Our relaxing stay near Traverse City, Michigan was interrupted by sad news. Tim Turner, Maggie’s brother (which makes him my ex-brother-in-law, a weird term if there ever was one) passed away last weekend. I’m flying to California Saturday for the celebration of his life.
Tim was an overgrown kid who, happily for everyone who knew him, never grew up. He was large in size and even larger in his kindness, humor and mischievousness.
There was no way not to like Tim. He always had a twinkle in his eye. His irreverence was contagious. But the younger you were, the more you liked him. He was the all-time best uncle – Pete, Abby and JJ loved him dearly, for good reason.
Tim regularly attended Burning Man, the annual celebration of utopian fantasmagoria. But he also was a brilliant mathematician and a gifted computer programmer, and he could intelligently converse about an amazing array of topics, always with a unique and thought-provoking perspective.
Here’s a classic Tim story. At about the time Gerald Ford became President, he (Tim) had a part-time gig tutoring math students at UC Berkeley. He got so many phone calls from his students, he gave himself a semi-unlisted phone number. Semi, in that he was still in the Pacific Bell Telephone Book (remember phone books?), but he listed his name backwards – Tim Turner became Mit Renrut.
I met Tim in the 1970’s, which put a poignant edge on my trip this week to the Gerald Ford Presidential Museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Gerald Ford was a man of solid accomplishments and no flamboyance. Due to his stiff speaking style, he was perceived as not very bright. In fact, he spent much of his life exceeding peoples’ expectations. He only got to go to the University of Michigan because his high school principal saw his potential and convinced people in Ford’s native Grand Rapids to establish a scholarship for him. He then starred for the Wolverine football team and even had NFL offers. But he wanted to be a lawyer. He got a job as an assistant coach for the Yale junior varsity football team. While there, he sought admission to the Yale Law School. When he was initially denied, he took classes on his own time to prove he could handle the academic rigors. He then was admitted, and went on to graduate in the top 25% of his class. First elected to Congress in 1948, he was shrewd enough to get appointed to the House Appropriations Committee, because he knew that those who controlled the pursestrings controlled power.
Lyndon Johnson once derided Ford’s intelligence by saying he had played football without a helmet (maybe because Ford committed occasional oratorical gaffes, such as when he said on the floor of Congress, “If Abraham Lincoln were alive, he’d be rolling in his grave”), but President Johnson appointed him to the Warren Commission in 1963 that investigated the assassination of President Kennedy.
The Watergate scandal started in 1972 (coincidentally, the year I met Tim Turner) with the break-in and wire-tapping of the Democratic Party’s national headquarters by burglars hired by the Republican Party. The scandal steadily escalated, due to historical investigative reporting by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post and a Congressional investigation into the whole mess.
In 1973, as Watergate grew into the dominant topic in American politics, Ford was a 12-term Congressman from Michigan and House Minority Leader. He aspired not to be President but to be Speaker of the House. Then, in the midst of Watergate, Vice President Spiro Agnew suddenly resigned in disgrace due to proof that he regularly accepted bribes while Governor of Maryland. Nixon became the first President to invoke the 25th Amendment of the Constitution by appointing Ford as Agnew’s successor in late 1973 and his appointment was enthusiastically ratified by Congress.
The following year, Ford became President when Nixon resigned amid conclusive proof that he had lied about his role in the Watergate affair. Yes, a President once resigned because he got caught lying.
“Our long national nightmare is over,” said Gerald Ford upon taking the oath of office as the 38th President. While that was the punchiest line of his speech, Ford then went on to say something else that is vitally important 44 years later – “Our Constitution works. Our great republic is a government of laws and not of men.”
President Ford set an example of common decency that contrasted refreshingly with the deviousness, combativeness and paranoia of his predecessor, Nixon. “There are times when we don’t need greatness in our Presidents,” CBS News once said. “As Ford showed in the wake of Watergate, there are times when goodness will do.”
Ford was President for only two-and-a-half years, but they were momentous years. The Vietnam War ended in defeat for the U.S. and its South Vietnamese ally (after which Ford not only authorized the immigration of Vietnamese refugees into the U.S., he personally welcomed many of them to the country), 
the nation endured a serious energy shortage, inflation rattled the U.S. economy, the Helsinki Accords were ratified (mandating economic, scientific and economic cooperation among nations and embracing human rights, which were credited with hastening the demise of the Soviet Union) and the U.S. celebrated the bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence. During his 1976 bid for election to a full term, Ford’s platform included national catastrophic health insurance, “so people don’t have to go broke to get well.”
With President Ford, America also had a rock-star First Lady. Betty Ford was more than just charming – she was an out-front proponent of the Equal Rights Amendment, which ultimately failed to become a part of the Constitution because enough Republican-controlled state legislatures rejected the notion that the Constitution should state unequivocally that women are entitled to equal rights under law. 
Betty also matter-of-factly acknowledged the reality of things that made conservatives gasp in horror in the 70’s (not the 60’s, the 70’s), such as premarital sex and marijuana usage.
When President Ford left office, he and Betty were the first First Couple to sign a joint book deal, so that each of them wrote their memoirs. That Christmas, one of Betty’s gifts to Jerry was a t-shirt saying, “I’ll Bet My Book Out-Sells Yours!” It did. By a lot.
However, Betty’s most significant contribution to American society came when she admitted to alcohol and prescription-drug dependency. She not only candidly acknowledged her problem, she did something about it…The Betty Ford Center now is a worldwide leader in innovative and effective treatment of substance-abuse problems.
Gerald and Betty Ford each were awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. President Ford also was bestowed with the Kennedy Profiles In Courage Award for pardoning Nixon and sparing the nation the prolonged agony of prosecuting the disgraced ex-President.
I’ve never voted for a Republican for President, but if I had to pick one to have voted for, it would be Gerald Ford. It’s a wonderful irony, which is hard to imagine in the ugly times in which we now live, that Ford became good friends in his later life with the man who defeated him in 1976, Jimmy Carter…himself one of the most decent men ever to sit in the Oval Office (as confirmed as recently as this week – https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/national/wp/2018/08/17/feature/the-un-celebrity-president-jimmy-carter-shuns-riches-lives-modestly-in-his-georgia-hometown/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.b66eadd99ac8).
After my trip to California, we will enjoy a couple of days in Chicago/Evanston with Abby and Clark, then we head east again for a brief visit to the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame In Cleveland and then a weekend of baseball at the Little League World Series in Williamsport, PA.