PHILADELPHIAGood old Gerry Ford, hard luck Gerry Ford, left this city under his own steam, reminding me that the doughty ex-president keeps having these near-miss experiences at Republican national conventions.
In 1976, he came within a whisker (OK, 80-odd votes out of a couple of thousand) of being denied the party's presidential nomination by a rampaging Ronald Reagan. In 1980, he was within a hair's-breadth of being named Ronald Reagan's running mate until a late-night deal fell through in the Gipper's Detroit hotel suite.
And nine days ago, amid a grueling series of interviews on behalf of the son of the guy who aced him out of being Reagan's No. 2 man, Ford walked his 87-year-old body into a local hospital for treatment of a stroke. He got released Wednesday.
Ford's long career was marked by a remarkable series of accidents, coincidences, and hard-to-explain events. But he is the last major Republican figure to personify the Old Guard of moderate Republicanism, the remnants of the wing of the party that included the congressional leaders of a half-century back, plus moderate stalwarts like Christian Herter, Leverett Saltonstall, Edward Brooke, Elliot Richardson, and Frank Sargent of Massachusetts, New York's Nelson Rockefeller, Vermont's George Aiken.
When weird things happened to Republicans, Ford happened to be in the neighborhood. When Richard Nixon needed a clean-jeans sure-to-be-confirmed replacement for the corrupt Vice President Spiro T. Agnew - Nixon and Agnew are nonmentionables in this scrubbed-up Republican made-for-TV commercial of a convention - Nixon plucked Ford from the House minority leader's office.
When lightning struck twice, and Nixon was forced to walk the plank of impeachment, Ford got promoted to his second job - the only man ever appointed both president and vice president. It was Ford who gave George Herbert Walker Bush the diplomatically challenging but politically irrelevant job of special representative of the United States in Beijing.
When Ford and Henry Kissinger, the secretary of state whom Ford inherited from Nixon, flew to China in December of 1975, Bush was at the tarmac to greet them upon the 2 a.m. arrival at the shabby old airfield of the capital of the Middle Kingdom. Ford then named Bush to head the Central Intelligence Agency, riddled by scandal and wracked by ridicule for its Cold War excesses. After Ford narrowly lost the '76 election to Jimmy Carter, Bush went to the president-elect and asked to be allowed to remain on as CIA chief.
He was the first politician ever to run CIA, and Carter rejected his request. Bush offered to promise that he would not run for president against Carter if the Democrat would let him stay on at CIA. Carter still refused. The Washington Post said Bush was ''a little shocked'' at Carter's refusal and wanted to remain CIA chief ''desperately.''
Four years later, Bush campaigned hard for president, castigating Carter, who could have kept Bush out of the fray by icing him at CIA. Bush won Iowa, but was upset in New Hampshire by Ronald ''I'm paying for this microphone'' Reagan, who came to Detroit as the nominee. The night he won the nomination, Reagan dickered with Ford and Kissinger.
Richard Allen, Reagan's foreign policy adviser, wrote in a recent New York Times Magazine that Reagan was on the verge of naming former President Ford to be his running mate. Ford and Kissinger had come up with a scheme that these two Ford administration vets, plus Alan Greenspan, would be a package deal for Reagan, with specific roles and veto powers over Reagan's initiatives.
Allen claims he ''had the clearest channel to Bush and knew him the best,'' but in the running mate derby, ''George Bush was not really on Reagan's radar screen,'' and would be ''a hard sell.'' Allen says he contacted the Bush camp to plant the seeds of Bush as running mate, in place of Ford. Reagan was never fond of Bush, particularly after Bush's humiliating night in the Nashua, N.H., high school gym where Bush had denied Bob Dole and three other GOP candidates the right to debate Bush and Reagan. But by the summer of '80, Reagan needed a so-called ''moderate'' like Ford or Bush to win.
It was after midnight when Reagan vetoed the Ford-Kissinger ''co-presidency'' scheme. But Reagan still balked at Bush. Allen writes: ''`I can't take him,' Reagan said of Bush. `That ''voodoo economic policy'' charge and his stand on abortion are wrong.''' But after being assured Bush would embrace every word of the right wing platform, Reagan gave in.
The Gipper drove to the convention hall to inform the delegates. Allen: ''And so it came to pass that Ronald Reagan averted what would have been a disaster for his candidacy and the Republican party,'' if that cockeyed shared-presidency scheme had materialized. Ford came that close, again.
This year Ford came to a convention even more firmly in the grip of the party's right wing than ever. Ford had publicly urged Bush Jr. to choose a running mate who does not want to outlaw abortion. But the nominee did not take Ford's advice. Instead, he picked Dick Cheney of Wyoming, who had been Ford's chief of staff at age 36 and is far more conservative than Ford.
Still, the ex-president played the part of the good soldier, making the rounds of parties and interview sites, talking up the ticket, urging on the troops, until he was slowed and then felled by his stroke. He remains the last link to the old GOP, the let's-make-a-deal party.
David Nyhan is a Globe columnist.
