By Jane R. Elgass
“There is no higher honor for a man than to have a school bear his name, especially when it is dedicated to public service,” former President Gerald R. Ford told a Hill Auditorium audience Sept. 12.
“This is a very high honor and a wonderful occasion in my life. I am excited by the plans for the future and new partnerships among the Ford Library, School and Ford Museum.” Noting that he had lectured at more than 200 schools since leaving government, Ford added, “I can’t imagine a better place to hang around.”
Ford, the 38th president of the United States and a U-M graduate, addressed about 2,500 people during a ceremony making official the naming of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. The audience included many members of his family and associates from his term as president in 1974–77. Ford succeeded to the post following the resignation of Richard Nixon.
Commenting on the importance of public policy and policy-making, Ford said that he senses “a longing for community among us that is especially strong in the younger generation. It is not long before they will be tested.
“Your America does not look the same as mine,” he told the students in the audience, “but I hope the new generation will never lose faith in America, whose greatest weapons are moral, not military.”
Today’s young people, he said, will have to address entitlement issues, such as social security and prescription drugs. “Health care is a human priority,” he noted, adding that the current presidential campaigns have put these issues at center stage. “We are being treated to more substantive issues than before.”
Optimistic about policy process in the future, he cited several lessons learned from his many years in public service:
Keynoting the naming ceremony was Henry Kissinger, secretary of state in 1973–77 during the Ford administration and winner of the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize.
Kissinger gave the audience an inside look at the sense of Ford as president, citing his skills as a thoughtful negotiator and his integrity, as well as explaining the context in which Ford had to operate.
Ford’s presidency, Kissinger said, was during “one of the most tragic periods in American history,” with a demoralized administration after Nixon’s
resignation and in the aftermath of Watergate; adversaries questioning the country’s role as a defender of freedom; and allies uncertain where we were headed.
“The integrity of his convictions and his conciliatory nature” allowed Ford to “overcome the tragedy as if no other course were possible,” Kissinger said. Ford “inherited a crisis of society, the worst crisis since the Civil War.”
Kissinger also noted the different perspectives brought to public service by academicians and policy-makers.
Those outside the policy-making arena can choose their subjects, and return to the library and start over again if it they don’t like it. Policy-makers, on the other hand, are unable to choose their subjects and always are under pressure.
“You get an eerie feeling at the end of the day,” he explained, faced with phone calls to return, documents to review. One has to decide which ones to neglect, he said, “which to add to your list of enemies (mine was never short),” and what things you can let go and hope there is no flare-up.
“The most difficult problem is to separate the urgent from what may be important in the future. The urgent always has a constituency and priorities are always shelved.”
One of Ford’s toughest decisions related to disarmament, Kissinger noted. There were hopes that if there were a call for unilateral disarmament that the Soviet Union would follow suit. Ford had to reject that because failure could not be risked. “This is what a president faces,” he said.
“We are a uniquely blessed society,” he continued. “We’ve had no powerful enemy until recently; we have not had to conduct policy with the imminent threat of danger.”
A president, Kissinger said, must bear the burden of the gap between realities of decisions and public sentiment. “The public does not forgive leaders for disasters. Those of us under Ford will never forget the way he handled [the disarmament crisis].”
Kissinger offered another glimpse of the only U.S. president from Michigan, relating some of the final days of the pullout of American forces from Vietnam on April 30, 1975.
In the last two months, Ford was concerned about only one issue—rescuing as many Vietmanese who had staked their lives on the United States as possible. Ford made a “historic decision,” Kissinger said, in deciding to do a gradual withdrawal of Americans, and take along as many Vietnamese people as possible each day. Ultimately, Kissinger said, Ford saved 150,000 lives.
Remembering a phone conversation, Kissinger said that as the Saigon airport was under fire he pressed for “pulling the plug.” Ford however, resisted, noting that some 2,000 people still were at the airport, wanting to find some way to get them out.
“The last helicopter left one hour before the North Vietnamese entered Saigon, and one million people were sent to concentration camps.”
The challenge today, the former secretary of state said, is to work with overlapping generations who have different world views and perspectives, to find a way to distill wisdom from knowledge. Ford, he noted, “identified big problems and reduced them. What more can you say about a national leader?”
Gifts to the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy
In her address, Dean Rebecca Blank acknowledged donors of gifts to the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy that total $6.6 million. The School is undertaking a $30 million fundraising campaign.
The donors are:
