He was a president without pretense, a man without illusion. He didn’t think he was a visionary, he didn’t think he was a big thinker, and he knew that he, alone among America’s chief executives, had never been elected. He was, he liked to say, a Ford, not a Lincoln.

But now that he is gone – now that Gerald R. Ford of Grand Rapids has died – it is clear that while Richard Nixon’s successor and pardoner was wrong about a lot of little things, he was right about a few big things.

He pardoned America’s most disgraced president, exposing himself to the opprobrium of the nation, ending his brilliant honeymoon, endangering his legislative program, alienating his new allies and dooming his chances to be elected president in his own right. He did it because it was the right thing to do, the way to heal a broken nation. He was right, and all the people, including myself, who swore with such certainty that Ford would be damned by history were wrong.

One of Ford’s successors, Bill Clinton, once vowed – it was the day he was impeached – “to overcome the pain and division, to be a repairer of the breach.” For Clinton it was a goal – unrequited, as it turned out. For Ford it was a legacy. Next to Lincoln – and it was typical of Ford that he couldn’t imagine any presidential assessment that would place him even close to Lincoln – Ford was America’s greatest healer.

Not that his was an easy passage in the White House. He had inflation, and the last coughs of Vietnam, and a nasty episode with Cambodian gunboats that resulted in the seizure of a U.S. merchant ship, and a confrontation over the bailout of New York City that prompted perhaps the most famous tabloid headline ever (Ford to City: Drop Dead). He was the target of two assassination attempts, cabaret comedians’ gags about his clumsiness getting off helicopters and on the golf links, and was even the target of a deceased president’s jibes (“Spent too much time playing football without a helmet.” – Lyndon B. Johnson).

Most of that seems so ephemeral today, when the word “Mayaguez” (the name of that merchant ship seized in the Gulf of Siam) has completely faded from American memory and when President Bush has recently completed a visit to Vietnam, which fell to the communists on Ford’s watch. Ford is remembered as America’s oldest former president, a symbol of bipartisan openness, and as the man who put what he called America’s “long national nightmare” behind us.

Rising above the rancor of the past was Ford’s greatest skill. He did it when he became vice president, somehow making all of Washington forget that, in 18 years as House minority leader, he had been so committed a partisan that he had opposed Medicare and had derided the war on poverty mounted by the Johnson administration as “a lot of washed-up programs.”

He rose above the rancor again after he lost the 1976 presidential election to former Gov. Jimmy Carter of Georgia in so bitter a battle that, during a power outage, the two men stood without even looking at each other on a debate stage. That moment, captured in a thousand awkward still photos, seemed to symbolize the inability of the two parties even to speak with each other.

And yet once he and Carter were out of office, they became more than simply members of an exclusive fraternity. They became friends, guardian of each other’s privileges, prerogatives and reputations. It was not uncommon for an interviewer to be told by Carter: You should probably get President Ford’s views on that.

One of Ford’s finest moments was when he was selected to receive the Profile in Courage Award by the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation. There were ironies abounding in that award, not least of which was the sobering fact that Ford had served on the Warren Commission that investigated the assassination of President Kennedy. Ford traveled to Columbia Point, a spit of land reaching into Boston Harbor, and gave a speech redolent of the idealism of Kennedy himself. “Now a new generation, in a new century, is summoned to complete our unfinished work and to purge our politics of cynicism,” said Ford, and it was impossible to miss the echoes of Kennedy’s own inaugural address.

A few moments later Ford shared a fateful sentence: “History tells us that it is only a matter of time before your generation is tested, just as ours was tested by economic depression, foreign wars and the hateful regime of Jim Crow.” Ford made that comment on May 21, 2001. A hundred days later four planes were hijacked over the East Coast, and the new generation was facing its most difficult test.

Ford paid a big price for his heroism. He was criticized, ridiculed, dismissed and held up as a practitioner of the biggest corrupt bargain since the election of John Quincy Adams.

That was a very difficult time for Ford, the hardest days for a man who had for so long enjoyed the warm support, even adoration, of his Michigan constituents. But Ford retained his faith. It was, after all, Ford who, the day the Nixons left the White House for their West Coast exile, summoned his family into a private room in the executive mansion.

There, alone, they held hands and read from Proverbs: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge Him and He will make your paths straight.”