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After Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned during Richard Nixon's presidency, on October 10, 1973, Nixon nominated Ford to take Agnew's place, under the 25th Amendment - the first time it applied. The United States Senate voted 92 to 3 to confirm Ford on November 27, 1973 and on December 6, the House confirmed him 387 to 35. Ford had long been one of President Nixon's most outspoken supporters (someone joked once that "He is one of the few people who not only admires Nixon, but actually likes him!"). Ford traveled widely as Vice President and made many speeches defending the embattled President. He cited the many achievements of President Nixon and dismissed Watergate as a media event and a tragic sideshow.
Vice President Ford is sworn in as the 38th President of the United States by Chief Justice Warren Burger as Mrs. Ford looks on.
When Nixon then resigned in the wake of the Watergate scandal on August 9, 1974, Ford assumed the presidency, proclaiming that "our long national nightmare is over". On August 20 Ford nominated Nelson Rockefeller to fill the Vice Presidency he had vacated, again under the 25th Amendment.
One month later, Ford gave Nixon a blanket pardon for any crimes he may or may have not committed while President or indeed anything else he might have done — a move that many historians believe cost him the election in 1976.
The economy was a great concern during the Ford administration. In response to rising inflation, Ford went before the American public on television in October, 1974 and asked them to "whip inflation now" (WIN); as part of this program, he urged people to wear "WIN" buttons. However, most people recognized this as simply a public relations gimmick without offering any effective means of solving the underlying problem. At the time inflation was around 7%, a relatively modest number in restrospect, but still enough to discourage investment and push capital overseas and into government bonds.
The economic focus began to change as the country sank into a mild recession, and in March, 1975, Ford and Congress signed into law income tax rebates to help boost the economy.
In the aftermath of Watergate, the Democrats scored major gains in both the House and the Senate in the 1974 elections. Ford and Congress battled over legislation, with Ford vetoing scores of Democrat-supported bills.
Ford also faced a foreign policy crisis with the Mayaguez Incident. In May 1975, shortly after the Khmer Rouge took power in Cambodia, Cambodians seized an American merchant ship, the Mayaguez, in international waters. Ford dispatched Marines to rescue the crew, but the marines landed on the wrong island and met unexpectedly stiff resistance just as, unknown to the US, the Mayaguez sailors were being released. In all phases of the operation, fifty service men were wounded and forty-one killed, including three men believed to have been left behind alive and subsequently executed and twenty-three Air Force personnel killed earlier while enroute to the staging area at Utapao , Thailand. It is believed that approximately sixty Khmer Rouge soldiers were killed out of a land and sea force of about 300.
While in Sacramento, California on September 5, 1975, a follower of incarcerated cult leader Charles Manson named Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme pointed a gun at Ford's stomach as he was shaking hands with well-wishers. No shots were fired, though, and nobody was injured. Seventeen days later, another woman – Sara Jane Moore – also tried to kill Ford in San Francisco; but her shooting attempt was thwarted by a bystander, Oliver Sipple.
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