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Shortly before his boss was scheduled to give what turned out to be his last State of the Union address in 1974, a concerned Vice President Gerald Ford thought that it would be fitting for President Nixon to say a few approving words about civil rights — or, more particularly, about African Americans. Nixon’s soothing words on race, Ford believed, would be good politics and a kind of reward for blacks who had not joined in the chorus of rage that swelled around Nixon over the Watergate scandal. Ford dispatched his top aide Stanley Scott to make the request to Nixon’s advisors.

Scott and Ford could have spared themselves the effort. The request was quickly turned down. Later, when Ford requested to be allowed to attend the funeral of the assassinated mother of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the White House rejected it, and a chagrined Betty Ford ended up representing Ford at the funeral. That was the one apparent difference between Nixon and Ford: Ford had decent instincts and was politically sensitive to civil rights, both traits that Nixon lacked. Tapes later made public showed Nixon to be a borderline bigot who delighted in making derogatory cracks, name-calling and tossing around racist barbs about blacks and Jews.

A few months later, after the fallen and disgraced Nixon was out and Ford was ushered in, the big question became: would Ford show the same good graces on civil rights that he hinted at during his stint as Nixon underling? When the inevitable tests came, the accidental president shoved into the White House by default proved to be conflicted.

He did get off to a good start. Whereas Nixon avoided personal contact with blacks like the plague, Ford went out of his way to cultivate good relations with civil rights leaders. A parade of them regularly trooped to the White House for meetings and events. With much fanfare, Ford scored a first when he appointed noted Philadelphia attorney William T. Coleman as the first black Secretary of Transportation.

Ford even expressed mild qualms about Nixon’s “Southern strategy” — say and do as little about civil rights as possible, toss out racially charged code words and aggressively court white former Dixiecrat politicians. Ford ignored the howls from them to scrap the Voting Rights Act and asked Congress to extend the Act for five years.

But then Ford stumbled. The issue then was busing for school integration, and by the time Ford stepped into the controversy, the practice had deeply polarized whites and blacks. In the beginning, Ford walked a tight line. He made it clear that he opposed busing and vigorously condemned the courts for imposing more busing on local school districts. He even committed a gaffe when he appeared to express some doubts about the Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision (he quickly recanted and said that he fully supported the decision).

But Ford balked at going the next step and endorsing the efforts of anti-busing firebrands that had torn up Boston to stop court-ordered busing there. He turned a deaf ear to the shouts from busing opponents who demanded that he do more to stop busing. There was even some talk about a constitutional amendment to ban busing. But that was empty talk, and Ford gave no hint that he’d support it anyway.

With the 1976 presidential election nearing and Jimmy Carter looming as his opponent, some GOP strategists thought that Ford should totally scrap Nixon’s Southern strategy and go after the black vote. That went nowhere. Civil rights leaders pounded Ford for his busing opposition and vowed to work for his defeat. During the campaign, Ford did not stoop to the thinly disguised race-baiting of Nixon, and even rejected calls to dump his pro-civil rights running mate Nelson Rockefeller, who sent red flags soaring for many white Southerners. Instead, Ford steered a cautious middle ground, either saying little about civil rights or uttering only bare platitudes.

Ford realized that Watergate or no Watergate, blacks loathed Nixon so much that any effort he made to reach out to black voters was doomed. “Most blacks,” he quipped, ”wouldn’t vote for me no matter what I did.” He was right. Blacks and many white Southerners crisscrossed each other when they shifted their respective political allegiances to the Democrats and the GOP. Carter got nearly 90 percent of the black vote, and that spelled the difference in his narrow victory.

Though Ford was cursed with the stain of Watergate, it did not totally sink his presidential bid. His caution and timidity on civil rights and social issues also contributed mightily to his being anything more than an accidental president. In fact, three decades after his loss, an exhaustive search for his presidential record on civil rights turns up this: “no stance on civil rights.” But then again, given Nixon’s scarred legacy on civil rights, that may not be a totally bad thing for Ford in figuring his final place in American politics and history.

BlackNews.com columnist Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author, political analyst and social issues commentator.