Gerald Ford

Gerald Rudolph Ford Jr., born July 14, 1913, in Omaha, Nebraska, and died December 26, 2006, served as the thirty-eighth President of the United States from 1974 to 1977, and remains the only person to have held the presidency without having been elected either president or vice president. A longtime member of the House of Representatives, he was appointed Vice President under the Twenty-Fifth Amendment after Spiro Agnew's resignation in 1973, then succeeded to the presidency himself when Richard Nixon resigned in August 1974 over the Watergate scandal. About a month into his term he issued Nixon a full and unconditional pardon for any crimes committed as president, a controversial decision widely believed to have contributed to Ford's narrow loss in the 1976 election.