The Exploration of a Controversial Decision, with Ford Biographer Richard Norton Smith and Board Trustee Hank Meijer
Gerald Ford’s pardon of his predecessor, Richard Nixon, was one of the greatest acts of political courage in postwar America. It was also one of the most controversial.
As Richard Norton Smith writes in An Ordinary Man, “Overnight, Ford’s approval rating dropped 22 points, a descent unmatched in the history of public opinion polling.”
“It will cost me the ’76 election, but I had to do it,” said Ford.
Privately, RNS writes, Ford revealed that he wasn’t forgiving Nixon so much as trying to forget him; more precisely, to redirect his energies, and the country’s attention, toward a rapidly deteriorating economy, as well as escalating tensions around the world.
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About Richard Norton Smith
RICHARD NORTON SMITH is a nationally recognized authority on the American presidency and a familiar face to viewers of C-SPAN, as well as The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.
Following graduation from Harvard in 1975, he worked as a White House intern and a speech writer for Massachusetts Senator Edward Brooke. In 1979 he went to work for Senator Bob Dole, with whom he collaborated on several volumes of autobiography and political humor.
Between 1987 and 2001, Mr. Smith served as Director of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum in West Branch, Iowa; the Dwight D. Eisenhower Center in Abilene, Kansas; the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and the Reagan Center for Public Affairs in Simi Valley, California; the Gerald R. Ford Museum and Library in Grand Rapids and Ann Arbor, Michigan respectively.
Much in demand as a speaker, in 2009 Smith was invited by Congress to be one of two historians addressing it on the two hundred anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth. Earlier, millions of television viewers heard him deliver the final eulogy at Gerald Ford’s Michigan funeral, a role he repeated at Betty Ford’s request when she was laid to rest beside her husband in 2011. Twice a year he personally leads historical tours (www.presidentsandpatriots.com) emphasizing American presidents and history rarely found in the text books.
About Hank Meijer
HANK MEIJER is executive chairman of Meijer, Inc. in Grand Rapids. He joined the family retail business at the age of eleven as a grocery clerk. After serving as a reporter for Detroit-area newspapers he became editor and later publisher of a weekly newspaper in Plymouth, Michigan. He rejoined Meijer in 1979 as assistant advertising director.
His first book, a biography of his grandfather, Hendrik Meijer, appeared in 1985. His second, a biography of Senator Arthur Vandenberg, was published in 2017 by University of Chicago Press.
Hank is vice-chairman of the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation. He also serves on the executive committees of the Food Marketing Institute and the National Constitution Center. He is a member of the University of Michigan President’s Advisory Group, the Ford School of Public Policy board of advisors, The Henry Ford board of directors and the Mackinac Island State Parks Commission. He is also trustee of the Kettering Foundation.
