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.
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