Jan. 7, 2025, 2:28 p.m.
When Gerald R. Ford came home to his beloved Grand Rapids, Michigan, for the final time on Jan. 2, 2007, he was eulogized by none other than Jimmy Carter, his onetime political antagonist.
“For myself and for our nation, I want to thank my predecessor for all he has done to heal our land,” Carter said, reprising the very first words he’d uttered as the new president 30 years earlier.
It wasn’t sheer coincidence that the ex-Georgia governor who defeated Ford in 1976 led the tributes to the 38th president on that wintry Michigan day. Years before his death at the age of 93, Ford had personally asked his successor to speak at his funeral, and Carter instantly agreed.
In fact, Ford also directed aides to make sure Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter were added to the manifest when Air Force One carried his body back to Grand Rapids for burial.
“Jerry and I frequently agreed that one of the greatest blessings that we had, after we left the White House … was the intense personal friendship that bound us together,” Carter told the mourners. “Our mutual respect blossomed.
“We enjoyed each other's private company," he added. "And he and I commented often that, when we were traveling somewhere in an automobile or airplane, we hated to reach our destination, because we enjoyed the private times that we had together.”
Recalling the relationship that developed among the two presidents and their wives, Carter added: “The four of us learned to love each other.”
Even from beyond the grave, Ford was prepared to pay back the favor. NBC News reported that Carter's funeral will feature posthumous eulogies by Ford and Walter Mondale, read by Carter's sons.
Such a rapprochement between implacable political adversaries was as remarkable as it was improbable. By any yardstick, Carter and Ford were an odd match for post-presidential reconciliation. The wonkish engineer and the gregarious jock had little in common beyond their service as naval officers and presidents. Their policy views were solar systems apart—country-club conservative Republican, classic Democratic liberal.
Philosophical differences even degenerated into personal animus during the 1976 election. Carter called Ford incompetent, a failed president who created runaway inflation, unemployment, and interest rates. At the second debate, he said his opponent hadn’t managed a single accomplishment in office and claimed Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was actually running the country.
Ford believed Carter wholly unfit to be president and was stunned when he lost to the former Georgia governor, descending into an uncharacteristic sulk for weeks. “A peanut farmer,” more than one aide heard him mutter during the transition. “I lost to a peanut farmer.”
Four years later, Ford seriously contemplated a rematch. “He’s the weakest president I’ve ever seen in my lifetime,” he said in a fall 1980 interview, “and he’s defending the poorest economic record of any incumbent president since the Depression.” If Carter were reelected, he added, “God help us. I really mean that.”
Three days after reluctantly passing up an encore campaign, he warned that his successor was a disaster for America. “The country has to get rid of Carter,” he told me. “To jeopardize that for the sake of personal ambition would have been irresponsible.”
The death of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in the fall of 1981 proved an unlikely catalyst for the thaw in their relationship.
Still recovering from an assassination attempt, President Reagan asked Ford, Carter, and Richard Nixon to represent him at Sadat’s funeral.
Early on the flight to Cairo, an Air Force steward asked the three presidents to pose for a photo with the crew. Nixon and Ford promptly agreed. Carter wondered: “How long will it take?” Assured it would just be a couple of minutes, Carter agreed but said it needed to be quick.
A few minutes after the historic photo op, Ford confided to an aide, “That just goes to show you can’t make chicken salad out of chicken shit.”
It was an uncharacteristically harsh and unkind rebuke from Ford, no doubt reflecting lingering bitterness from the 1976 campaign.
On the return trip, however, after Nixon was dropped off, Carter and Ford engaged in hours of one-on-one conversation. Unexpectedly, ancient enmities seemed to diminish, if not entirely dissipate.
“After several meals we had together, I felt there was a warmth that really hadn’t existed [before], and I felt very good about it,” Ford told me after the trip.
Members of the public paid their respects to the late first lady Betty Ford during a public viewing at Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum in Grand Rapids, Mich., in 2011.
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Suddenly, the pace of détente accelerated, fueled by Carter’s difficulties in getting his presidential library off the ground.
Having left office as an unpopular and more or less failed president, Carter was having trouble raising the millions of dollars in private funds needed. Essentially desperate, he asked Ford for a huge favor: Would he be willing to participate in a symposium to help raise interest—and more to the point, serious cash—for the Carter Center?
“I told him I agreed on one condition,” Ford later remembered. “That he would come to an event in Grand Rapids or Ann Arbor for my museum or library.”
Carter eagerly accepted, triggering a Jimmy-Jerry tag-team match extending over several years.
Before long, they were in regular contact, exchanging telephone calls and birthday greetings.
By 1997, Ford still thought Carter was meddling too much in foreign affairs but was mellower about his erstwhile rival. “It’s warmed up, it’s gotten more intimate, and Betty and Rosalynn have become, I would say, close," he said. "It’s good for the institution.”
Some former presidents have taken notice. Victor and vanquished in 1992, Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush became unlikely pals in retirement. Some Bush staffers dubbed Clinton the "fifth son" of the 41st president. George W. Bush once called Clinton “a brother with a different mother.”
“I love Bill Clinton,” Barbara Bush confessed. “Maybe not his politics, but I love Bill Clinton. … [We] have become friends, and Bill visits us every summer.”
Conversely, don’t expect an era of good feelings between a suddenly magnanimous Donald Trump and his Democratic predecessors. After losing to Joe Biden in 2020, he has consistently bashed Biden and Barack Obama on his way to recapturing the White House last November, and vice versa.
So at least for now, Carter may have been prescient when he called his unlikely friendship with Ford “now perhaps a long-lost bipartisan interrelationship."
