Gerald Ford was an American politician who served as the 38th president of the United States from August 1974 to January 1977.

Ford was born Leslie Lynch King Jr. on July 14, 1913, but his parents separated just sixteen days after his birth. The young boy eventually took the name Gerald Rudolph Ford Jr. after his mother's second husband.

Ford attended the University of Michigan, where he played center, linebacker, and long snapper for the school's football team, helping the Wolverines to two undefeated seasons and national titles in 1932 and 1933. Upon graduation, Ford received offers from two professional football teams, the Detroit Lions and the Green Bay Packers, but turned them down to take a position as head boxing coach and assistant football coach at Yale University, where he hoped to study law.

The Warren Commission was a special task force set up to investigate the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. It concluded that President Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald and that Oswald acted entirely alone. It also concluded that Jack Ruby acted alone when he killed Oswald two days later. The Commission's findings have proven controversial and have been both challenged and supported by later studies.

Ford is the only person to have served as both vice president and president without being elected to either office by voters.

Ford began his political career in 1949 as the U.S. representative from Michigan's 5th congressional district. He served in this capacity for 25 years, the final nine of them as the House Minority Leader.

In December 1973, two months after the resignation of Spiro Agnew, Ford became the first person appointed to the vice presidency under the terms of the 25th Amendment by President Richard Nixon. After the subsequent resignation of President Nixon in August 1974, Ford immediately assumed the presidency. His 895 day-long presidency is the shortest in U.S. history for any president who did not die in office.

On August 20, 1974, Ford nominated former New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, grandson of billionaire John D. Rockefeller, to fill the vice presidency he had vacated. Rockefeller was considered progressive at the time, and liberals in the Republican Party were called "Rockefeller Republicans". Although conservative Republicans were not pleased with the pick, his nomination passed both the House and Senate.

Ford's decision to pardon Nixon was highly controversial. Critics derided the move and said a "corrupt bargain" had been struck between the men. Ford's first press secretary and close friend Jerald terHorst resigned his post in protest, and historians have suggested that the controversy was one of the major reasons Ford lost the 1976 presidential election, an observation with which Ford agreed. In an editorial at the time, The New York Times stated that the Nixon pardon was a "profoundly unwise, divisive and unjust act" that in a single stroke had destroyed the new president's "credibility as a man of judgment, candor and competence".

In 1976, Ford was confronted with a potential swine flu pandemic. Public health officials in the Ford administration urged every person in the United States to be vaccinated. After some 25% of the population had been vaccinated, however, the immunization program was halted because the vaccine was found to be associated with an increased risk of Guillain-Barré Syndrome, which can cause paralysis, respiratory arrest, and death.