Gerald Ford was unique in the history of the United States as being the only man to occupy both the vice-presidency and the presidency without being elected to either office. Nevertheless, he played an indispensable role in guiding the country’s political life back to solid ground when the Vice-President, Spiro Agnew, and the President, Richard Nixon, had been forced from office after being exposed as having broken the law of the land.

By contrast with his predecessors, Ford frequently conveyed the impression of verbal clumsiness. (He never really lived down Lyndon Johnson’s cruel gibe: “The trouble with Jerry Ford is that he used to play football without a helmet.”) But he provided a reassuring solidity and stability in one of the most serious crises of confidence that has shaken the body politic and the people of the US.

His succession as Vice-President to Agnew on the latter’s resignation in the autumn of 1973 gave the political authorities in Congress and in the country sufficient confidence in the succession to grapple with the Watergate affair, to face the issue of the impeachment of the head of the executive and, ultimately, to force President Nixon’s resignation.

By the time Ford came to the presidency in August 1974 America was reeling from a series of blows to its sense of direction and identity in the world unprecedented, perhaps, since the Civil War. The conclusion of a “peace” in Vietnam in 1973 confronted the US public with a humiliating and costly military defeat and the spectre of a complete failure of foreign policy, one which at the same time cast a large question over the fundamental morality of American actions overseas.

And when the President of the United States, in the person of Richard Nixon, stood exposed as being guilty of malfeasance over the break-in by Republican campaign workers at the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate Hotel, Washington, public confidence was further shaken in an Administration that seemed capable of descending to such reckless and wanton thuggery.

It was Ford’s task to confront the fall-out from the first of these crises, mopping up the dregs of the withdrawal from Vietnam, and looking that failure squarely in the face. After Watergate his Presidency provided the country with an image of honesty and reliability, without which confidence in US institutions might well have evaporated completely.

Like many Presidents before him Ford matured into the position until he had clearly established his dominance over Congress and over his potential challengers for the leadership of the Republican party. He generally maintained the trust and respect of professional politicians for the understanding of Congressional politics that he had built up during his long service in the House of Representatives — although for much of his presidency he was trying to preach and practise a fiscal conservatism very much to the right of what was then the central consensus in Congress.

But to his great chagrin, he was unable to vindicate his Presidency at the polls. Although he had managed in a remarkably short time at least to give the impression of steadying the foreign-policy ship after Vietnam, Watergate had inflicted grave damage on the Republican Party. A new kind of radical Democrat had come on the scene in Jimmy Carter, peanut farmer and Governor of Georgia. With his informal manner Carter seemed to have irresistible appeal and started with an immense lead in the opinion polls. As the campaign went on and voters increasingly looked for substance to match the Carter style, Ford, remarkably, looked like closing the gap on him. But it was not to be. Although the result on election day was much closer than might have been expected at the outset, it was a defeat, nevertheless, and it marked the end of Ford’s political career.

Gerald Rudolph Ford was born Leslie Lynch King Jr in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1913, the only child of Leslie and Dorothy King. Two years later his parents divorced, and he moved with his mother to Grand Rapids, Michigan. There she married Gerald R. Ford, a paint maker and local leader in the Republican party, and her child was adopted by her new husband, and renamed Gerald Rudolph Ford, after him.

Ford captained his high school football team and won a football scholarship to the University of Michigan where he became a star of its undefeated national football champion teams of 1932 and 1933. He went on to Yale University Law School where he paid his way as a coach to the Yale football and freshman boxing teams.

On the outbreak of war in 1941 he abandoned his recently founded legal practice and enlisted in the US Navy. He was commissioned and served throughout in the Pacific on aircraft carriers, rising to the rank of lieutenant-commander.

After the war he returned to legal practice in Michigan. In 1948 at the initiative of the moderate internationalist Republican, Senator Arthur H. Vandenburg, he won the Republican nomination in his home constituency from its isolationist incumbent, and was elected to the House of Representatives.He joined the House Appropriations Committee, specialising in military budget and foreign appropriations, and gained a reputation as a hard-working, hard-nosed conservative.

In 1959 he took part in the overthrow of the Republican leader in the House, the aged Joe Martin Jr of Massachusetts, and in 1965 he won the leadership from Martin’s successor, Charles Halleck Jr, on a programme of conservative activism and a conservative “alternative” to President Johnson’s reform legislation.