On the death of Gerald Ford, it is tempting to remark that his presidency was a transient moment of little historic significance save for the pardon of President Nixon and the signing of the Helsinki Final Act. There was the brief, but doomed, fight to sustain a policy of providing military aid to the free Vietnamese forces the Democrats in Congress were determined, after their gains in 1974, to abandon. And there was the drama of the Mayaguez. But there were also his wan economic policies, captured in the slogan Whip Inflation Now. And a general sense that Ford somehow, in the great showdown with the Soviet Union, just didn’t quite comprehend the deep tides and allowed himself to get outmaneuvered in debate by Governor Carter.

Yet, if one takes the long view, Ford emerges in a different light, if not as a large figure, at least as a part, even a tribune, of a great shift in the Republican Party. This was the move away from the isolationism of the years that preceded World War II. The move began when Wendell Willkie challenged the incumbent Franklin Roosevelt to take seriously the threat posed to democracy by the European war. After the war, Senator Vandenberg of Michigan acceded on the foreign relations committee and helped swing the Senate behind the Marshall Plan with the famous principle that America’s voice had to “unite at the water’s edge.” Vandenberg, a Republican from Grand Rapids, inspired Ford, fresh from the Navy and before that Yale Law School, in the run for Congress that began his own long rise.*

It is one of the most important facts of the 20th century that by the time Ford was elevated by Richard Nixon to the presidency, the tables had turned. It was the Democrats who were succumbing to the isolationist urge and the Republicans who were fighting to stay in the struggle against Soviet communism. First President Lyndon Johnson gave up the fight President Kennedy had started for a free Vietnam and announced he would not seek a second term. Then came the Democratic National Convention of 1972, when the anticommunist labor leader George Meany was locked out, while the party, having spurned Senator Jackson, gave its nomination to Senator McGovern. Ford’s reputation for honesty must have prompted President Nixon to choose him to replace the disgraced Spiro Agnew. That career-long record of trust and respect was no doubt Ford’s greatest achievement, enabling him to take on the healing role that was handed to him with Nixon’s resignation. That he was capable of acting in the face of controversy was demonstrated with his pardon of the 37th president, though there are those of us who would have welcomed the full-scale investigation of Watergate that a trial of Nixon might have brought. It might well have illuminated the role played in the whole affair by those hoping to use it to weaken Nixon during a testing time in Vietnam.

In any event, the Vandenberg tradition was ended by the Democrats, and the high ground shifted to President Ford and Secretary Kissinger. By 1974, they were desperately pleading for the Congress to stay in the fight for a free Vietnam against a Democratic Party tide that was determined to abandon the struggle. We understand there were millions of honorable doves. But there were, among them, those who earned a portion of dishonor. That dishonor did not attach to the Republicans was because they will always be able to look the historians in the eye and say that when the communists were massing their armies to conquer, in Indochina, a population as large as that of Eastern Europe, Ford had tried.

That Ford nonetheless lost was due in part to a failure to illuminate a larger vision. Even as Vietnam was falling, Ford spurned the entreaties of Meany to meet with Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. The AFL-CIO hosted Solzhenitsyn at its convention, and Senator Jackson hosted him in the Senate. Finally, Ford invited the dissident Russian writer to the White House, though by that time the Russian declined. One timeline, at sandiego.history.edu, reminds that the individual who urged Ford to stop avoiding Solzhenitsyn was the president’s chief of staff, Richard Cheney (one of a number of stars Ford elevated during his presidency, another being Donald Rumsfeld, whom Ford named defense secretary).

Solzhenitsyn refused Ford’s belated invitation in the season that Ford made what some believe was the worst mistake of his presidency, the signing, in August 1975, of the Helsinki Final Act, which could have been construed by the communists as legitimizing the rule of the Soviet puppets in Eastern Europe even as their actual illegitimacy was becoming ever more undeniable. Ford — and, later, others, such as Natan Sharansky — believed the Helsinki process helped win the Cold War by legalizing the tool of human rights. Yet the sense that Ford never fully understood the dynamic bedeviled Ford, who, in his debate with Governor Carter during the 1976 campaign, stated that Poland was not dominated by the Kremlin. His chance for an elected presidency was doomed, and President Carter got his one term.

That is how the stage was set for the rise of Ronald Reagan, who comprehended the possibility of — and secured — victory against the Soviet tyranny. He led by enfolding into the Republican administration hawkish Democrats, including the heirs to Scoop Jackson and those who had worked in league with the AFL-CIO in the struggle against communism. Reagan’s victory was so large and unambiguous that one can tend to forget the role that Ford and the Vandenberg tradition had played. All the more important to reflect, as Ford is mourned this week, on what it all means for our own time, when a Republican president is again going to be forced to plead with a Democratic Congress to leave politics at the water’s edge and keep our troops in the fight against an aggressive, totalitarian enemy.

* Ford liked to talk about the Willkie campaign, Paul Mirengoff notes in an illuminating post yesterday at powerlineblog.com. Mr. Mirengoff writes that “Willkie’s unexpected nomination enabled FDR to run comfortably as an internationalist and to offer assistance to Great Britain without fear of being attacked by his opponent.” Yet, Mr. Mirengoff notes, shortly after the GOP nominating convention in 1940, Ford joined the America First Committee, a group whose goal “was to keep us out of the war in Europe.” After Pearl Harbor, he adds, Ford joined the Navy and served between 1942 and 1946. Mr. Mirengoff refers readers to Charles Peters’ telling of much of this story in his book “Five Days in Philadelphia.” It is remarkable how clearly the war changed Ford’s thinking, as it did Vandenberg’s.