Smile!  It is time for the Professor’s Classroom.

I have started a short series on some of our presidents and the story around their rise to the job of president.

Most Americans know that we go to the polls every 4 years to vote for the person we would like to see as the president, the leader of the “Free World”…..but has there ever been a leader that was never elected by the people to serve in that position?

(I will pause here so that the younger members of my reading audience can trot off to the Google button)

That is correct President Gerald Ford was NEVER elected to that position…..he was VP when Nixon had to go on the lam and he rose to the highest office in the land…..

America’s 38th president, Gerald Ford (1913-2006) took office on August 9, 1974, following the resignation of President Richard Nixon (1913-1994), who left the White House in disgrace over the Watergate scandal. Ford became the first unelected president in the nation’s history. A longtime Republican congressman from Michigan, Ford had been appointed vice president less than a year earlier by President Nixon. He is credited with helping to restore public confidence in government after the disillusionment of the Watergate era.

https://www.history.com/topics/us-presidents/gerald-r-ford

In the past Repubs have been hard on Ford’s successor, Jimmy Carter….they have called him weak and ineffective….a position that as a foreign policy wonk do not agree with….but all that aside Repub Gerald Ford was soft on the dictators of this world in his day…..

One expects a certain amount of piety and hypocrisy when retired statesmen give up the ghost, but this doesn’t excuse the astonishing number of omissions and misstatements that have characterized the sickly national farewell to Gerald Ford. One could graze for hours on the great slopes of the massive obituaries and never guess that during his mercifully brief occupation of the White House, this president had:

1. Disgraced the United States in Iraq and inaugurated a long period of calamitous misjudgment of that country.
2. Colluded with the Indonesian dictatorship in a gross violation of international law that led to a near-genocide in East Timor.
3. Delivered a resounding snub to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn at the time when the Soviet dissident movement was in the greatest need of solidarity.

Read More…….http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2006/12/our_short_national_nightmare.html

Keep his name in mind when you play Trivial Pursuit or some Bar Game…it should be good for a few points…..

Class Dismissed!