Gerald Ford never wanted to be president. Never ran for it either. He became vice president because Spiro Agnew resigned in a bribery scandal, and then president because Richard Nixon resigned in Watergate, making Ford the only person in American history to hold both offices without being elected to either. Born Leslie Lynch King Jr. in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1913, he was renamed after his stepfather and grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He played center and linebacker at the University of Michigan, turning down offers from the Green Bay Packers and the Detroit Lions to attend Yale Law School. He served in the Navy during World War II, won a Congressional seat in 1948, and spent twenty-five years as a steady, well-liked Republican member of the House, eventually becoming Minority Leader. Nixon nominated him for vice president in October 1973 after Agnew's resignation, and Ford was confirmed by Congress under the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. He became president on August 9, 1974, telling the nation: "Our long national nightmare is over." His first major act was pardoning Nixon on September 8, a decision that dropped his approval rating from seventy-one percent to forty-nine percent overnight and likely cost him the 1976 election against Jimmy Carter. Ford believed the pardon was the only way to move the country past Watergate's paralysis, and he accepted the political cost knowingly. He died on December 26, 2006, at ninety-three, the longest-lived American president until Jimmy Carter surpassed his record. He left behind something rarer than a presidential library: a model of putting country over career.