Ford is credited with welcoming South Vietnamese refugees who left the country as U.S. forces withdrew, said Gleaves Whitney, a historian and director of the Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies at Grand Valley State University in Michigan.

"He was so humane, and that reflected his decency through and through," said Whitney, who is writing a book about Ford and last interviewed him in August 2005.

Nessen called the refugee aid an example of Ford's "moral leadership" and said he worked hard to turn around public opinion and successfully pressed Congress to fund the effort.

While Ford's tenure was short, he also made his mark on civil rights by working to implement the hard-fought battles from the 1960s, said Hilary Shelton, director of the NAACP's Washington office.

"He was someone whose policies supported important equal opportunity programs like affirmative action" for women and minorities, Shelton said. "It speaks very highly of his legacy."

Whitney said Ford established a commission on CIA domestic spying and in 1976 signed the first executive order banning assassinations of foreign leaders.

Experts also pointed to Ford's role in the Helsinki Accord, a Cold War-era human rights agreement.

"All of these were acts that were meant to heal the country and to re-establish confidence in our nation and our presidency," Whitney said.

Aggie Sarvis, 91, who spent 20 years handling public correspondence for all the presidents who served from the Eisenhower administration through the Ford administration, remembers him as "down to earth" and even spotted him on one occasion at the White House cafeteria.

"There he was, going through the line with all of us," said Sarvis. "He mixed with the people."