"History will long remember the courage and common sense that helped restore trust in the workings of democracy." Since his death on December 26th, 2006 Gerald Ford has been lauded as if he was one of our great presidents, and a man of strength who kept the country together at a time of national crisis. I always thought he was the one who played football without a helmet. I guess nothing is better for a President's reputation, or anyone else's for that matter, than death. Nothing except having a truly incompetent idiot currently in office. Maybe Ford killed himself. I mean he couldn't have chosen a better time to die. It might be 70 more years before we have another president that reaches these levels of incompetence, arrogance, and general oopsiness. No wonder when I read the paper it seems as if FDR had died again.
The depiction of Ford as a modern day Madison or Lincoln boils down to context (humans want to say nice things about the newly dead, our current President is busy screwing us in a million different ways, and historians have been able to better assess the context within which Ford became President and pardoned Richard Nixon). I suppose it is not Ford's record as President that has changed, but our ability to interpret the circumstances in which he served as president.