David M. Shribman

NATIONAL PERSPECTIVE

A smart editor once gave me an admonition about writing a column: Aim to give your readers something nobody else will offer them. I feel quite sure that this summer 2026 column about two speeches Gerald Ford delivered a half-century ago will qualify.

Because even with semiquincentennial celebrations and anniversary essays in the air, and with readers already saturated with commentaries on American democracy and 250 years of independence, there’s good reason to linger, if just for a moment, on what the 38th president had to say when the country, exhausted by the Vietnam War and besieged by Watergate, marked its bicentennial.

With the possible exception of the 150th anniversary remarks of Calvin Coolidge — another surprise! — the speeches by Ford stand as perhaps the least likely, and yet the greatest, commemorative remarks in American history. In 1926, speaking at America’s cradle of democracy in Philadelphia, Coolidge provided Americans with a sense of comfort and security that no one would contemplate at this season: “Whatever perils appear, whatever dangers threaten, the nation remains secure in the knowledge that the ultimate application of the law of the land will provide an adequate defense and protection.”

As stirring as that thought may be — and as antiquarian as it may seem a century later — Ford delivered even more in speeches perfectly suited to his time, and all time, including and especially our own. What the country wouldn’t give to hear speeches like these next week. What the country wouldn’t give to believe speeches like these in this era.

“These are thoughtful, substantive speeches,” Richard Norton Smith, the author of “An Ordinary Man,” the definitive biography of Ford, said in an interview, “and if you put out one of those speeches today and asked whom do you think delivered them, people won’t say Gerald Ford.”

The president began his July 2, 1976, remarks by reminding his listeners that July 4 may not really be the beginning of American independence. But the founders, those sages in powdered wigs and knee breeches, did what editors do to columns like this one: They read and reread what Thomas Jefferson had drafted, offered some suggestions, and made some adjustments. “They took two more days to debate and to approve this declaration and announcement to the world of what they had done and the reasons why,” Ford explained.

Standing in the National Archives, the home of America’s cherished founding documents, Ford reminded the country that the Declaration of Independence was far more than the beloved melodic opening language, with its “self-evident truths” and “unalienable rights” and its high-minded goals to achieve “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” He pointed to the document’s list of grievances the onetime Colonists deplored (obstructing justice, establishing an “Arbitrary government” and “cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world”) and urged Americans to read what he called the “dull parts.”

“In grade school, we were taught to memorize the first and last parts of the Declaration,” Ford said. “Nowadays, even many scholars skip over the long recitation of alleged abuses by King George III and his misguided ministers. But occasionally we ought to read them, because the injuries and invasions of individual rights listed there are the very excesses of government power which the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and subsequent amendments were designed to prevent.”

Three days later, at Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson, he used a naturalization ceremony to expand his thoughts.

He spoke about independence — not only from Great Britain but also from governmental tyranny.

“Jefferson and his colleagues very deliberately and very daringly set out to construct a new kind of nation,” Ford said, quoting the declaration’s author (“Men may be trusted to govern themselves without a master”) and saying, “This was the most revolutionary idea in the world at that time. It remains the most revolutionary idea in the world today.”

This is a speech that’s celebratory without in any way being chauvinistic. It is a fundamentally optimistic view, but Ford wasn’t issuing an apologia for America. He was simply saying the country had unfinished business and must overcome a history that in many ways wasn’t the history we wished it were. It’s important to remember that this speech was issued after the country came through Watergate’s severe test of our founding and the nation’s defining values.

He then went on to speak of the contributions of America’s immigrants, saying that their “transfusions of traditions and cultures, as well as of blood” have enriched the country and transformed America into “a new kind of people.” In today’s environment, it is worth quoting Ford at length:

“Foreigners like Lafayette, Von Steuben, and Pulaski came to fight in our Revolution because they believed in its principles that they felt were universal. Immigrants like Andrew Carnegie came as a poor boy and created a great steel industry, then gave his fortune back to America for libraries, universities and museums. Maria Francesca [Ste. Frances Xavier] Cabrini came as a missionary sister to serve the sick and the poor. Samuel Gompers worked in a sweatshop, spent his lunchtime helping other immigrant workers learn to read so they could become citizens. We have gained far, far more than we have given to the millions who made America their second homeland.”

Using the metaphor of Jacob’s multicolored coat to describe the modern United States, he cited “the rich treasures you brought from whence you came, and let us share your pride in them.”

Hardly anyone at the time pointed to these speeches as especially eloquent. They were delivered by an accidental president whose eloquence was in his simple appreciation of the achievement of the founders.

“The Ford vision was the World War II generation’s view of the Revolution,” said Jon Meacham, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian. “They’d seen what authoritarianism and totalitarianism could do to the world. They’d seen the wages of extremism. This may seem to us today as mooshy moderation. It was instead a thoughtful, hard-earned reaction to how imbalance could lead to extremism and to chaos. That was his lived experience: unchecked appetites and unchecked ambition. In 1976, the goal was to avoid extremism.”

So think of this week as more than the 250th anniversary of American independence. Think of it as the 50th anniversary of two remarkable speeches.

A Swampscott High School Class of 1972 member, David M. Shribman is the Pulitzer Prize-winning former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.