A Ford In Your Future
The dog days of August will be brightened when the new Gerald Ford stamp goes on the market on the 31st. Nostalgic swooning for the liberator of East Timor will echo through the empty streets of Washington, with Stephen Hess leading the band.
Never has the Nation’s need to feel good about itself felt so good, or will feel.
The Washington Post mentions that the Ford family chose dead August, passing up the chance to issue the stamp on Ford’s July birthday. But we know where the Ford’s will be in July:
How much presidential greatness can the market bare? The Ford family is determined to know.
The biggest chunk of executive effluvia since the notorious Jackie Kennedy vacuum cleaner sale goes on the block in July, and the excitement is palpable. One expects the piles of golf-wear, but you don’t get a crack at a Plexiglas [engraved!] storage box from Lucile Ball everyday.
The offerings provide a window into the swanky seventies of Jerry and Betty Ford, a time when a signed Peter Max coffee table book was a plausible gift. Long playing records by Marvin Gaye distract you from the absence of gifts from Richard Nixon, although Nelson Rockefeller is represented.
The two residences would have to be wall to wall china cupboards to hold all the hideous crystal and commemorative plates they’re selling. The one hundred thirty four mostly coffee table books on sale would take up less space, but they include seemingly any possible book an author ever dedicated to either Ford, and one of Betty’s Readers Digest Condensed Books. It’s not surprising the family would choose to unload some of these dogs, but where has it been all these years?
Could this be merely the teaser for the deluge to follow Betty’s death?
Jerry’s Kids
We are often told that like Presidents “growing in office,” presidential museums somehow worm their way from the grasp of the Ex and his followers and become almost real museums, splorin’ controversies ‘n such. Twenty five years on the Ford museum appears to be still at least holding hands with the past.
With so little time in office, much of it cleaning up Nixon’s messes, the Ford administration seemed then and the museum now to grasp any chance to tell a nice story. So set aside the dead millions and the damaged survivors of Southeast Asia and recall a happy time, when Saigon fell but America saved the children!
The museum is recalling 1975’s “Operation Baby Lift”, a project to withdraw Vietnamese orphans, or simply available children, from Saigon before it fell. The first flight crashed, killing hundreds of children and damaging survivors by oxygen deprivation in a plane never designed for carrying passengers. But hundreds of others were brought out. The effort was controversial at the time, but the museum is mounting a celebration.
Other issues beckon. Henry Kissinger’s Ford funeral oration broke new ground in creative remembrance, claiming Ford “sparked the initiative to bring majority rule to southern Africa, a policy that was a major factor in ending colonialism there.” Others might recall that Ford and Kissinger’s effort to ally with South Africa in it’s Angola intervention was only prevented by the Democratic Congress blocking it.
The Ford Legacy: tiny, tiny White House
The death of a leader often prompts a look back, a renewed appreciation for their role in the Nation’s life. So it is with Gerald R. Ford.
The museum of his former CIA Director is now displaying a miniature White House whose creator claims Jerry asked him to build it as part of the heal-a-thon which was the Ford Administration.
