President Gerald Ford said prayers during the most difficult moments in life.

His favorite prayer was from Proverbs, presidential historian Richard Norton Smith told a crowd of 250 people Thursday evening at the Dole Institute of Politics.

Ford held hands and prayed with his wife, Betty, on Aug. 8, 1974, the day Richard Nixon announced his resignation in the wake of the Watergate scandal.

Ford, the longtime Michigan congressman, had said the same prayer at least twice before in his life: once as a teenager when he found out his birth father was not the man he had believed to be his father and in December 1944 when a two-inch railing saved his life on the deck of the USS Monterey during a typhoon near the Philippines.

“That’s literally what saved his life, and perhaps Proverbs,” Smith said of the typhoon incident. “And 30 years later it was a different kind of storm in which he found himself.”

Smith is a well-known presidential historian and former director of the Gerald R. Ford Museum and Library in Grand Rapids, Mich. He was also the Dole Institute’s first permanent director and spoke Thursday night at the Ford tribute during the first event of the institute’s 2007 Presidential Lecture Series.

Smith spoke candidly for about 90 minutes as he answered questions from current Dole Institute director Bill Lacy and audience members.

Presidential historian Richard Norton Smith speaks Thursday about the presidency of Gerald Ford. Smith's speech at the Dole Institute of Politics was part of the 2007 Presidential Lecture Series.

He described the circumstances behind Ford’s controversial decision to pardon Nixon. Ford’s first few weeks in office presented challenges with several international and economic issues, but the country and the media were still obsessed with Watergate, Smith said.

Finally, Ford became frustrated after a news conference when he was forced to talk mostly about Nixon.

During a heated conversation on the pardon with staff members, an aide warned Ford about how polling numbers could plummet.

“‘I don’t need polls to tell me what’s right and wrong,’ and then he went on to say something very interesting,” Smith said. “He said ‘too many decisions in this office have been based on politics,’ and I think at that moment, he decided he had no alternative.”

He said a prayer then, too, that morning before making the announcement. His approval ratings dropped from 71 percent to 49 percent.

Pundits widely mentioned the pardon on news coverage last month about Ford’s legacy and credited him somewhat for helping move the nation past Watergate, which, in a speech, Ford had termed the “great national nightmare” that was over.

Smith said that now famous line almost never made it in Ford’s speech because the president believed he was “piling on.” But speech writers begged, and he eventually OK’d it.

Even though Ronald Reagan fought Ford tooth and nail for the 1976 Republican nomination, he and running mate Bob Dole came out of the 1976 Republican National Convention trailing Jimmy Carter by 30 points. They made a furious comeback until the final weekend, when, Smith said, the release of higher unemployment statistics may have ultimately doomed Ford rather than his Nixon pardon.

Smith said during the country’s bicentennial celebration two years after Watergate, America was a different country, where people were genuinely proud of the institutions of government, for which he credited Ford.

“And I think history, and I think this generation of Americans are grateful,” Smith said.

– Kansas University journalism student Kim Lynch contributed to this report.