WASHINGTON, D.C. -- U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell paid tribute to President Gerald Ford on the Senate floor today. The text of his remarks follows:

Many praiseworthy things have been said about Gerald Rudolph Ford over the last two weeks. And this is good. It is good to see so many people speak so well of a man who was often wrongly criticized in life…

And it’s uplifting to watch an entire nation stop and reflect on what it means to live a good life, good to see that the old virtues still have the power to inspire.

Of course, Gerald Ford didn’t seek out the presidency, and certainly he came into the highest elected position in the land in the unlikeliest of ways.

I was recently reminded that his life didn’t get off to the most promising start. Born Leslie Lynch King Jr., in Omaha, Nebraska, his mother and father divorced when he was two.

His mother picked up and moved back home to Grand Rapids, where she married a paint and varnish salesman. Gerald Ford Sr. gave Dorothy three more boys — and her first son a new name that he would carry into history.

The childhood home was pleasant, but since money was tight, Junior had to mow lawns and grill hamburgers after school.

The experiences of the boy had an effect on the man: Ford would later gain a reputation in Congress as a fiscal conservative, someone who thought that government, like any household, should live within its budget. He didn’t learn this from a policy paper. He didn’t need to.

We’ve heard that Gerald Ford was a great athlete, that he could have played with the Packers or the Lions but took a job as an assistant coach at Yale instead. And determined to go to Yale Law School, he convinced the faculty to let him on part-time. They did. Gerry Ford once said: “The harder you work, the luckier you are. I worked like hell.” He ended up in the top fourth of a law school class that included a future Supreme Court justice, a future Secretary of State — and a future president.

We have heard how President Ford signed up for the Navy after Pearl Harbor; that he put duty and country first, and nearly got swept off the deck of the USS Monterey in the middle of a typhoon. It wouldn’t be his last brush with an early death.

And we have heard a love story: that Ford came home to Michigan after the war and married a pretty young dancer named Betty Bloomer; that he started to think about politics, and that Betty wasn’t worried at all about it distracting from family life. “I never thought he’d win,” she said.

But, of course, he did…

The Fords moved East, and decided to stay awhile, and stayed together through it all — until last week, when Betty, older now but no less graceful, said goodbye to her husband, the president, in the same church where they said “I do” fifty-eight years ago.

We have been inspired by the story of President Ford’s political career — how he didn’t make a name for himself with high-profile speeches or partisan broadsides. How he did his job, and did it well, in big and little things.

He built a reputation as someone who could bridge the gap, who brought people together and worked problems out. Gerry Ford summed up his approach to lawmaking this way: “You have to give a little, take a little, to get what you really want. But you don’t give up your principles.”

All this is what we’ve heard about Gerald Rudolph Ford’s life before the President of the United States called him up at home on October 6, 1973, to see if he’d be willing to replace a vice president who had resigned in disgrace. Congressmen all over Washington were sitting by their phones that night, hoping the call would come for them — Jerry Ford was swimming laps.

And eight months later, when the President himself resigned, Ford was there again. There’s a plaque at the Ford library which says that Gerald Ford may have been among the unluckiest presidents of the 20th Century. Mr. President: Where I come from we don’t call that luck. We call it providence.

As Ford himself put it: 1975 was “not a time for summer soldiers and sunshine patriots. It was a year of fears and alarms.” Gerry Ford was the right man for the moment because he was a good man all along.

And what did he bring to the presidency? Exactly what we needed in that dark and painful hour: honesty, simplicity, and what he liked to call, “a little straight talk”.

Ford’s sincerity may have been his greatest gift, but it almost surely cost him the greatest honor the voters could have given him. He told them plainly, just a few months after taking the oath, that the state of the union wasn’t good. He gave them bad news again the next year — an election year when most people would have been tempted to gloss over problems. The State of the Union was better, he said, but it still wasn’t good enough.

And when he lost, he wasn’t bitter. He even made a point to make sure the transition was smooth. He didn’t want Jimmy Carter to face the same problems he did, he said.

I remember those days. I was a young lawyer in Ford’s Justice Department. I remember how the new president restored hope in our country, in the presidency, and in the Republican Party. I remember how he lost his own race for reelection — but cleared the way for another great Midwesterner to win four years later. This nation has owed a tribute to Gerald Ford for a long time. And it is good that he has gotten it in these last days.

In weaker moments, we tend to think that victory goes to the fast, the brilliant, the well-born. But in one of our nation’s weakest moments, Gerald Ford showed us leadership through the gentlemanly virtues of honesty, integrity, and plain hard work.

The tributes now are almost done. But the greatest tribute we can give to Gerald Rudolph Ford lies ahead. The American people have shown how much they admire leaders who are honest, straightforward, kind.

In the early days of a new session, we best honor the memory of our 38th President, and the nation he loved and served so well, by making those qualities our own.

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