Honors for Ford move to homecoming in Mich.

updated 7:03 p.m. ET Jan. 2, 2007

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. - The nation remembered Gerald R. Ford on Tuesday for what he didn’t have — pretensions, a scheming agenda, a great golf game — as much as for the small-town authenticity he brought to the presidency.

In an elaborate national funeral service in Washington and then more simply at his final homecoming in Grand Rapids, the 38th president was celebrated for treating politics as a calling rather than blood sport.

The last act of Ford’s state funeral was playing out at his presidential museum, open throughout the night and Wednesday morning for the public to pay final respects. Scouts came forward three by three and saluted by his casket to open 18 hours of visitation, before a final church service and Ford’s hillside burial Wednesday afternoon.

The marching band from the University of Michigan, the school where he played football, greeted the White House jet carrying his casket, members of his family and others in the funeral party.

Ford brought 'calm and healing'
The service in Washington unfolded in the spirit of one of its musical selections — “Fanfare for the Common Man” — as powerful people celebrated the modesty and humility of a leader propelled to the presidency by the Watergate crisis that drove predecessor Richard Nixon from office.

“In President Ford, the world saw the best of America, and America found a man whose character and leadership would bring calm and healing to one of the most divisive moments in our nation’s history,” President Bush said in his eulogy.

Bush’s father, the first President Bush, called Ford a “Norman Rockwell painting come to life” and pierced the solemnity of the occasion by cracking gentle jokes about Ford’s reputation as an errant golfer. He said Ford knew his golf game was getting better when he began hitting fewer spectators.

Ford’s athletic interest was honored too in the capital and in Michigan. At the Grand Rapids airport that bears Ford’s name, the Michigan band played the school’s famous fight song, “The Victors,” as Ford’s flag-draped casket was transferred to a hearse.

Chose law school over pro football
He had played center for the Wolverines in their undefeated, national championship seasons in 1932 and 1933 and turned down several pro football offers to go to law school at Yale instead.

Jimmy Carter, the Democrat who defeated Ford in 1976 and became his friend, not only attended the Washington service with the two other living ex-presidents, the elder Bush and Bill Clinton, but came to Grand Rapids on the plane with Ford’s family and his remains.

Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, delivering one of the most emotional tributes of the day, spoke as if addressing Ford directly, in remarks at the museum. “You were a paradoxical gift of remarkable intellect and achievement wrapped in a plain brown wrapper,” said Granholm, a Democrat.

Under towering arches of the cathedral in the morning, Henry Kissinger, Ford’s secretary of state, paid tribute to his leadership in achieving nuclear arms control with the Soviets, pushing for the first political agreement between Israel and Egypt and helping to bring majority rule to southern Africa.

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