Gerald R. Ford was the longest- living president when he died Tuesday at 93. He battled pneumonia and heart trouble in 2006.

LOS ANGELES -- Gerald R. Ford, who picked up the pieces of Richard Nixon's scandal-shattered White House as the 38th and only unelected president in America's history, has died, his wife, Betty, said Tuesday. He was 93.

"My family joins me in sharing the difficult news that Gerald Ford, our beloved husband, father, grandfather and great grandfather has passed away at 93 years of age," she said in a statement. "His life was filled with love of God, his family and his country."

He died at 6:45 p.m. Tuesday at his home in Rancho Mirage, Calif., his office said in a statement. Funeral arrangements were to be announced today. The statement did list a cause of death. Ford had battled pneumonia in January 2006 and underwent two heart treatments in August.

He was the longest-living president, followed by Ronald Reagan, who also died at 93. Ford had been living at his desert home in Rancho Mirage, about 130 miles east of Los Angeles.

Ford was an accidental president, Nixon's handpicked successor, a man of much political experience who had never run on a national ticket. He was as open and straightforward as Nixon was tightly controlled and conspiratorial.

He took office minutes after Nixon resigned in disgrace over the Watergate scandal and declared "our long national nightmare is over." But Ford revived the debate a month later by granting Nixon a pardon for all crimes he committed as president. That single act, it was widely believed, cost Ford election to a term of his own in 1976, but it won praise in later years as a courageous act that allowed the nation to move on.

The Vietnam War ended in defeat for the U.S. during his presidency with the fall of Saigon in April 1975. In a speech as the end neared, Ford said: "Today, America can regain the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam. But it cannot be achieved by refighting a war that is finished as far as America is concerned."

Ford's response to the Air Force's "swamp gas" explanation of the Michigan UFO Wave of 1966

"In the firm belief that the American public deserves a better explanation than that (swamp gas) thus far given by the Air Force, I strongly recommend that there be a committee investigation of the UFO phenomena. I think we owe it to the people to establish credibility regarding UFOs, and to produce the greatest possible enlightenment of the subject."- President Gerald Ford (during his years as a US Congressman).

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