Gerald R. Ford
Author: Douglas Brinkley
THE "ACCIDENTAL" PRESIDENT WHOSE INNATE DECENCY AND STEADY HAND RESTORED THE PRESIDENCY AFTER ITS GREATEST CRISIS
When Gerald R. Ford entered the White House in August 1974, he inherited a presidency tarnished by the Watergate scandal, the economy was in a recession, the Vietnam War was drawing to a close, and he had taken office without having been elected. Most observers gave him little chance of success, especially after he pardoned Richard Nixon just a month into his presidency, an action that outraged many Americans, but which Ford thought was necessary to move the nation forward.
During his presidency, many people thought of Ford as a man who stumbled a lot -- clumsy on his feet and in politics -- but acclaimed historian Douglas Brinkley shows him to be a man of independent thought and conscience, who never allowed party loyalty to prevail over his sense of right and wrong. As a young congressman, he stood up to the isolationists in the Republican leadership, promoting a vigorous role for America in the world. Later, as House minority leader and as president, he challenged the right wing of his party, refusing to bend to their vision of confrontation with the Communist world. And after the fall of Saigon, Ford also overruled his advisers by allowing Vietnamese refugees to enter the United States, arguing that to do so was the humane thing to do. Brinkley also offers keen analyses of the Mayaguez incident and the Helsinki Accords, where Ford's steady and focused leadership played a key role in advancing American interests.
Brinkley draws on exclusive interviews with Ford and on previously unpublished documents (including a remarkable correspondence between Ford and Nixon stretching over four decades), fashioning a masterful reassessment of Gerald R. Ford's presidency and his underappreciated legacy to the nation.
The Washington Post - David Broder
Brinkley does full justice to those qualities of Midwestern goodwill exhibited by Ford all his life, and he excuses Ford's anger with Reagan and the right-wingers because he plainly shares Ford's preference for a more tolerant, pragmatic version of conservatism.
Foreign Affairs
Brinkley has written a decent and honest book about a decent andhonest man; more than that, Brinkley has managed to get beneath Gerald Ford's Midwestern reserve to give us a surprisingly engaging and accessible account of the most down-to-earth president since Calvin Coolidge. He is particularly good on Ford's congressional years, illuminating the political life of a Republican Party that seemed, for much of Ford's active career, doomed to perpetual minority status.
Brinkley's Gerald R. Ford is part of a series of short presidential lives edited by Arthur Schlesinger. The series is the latest and by no means the least of the contributions Schlesinger made to American studies during a long and extraordinary career. His generosity to rising generations of historians and his commitment to useful history that could inform contemporary policy debates in the service of democratic values were remarkable; he will be sorely missed. <
What People Are Saying
"A rock-hard moral core defined Gerald Ford. Unrattled by the speed of events or by their uneven consequences, Ford remained the steadiest of public men, certain of his course and confident in his ability to keep to it. He may have landed in the White House without planning to but he proved well prepared for the nation's highest office, intellectually as well as emotionally. Having never slogged through the mud of a presidential campaign, he arrived in the White House with neither an untoward gratitude for those who had supported him nor any lingering animosity toward those who hadn't. Instead, he had an unobstructed view of his enormous and widely diverse constituency, and his record in the White House was remarkably evenhanded. He left the presidency in far better shape than he had found it -- perhaps even healthier than it had been in decades."
--Douglas Brinkley on Gerald R. Ford
Go to: Whats Cooking America or Donna Dewberrys Designs For Entertaining
Hizbullah (Hezbollah): The Story from Within
Author: Naim Qassem
A unique insider's view of one of the most important political parties in the Middle East. The mandate of Hizbullah ("Party of God") is laid out here for the first time in English by a high-ranking insider.
Table of Contents:
| 1 | Vision and goals | 13 |
| 2 | Organization and public work | 59 |
| 3 | Key milestones in the history of Hizbullah | 87 |
| 4 | The Palestinian cause | 151 |
| 5 | Issues and stance | 187 |
| 6 | Regional and international relations | 235 |
| 7 | Hizbullah's future | 261 |
| App | Hizbullah's 1992 election programme | 271 |
No comments:
Post a Comment