WHEN Gerald Ford accepted the Republican Celebration’s nomination for president on the 1976 conference, he stood, actually, between the get together’s previous and future. He shook palms with the longer term, standing on his proper: Ronald Reagan, the challenger he narrowly defeated. To his left, the previous—Nelson Rockefeller, the vice-president whom Ford dropped from the ticket—dutifully cheered. Ford would go on to lose to Jimmy Carter that autumn; 4 years later, Reagan would win the nomination and the primary of his two landslide general-election victories. Rockefeller, in the meantime, would depart public life and die at his desk in 1979.
