in full Gerald Rudolph Ford, Jr. orig. Leslie Lynch King, Jr.
born July 14, 1913, Omaha, Neb., U.S.
38th president of the U.S. (197477).
While he was still an infant, his parents were divorced; his mother later married Gerald R. Ford, Sr., who adopted the boy and gave him his name. He received degrees from the University of Michigan and Yale Law School (1941). He joined the Navy during World War II and served in the South Pacific, attaining the rank of lieutenant commander. He served in the U.S. House of Representatives for 25 years (194873), becoming Republican minority leader in 1965. After Spiro Agnew resigned as vice president in 1973, Richard Nixon nominated Ford to fill the vacant post. When the Watergate scandal forced Nixon to resign, Ford became the first president who had not been elected to either the vice presidency or the presidency. A month later he pardoned Nixon; to counter widespread outrage, he voluntarily appeared before a House subcommittee to explain his action. His administration gradually lowered the country's high rate of inflation by slowing down the economy, though at the cost of a severe recession (197475) and high unemployment. Ford had a tense relationship with the Democrat-controlled Congress, vetoing more than 50 bills (more than 40 were sustained). In September 1975 he was twice the target of assassination attempts. In the final days of the Vietnam War , he ordered an airlift of 237,000 anti-communist Vietnamese refugees, most of whom came to the U.S. The public's revulsion at the events of Watergate contributed to his narrow defeat by Jimmy Carter in 1976.