From a Wall Street Journal review by Michael Barone headlined “‘An Ordinary Man’ Review: Underestimating Gerald Ford”:

“I am a Ford, not a Lincoln,” Gerald Ford said at the time of his vice-presidential confirmation hearing in 1973. It was a Michigan politician’s way of saying that he was an ordinary man.

But he wasn’t, as Richard Norton Smith reveals in his superb, ironically titled, biography. The portrait of Ford that emerges from “An Ordinary Man” brings to mind what Lincoln’s law partner, William Herndon, said of Lincoln’s ambition: “a little engine that knew no rest.” Mr. Smith’s Ford is a man of modest beginnings who, with hard work and occasional guile, made his way to the country’s chief magistracy.