Yale Law & Politics
John C. Calhoun; BA 1804; 7th Vice President of the US for John Quincy Adams & Andrew Jackson; Senator; Congress Member; Secretary of State Under President Tyler.
Tansu Ciller (Postdoctoral fellow) Prime Minister of Turkey 1993-1996;
AbD Al-Karim Al-Iryani (Ph.D. 1968) Prime Minister of Yemen Republic (1980-1983, 1998-2001), Foreign Minister 1993-1998.
Salvador H. Laurel (LLM 1953; JSD 1960) Vice President of the Philipinnes 1986-1992.
Lee Hong-Koo (Ph.D. 1968) Prime Minister of South Korea 1994-1995.
Mario Monti (M.Sc. 1968) Prime Minister of Italy 2011-Present
Wendell Mottley (BA 1964) Olympic Medalist; Trinidad & Tobago minister.
Peter Mutharika (LLM 1966; JSD 1969) 5th Malawi President.
Jovito R. Salonga (JSD 1949) Philippines Senator 1965-1972; 1987-1992.
Tansu Ciller (Postdoctoral fellow) Prime Minister of Turkey 1993-1996;
AbD Al-Karim Al-Iryani (Ph.D. 1968) Prime Minister of Yemen Republic (1980-1983, 1998-2001), Foreign Minister 1993-1998.
Salvador H. Laurel (LLM 1953; JSD 1960) Vice President of the Philipinnes 1986-1992.
Lee Hong-Koo (Ph.D. 1968) Prime Minister of South Korea 1994-1995.
Mario Monti (M.Sc. 1968) Prime Minister of Italy 2011-Present
Wendell Mottley (BA 1964) Olympic Medalist; Trinidad & Tobago minister.
Peter Mutharika (LLM 1966; JSD 1969) 5th Malawi President.
Jovito R. Salonga (JSD 1949) Philippines Senator 1965-1972; 1987-1992.
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- The 41st President of the United States of America, George Herbert Walker Bush (known colloquially as "Bush 41" to distinguish him from his son, George W. Bush, the 43rd president of the U.S., who is known as "Bush 43"), was born on June 12, 1924 in Milton, Massachusetts, a suburb south of Boston. His parents were Dorothy (Walker) and Prescott Bush, who was then the president of sales for the Stedman Products Co. of South Braintree, Massachusetts. In 1925, Prescott joined the United States Rubber Co. (New York, NY) as their foreign division manager, necessitating a move to Greenwich, Connecticut.
Prescott Bush (Yale 1917) made his fortune and name as an investment banker on Wall St., eventually becoming a partner of the white shoe brokerage Brown Bros. Harriman. He was a member of the Yale Corp., the principal governing body of Yale University, from 1944 to 1956 and was on the board of directors of the Columbia Broadcasting System (C.B.S.), after having been introduced to C.B.S. Chairman William Paley in 1932 by his friend and business partner Averell Harriman, a major Democratic party power-broker.
George Bush was educated at the exclusive Greenwich Country Day School in Greenwich, Connecticut before moving on to Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, where he matriculated from 1936 to 1942. At Phillips Andover, he captained the baseball and soccer teams and was a member of an exclusive fraternity called the A.U.V, or "Auctoritas, Unitas, Veritas", Latin for "Authority, Unity, Truth". Like his father before him, Bush was on schedule to attend Yale College and would have in the fall of 1942, but for the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor by the Imperial Japanese Navy on December 7, 1941 that necessitated the entry of the United States into World War II.
Upon his graduation from Phillips Andover, George Bush enlisted in the U.S. Navy on June 12, 1942, his 18th birthday, with the intent on becoming an aviator. After completing the 10-month naval aviation course, he was commissioned as an ensign in the U.S. Naval Reserve three days before his nineteenth birthday, which made him the youngest naval aviator ever at the time.
George Bush married the former Barbara Pierce on January 6, 1945, and after he was demobilized, they moved to New Haven, Connecticut so that he could attend Yale, where he proved a fine student and captained the baseball team, which made it to the first College World Series. They had their first of six children, future President George Walker Bush, two days after the Fourth of July, 1946. In his senior year, George Bush was tapped for the exclusive secret society Skull & Bones, as had been his father (and as his son would be).
Using his father's connections and $2 million in seed money from his relatives (approximately $17 million in 2006 terms), George Bush prospered in the oil industry after graduating from Yale in 1949. Through his father's business and social relationship with a fellow Skull & Bones member, George Bush secured a position with Dresser Industries, on whose board of directors Prescott had served for 22 years.
As the son of a moderate Republican senator, it was natural that George Bush would stand for office. At the time, the "Solid South" was solidly Democratic, with the Republican Party of Civil War winner (and Civil Rights champion) Abraham Lincoln anathema below the Mason-Dixon line.Good Republican candidates were hard to come by (though John Tower later proved that a Republican could win in the Deep South when he took a Senate seat in 1966). One year after his father left the Seante, his son George stood won the Republican nomination to oppose Democratic Senator Ralph Yarborough, an ally of President 'Lyndon Johnson (I)' (QB), who was on his way to defeating Republican Presidential nominee Barry Goldwater in an electoral landslide in 1964. Riding the coat-tails of favorite son Johnson, Yarborough handily won reelection, keeping George Bush in the private sector for two more years.
Bush stood for a House seat in 1966 and won, then won reelection in 1968. In Congress, he established a reputation as a liberal Republican and was known as a supporter of contraception services (his father, Prescott, had been a mainstay of Planned Parenthood). At the request of President Richard Nixon, Bush gave up his seat voluntarily in 1970 to seek the Senate seat of Democratic Senator Ralph Yarborough, who was a fierce Nixon critic. It was felt that Yaborough's liberalism made him vulnerable to a challenge from the right, and it did; however, it was the right-wing of the Democratic Party. Lloyd Bentsen won the Democratic nomination and, endorsed by Yarborough, beat Bush handily in the November general election. (Ironically, Bentsen would one day be the running mate of Bush's 1988 rival for the presidency, Michael Dukakis.) One of the reason for Bush's defeat was that with Yarborough out of the race, Nixon's support for Bush's campaign was only half-hearted.
As a payback to Bush, Nixon appointed him Ambassador to the United Nations, and he later served Nixon as the Chairman of the Republican National Committee during the Watergate crisis. Nixon's successor in the Oval Office, Gerald Ford, briefly considered appointing Bush as his replacement as vice president before going with liberal Republican stalwart Nelson Rockefeller, the four-term governor of the State of New York, but Ford eventually appointed Bush as the first American plenipotentiary to Communist China, then later director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
After losing the 1980 Republican nomination to Ronald Reagan, Bush was chosen as Reagan's running mate and elected Vice President of the United States in Reagan's victory over incumbent President Jimmy Carter in November. In 1988, Bush as vice president was Reagan's heir apparent, and he won the Republican nomination handily, though personally he was not very popular. Bush was perceived as "weak" due to his social liberalism, which included support for abortion rights and contraception. As a "Rockefeller Republican" (that is, an Eastern Establishment pro-business Republican who is moderate or liberal on social issues), Bush, unlike Reagan, was out-of-step in an increasingly conservative party dominated by voters from the South and West. The well-educated, thoughtful Bush, according to Reagan biographer Edmund Morris, was a genuinely nice and gracious person, and more importantly: sincere. However, he was perceived as not standing for anything, at least not in the stark black & white terms that had inspired the conservative if not reactionary Republican Party faithful during the two terms of the "Great Communicator".
As president, Bush saw the collapse of the Soviet Union, and he soared to unprecedented levels of public approval after his firm handling of Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait pushed the Iraqi army out of the invaded kingdom with a minimum amount of U.S. casualties. However, his popularity plummeted by the time the campaign rolled around in 1992 due to his seeming inability to cope with a recession caused by economic dislocations linked to the end of the Cold War.
After the presidency, George Bush prospered financially as a corporate speaker, reportedly making as much as $10 million from the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. Bush's business ventures through the Carlyle Group, a private equity fund with close ties to the government of Saudi Arabia, have proved very remunerative. Most importantly, he achieved a sort of personal vindication when his son, George Walker Bush, defeated Clinton's vice president, Al Gore, and was elected the 43rd President of the United States.
In the twilight of his years, comfortably retired from the political wars, Bush teamed with fellow ex-President Bill Clinton for a uniquely close relationship in which the two jointly led campaigns to help the victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and the 2005 devastation of the Gulf Coast by Hurricane Katrina via private sector fund-raising.
George Herbert Walker Bush died on November 30, 2018, in Houston, Texas. He joined his wife Barbara, who had passed in April of that year.BA 1948; President of the US (1989-1993), Vice President (1981-1989); Congress 1967-1971). - Camera and Electrical Department
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The 43rd President of the United States of America, George Walker Bush (known colloquially as "W" to distinguish himself from his father, George Bush, the 41st president of the U.S.), was born two days after the national holiday of the Fourth of July, 1946 in New Haven, Connecticut. There, his father was attending Yale College in the Class of 1949. His mother was Barbara Bush (the former Barbara Pierce), whom his father had married on January 6, 1945. "W" was their first child. Bush disliked being called "Junior" or Bush II, or even having the term "Jr." abbreviated next to his name.
Initially, W's prospects of living up to his illustrious pedigree were dim. Possibly hobbled by dyslexia (a condition little understood and seldom treated during his childhood), Bush proved an uninspired student in high school. He did maintain a gentlemanly "C+" average at Yale and acquired a Masters of Business Administration degree from Harvard Business School, but until he turned 40, he seemed to be floundering. He admittedly had a drinking problem in his youth, but a late marriage to Laura Welch helped stabilize him. His rebirth as a believing Christian (he is a Methodist whereas his parents were Episcopalian) in 1986 helped put him on the straight and narrow path that led him to the Presidency.
Bush has been discounted many times in his life and career for being wooden and unintelligent due to his fractured speaking style, but in fact, his academic performance was on par if not slightly better than that of his better-spoken, fellow Yalie John Kerry. As Bush's test scores and subsequent achievements suggest an above average intelligence, it is appropriate to believe that he likely has benefited from other's underestimation of his gifts. This was apparent in the first televised debate with Al Gore in 2000, when Bush held his own against the condescending vice president, and in doing so, triumphed in the eyes of the political handicappers.
After W. turned his life around in the late 1980s, he began achieving success on his own, though that success inevitably was indebted to his social position and his father's business and political connections, particularly after he himself ascended to the Presidency after the expiration of Ronald Reagan's second term. The first President Bush (Bush 41, as he is colloquially known) had great connections in the Middle East, particularly with the Saudi royal family and the powerful Bin Laden clan. Using his father's Saudi connections, Bush Jr. became a millionaire twice over through Middle Eastern oil projects. His most notable achievement in private life was in becoming president and chief operating partner of the Texas Rangers professional baseball team, which was financially invigorated by the building of a new stadium with taxpayers' funds. For a man whose greatest ambition was not the presidency but to be baseball commissioner, the "job" of Rangers owner suited him just fine, and his stint as the amiable owner of the team helped generate good publicity that wiped out his past image as a playboy. When he cashed out his ownership stake, Bush had a $14 million profit. More importantly, ownership of the Rangers positioned him financially and in the public eye for a successful run for the governorship of Texas, which proved to be his springboard to the presidency.
Under the quirky Texas constitution, the governor of Texas is primarily a ceremonial position, somewhat akin to that of the president in a Parliamentary system. The true political power in Texas lies with the lieutenant governor, who acts as a prime minister (or provincial premier in Canada) in that that he/she runs the legislature. In a life characterized by luck, the capricious Bush was luckier still in that he was told by the lieutenant governor, a Democrat, that he would make Bush a great governor if he would let him. Bush did and established an enviable reputation, one that crossed both party lines in Texas, where it would have been futile for the governor to act in a partisan fashion.
With his father's Eastern Establishment credentials that linked him to the "Rockefeller Republicans" (conservative on financial matters, liberal on social issues) and his mother's own noted social liberalism, Bush was seen as being a moderate with a difference. That difference was his connections to the powerful evangelical Christian wing of the Republican Party, due to his own rebirth as a believing Christian and his immersion in day-to-day Texas politics. In the Sun Belt, fundamentalists and evangelicals were considered ordinary, run-of-the-day folk, not the exotics that Washington and the Eastern Establishment looked at them as.
With a foot in both wings of the party, Bush was seen as a natural candidate for president after Bob Dole's dolorous 1996 candidacy. That he was a "straight shooter" with no scandal attached to him since his misbegotten youth (which he had confessed to and had put behind him) made him attractive to the Republicans, who had tried to terminate William Jefferson Clinton's presidency through impeachment due to his lies linked to his "bimbo eruptions." Bush seemed like a "Man for All Seasons" that would be the GOP's best shot of unseating the Clintonistas as represented by Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election.
With the Republican Establishment firmly behind him as a kind of "Great White Hope" of the Grand Old Party, Bush managed to wrap up the nomination easily, after stumbling initially when confronted with the candidacy of the renegade Republican senator from Arizona, John McCain. Although viewed by most Republicans as a RINO (Republican in name only), McCain dominated the early primaries in states that allowed cross over voting by attracting middle-of-the-road independents and conservative Democrats, but stumbled himself when the primary season headed South. He was badly defeated by Bush in South Carolina, a deeply conservative state that had voted for favorite son (and segregationist) Strom Thurmond in 1948, uber-conservative Barry Goldwater in 1964, and segregationist George Wallace in 1968. McCain also was victimized by smear tactics, such as the whispering campaign started by Mississippi Senator Trent Lott that claimed the renegade McCain had been mentally discombobulated by his seven years as a POW in Vietnam. The dirty tricks used against McCain by Bush campaign manager/major domo Karl Rove would prove to be harbingers of the paranoid style of politics that would come to fruition during Bush's first term.
McCain, a maverick senator with the support of many moderate Republicans and Independents as well as a following among conservative Democrats, was not only smeared, but his attempts to get on the ballot in such states as New York were stymied until the federal courts stepped in. (In 2004, even though he endorsed Bush against Kerry, McCain found himself smeared again by elements connected with Karl Rove when he defended Kerry's war record and patriotism.) The Republican Establishment were determined to give the nomination to a true blue Republican who could win (the color red was not associated with the GOP until Election Night 2000, when it was used as the map color for the Party after a century wherein the Republicans were blue and the Democrats red). After his defeat of McCain in South Carolina, Bush had as easy a time wrapping up the nomination as if he had been an incumbent.
At the beginning of the fall campaign, what with the U.S. still enjoying the tail end of almost eight years of prosperity under President Bill Clinton, his vice president, Al Gore, started out as a prohibitive favorite to win the presidency. Gore, whoever, turned out to be unable to shed his past reputation as an uninspiring campaigner, and failed to fire up the uncommitted. Bush, on the other hand, a relative unknown commodity who had enjoyed good press for the past decade as a baseball owner and governor, did not make many errors after appearing at Bob Jones University several weeks after it had banned interracial dating during the early Republican primaries (for which he apologized). He capitalized on the low expectations others had for him, and won respect - and votes - for going the distance without stumbling or embarrassing himself, while Gore had to live down the bimbo eruptions of his past running mate and his own faux pas, such as his claim to have invented the "Information Superhighway" (Internet). His stiff, "Wooden Indian" style came off as pompous on the campaign trail, giving Bush's persona a boost as it could have been portrayed as bumbling if he had been up against a natural born campaigner such as Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan.
In the game of politics as played in the US, Gore had everything to lose and Bush had everything to gain. Gore had to rise and exceed expectations while Bush merely had to live up to lowered expectations to rise above them and gain credence, and he did, beginning with the first debate. Going into the first debate, pundits expected the better-spoken Gore to eviscerate the syntactically challenged Bush (whose intelligence they disparaged), but it did not happen. Gore was haughty, and since Bush held his own, the governor of Texas was adjudged the winner. From there to the end of the campaign, Gore could never consolidate his early lead, which slipped away.
On election day, Bush and Gore were locked in a dead heat. In the closest election in a century, it all came down to a matter of 537 votes in Florida. Out of the nearly six million votes cast in the Sunshine State (5,861,785 total, with 36,742 won by third party candidates), Bush was certified as the winner, with a margin representing 0.0087%, less than nine one-thousandths of a percentage point.
After a long drawn-out process involving recounts and court challenges, Bush took the oath of office on January 20, 2001 and won re-election in November 2004 to become the first son of a president to win two terms in office.BA 1968; US President 2001-2009; Texas Governor 1995-2000;- Karl Carstens was born on 14 December 1914 in Bremen, Germany. He was married to Veronica Carstens. He died on 30 May 1992 in Meckenheim, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany.LLM 1949; 5th President of German, 1979-1984.
- Dick Cheney was born on 30 January 1941 in Lincoln, Nebraska, USA. He has been married to Lynne Cheney since 29 August 1964. They have two children.BA 1963; US Vice President 2001-2009.
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His father, a sales representative, died in a car accident a few months before his birth. His mother then moved to New Orleans. Bill Clinton initially grew up with his grandparents. In 1950 his mother returned to Hope. That same year she married car dealer Roger Clinton. As a member of a student delegation from the patriotic American Legion, Clinton met in Washington D.C. with President John F. Kennedy. Clinton was interested in politics from a young age. After graduating from high school, he studied international relations at Georgetown University in Washington D.C. until 1968. He then studied law at Yale and Oxford Universities on a scholarship until 1973. During his studies, Clinton was already involved in various student organizations. He played saxophone in a jazz band and supported himself as a staffer in the office of Senator J. William Fulbright. In 1968, Clinton received a "Rhodes Scholarship" that allowed him to travel to the University of Oxford, England.
From 1970 he studied law at Yale University. After receiving his doctorate in 1973, he briefly worked for the House Judiciary Committee. From 1973 to 1976 he was appointed to the University of Arkansas School of Law. In 1974 he ran for a seat in the House of Representatives, but was narrowly defeated by the Republican incumbent John-Paul Hammerschmidt. In 1975, Bill Clinton married Hillary Rodham, Hillary Clinton. In 1976, Clinton was elected to the office of Attorney General of Arkansas. Two years later, in 1978, at just 32 years old, he was appointed governor of Arkansas, the youngest head of government of an American state at the time. After two years he resigned from the senatorial office. His daughter Chelsea was born in 1980. From 1980 to 1983, Bill Clinton worked at the law firm of Wright, Lindsey and Jennings in Little Rock. At the end of 1983 he was re-elected as governor of Arkansas. In 1985 he became a co-founder of the "Democratic Leadership Council" and from 1990 its chairman.
From 1986 to 1987, Clinton served as chairman of the National Governors Association. In 1991, Clinton decided to run for president. In July 1991 he was nominated as the Democratic presidential candidate. Senator Al Gore, who was running for vice-presidency, went into the election campaign with him. Throughout the entire election campaign, Bill Clinton was in the lead by a clear margin, not least because of his successful connection to the historical myth of former President John F Kennedy. In the presidential election on November 3, 1992, Clinton won over the incumbent George H. W. Bush. He then moved into the White House on January 20, 1993 as the 42nd President of the United States of America. At 46, he was the third youngest president in the history of the United States, after Theodore Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. Clinton's top priorities during his term in office were the introduction of health insurance, reconciliation with Vietnam, and combating drug abuse, gun violence, and poverty in the United States and the world.
On foreign policy matters, Clinton visited Germany on July 10, 1994. In Berlin he gave a speech in which Clinton, like John F. Kennedy in 1963, said in German "America is at your side - now and forever." In 1994 he received an honorary doctorate from Oxford University. In terms of foreign policy, he supported the Israeli-Jordanian peace process, which led to the peace treaty between the two countries. At the CSCE summit in Budapest in 1995, Clinton, Boris Yeltsin and the presidents of Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan exchanged views on the instruments of ratification of the START I Agreement. The Treaty on the Reduction of Nuclear Weapons with a Range of More Than 5,500 km, signed in 1991, thus came into force. In the following presidential election in November 1996, Clinton was able to clearly assert himself in office against Bob Dole. The summit meeting between Boris Yeltsin and Clinton in Helsinki ended in March 1997 without an agreement on the dispute over NATO's eastern expansion. In May 1997, Clinton traveled to Mexico on an official visit. It was the first visit by a US president to the neighboring country since 1979.
In May 1997, the "Basic Act on Mutual Relations, Cooperation and Security between the North Atlantic Organization and the Russian Federation" was signed in Paris. After a long budget dispute between the administration and Congress, an agreement on tax cuts was reached. The US budget was brought out of the red for the first time since 1969. President Clinton's second term was overshadowed by allegations of sexually assaulting government employee Paula Jones in a hotel room in 1991. Clinton denied the accusation.
For the first time in the history of the United States, a sitting president testified under oath on his own behalf on January 17, 1998. On January 26, 1998, Clinton reaffirmed his sworn statement that he had not had an extramarital affair with his intern, Monica Lewinsky. Clinton also rejected the accusation that he had incited Lewinsky to make false statements with an affidavit. For the first time in 130 years, i.e. H. Since the presidency of Andrew Johnson, impeachment proceedings have again been opened against an American president in office.
Clinton later revised his statement. However, at the end of the investigation in 1999, the allegations were not sufficient for either impeachment or indictment. In March 1998, Clinton became the first US president to undertake an extensive tour of southern Africa. As part of this trip, he announced debt relief for African reform states. Paula Jones' lawsuit against Clinton was dismissed by the Arkansas federal court in April 1998. After bombings at the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the US fired cruise missiles at six suspected terrorist camps in Afghanistan in retaliation on August 20, 1998. In October 1998, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Yasser Arafat signed a peace agreement in Washington at Clinton's initiative. This got the peace process in the Middle East, which had been stalled for almost two years, back on track. Despite protests from the Chinese government, Clinton received the Dalai Lama at the White House in November 1998. As a result of the 2000 hacker attacks on the World Wide Web, a conference on Internet security issues began in Washington. Clinton advocated for a national security center.
On June 2, 2000, during his visit to Germany, Bill Clinton became the first US president to receive the International Charlemagne Prize from the city of Aachen. In his laudatory speech, Gerhard Schröder praised Clinton's commitment to growing together in Europe. That same month, he became the first U.S. president to deliver a speech to the Russian parliament. He offered Russia comprehensive cooperation. During his three-day visit to Moscow, he met with Russian President Vladimir Putin and privately visited former President Boris Yeltsin. At the turn of the millennium, Bill Clinton completed his term as one of the most successful presidents of the United States. Above all, his commitment to new companies and technologies gave the USA the longest economic rise in its history. His successor as US President was George W. Bush, who was sworn in as the 43rd President of the United States on February 20, 2001. On June 22, 2004, Bill Clinton published his biography entitled "My Life" in New York. The almost 1,000-page work was pre-ordered two million times before publication.
Bill Clinton underwent quadruple heart bypass surgery in New York on September 6, 2004, but he survived without incident. The former US President is committed to fighting poverty, corruption and climate change worldwide with his "Clinton Global Initiative", which held its first conference in New York in mid-September 2005. For his tireless efforts to help the poorest, Bill Clinton was awarded the German media prize "Bambi" by Hubert Burda Medien in the "Charity" category in Germany in December 2005. In 2007 he was honored with the TED Prize and in 2013 Clinton was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States of America's highest civilian honor, by Barack Obama.JD 1973; US President 1993-2001; Arkansas Governor, 1979-1981, 1983-1992.- Gerald Rudolph Ford was the 38th President of the United States from August 1974 until January 1977.
Ford was born on July 14, 1913, in Omaha, Nebraska as Leslie Lynch King, Jr., being the son of Leslie Lynch King and Dorothy Ayer Gardner King. His parents separated two weeks after his birth and his mother took him to Grand Rapids, Michigan to live with her parents. On February 1, 1916, his mother Dorothy married Gerald R. Ford, a paint salesman. The Fords began calling their son Gerald R. Ford, Jr. but the name became legal only on December 3, 1935. Aged 13, Ford knew that Gerald Sr., was not his biological father, but it wasn't until 1930 he met his biological father Leslie King, who had made an unexpected stop in Grand Rapids.
Ford grew up in a family with three younger half-brothers, Thomas, Richard, and James. He attended South High School in Grand Rapids, where he already showed his athletics skills, being named to the honor society and the "All-City" and "All-State" football teams. As a scout he was ranked Eagle Scout in November 1927. He earned money by working in the family paint business and at a local restaurant.
Ford attended The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor from 1931 to 1935. He majored in economics and political science and graduated with a B.A. degree in June 1935. He played on the University's national championship football teams in 1932 and 1933 and was voted MVP of Wolverine in 1934. He also played in All-Star and benefit football games. He denied offers from two professional football teams, (Detroit Lions and Green Bay Packers), but chose to become boxing coach and assistant varsity football coach at Yale hoping to attend law school there. Ford earned his law degree in 1941.
After returning to Michigan and passing his bar exam, Ford set up a law partnership in Grand Rapids with Philip Buchen, a University of Michigan fraternity brother (who later served on Ford's White House staff as Counsel to the President).
In April 1942 Ford joined the U.S. Naval Reserve and became a physical fitness instructor at a flight school in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. In the spring of 1943 he began service in the light aircraft carrier USS Monterey. Ford spent the remainder of the war ashore and was discharged as a lieutenant commander in February 1946. He returned to Grand Rapids to become a partner in the locally prestigious law firm of Butterfield, Keeney, and Amberg.
His first political experience was in the summer of 1940 when he was working in the presidential campaign of Wendell Willkie. Six years later he decided to challenge Bartel Jonkman for the Republican nomination for the U.S. House of Representatives in the 1948 election. Ford won the nomination and after that was elected to Congress on November 2, 1948, receiving 61% of the vote.
On October 15 1948, the height of the campaign, Ford married Elizabeth ('Betty') Anne Bloomer Warren, a department store fashion consultant. Betty was born on April 8, 1918 in Chicago, Illinois, but grew up in Grand Rapids. They subsequently had four children: Michael Gerald (March 14, 1950), John Gardner (March 16, 1952), Steven Meigs (May 19, 1956) and Susan Elizabeth (July 6, 1957).
Ford served in the House of Representatives from January 3, 1949 to December 6, 1973. He was re-elected twelve times, winning each time with more than 60% of the vote. As his ambition was to become Speaker of the House already in the early 1950s, he denied offers to run for both the Senate and the Michigan governorship in these years. In 1961 he became chairman of the House Republican Conference. In 1963 President Johnson appointed Ford to the Warren Commission to investigate the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He was the last living member of the Warren Commission.
In 1965 Ford was chosen as the House minority leader, a post he held until 1973. As minority leader Ford made more than 200 speeches a year all across the country, which made him nationally known. He was not only a close friend of Richard Nixon for many years, but also a loyal supporter in both the 1968 and 1972 presidential elections. As in 1960, Ford was again considered as a vice presidential candidate in 1968. Because the Republicans did not attain a majority in the House, Ford was unable to reach his ultimate political goal, Speaker of the House. Instead, he became President of the Senate.
Late in 1973 Spiro Agnew pleaded no contest to a charge of income tax evasion and resigned as Vice President. President Nixon was empowered by the 25th Amendment to appoint a new vice president and chose Ford. He was sworn in on December 6, 1973.
On August 9, 1974, Nixon became the first president in U.S. history to resign from the office under the threat of impeachment in the Watergate scandal. The same day Gerald R. Ford took the oath of office as 38th President of the United States on August 9, 1974. Also in August 1974, Ford nominated Nelson Rockefeller for vice president, which nomination was confirmed by Congress on December 19, 1974.
One month after taking office President Ford faced one of the toughest decisions in his career. He decided to grant Nixon a full, free and absolute pardon for all offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in. The public opinion was mostly negative about the pardon and there was even suspicion Ford and Nixon had made a deal to grant a pardon if Nixon would resign. Although this happened on September 8, 1974, it might have cost the re-election of Ford two years later.
On November 24, 1974, in the conference hall of the Okeansky Sanitarium, Vladivostok, USSR, President Ford and Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev signed the SALT-treaty, following talks on the limitation of strategic offensive arms.
In March 1975, during the final days of the Vietnam War, Ford ordered the airlift of about 237,000 Vietnamese refugees to the United States. Two months later, on May 14, 1975, Ford ordered U.S. forces to retake the S.S. Mayaguez after its seizure by Cambodia, an action Ford characterized as an "act of piracy." The operation saved the ship's 39-member crew, but sadly 41 Americans were killed and 50 more wounded during the preparation and execution of the rescue.
President Ford was twice the target of assassination attempts. Both took place in on two separate trips to California in September 1975 and both were 'performed' by women. On September 5, 1975 he survived an assassination attempt in Sacramento, California, by Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, a member of a cult once led by convicted mass murderer Charles Manson. On September 22, 1975, in San Francisco, California, Sara Jane Moore fired a shot at the president, but a bystander diverted the shot.
Despite his former athletics skills, Gerald Ford tumbled several times during his presidency. No cause was ever communicated. At the Republican National Convention in August 1976, Ford fought off a serious challenge from Californian Governor Ronald Reagan to be nominated as his party's presidential candidate. He chose Senator Robert Dole of Kansas as his running mate.
Although he succeeded in closing in on Democrat Jimmy Carter's large lead in the polls, President Ford finally lost one of the closest elections in history in November 1976. After leaving office, Gerald and Betty Ford returned to private life and moved to California where they built a new house in Rancho Mirage, which became his last residence.
President Ford continued to actively participate in the political process and to speak out on important political issues. He lectured at hundreds of colleges and universities. In 1981, the Gerald R. Ford Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and the Gerald R. Ford Museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan, were dedicated.
President Ford was the recipient of numerous awards and honors by many civic organizations, like the recipient of many honorary Doctor of Law degrees from various public and private colleges and universities.
In August 1999, President Bill Clinton presented Ford with the nation's highest civilian award, the Medal of Freedom. Two months later, in October 1999, Senate and House leaders presented Ford and his wife, Betty, with the Congressional Gold Medal. Together with former President Carter, he served as honorary Co-Chair of the National Commission on Federal Election Reform in 2001. In May 2001 he was presented with the Profiles in Courage award for his controversial decision to pardon former President Nixon.
In August 2000 Ford suffered a mild stroke while attending the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. On May 16, 2003 following fluctuations in blood pressure and hot weather, Ford suffered dizzy spells on the golf course and taken to hospital. He was released the next day.
Although President Ford cut back on his travel and public appearances in recent years, he attended funeral services for President Ronald Reagan at Washington's National Cathedral, sitting with former Presidents Clinton, Bush and Carter, and their wives in June 2004.
In August 2006, he was discharged from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, after doctors tried to reduce or eliminate blockages in his coronary arteries. They also implanted a pacemaker to improve his heart performance. In the fall of 2006 Ford spent several days at Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage for medical tests. He was released on October 16.
On November 12, 2006, Ford officially became the longest-lived president, surpassing Ronald Reagan. Ford would extend the record by 45 days.
On December 26, 2006 at 6:45 p.m., President Ford died in his house in Rancho Mirage, California. He was aged 93 years and 165 days old, making him the longest-lived United States President. No cause of death was communicated. A state funeral and memorial services were held at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. on January 2, 2007. President Ford was buried at his presidential museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
President Gerald Ford was survived by his wife Betty, after more than 58 years of marriage, and by their four children, seven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. He was also survived by his brother, Richard, of Grand Rapids, Michigan.LLB 1941; US President 1974-1977; Vice President 1973-1974; Congress Member. - JD 1988; Vice President of the European Parliament (2009-2011), Minister for Foreign Affairs of Greece 2011.
- William Howard Taft was the 27th president of the United States (1909-1913) and the tenth chief justice of the United States (1921-1930), the only person to have held both offices. Taft was elected president in 1908, the chosen successor of Theodore Roosevelt, but was defeated for reelection in 1912 by Woodrow Wilson after Roosevelt split the Republican vote by running as a third-party candidate. In 1921, President Warren G. Harding appointed Taft to be chief justice, a position he held until a month before his death.BA 1878; Honorary LLD 1893; 27th US President 1909-1913; 10th Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court 1921-1930.
- Margareta von Schweden was born on 31 October 1934 in Castle Haga, Sweden. She was previously married to John Kenneth Ambler.Crown Princess of Sweden of the House of Bernadotte (Class of 2000, attended for 2 years).
- Ernesto Zedillo was born on 27 December 1951 in Mexico City, Distrito Federal, Mexico. He is married to Velasco Núñez, Nilda Patricia.Ph.D. 1981; Mexican president 1994-2000.