Hanging Brings Iraq No Harmony

Those who believe that a kindly Providence keeps a watchful eye on America's welfare can cite the fact of Gerald Ford. On Aug. 9, 1974, at a moment when the nation was putting aside a tormented president and aching for serenity in high places, to the center of national life strode an abnormality - a happy, normal man as president.

Watergate and a presidential resignation were only two of the nation's problems that August. The mid-'70s were years when everyday things could no longer be counted on - inflation was undermining the currency as a store of value, and lines at gasoline pumps testified to the power of foreigners to get between the Americans and their best friends, their automobiles.

Ford was a political sedative for a nation with jangled nerves.

He was one of five presidents who never got elected to the office. He was the only person to be president without receiving any popular or electoral votes for president or vice president. He was born in Omaha and represented a western Michigan district, and much was made, rightly, of his Midwesternness.

Ford was an "accidental president," but there are reasons why accidents happen as they do. Call it the cunning of history, or an irony of American life, but this underestimated graduate of the Yale Law School served a purpose Nixon did not have in mind when he nominated him to replace the disgraced Vice President Spiro Agnew. Nixon probably hoped Ford's popularity in the House would enable him to rally House Republicans against impeachment. Instead, Ford's presence in the vice presidency probably made his former House colleagues less afraid of impeachment.

There is a photograph of the House Chamber when President Truman was delivering one of his State of the Union addresses. Scattered through the chamber in front of Truman were four future presidents - Congressman Kennedy, Sen. Johnson, Congressman Nixon, Congressman Ford. Never before or since have four consecutive presidents gone directly from the legislative branch to national elective office.

In 1976 Ford might have won a full term if he had been less statesmanlike: His pardon of Richard Nixon unquestionably hurt him politically but unquestionably helped with national healing. Ford also might have won if he had stepped out of character and been more adventurous - if in selecting a running mate he had chosen, as he considered doing, Ambassador Anne Armstrong, a Texan, to be the first woman on a national ticket. Instead he chose a Midwesterner, Kansan Bob Dole, thereby giving a boost to a distinguished career that would produce the party's presidential nominee 20 years later. Ford also might have won if some unsettling economic numbers had not come out a few days before Election Day. Or if he had not become lost in the labyrinth of peculiar thinking and rhetoric that went with detente, insisting that Poland was not dominated by the Soviet Union.

He almost won anyway. A change of 12,791 votes in Ohio and Mississippi would have sufficed. The 1976 presidential election was the only one the Republicans lost between 1964 and 1992. Ford was punished for Nixon's sins: Jimmy Carter won by running as the non-Nixon.

Surely subsequent presidential history has deepened the nation's appreciation of what it had for 29 months.