This may sound odd, but when I think of Detroit Mayor Dave Bing, I often think of President Gerald Ford. They were both star athletes who went on to success in other walks of life before having power unexpectedly thrust on them.
Neither ever expected to get the top job — but ended up in the roles they did in large part because of corrupt former leaders who had damaged and tainted the institutions these men loved and respected. Both Ford and Bing found themselves forced to make difficult decisions; knowing doing the right thing would be politically damaging, even fatal.
They both rose to the challenge. Gerald Ford was in some ways probably the least likely president we’ve ever had. Eleven months before he took office, he was a congressman from Grand Rapids who never dreamed he would ever be President.
But then the vice-president resigned and he was appointed to that position, and a few months later, his lying and obstruction of justice totally exposed, Richard Nixon resigned in order to avoid being impeached and losing his pension. Ford took over, and told America “our long national nightmare is over.” He was greeted warmly and enthusiastically.
But then, he pardoned Nixon – and instantly lost much of that goodwill. Two years later, trying to get elected President on his own, he lost a close race to Jimmy Carter.
Everybody knew the pardon was the biggest reason he was defeated. Today, most historians agree pardoning Nixon was the right thing to do. Not because Nixon deserved it, but because the country needed to move on. President Ford told me twenty years later that he knew the pardon might cost him the election, but that he had to do it for the good of the nation.
Dave Bing also stepped up when he didn’t have to, announcing ten years ago that he was going to run for mayor after the city’s long nightmare ended when Kwame Kilpatrick resigned.
People had been pressing him to run for many years, but he had given back to the community in other ways, learning the steel business, starting a company, making it successful and employing workers. But in 2008 Detroit was on the ropes.
Bing felt the city needed someone from outside the conventional political circles. But he had to fight hard to win both the special election and the full term. He told me once that it took him months to figure out what the city’s finances really were; the numbers he’d been left by the Kilpatrick administration were largely fictitious.
Mayor Bing succeeded in restoring honesty and decency to the office. But he couldn’t deliver prosperity, or keep Detroit out of bankruptcy. He became mayor at the time of the nation’s worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The city already had been in decline for decades. Four years before Bing became mayor, Joe Harris, Detroit’s auditor general told me the city was headed for bankruptcy regardless of what anyone did.
When the state took over Detroit and appointed an emergency manager, Bing could have been a demagogue, played the race card, and maybe made himself a popular symbol of resistance. Instead, he was a statesman, doing what he could to help.
He quietly declined to run for reelection, and returned to private life. I think we still don’t realize what a positive difference his decency made.
When Jimmy Carter gave his inaugural address, he turned to President Ford and said “I want to thank my predecessor for all he has done to heal this land.”
Mike Duggan should have said something like that to Dave Bing.
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