It was as though nothing had changed. Gerald Ford was still surrounded by his loving family. His coterie of top aides were all huddled together. David Hume Kennerly was still scurrying, camera in hand, after his favorite subject.
But there were, of course, some key differences as the life of the nation’s 38th president was celebrated Tuesday in Washington. Betty Ford and the four Ford children were now holding on to each other for support as they grieved for a lost husband and father. Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Henry Kissinger met their old boss not in the Oval Office, but in a biting wind outside his hearse. Kennerly this time was not chasing the president on the tarmac at Andrews, but hurrying down the left-side aisle of the majestic National Cathedral hoping to get one final shot of the flag-draped coffin at the end of the service.
America’s political class does frequently gather in January, but it is usually later in the month, for presidential inaugurations. On Tuesday, the country’s elite came together for a closing of a chapter, not an opening. And they bade farewell in a way that “the man from Grand Rapids,” as President Bush eulogized him, would have found fitting.
An Episcopalian with a reverence for the dignity of the office in which he served for 895 honest days, Ford was honored with a funeral suffused with high-church formality and the pageantry of the presidency.
But Ford’s “understated” manner, as both the former President Bush and Kissinger described it, also shone through. This modest son of the midwest was honored in plain words kept short. The former University of Michigan football player was, as Tom Brokaw put it, the consummate center — “a position that seldom receives much praise.”
“But he had his hands on the ball for every play and no play could start without him. And when the game was over and others received the credit, he didn’t whine or whimper.”
So a humble man who rose to grand circumstances was sent home — simply yet powerfully. A local parish rector offered the homily, but his tribute was buttressed by the praise of presidents. The Lord’s Prayer — most common of prayers was heard — but it was flourished by the voice of a mezzo-soprano. And though the people in the pews responded with that most familiar of affirmations, the amens came from the lips of giants in government, military, media, and business.
This bipartisan Who’s Who caucused in a way that the former House Minority Leader would have envied. Surely Ford smiled when he looked down to see his old-rival-turned-friend Jimmy Carter seated next to Lynne Cheney. Or when former Senator Alan Simpson (just one of at least five members of that establishment of the establishment, the Iraq Study Group, to show) ambled into the sanctuary alongside Norm Ornstein. Certainly, somebody who chose a reporter to give one of his eulogies would have loved the site of so many journalists coming not to file a story, but off the clock and without notebooks to honor a friend and a source whose “word was good,” as the 41st president captured it.
Just the same, the politician who rose to the top of his party on both sides of Pennsylvania Avenue would’ve understood — and probably appreciated — when, after the friends and family had left the church, hundreds of hands reached into pockets and purses to retrieve BlackBerries that had been respectfully turned off. After all, in just two days there would be a swearing-in of a new Congress and new Speaker. And in a few weeks, a much-anticipated State of the Union by another president facing his share of challenges at home and abroad would be given.
Thanks in no small part to Gerald R. Ford, the continuity of our politics charges on.
– Jonathan Martin is a reporter in Washington, D.C.