The Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation and the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library & Museum were excited to host the premiere of An Ordinary Man—the long-awaited book tour with Richard Norton Smith! The tour consisted of a great conversation between Hank Meijer and Richard Norton Smith as they explored Richard’s new book An Ordinary Man: The Surprising Life and Historic Presidency of Gerald R. Ford.
The tour locations included the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum, Michigan History Center, Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, Albion College, and Hauenstein Center at Grand Valley State University.
An Ordinary Man: The Surprising Life and Historic Presidency of Gerald R. Ford by Richard Norton Smith
From the preeminent presidential scholar and acclaimed biographer of historical figures including George Washington, Herbert Hoover, and Nelson Rockefeller comes this eye-opening life of Gerald R. Ford, whose presidency arguably set the course for post-liberal America and a post-Cold War world.
For many Americans, President Gerald Ford was the genial accident of history who controversially pardoned his Watergate-tarnished predecessor, presided over the fall of Saigon, and became a punching bag on Saturday Night Live. Yet as Richard Norton Smith reveals in a book full of surprises, Ford was an underrated leader whose tough decisions and personal decency look better with the passage of time.
Drawing on hundreds of interviews and thousands of documents, Smith recreates Ford’s hardscrabble childhood in Michigan, his early anti-establishment politics and lifelong love affair with the former Betty Bloomer, whose impact on American culture he predicted would outrank his own. As President, Ford guided the nation through its worst Constitutional crisis since the Civil War and broke the back of the most severe economic downturn since the Great Depression—accomplishing both with little fanfare or credit (at least until 2001 when the JFK Library gave him its prestigious Profile in Courage Award in belated recognition of the Nixon pardon).
Less coda than curtain raiser, Ford’s administration bridged the Republican pragmatism of Eisenhower and Nixon and the more doctrinaire conservatism of Ronald Reagan. His introduction of economic deregulation would transform the American economy, while his embrace of the Helsinki Accords hastened the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Illustrated with sixteen pages of black-and-white photos, this definitive biography, a decade in the making, will change history’s views of a man whose warning about presidential arrogance (“God help the country”) is more relevant than ever.
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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 speechwriter 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 was 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 Presidential 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 the 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 hundredth 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 textbooks.
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Hank Meijer is executive chairman of Meijer, Inc. in Grand Rapids. He joined the family retail business at the age of 11 as a grocery clerk.
After serving as a reporter for Detroit-area newspapers he became editor and later publisher of a weekly newspaper in Plymouth, Michigan. He rejoined Meijer in 1979 as assistant advertising director.
His first book, a biography of his grandfather, Hendrik Meijer, appeared in 1985. His second, a biography of Senator Arthur Vandenberg, was published in 2017 by University of Chicago Press.
Meijer, Inc. operates a chain of more than 260 combination supermarket-discount department stores in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky and Wisconsin.
Hank is vice-chairman of the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation. He also serves on the executive committees of the Food Marketing Institute and the National Constitution Center. He is a member of the University of Michigan President’s Advisory Group, the Ford School of Public Policy board of advisors, The Henry Ford board of directors, and the Mackinac Island State Parks Commission.
