Gerald Ford:Gerald Ford, who has died aged 93, will be remembered for exposing an extraordinary constitutional weakness unforeseen by the founding fathers of the United States. Having been a mediocre congressman, he went on to fill the country's two principal executive posts - vice-president and president - without the benefit of a single electoral vote.
When voters were eventually given a chance to legitimise his presidency in 1976, he became the first White House incumbent in 44 years to be thrown out of office. Opinion polls showed that a critical factor had been his decision, almost as soon as he succeeded his disgraced patron Richard Nixon, to issue the former president a "full, free and absolute pardon for all offences against the United States" committed during the Watergate cover-up, concealing the links between a burglary at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate Hotel, Washington, and the White House.
There has been endless speculation whether this pardon was part of a deal to persuade Nixon to abandon his rearguard fight against impeachment. Certainly there were well-attested, if tangential, discussions on the subject between the vice-president, Ford, and the White House chief of staff, Alexander Haig. But the consensus is that, even as his tenure crumbled, Nixon remained confident that his influence over Ford would stop him facing trial.
Ford was not Nixon's first choice as vice-president when Spiro Agnew was forced out of office in 1973 for corruption. The president wanted one of his closest political allies, former Texas governor John Connally, to take over, but he was warned of insuperable opposition in Congress where, under the terms of the recently adopted 25th amendment, any nominee required confirmation by a majority in both houses.
So, after a review of a wide variety of candidates ranging from governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York on the Republican left to senator Barry Goldwater on the party's right, Nixon settled for the minority leader in the House of Representatives.
He did so to ensure an easy confirmation - which he got. But, according to former White House chief of staff HR Haldeman, Nixon also calculated that a House familiar with Ford's inadequacies would never risk presidential impeachment, since that would put Ford into the Oval Office. Henry Kissinger acknowledged in his memoirs that he made a similar judgment at the time.
Alexander Butterfield - Haldeman's White House deputy who revealed to a startled Senate committee Nixon's habit of taping his conversations - reminisced in 1983 that the president had always had the minority leader under his thumb. "He was a tool of the Nixon administration, like a puppy dog. They used him when they had to - wind him up and he'd go 'arf 'arf."
When he was born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1913, his parents named him Leslie King. They were divorced when he was still an infant and, after his mother had moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan and married a paint salesman, Leslie's name was changed to that of his stepfather, Gerald Rudolph Ford.
He gave differing accounts of his feelings when he accidentally met his natural father at the age of 17 and discovered he had been adopted. At times, he said it had not had any particular impact, but at others he commented that he had felt very bitter comparing the affluent life of his natural father with the poverty of his upbringing in the Ford family.
At the age of 18, he gained a football scholarship to the University of Michigan and ended his time there as the university's star player. In 1935 he moved to Yale to work his way through its law school, graduating in 1941 just as the US entered the war. He volunteered for the navy and spent most of his active service in the South Pacific, rising from ensign to lieutenant commander.
After the war he resumed his legal career, but with the clear intention of making his way in politics. In 1948 he stood for Congress in the third district of Michigan, gaining invaluable support in the Republican primary from the state's long-serving and influential senator, Arthur Vandenberg.
Taking an internationalist line in a solidly Republican seat containing a community of Dutch-origin isolationists, Ford beat the sitting member by a margin of two to one and was repeatedly re-elected as the Grand Rapids representative for the next 25 years.
He built up an impressive record of flat-earth conservatism. He voted against federal aid for education and housing, repeatedly resisted increases in the minimum wage, tried to block the introduction of medical care for the elderly and consistently fought any measures to combat pollution. He supported virtually all increases in defence spending. One of his few deviations from the classic right-wing agenda was to support Lyndon Johnson's civil rights legislation.
Ford had a mixed record as minority leader. He was responsible for persuading between 140 and 190 wayward Republican members to vote the right way in a political culture where party discipline counts for little.
Most of the time he delivered between 85 per cent and 95 per cent of them but, since the House had an overwhelming Democrat majority while he was there, his efforts had little practical impact.
He often showed an extraordinary lack of political grasp, attacking president Lyndon Johnson for putting up interest rates without apparently understanding that the decision had been taken by the wholly independent Federal Reserve board. And, at the time of the 1968 Tet offensive in Vietnam, when the US already had 500,000 troops fighting in the country, he told an election strategy meeting that the White House's best response was "to Americanise the war".
Apart from the furore raised by the Nixon pardon and two bungled assassination attempts in California in 1975, one of them by a disturbed follower of the mass murderer Charles Manson, there was little to remember about Ford's presidency. For the most part he retained his predecessor's key staff and they carried on the Nixon administration's policies. The Helsinki Agreement on security and co-operation in Europe was signed under Ford in 1975, but all the crucial groundwork had preceded him. Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev invited him to a summit meeting in Vladivostok in November 1974, at which the two agreed to pursue further strategic arms limitation. But nothing concrete was achieved for years.
Domestically, he was faced with rampant inflation and the highest unemployment rate since the Depression. There was also an energy crisis following the 1973 Middle East war.
The seal was finally set on his presidency in the 1976 campaign against Jimmy Carter. In one of their televised debates, he offered the unbelievable judgment that "there is no Soviet domination of eastern Europe". It brought home sharply to his audience how slim was his understanding of the world he was supposed to lead. A few weeks later, a virtually unknown southern governor was heading for the White House to close one of the odder chapters of American history.
For a time after his defeat Ford remained surprisingly influential within the Republican party and there was even a bizarre proposal at the 1980 convention for him to be Ronald Reagan's running mate so they could share the presidency. But that was a nine-hour wonder, after which he retired to the Californian sunshine. He continued to campaign for Republican candidates for many years, initially insisting on sizeable charitable donations to his presidential library and museum for such appearances.
He married Elizabeth Warren, a model and fashion co-ordinator who had studied dance with Martha Graham, in 1948. Betty Ford attracted respect for the candid way she spoke about abortion, feminism and the mastectomy she underwent in response to breast cancer while in the White House. She became dependent on prescription drugs and alcohol and sought treatment for these addictions in 1978. Four years later she gave her name to the celebrated centre for drug and alcohol rehabilitation in California.
She survives her husband, as do their children Michael, John, Steven and Susan.
Gerald Rudolph Ford: born July 14th, 1913; died December 26th, 2006