Gerald Ford speaks from the grave...

Just in time for Halloween, we have Gerald Ford, now speaking with tremendous courage from the grave (hat tip: Opening Arguments)

Even in death, the voice of Jerry Ford still reverberates in political circles. Bill Clinton was a sex addict in need of therapy. His former chief of staff, Dick Cheney, has not been the asset he could have been to George W. Bush. Ronald Reagan "had a helluva flair" but was "not up to the standards of either Democrat or Republican presidents." As for Jimmy Carter, "I think he's the weakest president I've ever seen in my lifetime," he said in 1999. And George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq was made for the wrong reasons, since it turned out Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction....

He never forgave Reagan for running against him in 1976, telling DeFrank that he could have defeated Jimmy Carter if Reagan had not challenged him. But Ford stopped criticizing Reagan in his interviews with DeFrank after Reagan came down with Alzheimer's Disease....

"Write It When I'm Gone," journalist Tom DeFrank's book on his interviews with the former president--interviews held until after his death by agreement--gives the world some juicy, posthumous candor. DeFrank, a former Newsweek reporter now with the New York Daily News, developed a close relationship with Ford and signs off his book with these words, "Thank you, Mr. President."

Yet it feels a little weird, perhaps even a bit unfair, to hear now what Ford knew would not be printed until his death. He never spoke this harshly in public as a major political leader of our time, and so it could be rationally concluded that he did not want to take the heat for these words and wanted to have it both ways. And how can those attacked in the book answer a dead man?...

President Ford will always be, to me, the man who pardoned Nixon, the president who got us through a tough time in American history, and a man who should have said it while he was alive or left it better unsaid. Oh yes, and a man whose finest tribute may have come in a field of corn.