Gerald Ford became President under the 25th Amendment after Nixon's resignation due to the Watergate scandal. One of Ford's controversial actions was pardoning Nixon shortly after taking office, which significantly affected his popularity.
The CIA would secretly interfere with foreign interferes. They mainly got involved in South America and the Middle East.
When we were leaving South Vietnam we brought Vietnamese babies to America where they would be orphans. This was called operation Babylift.
In countries like Nicaragua the CIA would assassinate democratic elected leaders because they were socialist. We put military dictators in power because to us they were better than a Communist leader.
Israel and Egypt were involved in the Yom Kipur war over the loss of land in a war. American Jews were giving money to Israel. This cause the Middle Eastern countries to become furious with the United States and start the OPEC oil ban which hurt our economy.
Millions of people who wanted to seek refuge in other parts of Southeast asia but failed and went to the US or Canada were called Boat People
We followed a policy of detente (improving relations) when it came to Communism especially with the Soviet Union and China
The Khmer Rouge takes an American merchant ship called the Mayaguez and Ford is forced to sent American marines to save the crew and the ship
After the United States got out of the Vietnam war a civil war between North and South Vietnam war started that lasted 3 years before the South Vietnamese lost. The U.S. left before the Fall of Saigon and they took orphan with them back to the United States
SALT 2 was an addition of the original SALT agreement that limited nuclear weapons.
The Helsinki led to SALT 2 which limited the production of the amount of nuclear weapons that were produced
Watergate
This was the most controversial thing of his presidency.
A month after he became President Ford pardoned Nixon.
Internal Affairs
Ford lost a lot of popularity when he decided to pardon Nixon just a month into his presidency. Due to the events that occurred during Nixon presidency and the Vietnam war the public was losing a lot of support and they did not trust him. At one point 2/3 of the population did not vote in the election. An outsider in Jimmy Carter was able to win the election.
At this time most of Congress was Democratic and president Ford was a Republican. Due to this fact they rarely agreed and they kept vetoing each others bills and voting against it. This created a bad relationship between President Ford and Congress which led to the most amount of times during a presidency that a bill was vetoed/ not passed.
Economy
WIN was an attempt to stop inflation and save the economy but it failed and made the economy worse.
The economy was in a stagflation. This means the economy was in a recession and inflation at the same time.
How he became President
Due to the 25th Amendment Nixon was allowed to pick the new president because the vice president resigned.
Nixon resigned from office due to the Watergate scandal
