Michigan mourners welcome Ford body
Moving quietly and solemnly through the moonlight, mourners in Michigan waited for a chance to file past the casket of Gerald Ford, welcoming home the 38th US president for a final time.
“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to pay tribute,” said Karin Lewis, 44, who brought her five boys, aged six to 15, to Ford’s presidential museum to pay their respects last night. “He meant so much to this community.”
Ford’s state funeral was to end this afternoon after a service at Grace Episcopal Church in East Grand Rapids. His body was to be interred during a private burial overlooking the Grand River, north of the museum on the museum grounds.
Donald Rumsfeld, who served in Ford’s cabinet as his chief of staff and as his defence secretary, was to deliver a eulogy.
Former President Jimmy Carter, who defeated Ford in 1976 but later became a close friend of his former opponent, and Richard Norton Smith, who used to be the director of the Ford museum and presidential library, also were scheduled to speak.
Yesterday, members of the public jammed streets and waved as Ford’s coffin was carried from the Grand Rapids airport, where it arrived following services at Washington National Cathedral.
“You were a paradoxical gift of remarkable intellect and achievement wrapped in a plain brown wrapper,” Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm said of Ford. “Welcome home to the people that you reflected so well when you were in Washington.”
Later, members of the public walked from the DeVos Place convention centre across a bridge over the Grand River to the Gerald Ford Presidential Library and Museum for a final salute.
Some wore formal suits and dresses. Others wore sweat shirts from University of Michigan, where Ford played centre on the Wolverines’ undefeated national championship college football teams of 1932 and 1933.
“I grew up in Grand Rapids and President Ford was our legacy,” said Bobbe Taber, 43, who now lives in the Kalamazoo area, but went to Grand Rapids to see Ford’s casket.
Michigan National Guard spokeswoman Lynn Chapp said 60,000 people were expected to walk by the casket from the time repose began around 6pm local time (11pm Irish time) yesterday until it was scheduled to end at 11am local time (4pm Irish time) today.
Lines snaked along several blocks in the city as people waited their turn last night.
The service today at his hometown church, which seats about 350, was to be much smaller than yesterday’s elaborate national funeral service in Washington, which drew 3,000 people.
President George Bush and his father spoke yesterday, as did NBC newsman Tom Brokaw and Ford’s secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, among others.
“In President Ford, the world saw the best of America, and America found a man whose character and leadership would bring calm and healing to one of the most divisive moments in our nation’s history,” President Bush said in his eulogy.
Bush’s father, former President George HW Bush, pierced the solemnity of the occasion by cracking gentle jokes about Ford’s reputation as an errant golfer. He said Ford knew his golf game was getting better when he began hitting fewer spectators.
Under the towering arches of the cathedral, Kissinger paid tribute to Ford’s leadership in achieving nuclear arms control with the Soviet Union, pushing for the first political agreement between Israel and Egypt and helping to bring majority rule to southern Africa.
“In his understated way he did his duty as a leader, not as a performer playing to the gallery,” Kissinger said. “Gerald Ford had the virtues of small-town America.”
Brokaw said in his eulogy that Ford brought to office “no demons, no hidden agenda, no hit list or acts of vengeance”, an oblique reference to the air of subterfuge that surrounded President Richard Nixon in his final days.
Ford’s athletic interest was honoured, too, in the capital and in Michigan. At the Grand Rapids airport that bears Ford’s name, the University of Michigan band played the school’s famous fight song, The Victors, as Ford’s flag-draped casket was transferred to a hearse.
Ford died aged 93 on December 26 at his home in Rancho Mirage, California.
Ford was appointed vice-president by Nixon in 1973 to replace Spiro Agnew, who resigned in a bribery scandal stemming from his days as Maryland governor. After Nixon resigned in 1974, Ford assumed the presidency for two and a half years.
Nixon resigned rather than face impeachment after he was implicated in a White House cover-up of a burglary at Democratic Party national headquarters in the Watergate apartment complex.
A month after taking office, Ford pardoned Nixon for any Watergate crimes he might have committed.
