George Bush's Misplaced Hope that Historians Will Rank Him Higher than His Contemporaries

"Look, everybody’s trying to write the history of this administration even before it’s over. I’m reading about George Washington still. My attitude is, if they’re still analyzing No. 1, 43 ought not to worry about it, and just do what he thinks is right, make the tough choices necessary."--George W. Bush

While we are reflecting at this time on Gerald Ford's legacy, it is a good time to think about George W. Bush's, as Bush himself has been doing.

President Bush is right to think that history is always being rewritten. As the president noted recently, historians are still debating the role of George Washington in the creation of a new nation. But Mr. Bush's hopes are misplaced if he thinks that gives him a reason to hold out hope for history's redemption.

While Mr. Bush has rightly grasped the insight that there is no History God in the Heavens writing the verdicts on American presidents on sacred tablets, he should probably not read too much into the reassessments of Washington's legacy. Washington has been regarded by almost everybody since he stepped on the American political stage as a leading figure of incomparable dimensions. Even George III recognized Washington's greatness. If Washington gives up his sword and returns to private life after the war, the king purportedly said, he is the greatest man in the world. He did and he was, as one historian aptly put it. While some poliical enemies made a few colorful disparaging remarks about Washington his contemporaries by and large regarded him as a sage.

Mr. Bush is right to surmise that the verdicts of contemporaries are rarely sustained by historians, who have the benefit of hindsight. Of the 10 presidents who served from FDR to the first President Bush, 7 are regarded differently now by historians than they were by contemporaries at the time they left office. Only the reputations of FDR, Nixon and Carter have remained carved in granite: FDR the Great, Nixon the Corrupt, and Carter the Incompetent. All the others have either gone up or down in the esteem in which they are held.

Usually the direction has been up. As the first President Bush once opined historians tend to be generous to presidents. This is as it should be. Historians need to express a sympathy for their subjects and that means seeing things as the presidents saw them. From a president's vantage point, there are often only less bad choices not obviously right and wrong choices. (Note to President Bush: This is why diaries are important. If you happen to be keeping a secret diary be sure to mention every day that you are worried about the outcome in Iraq and are having sleepless nights over the misadventure. You might even concede that you think the invasion may have been a mistake. Historians love it when presidents express in private their misgivings over a war they perforce felt compelled to defend in public. That's why LBJ's stock has been rising. We have heard recordings of his phone calls. We now know he shared the same doubts about the war as the anti-war left.)

But sometimes the direction is down. JFK looked like a saint when he was assassinated. Probably on the day of his funeral you couldn't find 100 people in the whole country to say a bad thing about him outside the small circle of nuts who wanted him murdered. Today? While most Americans still rank him among our greatest presidents few historians do. Most of the information that has surfaced about him in the years since his death have left a distasteful impression. He was reckless in his private life. He may have brought on the Cuban Missile Crisis by his obsessive campaigns against Castro and his leaks about Soviet missile inferiority. And of course he got us into Vietnam. Not even his greatest defenders claim he was a great president even as they insist, with much evidence I might add, that he deserves to be remembered as a heroic figure given his personal struggle with persistent bad health.

Every survey of historians I have seen about President Bush indicates he will have to make up a lot of ground to be regarded as anything but a disaster. He bet his presidency on Iraq and at least at this point it looks like he bet wrong. If twenty years from now Iraq somehow emerges as a stable democracy Bush will be given enormous credit even as he is faulted for the way the war was badly waged (about this there can't be any doubt). But are there many people today willing to take the bet that Iraq and the Middle East will end up the better for our invasion? And nobody outside the self-serving circle of Bill Kristol, Fred Barnes, Dick Cheney and George Bush are making the case anymore that we are safer because of Iraq. We are plainly less safe. The war has inflamed anti-American passions around the world and served as a $400 billion blood-soaked recruiting poster for jihadists.

President Bush likes to think that he is doing what's right even if the public doesn't. But he has misconstrued American history. Presidents get points when they take action that the public isn't ready to accept. They don't receive credit for sticking with an action that is clearly discredited.

An example. Harry Truman, with whom President Bush likes to compare himself, was roasted politically during the Korean War when he fired General Douglas MacArthur. The general was more of a hero than Truman was. The public therefore recoiled at the president's decision. Truman's action, however, was clearly correct. If anything, he was late coming to the decision. MacArthur, as Richard Neustadt proved decades ago, had deserved to be sacked a long time before he finally was for challenging the president's authority to set American foreign policy.

Scorecard: Truman 1, the public zero. Truman was ahead of public opinion and deserves credit for doing what he thought needed to be done despite public opposition. To be sure, he deserves to be faulted for taking MacArthur's advice to pursue the war to the Yalu River, a decision that brought the Chinese into the conflict, dooming us to a three-year quagmire. But he wisely changed course and redefined American objectives once it became clear that we could not secure all of Korea. President Bush might take note of this if he really wants to emulate his hero Harry Truman.

To take another example. One of the positive achievements of the Carter presidency was the treaty signing over the Panama Canal. The public hated this treaty. One of Ronald Reagan's most effective lines in his campaign against Carter in 1980 was the claim that we built the canal, we paid for it and we should keep it. Carter was brave to negotiate the treaty and push it through the Senate. The public simply wasn't ready to accept a change the president knew was essential to progress.

And, of course, as we have been reminded ceaselessly over the last few days, there's Gerald Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon. The pardon was overwhelmingly regarded cynically at the time it was given. Americans were sure some sort of deal had been reached between Ford and Nixon. Had Ford traded a pardon for the presidency? It didn't seem farfetched to believe. He dropped thirty points in the polls in a matter of months. But Ford acted wisely. Letting the Nixon scandal continue to fester would have doomed his presidency to irrelevancy. All anybody would talk about would be Nixon. Ford's agenda would be lost. The pardon undoubtedly cost Ford election in his own right as president in 1976. But he is being remembered this week for his courage in pressing ahead with it anyway. A few years ago he was awarded the Kennedy Profile in Courage award. It was richly deserved.

Now ask yourself: When President Bush championed the invasion of Iraq in 2003 what great sail of public opinion was he blowing against? None as far as I can perceive. He had the public with him every step of the way despite strong but limited antiwar opposition. Going to war in Iraq was not a brave call. Given the 9/11 environment, making war against a dictator like Saddam was relatively easy. The public, fearful of another attack, was quickly persuaded that a war against Saddam would be beneficial.

Given the dimensions of the 9/11 attack, the public pressure was all in one direction: it was to take action against our enemies. From the moment the Twin Towers collapsed public sentiment was overwhelmingly in favor of a dramatic attack on our enemies somewhere. Bush would have shown more strength of character had he resisted this understandable bloodlust than he did by giving in to it.

Mr. Bush has misconstrued history as he has misconstrued so much else because he has not given the matter sustained and thoughtful attention. If he thought deeply about the way historians rank presidents he might have wondered about his decision to invade Iraq and he certainly would rethink his decision now that the war has turned sour. But he is not a man given to deep thinking. Like he says: he's a man who goes with his gut.