Ford's Supreme Court Legacy

Dec. 27, 2006 — -- One of President Ford's most enduring legacies was his nomination of Justice John Paul Stevens to the Supreme Court.

Now in his fourth decade on the court, Stevens is a maverick thinker who has proven to be surprisingly liberal and has kept the court from moving further to the right.

In a tribute last year, Ford praised the independent Stevens and said he was "prepared to allow history's judgment of my term in office" to rest exclusively on the nomination.

He said he agreed with Stevens' views on the separation of church and state, and on requiring rigorous procedural safeguards for criminal defendants.

Ford nominated Stevens to the Supreme Court in 1975, when he was a Chicago-based federal appeals court judge, to replace liberal giant William O. Douglas.

Douglas had suffered a debilitating stroke the year before, and he turned in his resignation letter to Ford the next year with great reluctance -- and only after concerned colleagues on the court had urged him to do so.

Ironically, Ford had tried to get Douglas off the court five years earlier, when as House minority leader, he led the call for Douglas' impeachment, largely because of his liberal ideology and sensational personal life.

Douglas had been raising eyebrows in Washington for years, and he'd just married his fourth wife, who was 44 years his junior.

Douglas' retirement was a chance for historic change on the court, because Ford could replace him with a solid conservative. He instead tapped Stevens at the urging of his attorney general, former University of Chicago Law School dean Ed Levi.

At the time, other Justice Department officials had been pushing a different nominee: a young Robert Bork, who had been President Nixon's solicitor general and had represented the United States in the Supreme Court.

But Bork was seen as too controversial in those post-Watergate years, having carried out Nixon's orders to fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox.