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By Root 806 0

the loss of civility poisoning American politics. During his years on Capitol Hill and, subsequently, as president grappling with the demons released by Vietnam and Watergate, Ford had prided himself on seeking common ground. “It’s all right to be a partisan,” he told one youthful White House aide, “but not a zealot.” In part this was generational; like his youthful House colleagues Jack Kennedy and Dick Nixon, Ford’s pragmatic outlook was shaped by his World War II experiences, and by the subsequent Cold War consensus that subordinated domestic differences to the superpower rivalry. Ironically, when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, so did many of our self-imposed restraints. The Cold War gave way to Culture Wars, more intensely waged than disputes over economic or foreign policy, if only because the ground being contested involved values rather than numbers. Against this increasingly polarized backdrop, presidents as dissimilar as Bill Clinton and George W. Bush found their legitimacy disputed in terms bordering on the apocalyptic.

This wasn’t Gerald Ford’s style. His funeral would serve to remind his countrymen of a time, not so distant, when success in politics was defined as narrowing differences, not exploiting them. First things first. “Keep it simple,” Mrs. Ford remarked at an early planning meeting I attended, “and remember the family.” The Fords selected favorite verses of scripture to be read, and hymns that had special meaning for them. The marvelous mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves accepted an invitation to perform The Lord’s Prayer at Washington’s National Cathedral. Penciled in for the Grand Rapids church service was the Army Chorus. Though generally amenable to the program outlined by military planners, Ford was adamantly opposed to a horse drawn caisson on Constitution Avenue, or anywhere else. Efforts to change his mind met with a predictable stone wall of resistance. Not only did we remember the family; the family had its own defining memories. In lieu of the aforementioned caisson, the hearse carrying the former president’s remains would drive through Alexandria neighborhoods in which the Fords had once lived. Later it would pause at the recently completed World War II Memorial, affording veterans an opportunity to salute their colleague and former commander-in-chief.

Again breaking with tradition, at the Capitol the casket would enter the building on the House side, this in recognition of Ford’s quarter century pursuit of the one Washington job he really wanted—Speaker of the House. Once the period of public viewing concluded, he would leave by way of the Senate, a symbolic tribute to his unique status as a Man of the House who also presided, however briefly, over The Other Body. Among his Washington eulogists, Ford counter-intuitively wished to include a journalist. His original choice, Time’s Hugh Sidey, died before he could carry out his assignment. A worthy replacement was identified in Tom Brokaw, whose career as a White House correspondent coincided with the Ford presidency. By the time these plans were actually implemented, they seemed almost eerily prescient; rarely had Americans been so divided as at the end of 2006. The ceremonies attending the death of a president long out of office, and not much in the public eye of late, provided an opportunity to come together.

Michigan was to be a homecoming, with Air Force One flying low over the Ann Arbor football stadium where young Junie Ford had attracted notice from pro scouts. Greeting the plane’s arrival in Grand Rapids, the Wolverine band offered a solemn rendition of Hail to the Victors, the Michigan fight song that had briefly displaced Hail to the Chief in the autumn of 1974. That night over 60,000 people braved the January cold, in lines stretching two miles from the Ford Museum where the town’s favorite son passed his final night. Don Rumsfeld spoke at the concluding church service on January 3, but so did Jimmy Carter, recalling in moving words his unlikely friendship with the man he defeated in the 1976 election. (Anyone questioning