Within eight turbulent months in 1974 Gerald Ford went from the United
States House of Representatives, where he was the minority leader, to
the White House as the country’s first and only unelected president. His
unprecedented rise to power, after Richard Nixon’s equally
unprecedented fall, has garnered the lion’s share of scholarly attention
devoted to America’s thirty-eighth president. But Gerald Ford’s
(1913–2006) life and career in and out of Washington spanned nearly the
entire twentieth century. Ambition, Pragmatism, and Party captures for the first time the full scope of Ford’s long and remarkable political life.
The
man who emerges from these pages is keenly ambitious, determined to
climb the political ladder in Washington, and loyal to his party but not
a political ideologue. Drawing on interviews with family and
congressional and administrative officials, presidential historian Scott
Kaufman traces Ford’s path from a Depression-era childhood through
service in World War II to entry into Congress shortly after the Cold
War began. He delves deeply into the workings of Congress and
legislative-executive relations, offering insight into Ford’s role as
the House minority leader in a time of conservative insurgency in the
Republican Party.
Kaufman’s account of the Ford presidency
provides a new perspective on how human rights figured in the making of
U.S. foreign policy in the Cold War era, and how environmental issues
figured in the making of domestic policy. It also presents a close look
at the 1976 presidential election—emphasizing the significance of image
in that contest—and extensive coverage of Ford’s post-presidency. In
sum, Ambition, Pragmatism, and Party is the most comprehensive
political biography of Gerald Ford and will become the definitive
resource on the thirty-eighth president of the United States.
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