Beard said the White House is probably still coated with whitewash and not paint.

“It would be a very Herculean task to paint over it,” he said.

Whitewash is good at handling the kind of moisture that is typical for D.C., Beard said.

“For that building, that was the perfect solution,” Beard said.

That conversation was so casual that Ford felt comfortable using Beard’s first name, Beard recalled today. The next time the president saw Beard, “it was Congressman Beard,” he said.

“I, of course, never called him anything other than Mr. President,” Beard said. “He felt comfortable, at that one moment, to call me Eddy.”

Ford was “a nice gentleman” and “a good president,” Beard said today.

Beard, now 66, represented the state’s Second District as a Democrat from 1975 until early 1981. He lost a re-election bid to Claudine Schneider.

As Beard sees it, Ford’s legacy was “bringing stability back to the government after Watergate.”

Beard agreed with Ford’s controversial decision to pardon former President Nixon.

“That put an end to the public misery of what happened with Watergate,” Beard said. “In other words, that was the end of it.”

Had Ford let Nixon go to jail, Watergate would have dominated his entire term, Beard said.

Beard said he wishes he could travel to Ford’s funeral, but he has been sick and is unable to do so.

“But in my mind, I remember a wonderful president, and that’s how I’ll always remember him,” he said.