Ship Naming
In 2006, while Gerald Ford was still alive, Senator John Warner of Virginia proposed to amend a 2007 defense-spending bill to declare that CVN-78 "shall be named the U.S.S. Gerald Ford." The final version signed by President George W. Bush on October 17, 2006 declared only that it "is the sense of Congress that ... CVN-78 should be named the U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford." Since such "sense of" language is typically non-binding and does not carry the force of law, the Navy was not required to name the ship after Ford.
On January 3, 2007, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld announced that the aircraft carrier would be named after Ford during a eulogy for the president at Grace Episcopal Church in East Grand Rapids, Michigan. Rumsfeld indicated that he had personally told Ford of the honor during a visit to his home in Rancho Mirage a few weeks before Ford's death. This makes the aircraft carrier one of the few U.S. ships named after a living person. Later in the day, the Navy confirmed that the aircraft carrier would indeed be named for the former President. On January 16, 2007, Navy Secretary Donald Winter officially named CVN-78 the USS Gerald R. Ford. Ford's daughter Susan Ford Bales was named the ship's sponsor. The announcements were made at a Pentagon ceremony attended by Vice President Dick Cheney, Senators Warner and Levin (D-MI), Major General Guy C. Swan III, Bales, Ford's other three children, and others.
The USS America Carrier Veterans Association (CVA) had pushed to name the ship USS America. The CVA is an association of sailors who served aboard USS America (CV-66), which was decommissioned in 1996 and scuttled in the Atlantic as part of a classified weapons damage/battle damage test of large deck aircraft carriers in 2005. Eventually, LHA-6 was named America.
Read more about this topic: USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78)
Famous quotes containing the words ship and/or naming:
“You live on hopes, I guess. You always dream that someday you might have a lot of money, your ship might come in. But if the ship doesn’t come in, I’m going to work as long as I can.”
—Marion Gray (b. c. 1914)
“See, see where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament!
One drop would save my soul—half a drop! ah, my Christ!—
Ah, rend not my heart for naming of my Christ!—
Yet will I call on him!—O, spare me, Lucifer!—
Where is it now? ‘T is gone; and see where God
Stretcheth out his arm, and bends his ireful brows!—
Mountains and hills, come, come and fall on me,
And hide me from the heavy wrath of God!”
—Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593)