ANN ARBOR -- Smart, thoughtful, cooperative, nice.

All are words that define the 38th president and allowed him to help the country navigate the post-Watergate, post-Vietnam era, said Elaine Didier, director of President Ford's Library at the University of Michigan.

When tapped by President Nixon to assume the vice presidency, President Ford brought an easy-going, next-door-neighbor demeanor to the White House. It helped the country as it made the transition out of scandal.

"I think it's very easy to overlook how incredibly chaotic it was and how it needed his calming influence," Didier said.

The library at Ford's beloved U-M, where he attended college and played football, is closed today but will reopen tomorrow to allow people to sign condolence books and browse through the standing exhibits and see additional photos compiled for the occasion.

The library houses 21 million pages of documents and a half-million audio-visual materials. Its sister museum is in Grand Rapids.

Bill McNitt was working at the Bentley Historical Library on campus in 1974 when he was assigned to work with the president's congressional papers. He continued on to work on the presidential papers as well.

McNitt's father graduated from high school with the president in Grand Rapids in 1931 and the family knew Ford as friend and congressman long before he entered the White House.

"He could deal with people of all levels, of all parties," McNitt said. "Everybody liked him and he liked everybody."

With the country torn apart by the Watergate scandal, Ford used that likeability to make his pardon of President Nixon work. It may have cost him the 1976 election. But it's an example of how Ford didn't look to pollsters to decide what course to take.

"I think he was thoughtful, decent, very much not just swayed by polls or expediency," Didier said.

"He really was the right person at the right time and not in a trivial way."

His peers at the Delta Kappa Epsilon house on the U-M campus, where he was a star center on the football team, liked their fraternity brother as well. They lauded him "because he never smokes, swears or tells dirty jokes, qualities quite novel among the rest of his brothers," they wrote at that time.