[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 153 (2007), Part 3]
[Senate]
[Pages 4132-4133]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                   HONORING PRESIDENT GERALD R. FORD

  Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, like his hero, Abraham Lincoln, Gerald 
Ford helped heal our Nation. His calm leadership and fundamental 
decency helped hold our Nation together at a time when the forces of 
war and scandal threatened to tear it apart.
  When he took the oath of office on August 9, 1974, President Ford 
declared, ``This is an hour of history that troubles our minds and 
hurts our hearts.'' During his Presidency, he worked to ease our minds, 
comfort our hearts, and restore our faith in our government.
  In his first official remarks as President, Gerald Ford promised 
America:

       In all my public and private acts as your president, I 
     expect to follow my instincts of openness and candor with 
     full confidence that honesty is always the best policy at 
     hand.

  Those were not just words to Gerald Ford, as he proved on October 17, 
1974, when he appeared voluntarily before Congress to give sworn 
testimony--the only time a sitting President has done so about his 
pardon of Richard Nixon.
  Gerald Ford believed that pardoning Richard Nixon was the only way to 
end the long national nightmare of Watergate. He also believed that it 
might end his political career. And he did pay a high price at the time 
in lost public approval and public trust.
  Over time, however, many people came to see the Nixon pardon not as 
an act of collusion, but of courage and conciliation. In 2001, the 
Kennedy Library Foundation awarded President Ford its John F. Kennedy 
Profile in Courage Award.
  Gerald Ford believed in hard work and duty to one's country. At the 
University of Michigan, he washed dishes at his fraternity house to 
earn money for college expenses. After graduating in the top quarter of 
his class from Yale Law School, he returned home to Grand Rapids, MI, 
to practice law--but Pearl Harbor was attacked. Like so many young men 
of his generation, Gerald Ford put his life on hold. He enlisted in the 
Navy and spent the next 4 years in the service.
  After the war, Gerald Ford decided to run for Congress and was 
supported by Michigan's legendary Senator Arthur Vandenburg, one of the 
architect's of American internationalism. His experience in World War 
II and his friendship with Senator Vandenberg helped turn him away from 
isolationism.
  As President, he described himself as ``a moderate in domestic 
affairs, a conservative in fiscal affairs, and a dyed-in-the-wool 
internationalist in foreign affairs.'' In the 2\1/2\ years of his 
Presidency, he ended America's involvement in the war in Vietnam. He 
helped mediate a cease-fire agreement between Israel and Egypt, signed 
the Helsinki human rights convention with the Soviet Union and traveled 
to Vladivostok to sign an arms limitation agreement with Leonid 
Brezhnev, the Soviet President.
  But what earned Gerald Ford the respect and gratitude of our Nation 
was not only what he accomplished but how he accomplished those things. 
He was a master of consensus-building, cooperation, and honorable 
compromise.

[[Page 4133]]

  It is notable that one of the first calls he made after becoming Vice 
President was to his old golfing buddy, Tip O'Neill. He set a standard 
for bipartisanship that we would all do well to follow.
  He was a good and honorable man who served this Nation well. He will 
be missed.

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