'Jerry Ford Would Be Heartsick About What’s Happened to His Party'

President Gerald Ford

Detroit News columnist Neal Rubin asks historians what Michigan's only president, Gerald Ford, would have thought about today's GOP and the partisan bickering in Washington. As you might expect, they say Ford would not be pleased.

“Jerry Ford would be heartsick about what’s happened to his party,”  journalist and author Thomas DeFrank, who is a keeper of Ford’s flame and informed interpreter of his legacy, tells Rubin. “But he’d be even more heartsick about the animosity and virulence that’s destroyed any semblance of bipartisanship in Washington.”

Rubin writes:

I asked Elaine Didier if she could imagine Michigan’s only president trading petulant insults with the contenders in the Republican debates.

“No,” she said.

I asked whether Gerald R. Ford, 38th in a line of succession that dates back to George Washington, would be despairing of the dysfunction that has the Senate majority refusing to even consider contemplating a prospective Supreme Court justice.

“Yes,” she said.

Then the director of the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library & Museum added a few words of her own.

“Dismayed, dispirited, disappointed,” she said. “This is not what he would believe in.”