News-Record.com

President Gerald Ford has died. He was 93. Click here for the early AP report.

I was less than eight months old when Ford took office, so I remember virtually nothing of his presidency. From my reading, his more than two years in office were a mix of the brilliant (guiding the nation past Watergate) and the boneheaded (saying in a debate "there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford administration.").

His contemporaries sometimes disagreed with his actions – pardoning disgraced former President Richard Nixon – but in the end decided his motives were pure. He answered to Congress, in person, to explain that pardon. And as president kept up a regimen of speeches and direct chats with the media that seems unfathomable even for lesser office holders like governors and senators today.

But what I am struck by listening to the news and reading up on him tonight is that he is remembered by and large as a fundamentally decent man. He did not need to be eloquent - though he sometimes was - or flawless - and he wasn’t – or universally beloved – he was a politician after all. But he was steady and straightforward in a time of crisis, judged in recent history as a trustworthy and decent steward of our democracy.

Would that all politicians could earn such an epitaph.

More: The Gerald Ford Presidential Library.