US:US president George Bush has led tributes to former president Gerald Ford, who has died aged 93, declaring a national day of mourning for a self-effacing leader who helped to unite Americans after the Watergate scandal and the loss of the Vietnam War.
The only occupant of the White House never to be elected president or vice-president, Mr Ford stepped into the presidency in August 1974 after Richard Nixon resigned rather than face certain impeachment.
"He assumed power in a period of great division and turmoil. For a nation that needed healing and for an office that needed a calm and steady hand, Gerald Ford came along when we needed him most," Mr Bush said.
US vice-president Dick Cheney, who served as Mr Ford's White House chief of staff, said that the former president succeeded in restoring public trust in the nation's highest office.
"Gerald Ford embodied the best values of a great generation: decency, integrity and devotion to duty. Thirty-two years ago, he assumed the nation's highest office during the greatest constitutional crisis since the Civil War. In that troubled era, America needed strength, wisdom and good judgment, and those qualities came to us in the person of Gerald R Ford," Mr Cheney said.
Former president Jimmy Carter described him as "one of the most admirable public servants and human beings I have ever known". Former president Bill Clinton said: "All Americans should be grateful for his life of service."
Mr Ford died on Tuesday evening at his home near Los Angeles after months of illness that included bouts of pneumonia and heart disease. He was the longest-living former US president, followed by Ronald Reagan, who also died at 93.
A former Republican congressman from Grand Rapids, Michigan, Mr Ford became vice-president in December 1973 after Spiro Agnew resigned over a bribery scandal. Eight months later, Mr Ford was sworn in as president following the constitutional and political crisis created by Watergate.
The scandal began in June 1972, when five operatives of Mr Nixon's re-election campaign were caught breaking into Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate office building in Washington.
The White House denied any involvement but taped conversations showed that Nixon ordered a cover-up and tried to thwart the investigation into the break-in.
In his inaugural address, Mr Ford promised to replace the secretiveness of the Nixon administration with the openness and candour that had long characterised his own political style.
"Our long national nightmare is over. Our constitution works. Our great republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule," Mr Ford said.
Americans of all political stripes were relieved by Nixon's departure and Mr Ford's unassuming manner, which saw him make his own breakfast in the White House and won him great popularity in the days that followed his inauguration. The political honeymoon ended abruptly a month later, however, when Mr Ford announced that he was pardoning Nixon for all federal crimes he had "committed or may have committed" when he was in the White House.
Democrats accused Mr Ford of having made a secret deal with Nixon before the disgraced president left office, a charge Mr Ford denied under oath before a congressional committee. The decision to pardon Nixon was deeply unpopular and most political analysts and historians believe it led to Mr Ford's defeat in 1976 by Mr Carter.
Mr Ford defended the pardon on the grounds that a lengthy trial, with appeals that could continue for years, would only prolong the national trauma of Watergate and prevent America's political life from moving beyond it. Many former critics subsequently changed their minds about the pardon and Democratic senator Edward Kennedy, who had denounced it at the time, said in 2001 that Mr Ford's decision was "an extraordinary act of courage that historians recognise was truly in the national interest".
Mr Ford was born Leslie King on July 14th, 1913, in Omaha, Nebraska. His parents were divorced when he was less than a year old, and his mother returned to her parents in Grand Rapids, where she later married Gerald Ford snr, who adopted the boy and renamed him.
Mr Ford did not discover that he was adopted until he was 17, when his biological father introduced himself at a lunch counter where the teenager was working. A star football player at the University of Michigan, Mr Ford turned down offers from professional teams, choosing instead to study law at Yale and serve in the US navy, before returning to Michigan to work as a lawyer.
He was elected to Congress in 1948 and his reputation as a solid, moderate Republican combined with an easy charm helped him to become minority leader in the House of Representatives in 1965.
As president, Mr Ford inherited an economy that had been hit hard by the 1973 oil crisis, with galloping inflation and unemployment at 9 per cent, its highest level since the 1930s.
The Vietnam War ended in defeat for the US during his presidency with the fall of Saigon in April 1975 amid distressing scenes of evacuees trying to scramble aboard helicopters leaving from the US embassy. In a speech as the end neared, Mr Ford said: "Today, America can regain the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam. But it cannot be achieved by refighting a war that is finished as far as America is concerned."
