This page features brief excerpts of stories published by the mainstream
media and, less frequently, blogs, alternative media, and even obviously
biased sources. The excerpts are taken directly from the websites cited in
each source note. Quotation marks are not used.
Source: WaPo
December 28, 2006
Gerald R. Ford's administration passed from the scene relatively quickly in the 1970s, but, like much of the decade's popular culture, it left an imprint that would be felt for years to come. In fact, when George W. Bush arrived at the Oval Office 24 years later, it felt at first as if he were shooting a remake of the Ford White House.
Ford's White House chief of staff, Dick Cheney, was now vice president. Ford's defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld, was again the master of the Pen
Source: WaPo
December 28, 2006
Without question, Gerald R. Ford was one of the most athletic presidents in history.
Ford, who died Tuesday night at age 93, loved to take part in sports from his days as a youth in Grand Rapids, Mich., until he occupied the White House and during the many years afterward. He is best known for playing center at the University of Michigan, where he was on the Wolverines' national championship football teams of 1932 and 1933 and was the team's most valuable player in 1934.
Source: WaPo
December 28, 2006
The modest two-story colonial in Alexandria has all the trappings of an ordinary home: the pink bathroom, the Magic Chef oven, a couple of fireplaces. But 514 Crown View Dr. also boasts some signs, both subtle and overt, that indicate its unusual status in U.S. history.
Neighbors talk of the steel rods placed underneath the driveway to support the limos. A previous tenant speaks about the countless telephone lines installed in the basement and attic used by the Secret Service.
Source: WaPo
December 29, 2006
Gerald R. Ford thought globally as a president, but in a salubrious 30-year retirement spent on ski slopes and putting greens, he acted locally, serving on charities, donning sneakers for the first Desert AIDS Walk, speaking to the Boys and Girls Club and leading the annual Fourth of July parade.
Ford's regular-guy lifestyle distinguished him from other former presidents. Richard M. Nixon, who handed the presidency to Ford, wrote books to buff up his reputation. Ford's former advers
Source: WaPo
December 29, 2006
One was an acolyte of Charles Manson, the other a suburban mom who dabbled at the fringes of San Francisco's counterculture and served as an FBI informant.
Both still alive and serving prison sentences, they are scarcely footnotes now. But in September 1975 -- just 17 days apart -- Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme and Sara Jane Moore shook the country, already rattled by Watergate and the collapse of South Vietnam, with their attempts to assassinate President Gerald R. Ford.
Source: Bob Woodward in the WaPo
December 29, 2006
Months before Richard M. Nixon set a relatively unknown Michigan congressman named Gerald R. Ford on the path to the White House, Nixon turned to Ford, who called himself the embattled president's "only real friend," to get him out of trouble.
During one of the darkest days of the Watergate scandal, Nixon secretly confided in Ford, at the time the House minority leader. He begged for help. He complained about fair-weather friends and swore at perceived rivals in his own pa
Source: BBC
December 29, 2006
Britain will settle its World War II debts to the US and Canada when it pays two final instalments before the close of 2006, the UK Treasury has said.The payments of $83.25m (£42.5m) to the US and US$22.7m (£11.6m) to Canada are the last of 50 instalments since 1950.
The amount paid back is nearly double that loaned in 1945 and 1946. "This week we finally honour in full our commitments to the US and Canada for the support they gave us 60 years ago," sa
Source: NYT
December 28, 2006
For every impossible problem that official Washington faces, there is a blue-ribbon panel, and for every panel there is a predictable life cycle, which the Iraq Study Group has so far followed to a fault.
First, the unrealistic expectations, fueled by feverish news coverage, including speculation and leaks about just what might be proposed. Next, the report’s grand unveiling, complete with White House photo op, this time featuring President Bush with the co-chairmen, James A. Baker
Source: NYT
December 28, 2006
Death is sad, at least in most cases. But the death of a former president has become an almost cheery television event.
It’s been more than 40 years since John F. Kennedy was assassinated. His successors died out of office, relatively quietly and well into old age. The passing of a retired commander in chief perks up the day with a wallop of stately special reports and bittersweet nostalgia, (plaid jackets, “Saturday Night Live,” détente) without undue anxiety or grieving.
Source: NYT
December 28, 2006
The body of former President Gerald R. Ford will lie in the Capitol this weekend amid tributes marked by considerably less pageantry than the funeral of former President Ronald Reagan in 2004, Congressional officials said Wednesday.
Services for Mr. Ford, the 38th president, who died late Tuesday, will begin Friday in Palm Desert, Calif., with private prayers for the family at St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church, Gregory D. Willard, a Ford family spokesman, said at a news conference.
Source: International Herald Tribune
December 27, 2006
Chinese and Japanese scholars on Wednesday finished the first in a planned series of historical study groups ordered by their governments amid fresh efforts to mend strained ties and reduce bitterness between the former World War II enemies.
Twenty academics — ten each from China and Japan — met in Beijing for two days focusing first on the basic format and dates of future talks, said Shinichi Kitaoka, a University of Tokyo professor and head of the Japanese delegation.
Source: CNN/AP
December 27, 2006
The cremated remains of a convicted murderer must be removed from Arlington National Cemetery under a new federal law.
The provision ordering the removal of Russell Wayne Wagner's remains was included in a veterans' health care and benefits bill that President Bush signed into law on Friday.
Wagner, a Vietnam veteran, was convicted in 2002 of stabbing to death Daniel Davis, 84, and Wilda Davis, 80, in their home in 1994. He was sentenced to life in prison.
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
December 27, 2006
But for some quick action, Gerald R. Ford's presidency, and his life, could have ended amid gunshots outside San Francisco's St. Francis Hotel on the afternoon of Sept. 22, 1975.
As Ford emerged from the historic Union Square hotel's Post Street entrance at 3:30 p.m. after addressing a World Affairs Council audience, he paused before getting into his limousine to wave to the crowd across the street.
In a flash, two shots rang out. The first narrowly missed the 38th pr
Source: NYT
December 27, 2006
When he died two Sundays ago, Gen. Augusto Pinochet was in disgrace, facing the prospect of trials for human rights abuses and for illicitly accumulating a $28 million fortune.
His closest associates, however, have seized upon his death as an opportunity to rehabilitate his tattered image and rewrite the recent history of Chile.
The widespread publication on Sunday of a farewell letter from General Pinochet to “all Chileans, without exception” was perhaps the most notab
Source: Press Release -- The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies
December 28, 2006
The prosecution and imprisonment of prominent Holocaust-deniers in Europe dealt a serious blow to the Holocaust-denial movement in 2006, according to this year’s annual report on Holocaust-denial activity around the world.
The year-end report, Holocaust Denial: A Global Survey - 2006, is published by The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, which is based in Washington, D.C. The report’s co-authors are Holocaust scholars Dr. Rafael Medoff, director of the Wyman Institute
Source: Independent
December 27, 2006
In the dying days of General Francisco Franco's dictatorship, Antoni Ruiz found out for himself what thousands of others had already suffered for being gay. Now, 31 years later, Mr Ruiz and a dwindling band of others who suffered General Franco's ruthless repression of homosexuals, may finally be offered compensation by the state.Antoni, then just 17, from Valencia, eastern Spain, told his mother he was homosexual and his family sought advice from a nun. "She went strai
Source: Guardian (UK)
December 27, 2006
Picking through centuries-old rubbish, masonry and discarded body parts beneath an abandoned Tuscan church, an Italian historian believes she has solved one of history's great crime mysteries.For more than four centuries, researchers have puzzled over the fact that Francesco I Medici, the son of the first Grand Duke, Cosimo, died within hours of his wife in October 1587. Legend had it they were poisoned by his brother and successor, a cardinal.
Modern historian
Source: NYT
December 27, 2006
He was 93, making him the oldest former president, surpassing Ronald Reagan, who died in 2004, by just over a month.
His death was announced late Tuesday night in a statement issued by his wife, Betty Ford, which gave no details. Further family announcements today gave no cause of death, but he had been in and out of the hospital since January 2006, most recently in October at the Eisenhower Medical Center for medical tests. He returned to his home in Rancho Mirage after five days o
Source: NYT
December 27, 2006
Gerald R. Ford and Marie Antoinette did not have much in common, but he shared her frustration about having been misquoted, which probably cost both of them their jobs.
In Hollywood’s latest biography of the French queen, she denies having callously suggested that breadless peasants eat cake instead. “I never said that,” the actress Kirsten Dunst pouts. “I wonder why people keep saying I did.”
Mr. Ford never explicitly said “Drop Dead” to New Yorkers during the city’s f
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
December 27, 2006
beral academics may best remember Gerald R. Ford, the 38th president of the United States, unfondly because of the pardon he granted to his former boss, Richard M. Nixon, over Mr. Nixon's role in the Watergate scandal.
Mr. Ford, who died on Tuesday night at the age of 93, held the presidency for just under 2½ years and was defeated in his bid for re-election by Jimmy Carter in 1976. It was a short tenure in which issues affecting higher education did not feature prominently. Mr. For
