Washington - The flow of ordinary mourners paused slightly Monday as US President George W Bush and wife Laura visited the casket of former president Gerald R Ford, lying in state in the Rotunda of the US Capitol.
The first couple stopped at the flag-draped coffin and bowed their heads for a moment of silence - interrupted only by rapid clicks and whirls of waiting photographers. Former president George HW Bush, father of the current president, and his wife Barbara also paid respects at Ford's coffin.
Ford, 93, died last Tuesday in California, where he and his wife Betty had lived in retirement after the nation's only unelected president was defeated in the 1976 presidential poll.
He was a long-serving member of Congress and leader of the centre- right Republican minority in the House of Representatives, before being appointed in late 1973 to fill a vacancy in the vice presidency. The following year, he became president after then- President Richard Nixon resigned to avoid a looming impeachment over the so-called Watergate scandal.
Some of Ford's grandchildren stood nodding somberly to the thousands of mourners who filed by the casket.
Bush is expected to be one of the speakers at Tuesday's state funeral service at Washington's National Cathedral. The body will be flown later Tuesday to Grand Rapids, Michigan, Ford's hometown, for a private burial service Wednesday at the Gerald R Ford Presidential Museum.
The mild-mannered Ford sent Bush a message from the grave, saying he opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq in an interview that was embargoed until his death. Excerpts of the interview with Post reporter Bob Woodward, conducted in July 2004 for a future book, were published last week.
Ford told Woodward that he sympathized with the 'theory' of spreading democracy but that the United States should not go 'around the globe freeing people, unless it is directly related to our own national security.'
In the interview, Ford referred to two key figures in the decision to go to war - Vice President Dick Cheney and ousted defence secretary Donald Rumsfled, both of them who also served in the Ford administration in various capacities.
'Rumsfeld and Cheney and the president made a big mistake in justifying going into the war in Iraq. They put the emphasis on weapons of mass destruction,' Ford said. 'And now, I've never publicly said I thought they made a mistake, but I felt very strongly it was an error in how they should justify what they were going to do.'
Ford's funeral events began Friday in California, where a memorial service was held at the couple's church in Palm Desert, California. The casket was flown Saturday morning to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, outside Washington.
A formal service was held in the Rotunda Saturday, attended by Ford's family, colleagues from his time in the White House and Congress and elected officials.
On Sunday, in 10-degree-Celsius weather, thousands stood in a line that snaked along the lawn leading up to the seat of the US Congress, where Ford's coffin lies in state at the historic Rotunda - the space under the Capitol dome that dominates the Washington landscape.
The Rotunda joins the two chambers of Congress - the 435-member House of Representatives, where Ford spent more than 24 years in elected office, and the 100-member Senate.
'I think about when he became president and what a difficult situation the country was in at the time,' Bee Gill, 72, of Richmond, Virginia, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa before queuing to view his casket. She said she came to remember a president she described as a healer and a 'gentle man.'
Those gathered included retired workers, school teachers and parents wanting to show their children part of history.
Joe Fergueson, 37, brought his two sons from the nearby Washington suburb of Alexandria, Virginia.
'He bound our country up at a time when we needed somebody strong,' he said after passing through the Capitol.
His 7-year-old son John wore his Cub Scout uniform in recognition of Ford, who was an Eagle Scout, the highest rank in Boy Scouts.
Kevin Young, 39, and Carolyn Taoka, 38, were in the area from Hawaii for the holidays and decided to participate in the historic event.
'Even though he made an unpopular decision in pardoning Nixon, he helped to heal our nation,' said Young, who waited about an hour in the midafternoon to see the president.
During Ford's brief stint as president, he was credited with uniting a nation bitterly divided over the Watergate scandal and the war in Vietnam, but he lost a subsequent bid for the presidency in 1976 to Democrat Jimmy Carter. Analysts have attributed Ford's defeat to his controversial decision to pardon Nixon.
© 2007 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur 
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