Should Historians Try to Rank President Bush's Presidency?

“George W. Bush’s presidency appears headed for colossal historical disgrace. Barring a cataclysmic event . . . there seems to be little the administration can do to avoid being ranked on the lowest tier of U.S. presidents.” So begins Princeton historian Sean Wilentz’s latest foray into political commentary disguised as historical analysis, in the pages of the May issue of Rolling Stone magazine. Complete with a mocking editorial cartoon by Robert Grossman, Wilentz’s essay asks: Is George Bush “The Worst President in History?” The posing of the question suggests the expected answer.

“Many historians are now wondering whether Bush, in fact, will be remembered as the very worst president in all of American history,” Wilentz reports, to no one’s surprise. In early 2004, a poll of 415 historians conducted here on the History News Network found that 81% considered the Bush Administration a “failure.” Wilentz rhetorically asks us to ponder the question of how there could be such a uniformity of judgment among so many scholars.

But one thinks to ask an alternative question: What is an historian doing offering up observations of the form “appears headed for . . .”? What are we doing assessing the Bush presidency in 2006, before that presidency has become part of history? We usually think it is the business of historians to follow along behind the policy parade, sweeping up the stray confetti left by the passing of events. Commenting on present public policies—and predicting their future course—seems more like something we might want to call “politics.” And that is precisely the problem with Wilentz and the kind of historical scholarship he offers us.

The Siren Call of Politics

Wilentz is an old hand at this sort of thing. During the Clinton impeachment a group of eminent historians–led by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Wilentz–took out a full-page ad in the New York Times under the heading “Historians in Defense of the Constitution.” Their ostensible purpose was to help the House Judiciary Committee by informing it about the history of the impeachment process. These historians told the legislative decisionmakers that an understanding of the history of the impeachment process indicated that Bill Clinton’s misconduct did not rise to the level of an impeachable offense.

This exercise in political advocacy was followed by another when the Judiciary Committee itself convened a panel of scholars–including Wilentz–to instruct them directly in the historical and legal context of the impeachment process. Wilentz thought the way to their hearts and minds was to insult them, so he hectored the Republican members of the Committee that if they voted articles of impeachment “your reputations will be darkened for as long as there are Americans who can tell the difference between the rule of law and the rule of politics.” Actually, history will show, if it shows anything on the point, that the reputations of these members of Congress will brighten for those who agreed with their decision and darken for those who did not. Wilentz’s own political judgment was that the impeachment was a stain on the reputation of the House. The problem was he conflated this opinion with the verdict of history.

This group of historians, as learned public intellectuals, certainly had every right to make their political views on the impeachment known, and to try and influence the decisionmakers to what they viewed as the right political outcome. But to suggest that history itself contains the answer to the political question of whether or not to impeach Bill Clinton—or that we can assess the Bush presidency before it is even ended—is a kind of hubris that is an embarrassment to our profession.

Before spending good money for an ad in the Times, Wilentz and company might have done better to reflect more thoughtfully on some of Schlesinger’s own advice about the utility of history: “History . . . can answer questions, after a fashion, at long range. It cannot answer questions with confidence or certainty at short range. Alas, policy makers are rarely interested in the long run–“in the long run,” Keynes used to say, “we are all dead–and the questions they put to history are thus most often questions which history is least qualified to answer.”1

The Nature of History

Like many of us, Schlesinger has trouble taking his own advice. Notwithstanding his genteel skepticism regarding the utility of history, he persists in thinking history contains definitive detailed instructions for present policymakers.2 Although he confides that professional historians “privately regard history as its own reward; they study it for the intellectual and aesthetic fulfillment they find in the disciplined attempt to reconstruct the past and, perhaps, for the ironic aftertaste in the contemplation of man’s heroism and folly, but for no more utilitarian reason,” he also admits that many historians are sorely tempted to “invoke arguments of a statelier sort in justifying themselves in society.”3 Schlesinger and Wilentz are two historians who are perpetually so tempted.

This temptation—to make the study of history somehow about the business of present politics—is perhaps the oldest vanity to which historians have succumbed. Even Thucydides thought generals and statesmen should study history since it would better equip them to cope with future challenges because history repeats itself in a circular pattern, and so the same life-quizzes are bound to come around again, for which the historian can offer the cribbed answers in advance.

The opposite instinct–that too much by way of utility for history may be too much to claim–has also been widely and amply expressed. To take just one example, Henry Steele Commager once put it this way: “History, we can confidently assert, is useful in the sense that art and music, poetry and flowers, religion and philosophy are useful. Without it–as with these–life would be poorer and meaner; without it we should be denied some of those intellectual and moral experiences which give meaning and richness to life.”4

The Historical Discipline

One core methodological restraint on the folly of historians is the idea that there needs to be a significant passage of time before historians weigh in on a topic. There are lots of reasons for this. Lord Acton reminded us of one when he observed “The living do not give up their secrets with the candour of the dead.” Ranke was certainly expressing a fundamental principle of historical scholarship when he wrote, “I would surprise you if I asserted that archival study of periods slightly removed from our times has an advantage over a view of the present. But it allows us to recognize more completely and clearly the relationship of events than we can surrounded by contemporary passions and interests.”5

Historians need to wait and see how the story turns out before we get too far along in our assessments. One possibility here is that the Iraq War might turn around and over the next few years Iraq could conceivably become a stable democracy. I am neither expecting nor predicting this outcome. But if future events take this course, Bush’s stock will rise considerably. He could, against all expectations, come to be seen as an accomplished statesman. Which would make these types of mid-stream instant historical assessments look foolish indeed.

More specifically, the craft plied by historians requires us to do lots of things which require time, and especially, the passage of time. To make an historical assessment we need to search through the unpublished memoranda and internal documents generated by an administration; we need to review the memoirs of insiders; we need to recover the story hidden from casual view—who supported and argued for which policies and who counseled against them; we need to compare documents generated inside the White House with those generated within other government agencies; we need to conduct oral history interviews, etc., etc.

All of these procedures are essential for any real historical assessment. What Wilentz has given us is not an historical assessment of the Bush presidency, even a tentative one. What he has given us is the journalist’s account of the Bush presidency. Wilentz reports on the Bush presidency by reviewing the flow of daily news stories and what we know about the surface view of current political events. What historians contribute to our understanding is a deeper, more thoughtful, more reflective view, from a longer perspective and a remove in time. Absent these attributes, we are not doing history, we are doing journalism or politics, wrapped in learned historical allusions and references to create a spurious scholarship effect.

We cannot honestly evaluate the Bush Presidency, as historians, until that presidency is finished, until it passes into history. Any attempt to do so while that presidency is in motion is both foolish and dishonest. It is dishonest because it misrepresents what are the historian’s political opinions as being the profession’s historical assessments.

Postmodern Decline

The traditional conception of the role of the historian involved an aspiration to objectivity in scholarship. Among other things, this meant that the historian was obligated to separate out his politics from his historical narratives. We have of course come to appreciate how difficult this is to achieve in practice, and we well understand that there is no such thing as a pure narrative, one without any taint of the biases and political agendas of the historian. But there are certainly differences of degree here, and degrees sometimes matter.

Some of us believe that the history profession is suffering from various forms of postmodern decline. One of those forms, is the idea that political advocacy and historical scholarship are indistinguishable parts of the same enterprise. This politicization of historical scholarship is so unreflectively accepted that we no longer expect historians to honor even the effort to aspire to objectivity. The Rolling Stone piece proudly says of Wilentz: “’Sean is one of the best historians of his generation,’ says the dean of American historians, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. ‘His careful and thoughtful analysis of current political events demonstrates that historians can also be good citizens.’” By which Schlesinger of course means that he and Wilentz agree on their politics; and no one seems to question whether this business of commenting on “current political events” really is the business of historians.

Like many scholars in this postmodern era, Wilentz simply cannot resist using his position to try and make the story of history come out as he prefers—he cannot resist trying to influence the course of public policy by suggesting that somehow his readings of the “lessons of history” ought to guide that policy. His essay in fact contains vast amounts of pure political harangue. He warns Bush about presumed plans to bomb Iran; he scoffs at the appointment of Josh Bolten as Bush’s new Chief of Staff, opining that “it represents a rededication to current policies and personnel, not a serious change.” He complains that “The power of Vice President Dick Cheney, meanwhile, remains uncurbed.” He recites a long litany of liberal complaints about the Bush presidency, from tax cuts that benefited the richest Americans to his too-cozy relationship with the Christian Right. “Bush’s faith-based conception of his mission . . . jibes well with his administration’s pro-business dogma on global warming and other environmental issues,” Wilentz informs us. All of which are perfectly legitimate political opinions; but none of which is historical scholarship. That Wilentz so promiscuously intermixes his current political opinions with his representations to be speaking with the voice of historical authority, shows just how corrupted historical practice has become in this era of postmodern declension.

My point is not that Wilentz is a bad historian. Indeed, much of his work—like his masterful new book The Rise of American Democracy—is of the highest caliber. That he won the 2006 Bancroft Prize is not unexpected. But Wilentz seems incapable of resisting the temptation to be more than a mere historian. He wants to be a player in shaping national public policy. But he is unwilling to enter the political arena and slug it out honestly and directly. He prefers the oblique approach of pretending to be giving us merely an historian’s account of recent historical events when in fact he is peddling a political agenda. The self-restraint of the traditional conception of the discipline is no restraint on Wilentz. This is all part of the postmodern diminution of the respect for objectivity in the history profession. We now routinely blur the distinction between politics and historical scholarship—and Wilentz is a serial abuser in this regard.

A Decent Interval

One of the most venerable games in Washington is naming public buildings after one’s political heroes. But the game has a sensible restraint: public buildings cannot be named for living individuals. This is done in order to reduce the amount of politics in this process—not eliminate it entirely, but to reduce it to more seemly levels. The intuition is that with the passage of time the passions of present partisanship will cool somewhat, and something more like an objective assessment can be made of just who merits such an honor.

The history profession needs something like the rule regarding the naming of public buildings. It should be against the canons of professional practice for an historian to offer historical assessments of political figures who are still in office and who are still making policies in the areas about which the historian presumes to comment. There should be a decent interval between the time about which an historian is commenting, and that historian’s own present moment. Without such a decent interval, it is inevitable that the historian’s historical assessments will themselves become part of the political debate. Which is precisely what Wilentz’s essay has become. Those whose politics are antagonistic to the President’s (most academic historians certainly fall into this category) welcome Wilentz’s essay precisely because they believe it helps to undermine Bush’s present political efforts. Which is what Wilentz hopes and expects as well.

Sean Wilentz, like any concerned citizen, has both a right and a duty to try to influence public policy in ways he thinks desirable. As a public intellectual, Wilentz can and should speak out about Bush Administration policies. But he cannot pretend that, qua historian, he is giving us a professional assessment of the presidency of George W. Bush, while that presidency is still in motion. It is a form of intellectual dishonesty to pretend that the discipline of historical analysis currently certifies—as a matter of learned scholarship—that Bush can be judged, even tentatively, as among our worst presidents. Wilentz can say—as a political liberal—that he disagrees with Bush policy in a number of areas, and he expects these policies to turn out badly. But he cannot play the coy game of pretending that this is the objective assessment of the history profession—no matter how many historians are polled in similar gestures of the same arrogance.

We need to adopt The Principle of The Decent Interval between the subjects of historical scholarship and the historians who presume to write about these subjects. Without such a principle, historians just become politicians in disguise.

1 Quoted in, William E. Leuchtenburg, “The Historian and the Public Realm,” American Historical Review, Vol. 97, No. 1, Feb. 1992, 9.

2 Cf. his War and the American Presidency, ( New York, W. W. Norton, 2004).

3 Ibid., 124.

4http://www.wisdomquotes.com/cat_history.html

5 Quoted in Roger Wines (ed.), Leopold von Ranke, The Secret of World History: Selected Writings on the Art and Science of History, (New York: Fordham University Press, 1981): 241.-242.

Related links

• American Historical Association, Professional Division,"Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct," 6 January 2005. Esp. Section 6: History in the Public Realm.
• Tim Burke,"One of These Things is Just Like the Other," Cliopatria, 7 January 2004.
• Jonathan Dresner,"Phronesis," Cliopatria, 17 November 2005.