Politics & Power Quote by Gerald R. Ford

Ford is selling the most American kind of reassurance: that the system is sturdier than the people running it. “A government of laws and not of men” is an old civic catechism, but in Ford’s mouth it reads like a pressure valve, meant to release the steam of a country that had started to doubt whether its leaders were governable at all. The line turns away from charisma and toward procedure, insisting that legitimacy comes from rules that outlast any individual’s ambition, paranoia, or appetite for secrecy.

The subtext is defensive and quietly radical. After Watergate, the presidency looked less like a constitutional office and more like a personality cult with wiretaps. Ford’s phrasing tries to reframe the nation’s humiliation as proof of institutional health: the scandal didn’t break the Republic because the Republic wasn’t built on one man. Even the word “great” functions as a small act of repair, stitching patriotism back onto a torn public narrative.

“Here, the people rule” is the populist kicker, but it’s also a strategic redistribution of agency. Ford wasn’t promising a thrilling new era; he was asking Americans to accept a less romantic heroism: oversight, courts, elections, and the boring discipline of norms. It’s the rhetoric of de-escalation, designed to lower the temperature and restore the idea that power is conditional.

Context matters: Ford assumed office without a national vote and soon pardoned Nixon. That made his appeal to law feel both necessary and vulnerable. The line works because it’s aspirational and anxious at the same time, a president trying to convince the country that the guardrails still hold while standing in the exact spot where they just failed.