Gerald Ford, who died Tuesday at the age of 93, was a political oddity, the only man to serve as both vice president and president without being elected to either position. However, if circumstances are to be credited with Ford’s elevation to the nation’s two highest offices, it should be said that circumstances chose exceptionally well.

Ford was not a glib policy dynamo, of course, and he didn’t succeed in winning the office he’d inherited. As a result, the nation got four years of Jimmy Carter. But neither was he the caricature created by late-night comedians who, capitalizing upon the president’s own gaffes, gave us Ford the Fumbler, the guy who stumbled like a drunken zombie and spouted malapropisms like Don King. Funny stuff, sure, but woefully inaccurate.

Ford was, in fact, a gifted athlete and an excellent scholar. He played football for the University of Michigan and later received offers to play for the Green Bay Packers and Detroit Lions. But he turned them down, heading instead to Yale Law School, where he studied while working as a boxing and football coach. Despite this difficult and unusual schedule – the school initially wouldn’t let him do it – Ford graduated in the top third of his class. Not bad for a guy whom Lyndon Johnson once accused of playing football for too long without a helmet.

Instead of settling into a long and lucrative law practice, Ford pursued and won a spot in the House of Representatives, where he rose through the ranks over nearly a quarter century. He was House minority leader in 1973, when he was chosen to replace Vice President Spiro Agnew. Assuming the presidency less than a year later, he was faced with an unenviable task: patching up a nation maimed by a bad economy, a failing war and the legacy of Richard Nixon. Some of the decisions Ford made to this end may not have won him popularity, but they underscore his decency and, as history has shown, his foresight.

Only a month into his tenure, Ford famously gave Nixon an unconditional pardon. This decision, which helped halve Ford’s approval rating within months, was criticized almost universally at the time, and even spurred his chief spokesman, Jerald terHorst, to resign in disgust. It probably cost him the election in 1976 as well. However, the pardon helped move the Watergate scandal, the defining episode of what Ford called “our long national nightmare,” into the past. At a ceremony honoring Ford in 2001, according to The New York Times, Sen. Ted Kennedy, who opposed the pardon, acknowledged that “President Ford was right.”

Ford also did his part to move the Soviet Union into the past. In 1975, Ford supported the Helsinki Accords, which – much to the Soviets’ glee – acknowledged the “inviolability” of European borders. For this, according to The New York Times, Ford was criticized by both Carter and Ronald Reagan. But the accords also committed the signatories – including the Soviet Union – to respect fundamental human rights. As historians have since pointed out, this commitment ultimately became a potent weapon for the Soviet Union’s critics.

Gerald Ford assumed the presidency in a strange manner and in a terrible time, but, despite occasional stumbles, he gave this nation just what it needed: steady, confident and decent leadership.