Gerald Ford, who picked up the pieces of Richard Nixon's scandal-shattered White House as the 38th and only unelected president in America's history, has died. He was 93.
He was the longest living president, followed by Ronald Reagan, who died - also at the age of 93 - in 2004. Mr Ford died at 6.45pm (0245 BST) at his desert home in Rancho Mirage, California.
The former president had battled pneumonia in January and underwent two heart operations, including an angioplasty, in August at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.
"My family joins me in sharing the difficult news that Gerald Ford, our beloved husband, father, grandfather and great grandfather has passed away at 93 years of age," his wife, Betty, said in a brief statement issued from her husband's office. "His life was filled with love of God, his family and his country."
President George Bush praised Mr Ford for taking on the commander in chief's role "in an hour of national turmoil and division".
"With his quiet integrity, common sense and kind instincts, President Ford helped heal our land and restore public confidence in the presidency," he said in a statement. "The American people will always admire Gerald Ford's devotion to duty, his personal character and the honourable conduct of his administration."
Mr Ford was an accidental president; Nixon's handpicked successor, a man of much political experience who had never run on a national ticket. Despite two assassination attempts, he was as open and straightforward as Nixon was tightly controlled and conspiratorial.
He took office minutes after Nixon flew off into exile following the Watergate scandal and declared, "our long national nightmare is over". But he revived the debate a month later by granting Nixon a pardon for all crimes he committed as president. That single act, it was widely believed, cost Mr Ford election to a term of his own in 1976, but it won praise in later years as a courageous act that allowed the nation to move on.
The US lost the Vietnam war during Mr Ford's presidency, with Saigon falling in April 1975. In a speech near the end of the war, Mr Ford said: "Today, America can regain the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam. But it cannot be achieved by refighting a war that is finished as far as America is concerned." Evoking Abraham Lincoln, he said it was time to "look forward to an agenda for the future, to unify, to bind up the nation's wounds".
Even to millions of Americans who had voted two years earlier for Nixon, the transition to Mr Ford's leadership was one of the most welcome in the history of the democratic process - despite the fact that it occurred without an election.
After the Watergate ordeal, Americans took to their new president, and to the first lady, whose candour charmed the country. They liked her for speaking openly about problems affecting young people, including her own daughter; and they admired her for not hiding the fact she had had a mastectomy, her example prompting thousands of women to seek breast examinations.
She remained one of the country's most admired women even after the Fords left the White House when she was admitted to hospital in 1978 and admitted to having become addicted to alcohol and drugs which she took for painful arthritis and a pinched nerve in her neck. Four years later she founded the Betty Ford Centre in Rancho Mirage, a substance abuse facility next to the Eisenhower Medical Centre.
Mr Ford spent most of his boyhood in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He was born Leslie King on July 14 1913 in Omaha, Nebraska. His parents were divorced when he was less than a year old, and his mother returned to her parents in Grand Rapids, where she later married Gerald Ford Sr. He adopted the boy and renamed him.
Mr Ford had slowed down in recent years. He was admitted to hospital in August 2000 when he suffered one or more small strokes while attending the Republican national convention in Philadelphia.
The following year, he joined former presidents Jimmy Carter, George Bush and Bill Clinton at a memorial service in Washington three days after the September 11 attacks. In June 2004, the four men and their wives joined again at a funeral service in Washington for the former president Reagan. But in November that year, Mr Ford was unable to join the other former presidents at the dedication of the Clinton presidential library in Little Rock, Arkansas.
In January, Mr Ford was admitted to hospital with pneumonia for 12 days. He was not seen in public until April 23, when he posed for photographers outside his house with Mrs Ford and Mr Bush, who was visiting their home.
The intensely private couple declined interview requests and were rarely seen outside their home in Rancho Mirage's gated Thunderbird Estates, other than to attend services at the nearby St Margaret's episcopal church in Palm Desert.
Mr Ford's standing in the polls dropped dramatically when he pardoned Nixon unconditionally. But an ABC News poll taken in 2002 in connection with the 30th anniversary of the Watergate break-in found that six in 10 said the pardon was the right thing to do.
Two attempts on his life were made in 1975. Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, a 26-year-old follower of Charles Manson, was arrested after she aimed a semi-automatic pistol at Mr Ford on September 5 in Sacramento, California. A secret service agent grabbed her and Mr Ford was unhurt.
Seventeen days later, Sara Jane Moore, a 45-year-old political activist, was arrested in San Francisco after she fired a gun at the president. Again, Mr Ford was unhurt. Both women are serving life terms in federal prison.
Mr Ford was the last surviving member of the Warren Commission, which investigated the assassination of President John Kennedy in 1963 and concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin.
Mr Ford had three sons, Michael, John and Steven, and a daughter, Susan.