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Also by Douglas Brinkley:

The Nixon Tapes, August 2014
Hardcover / e-Book
Cronkite, June 2012
Hardcover / e-Book
The Quiet World, January 2011
Hardcover
The Wilderness Warrior, August 2009
Hardcover
Gerald R. Ford, February 2007
Hardcover
The Great Deluge, May 2006
Hardcover
Parish Priest, January 2006
Hardcover
National Geographic Visual History of the World, November 2005
Hardcover
The Boys of Pointe du Hoc, May 2005
Hardcover
The Unfinished Presidency: Jimmy Carter's Journey to the Nobel Peace Prize, May 1999
Trade Size (reprint)

Gerald R. Ford
Douglas Brinkley

The "accidental" president whose innate decency and steady hand restored the presidency after its greatest crisis

Times Books
February 2007
On Sale: February 6, 2007
Featuring: Gerald Ford
224 pages
ISBN: 0805069097
EAN: 9780805069099
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography

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.

Many people today think 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Brinkley draws on exclusive interviews with Ford and on previously unpublished documents (including a remarkable correspondence between Ford and Nixon stretching over four decades), fashioning a masterful reassessment of Gerald R. Ford’s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.

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