An Ordinary ManThe Surprising Life and Historic Presidency of Gerald R. Ford
Available Now
A decade in the making, based on hundreds of interviews and thousands of documents, this is the definitive life of America’s 38th president. Full of surprises, historical revelations, and intimate details from the Warren Commission to Watergate to the Nixon pardon, the fall of Saigon, and the epic Ford-Reagan battle for the soul of the GOP… a gripping narrative that’s sure to invite a reappraisal of the “accidental” president whose decency and decisiveness look better and better with the passage of time.
“So few people knew that I was not Jerry Ford’s son in Grand Rapids … and we sure never talked about it in our house.”
”Dancing is discovery, discovery, discovery” - Martha Graham, credited by her student, Betty Ford, as one of the three most influential women in her life (the others her mother and Eleanor Roosevelt).
”Don’t ever tell me again what a nice goddamn guy Jerry Ford is” So observed a bitterly disappointed Republican House Leader in January, 1965, after “good old Jerry” ousted him in a closed door cliffhanger.
“You can’t pull a bandage off slowly” Ford said in defending his controversial pardon of Richard Nixon. Here, accompanied by presidential speechwriter Bob Hartmann, the look on Ford’s face says it all. It is moments away from his Sunday morning bombshell that led journalist Carl Bernstein to inform his Watergate partner, Bob Woodward,”The sonofabitch just pardoned the sonofabitch”.
”The type of man I could establish a great rapport with” Ford spoke the truth regarding Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, shown here during their first meeting in June, 1975. Their mutual trust led to the Sinai II agreement, separating Egyptian and Israeli forces and foreshadowing the landmark Camp David Accords brokered three years later by President Jimmy Carter.
Ford and Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev failed to conclude an arms control deal when they met at Helsinki in August, 1975. But they achieved something even more important… rejecting harsh criticism from right and left, Ford signed the Helsinki Accords, seen today as a major milestone on the road to human rights and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union.
“It is a little startling to look down to shake hands and you see a hand with a gun in it… Say a little prayer and the Lord will take care of you”. So Ford described his encounter with Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, a disciple of mass murderer Charles Manson, outside the California State Capitol in Sacremento on the morning of September 5, 1975.
Few would have imagined it on the morning of January 20,1977, but onetime rivals Ford and Carter would become close friends, their post-White House relationship unmatched since the autumnal reconciliation of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.
Advance Praise
John Meacham
John is a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, author of the New York Times bestsellers Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House, Franklin and Winston, and Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush
Bob Schieffer
Journalist & Anchor, CBS News
Take a Moment to
Explore Richard's work.
AUTHOR &
HISTORIAN
Richard Norton Smith is a nationally recognized authority on the American presidency and a familiar face to viewers of C-SPAN, as well as The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Following graduation from Harvard in 1975, he worked as a White House intern and a speech writer for Massachusetts Senator Edward Brooke. In 1979 he went to work for Senator Bob Dole, with whom he collaborated on several volumes of autobiography and political humor.
Smith’s first major book, Thomas E. Dewey and His Times, was a finalist for the 1983 Pulitzer Prize. He has also written An Uncommon Man: The Triumph of Herbert Hoover (1984), The Harvard Century: The Making of a University to a Nation (1986), Patriarch: George Washington and the New American Nation (1993), The Colonel: The Life and Legend of Robert R. McCormick, which received the prestigious Goldsmith Prize awarded by Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School, and has been described by Hilton Kramer as “the best book ever written about the press.” In October 2014 Random House published On His Own Terms, a monumental life of Nelson Rockefeller described by Douglas Brinkley as “one of the greatest cradle to grave biographies written in the past 50 years,” and tagged in advance by Amazon as one of the fall’s Twenty Big Books in Biography and Memoir.
Between 1987 and 2001, Mr. Smith served as Director of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum in West Branch, Iowa; the Dwight D. Eisenhower Center in Abilene, Kansas; the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and the Reagan Center for Public Affairs in Simi Valley, California; the Gerald R. Ford Museum and Library in Grand Rapids and Ann Arbor, Michigan respectively.
In December, 2001 Mr. Smith became director of the new Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. There he supervised construction of the Institute's $11.3 million permanent home and launched a Presidential Lecture Series and other high profile programs. In October, 2003 he was appointed the first Executive Director of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, a four building complex in Springfield, Illinois. The Library opened to the public in 2004 and the Museum opened the next year.
Much in demand as a speaker, in 2009 Smith was invited by Congress to be one of two historians addressing it on the two hundred anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth. Earlier, millions of television viewers heard him deliver the final eulogy at Gerald Ford’s Michigan funeral, a role he repeated at Betty Ford’s request when she was laid to rest beside her husband in 2011. Twice a year he personally leads historical tours (www.presidentsandpatriots.com) emphasizing American presidents and history rarely found in the text books.
EXPLORE OUR PAST WITH RICHARD
Discover the advantages of traveling on one of our guided, personally hosted, small group tours. Each of our two annual tours are hosted and led by renowned author and presidential historian Richard Norton Smith.
INVITING
Solo Friendly
Whether you're newly single or, perhaps, your companion just isn't into history as much as you are, solo travelers will find our tours fun and enjoyable, all while discovering new places and meeting new friends. And don't feel like you'd be the odd one out... our tours are comprised of roughly half doubles and half singles. As an added service, should you wish to be matched with another solo traveler, we will be more than happy to try to find you a roommate.
GREAT PEOPLE
Join "the Club"
Our deluxe motor coach tours are designed with your comfort and enjoyment in mind, and our small group setting creates a much more intimate, personal setting when compared with other tours who attempt to fill their motor coaches to capacity. In fact, many of our guests are repeat participants (more than 90 of our guests have joined us on six or more tours!). This, combined with a shared interest in the history being experienced, makes for an unusually relaxed, fun and friendly atmosphere. As a result, many of our patrons have begun calling us "their Travel Club".
C-SPAN
As Seen on TV
Our host, Richard Norton Smith, was C-SPAN's in-house historian, where he was responsible for such long form series as Presidential Libraries: History Uncovered, The Contenders, and Influence and Image: America's First Ladies. C-SPAN viewers may have seen one or more of our tours featured over the past several years. C-SPAN has been along with us on several past trips, and has broadcast segments on their history channel, C-SPAN 3.
MAY 2023
Featured Tour
MAY 2023 | EIGHT DAYS IN GILDED AGE AMERICA
Buckeyes & Hoosiers
No one's ever said it better than Harry Truman: “The only new thing in the world is the history you don't know.” Americans have long neglected the history of the Gilded Age, that post-Civil War adolescence when a divided land gradually coalesced around railroads and robber barons, exploding industries and wartime promises tragically deferred, massive immigration and festering inequalities. And, oh yes – some of the most colorful, contentious, and occasionally corrupt, politics and politicians in our history. It’s an incredibly rich pageant, one that will serve as the backdrop for our travel back to the origins of today's America.
Explore America's heritage.
More presidents. Less packing. Beginning the last week of May, we’ll visit sites associated with eight (mostly Gilded Age) presidents in Ohio and Indiana. Not to mention a host of historically significant women, from Lucy Hayes and Lucretia Garfield, to Florence “the Duchess” Harding, Nellie Taft and Ida McKinley. Our single hotel is our historical base camp in Columbus, Ohio. Such an itinerary allows for more in depth – dare I say, leisurely – exploration of the surprising McKinley era, the boyhood homes of Ulysses Grant and William Howard Taft, and the decidedly immodest post presidential estates of Rutherford and Lucy Hayes, and Indiana's favorite son Benjamin Harrison. In Marion, Ohio we’ll tour the brand new Harding Presidential Library and Museum, as well as the newly restored Harding home as it appeared on Election Night, 1920. In fact, a majority of the 20 attractions we'll visit are either themselves new to us, or places completely renovated/reimagined since any earlier travels.
