Part of being a good martial artist is being a good citizen and being
involved in community and country.

Former President Gerald R. Ford the nation's 38th president, and the
only one elected to neither the office of president nor vice
president, died at his desert home at 6:45 p.m. Tuesday.

Ford was the longest living former president, surpassing Ronald
Reagan, who died in June 2004, by more than a month.

Ford was an accidental president. A Michigan Republican elected to
Congress 13 times starting in 1948 before becoming the first
appointed vice president in 1973 after Spiro Agnew left amid scandal,
Ford was Richard Nixon's hand-picked successor, a man of much
political experience who had never run on a national ticket. He was
as open and straightforward as Nixon was tightly controlled and
conspiratorial.

Ford took office moments after Nixon resigned in disgrace over
Watergate.

Ford became the first vice president appointed under the 25th
amendment to the Constitution.

On Aug. 9, 1974, after seeing Nixon off, Ford assumed the office. The
next morning, he still made his own breakfast and padded to the front
door in his pajamas to get the newspaper.

In November 1976 he lost the election to Jimmy Carter. He was the
last surviving member of the Warren Commission, a group that was
tasked with investigating the assassination of John F. Kennedy and
concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin.

Twice people tried to assassinate President Ford in September 1975.
Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, a 26-year-old follower of Charles Manson,
was arrested after she aimed a semiautomatic pistol at Ford on Sept.
5 in Sacramento, CA. A Secret Service agent grabbed her and Ford was
unhurt.

Seventeen days later, Sara Jane Moore, a 45-year-old political
activist, was arrested in San Francisco after she fired a gun at the
president. Again, Ford was unhurt. Both women are serving life terms
in federal prison.

He was born Leslie King on July 14, 1913, in Omaha, Neb. His parents
were divorced when he was less than a year old, and his mother
returned to her parents in Grand Rapids, MI where she later married
Gerald R. Ford Sr. He adopted the boy and renamed him.

Funeral arrangements are pending. His body will lay in state in the
Capitol Rotunda.