August 1 — August 14, 2026
History Matters
Showing our children that their past is prelude to their future, with book recommendations
.Gerald Ford defeats Ronald Reagan for Republican Party Nomination, August 1976
Even as President Gerald Ford directed America’s Bicentennial celebrations in the summer of 1976, he was deeply immersed in a battle for the “soul” of his Republican Party. Up until then, the former Michigan congressman had never won a national election. Then, suddenly, he was selected as the vice president to replace the scandal-stained Spiro Agnew in 1973; the following year Ford catapulted into the presidency after Richard Nixon resigned in August. Like Nixon, he was a moderate/liberal Republican—who courted controversy by pardoning his predecessor and then grappled with a democrat-dominated Congress through a series of crises that encompassed the fall of Saigon, inflation, and an acute fuel shortage.
When the Republican presidential primaries commenced in February of 1976, Ronald Reagan, the former governor of California, became the face of the conservative resurgence that was partially inspired by Senator Barry Goldwater’s early-1960s movement. As the contest ramped up through July, Ford and Reagan remained nearly delegate-even, but by August—when the Republican National Convention opened in Kansas City, neither candidate had a locked—in majority. Ford eventually won—narrowly—on the first ballot—1,187 to 1,070, selected Kansas Senator Robert Dole as his running mate, but lost the 1976 election to Governor Jimmy Carter of Georgia. Reagan, however, emerged with longer lasting momentum; four years later, Carter lost his re-election campaign, and Reagan ascended to the White House in January 1981 as the fortieth president.
For more information about the Republican presidential primary of 1976, the Grateful American Book Prize recommends Craig Shirley’s Reagan’s Revolution: The Untold Story of the Campaign that Started it All (2005).
Ed Lengel is an author, a speaker, and a storyteller.
History Matters is a feature courtesy of the Grateful American Book Prize, an annual award for high quality, 7th to 9th grade-level books dealing with important events and personalities in American history.
