Americans queued up on a bright winter’s day in Washington to pay tribute to Gerald Ford as he lay in state in the rotunda of the US Capitol.

Thousands of citizens filed past the casket of “the accidental president”, who died on Tuesday, aged 93.

The ceremonies marking Ford’s passing were haunted by continuing controversy over his pardon of President Nixon in the Watergate scandal, and his posthumously published remarks criticising the Iraq war.

Ford’s flag-draped coffin was flown to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland aboard a presidential Boeing 747 and driven into Washington.

At Ford’s request, the funeral procession to the Capitol lacked the usual pomp of a presidential farewell. Absent were the horse-drawn caisson, seen by millions in the funerals of Ronald Reagan in 2004 and John Kennedy in 1963, and the riderless horse commonly used in such processions.

The Air Force flyover typical of a full state funeral will not take place in Washington, but instead at his former hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he will be buried on a hillside near his presidential museum. Ford, who served as president from Nixon’s resignation in mid-1974 until early 1977, was lauded at a memorial service at the Capitol as a great healer of the nation.

Dennis Hastert, the departing House Speaker, said: “In the summer of 1974 America didn’t need a philosopher-king or a warrior-prince, an aloof aristocrat or a populist firebrand. We needed a healer; we needed a rock. We needed honesty, candour and courage. We needed Gerald Ford.”

His controversial pardon of Nixon, which may have cost him the 1976 election, won praise from his old chief of staff, Dick Cheney, the Vice-President. Mr Cheney said that Ford “was almost alone in understanding that there can be no healing without pardon”.

At a time of “great malice” after Nixon’s resignation, he said, Ford’s decision saved the country from division and disaster. “It was this man, Gerald R. Ford, who led our republic safely through a crisis that could have turned to catastrophe.”

The ceremony was halted briefly when a former Michigan Congressman, William Broomfield, 84, collapsed. Medical staff and Senator Bill Frist, a Tennesse Republican, who is also a doctor, rushed to his assistance. Mr Broomfield was taken out in a wheelchair and Mr Frist returned to the ceremony to tell everyone that he was all right.

With a state funeral in the National Cathedral in Washington scheduled for tomorrow, many of Washington’s big names did not attend Saturday’s memorial service. The Washington Post noted that about 500 of the 535 members of the next Congress skipped the ceremony, as did six of the nine Supreme Court justices and all but one member of Mr Bush’s Cabinet, Carlos Gutierrez, the Commerce Secretary.

Mr Bush did not cut short his stay at his Texas ranch but he and his wife are expected to return to Washington today to pay their respects as Ford lies in state and to attend tomorrow’s state funeral. In his weekly radio address, Mr Bush called Ford “a great man who devoted the best years of his long life to public service”.

Some commentators said that Ford should have gone public with his apparent doubts about the Iraq war, revealed last week in an interview from 2004. Ford, requesting that the interview be withheld until his death, told The Washington Post’s Watergate sleuth Bob Woodward: “I just don’t think we should go hellfire damnation around the globe freeing people, unless it is directly related to our own national security.”

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