Gerald Ford was an accidental president who got his job because a former Maryland governor, Vice President Spiro Agnew, was found to have taken bribes during his days in Annapolis, and President Richard Nixon, who had replaced Agnew with Ford, quit because he was about to be impeached.
Ford died Tuesday, three decades after he left office.
Some Marylanders who knew Ford remembered him as a decent and honorable man who helped heal a nation.
“It?s been interesting that he?s survived to the age of 93 and maintained a wonderful reputation over all these years,” said former Maryland Republican Sen. Charles McCurdy Mathias Jr., who served with Ford in the House of Representatives from 1961 to 1968. “I knew him well.”
“He was one of the young reformers at the time,” said Mathias, now 84 and living in Chevy Chase.
He remembers the day Ford, a Michigan congressman, defeated the much more conservative House Minority Leader Charles Halleck to become GOP leader. “It was a very close vote,” said Mathias, who celebrated with Ford that night at his Virginia home.
Mathias called Ford?s brief 2 1/2 years as president “a very constructive period. There was serious rebuilding to be done and he managed to do that.”
Asked about Ford?s full pardon of Nixon ? often seen as Ford?s greatest political mistake ? Mathias repeated Ford?s own reasoning. “I think he felt that if he did not pardon Nixon, that there would be a trial [replaying the Watergate scandal], and he wanted to avoid that,” Mathias said.
Former Rep. Helen Delich Bentley, R.-Md., met Ford in the 1960s when she was a Sun reporter covering the maritime beat.
Nixon appointed Bentley as chairman of the Federal Maritime Commission, and when her appointment was up in 1975, Ford “wanted to let me know that I was going to get tarred and feathered in the Senate” if he reappointed her, but he was willing to do it, she said. She chose not to seek reappointment.
“President Ford was very thoughtful, very considerate, very compassionate and had the highest ranking of integrity,” Bentley said. “He healed the nation at a very crucial time. He was the right guy at the time to put America back ontrack.”
Ford appointed Jervis Finney, Gov. Robert Ehrlich?s counsel, as U.S. attorney for Maryland, where he oversaw the prosecution of another Maryland governor, Marvin Mandel.
“He was obviously a wonderful person,” Finney said of Ford.
