Over the last 50 years, no president has been overlooked more than Gerald Ford.  He served as our president from 1974-1977 and is best known for the sudden and (according to many) ill-advised pardon of former President Richard Nixon.  I had my kids look at this picture of President Ford, and not one of them had any clue who they were looking at.  When I told them who he was, my daughter Alexis replied, “Who the heck is President Ford?”

I was very young when Ford served as president, and I have little memory of him as well.  Growing up, my brother and I had a metal trash can in our room that had on it a caricature of him swinging a golf club and yelling “Fore!”  In 1976, I do remember voting for him in the election held in my first grade class.  Ironically, I remember the results of that election were the same as the results of the national election:  Ford lost to Jimmy Carter.    That’s about all I remember about him.

I’m reading a fascinating book  by David Gergen called, Eyewitness to Power: The Essence of Leadership Nixon to Clinton.  Gergen served as an adviser to four presidents: Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Clinton, and in the book, he shares leadership lessons he has learned from each one.  Here are some of the lessons on leadership he learned while serving President Ford.

1. He loved his wife dearly and this endeared him to his followers.

One morning, the press watched him making breakfast for his wife, Betty, and not only were they impressed, but so was the rest of the country.  Columnists promoted the idea that any man good enough to make English muffins for his wife in the morning must be good enough to run the country.

Shortly after the inauguration, doctors found that Betty had breast cancer and immediately performed a radical mastectomy.  Hearing the news, Ford sat at his desk in the Oval Office and cried, later describing it as “the lowest and loneliest moment” of his White House days.

With Kennedy before him and Clinton after him, Ford’s love and devotion to his wife (which was not always easy as she struggled with devastating addictions) was a breath of fresh air.  His love and dedication to her spoke volumes about his character and endeared him to many who knew him.

2. He was a man known for telling the truth.

In our relativistic and cynical society, we have come to expect politicians to lie, but this was not the case with President Ford.  He believed that truth is the glue that not only holds government together but civilization as well.  His old nemesis, former President Johnson, after many disparaging remarks behind closed doors told Ford, “You and I have had a lot of head-to-head confrontations, but I never doubted your integrity.”

Gergen states that in his experience of over 30 years in the White House, every administration – save one – has on occasion willfully misled or lied to the press.  He claims that the exception to the rule was the Ford White House, claiming that many modern presidents have been congenital liars, but Ford was a congenital truth-teller.

3. He didn’t need to be president to be happy with his life.

Gergen claims that former presidents Johnson, Nixon, and Clinton needed to win so much so that their unhealthy hunger drove them to extremes that sucked the dignity out of their presidencies.  Ford, on the other hand, entered the presidency content with his life and was not enamored by the position.  Because he was comfortable with himself, he was comfortable having men and women around him who were brighter and more talented in their area of expertise than him, but that didn’t matter to him as long as they could perform well.  He was not intimidated by their success.

President Ford was a man of integrity, and no matter how hard people tried, they could not poke holes in his character.  Maybe this is why he was so unmemorable.  According to many people, his biggest guffaw was pardoning President Nixon for his crimes while in office.  However, Ford had – in his opinion – a very noble reason for doing it.  His conviction was that post-Vietnam America could not handle a long-drawn out trial of a former president.  It would be too damaging and too taxing to a country already reeling from the negative outcomes of the Vietnam War, and so he did what he thought was best for the country.

Tip O’Neill, the former Democratic Speaker of the House, put it well about his friend in his memoirs: “God has been good to America, especially during difficult times.  At the time of the Civil War, he gave us Abraham Lincoln.  And at the time of Watergate, he gave us Gerald Ford – the right man at the right time who was able to put our country back together again.”