Of Course, Historians Can Offer Their Assessment of Bush's Presidency

Larry DeWitt’s article is unfortunate. Dating back to George Bancroft, there is a long tradition of American historians bringing to bear their knowledge of the past in order to assess present politics and social issues. These historians view such commentary as part of a historian’s civic role, even as a civic duty. They have included, in recent decades, not just Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., but C. Vann Woodward, Richard Hofstadter, John Hope Franklin, Christopher Lasch, and Garry Wills, among other leading scholars.

The main issue at stake in historical writing of any kind is not the proximity of events. It is whether that writing persuasively marshals evidence and historical reasoning. Of course, the documentation of recent and current events will always be thinner than it will become in future. What Theodore Draper once called “present history,” like all history, is subject to change, just as it is subject to debate. But it is not prima facie illegitimate, as DeWitt claims.

Let me be clear: I am not saying that good historians must be present-minded, or that objectivity is bogus, or any of the other radical and “postmodern” things DeWitt accuses me of saying. I reject the idea he imputes to Schlesinger (and by implication to me) that history “contains definitive detailed instructions for present policymakers” – though I do believe that an appreciation of history is essential for all citizens, voters and policymakers alike, and for the same humanizing reasons Henry Steele Commager described in a passage DeWitt quotes against me. I fully endorse William Leuchtenburg’s contention that “those who insist that history is worthwhile only when it offers solutions to current problems reveal a hostility to the very nature of the historical enterprise.”1 But I also believe it crucial that historical writing of any kind be judged on the basis of an engagement with its evidence and logic. DeWitt’s article consistently ducks that engagement, even when it advances its own arguments about recent events.

In 1998, I presented a detailed historical argument that the allegations against Bill Clinton did not rise to the level of an impeachable offense. DeWitt sharply disagrees; he says that history will, if anything, “brighten” the reputation of those who voted for impeachment. Yet he never discusses the evidence I provided from The Federalist, the ratification debates, and other sources, including the Constitution. Neither does he bother to rebut the historical reasoning of my argument. Nor does he present any evidence or logic of his own. Instead, he summarily dismisses my historical assessments as “political advocacy,” and “hectoring,” writes fancifully and fallaciously about my motives when I testified before Congress, and attacks my plainly rhetorical statements about the judgment of history (statements he feels perfectly free to make himself).

DeWitt likewise evades serious engagement regarding my Rolling Stone article, while he badly misrepresents its argument. According to him, I not only assessed George W. Bush’s presidency to date in historical terms, I predicted its future course. In fact, I wrote:

No historian can responsibly predict the future with absolute certainty. There are too many imponderables still to come in the two and a half years left in Bush’s presidency to know exactly how it will look in 2009, let alone in 2059.

Having read the results of a survey undertaken in 2004 by History News Network (which, strangely, escapes DeWitt’s ire), I sought to understand and explain why, by a lopsided margin, historians considered the Bush Administration an enormous failure, and why, even two years ago, a considerable number of historians considered Bush the worst president in history.

For DeWitt, my findings amount to nothing more than partisan claptrap, with “vast amounts of pure political harangue” – an unhistorical “long litany of liberal complaints about the Bush presidency” wrapped in “spurious” historical references. Once again, though, he refuses to engage seriously with my arguments, or to consider the evidence that lies behind them. It is neither “spurious” nor “liberal” to note that the lion’s share of benefits from the Bush tax cuts have gone to the richest Americans, with the tax burden shifted to middle-income families: the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office concluded as much in August 2004, and nothing has happened since to alter that conclusion. It is neither “spurious” nor “liberal” to note that President Bush is the first president in history to allow the press to disclose, through a close friend, his belief that he was ordained by God to lead the country: it is a fact. Nor is it “liberal” let alone “spurious” to say that “the American objective in Iraq has failed,” or that Bush has refused to back down from his “high-flown pronouncements” about failed policies: I quoted those passages from William F. Buckley, Jr.

But DeWitt shows little interest in debating the evidence. It is sufficient for him to impugn my motives, label any historical evaluation of the Bush Presidency to date self-evidently ludicrous, and then call for the prohibition of a certain kind of historical writing. Perhaps that last appeal was a little bit tongue-in-cheek. But it’s still dismaying.

1 William E. Leuchtenburg, “The Historian and the Public Realm,” American Historical Review, Vol. 97, No. 1, Feb. 1992, 7.