Gerald Ford: The Emotionally Intelligent President

THE EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE OF GERALD FORD
Ford had "guts" in the way that counts ... an emotionally stable and mature man, he was willing to put the common good before his personal good, and acted with courage and authenticity.

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The reports continue ... from cbs, "The Underappreciated President": "Ford was a genial, likeable man, not entirely guileless but still an antidote to Richard Nixon, whom he replaced as president. Ford saw the best in people and assumed that even his political adversaries — he insisted he had no enemies — usually had good intentions. Nixon saw his opponents as sinister. Nixon was paranoid. Ford wasn't. His appealing personality —his openness, his unperturbed reaction to critics, his cheerfulness and warmth — was a necessary factor in suturing the wounds left by the bitter political battles over Watergate and Vietnam. But imposing his personality on the nation wasn't sufficient for the task.

"That's where Ford's guts came in. The fallout from the pardon, which Ford issued a month into his presidency, was predictable. His approval rating was instantly cut in half — from the 70s to the 30s. His election to a full term in 1976 became problematic at best, impossible at worst. And, as expected, he lost to Jimmy Carter narrowly in the 1976 race. Ford knew the political downside of the pardon. But he went ahead anyway, and it had an extraordinarily benign effect in two ways. The pardon spared the nation the trauma of bringing a former president to trial, a polarizing drama that would have lasted for years. And it allowed Ford to govern without the distraction of a Nixon prosecution. Absent the pardon, Ford would have been a crippled caretaker in the White House...

"[Ford] was a moderate who got along famously with Democrats, especially the crusty conservatives from the South and West. He felt strongly, as others did in that era, that politics should stop at the water's edge. In other words, he believed the foreign policy pursued by presidents, whether Republican or Democrat, should have bipartisan support. But bipartisanship in foreign affairs had died in Vietnam. ..."

"Ford was more or less a small government conservative. His favorite saying in speeches was: 'A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.'

"It was two decades before Ford's success as president began to be appreciated. When presidential scholar Fred Greenstein of Princeton developed a half-dozen non-partisan, non-ideological measures for judging modern presidents, he found that Ford scored surprisingly well. Greenstein labeled Ford "underappreciated." Ford's greatest strength, Greenstein wrote in his book "The Presidential Difference," was his "emotional intelligence." This is the quality of emotional soundness that allows a president to avoid distractions, not be intimidated by his high office and its obligations, and to take criticism and even policy defeats with equanimity. Greenstein wrote: "Ford's own remark about himself upon assuming the vice presidency in December 1973 was that he was 'a Ford, not a Lincoln.' In the second half of the 1970s, it was more to the point for the nation that he was not an emotionally roiled Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon." Read the full article HERE.

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