The American public is well aware of Joe Biden’s childhood stuttering as it has been prominently covered in his three presidential campaigns and two vice-presidential campaigns. Surprisingly, an April 20, 2023 Wall Street Journal book review “’An Ordinary Man Review: Underestimating Gerald Ford” brought to light that President Gerald Ford struggled with stuttering in elementary school and junior high.


The 2023 biography An Ordinary Man: The Surprising Life and Historic Presidency of Gerald R. Ford by Richard Norton Smith discussed how President Ford’s childhood was affected by stuttering. Smith summarized Ford’s issues with stuttering, and when describing his childhood, wrote that it was “compounded by a severe case of stuttering that plagued the boy for several years.”


Many years prior to the publication of Smith’s book, the topic received coverage in a December 28, 2006 article in the Washington Post, “The Homegrown Decency of Gerald Ford,” which gave an interesting synopsis of how he successfully dealt with his debilitating stutter, “Young Jerry also had a stuttering problem (By the time he reached high school, however, the stutter was gone, as if he had miraculously laid it in his hand and flung it across a nearby lake).”


The 38th president, and the only president who was not elected president or vice president, is almost universally not known to have been a person who stutters. This legacy of the Republican president may not have received attention during his days as vice president or president, but now some 50 years after President Ford took office, the shining example of Gerald R. Ford casts stuttering in a most positive light as it proves presidential stuttering is truly bipartisan.


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