two years as president. Congress overturned 12 Ford vetoes. In his memoir, "A Time to Heal," Ford wrote, "When I was in the Congress myself, I thought it fulfilled its constitutional obligations in a very responsible way, but after I became president, my perspective changed." Some suggested the pardon was prearranged before Nixon resigned, but Ford, in an unusual appearance before a congressional committee in October 1974, said, "There was no deal, period, under no circumstances." The committee dropped its investigation. Ford's standing in the polls dropped dramatically when he pardoned Nixon. But an ABC News poll taken in 2002 in connection with the 30th anniversary of the Watergate break-in found that six in 10 said the pardon was the right thing to do. In 1976, Ford survived an intraparty challenge from Ronald Reagan, only to lose to Democrat Carter in November. In the campaign, he ignored Carter's record as governor of Georgia and concentrated on his own achievements as president. "Ronnie and I always considered him a dear friend and close political ally," Nancy Reagan said in a statement Tuesday. "His accomplishments and devotion to our country are vast, and even long after he left the presidency he made it a point to speak out on issues important to us all," she said. The decision to pardon Nixon won Ford a John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award in 2001, and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, acknowledging he had criticized Ford at the time, called the pardon "an extraordinary act of courage that historians recognize was truly in the national interest." Ford was undaunted even after the two attempts on his life in September 1975. Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, a 26-year-old follower of murderer and cult leader Charles Manson, was arrested after she aimed a semiautomatic pistol at Ford on Sept. 5 in Sacramento, California. A Secret Service agent grabbed her and Ford was unhurt. Seventeen days later, Sara Jane Moore, a 45-year-old political activist, was arrested in San Francisco after she fired a gun at the president. Again, Ford was unhurt. Both women are serving life terms in federal prison. Asked at a news conference to recite his accomplishments, Ford replied: "We have restored public confidence in the White House and in the executive branch of government." As to his failings, he responded, "I will leave that to my opponents. I don't think there have been many." Ford spent most of his boyhood in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He was born Leslie King on July 14, 1913, in Omaha, Nebraska. His parents were divorced when he was less than a year old, and his mother returned to her parents in Grand Rapids, where she later married Gerald R. Ford Sr. He adopted the boy and renamed him. Ford played center on the University of Michigan's 1932 and 1933 national champion football teams. He got professional offers from the Detroit Lions and the Green Bay Packers, but chose to study law at Yale, working his way through as a football coach and boxing coach. Ford got his first exposure to national politics at Yale, working as a volunteer in Wendell L. Willkie's 1940 Republican campaign for president. After World War II service with the Navy in the Pacific, he went back to practicing law in Grand Rapids and became active in Republican reform politics. His stepfather was the local Republican chairman, and Michigan Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg was looking for a fresh young internationalist to replace the area's isolationist congressman. Ford got twice as many votes as Congressman Bartel Jonkman in the Republican primary and then went on to win the election with 60.5 percent of the vote, the lowest margin he ever got. He had proposed to Elizabeth Bloomer, a dancer and fashion coordinator, earlier that year, 1948. She became one of his hardest-working campaigners and they were married shortly before the election. Betty Ford remained one of the country's most admired women after the couple left the White House. She was hospitalized in 1978 and acknowledged having become addicted to drugs and alcohol she took for painful arthritis and a pinched nerve in her neck. Four years later she founded the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, a substance abuse facility next to Eisenhower Medical Center. The Fords had three sons, Michael, John and Steven, and a daughter, Susan. Ford was the last surviving member of the Warren Commission, which investigated the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin. ___ Associated Press writer Harry F. Rosenthal, who retired from the AP Washington bureau, contributed to this report. ___ On the Net: Gerald Ford presidential library site: http://www.ford.utexas.edu/