How to Game a Presidential Legacy

We all know, more or less, what a president did, but not always why or how — the answers to which may determine a president’s place in history.

If the decision-making that took place during the Cuban missile crisis remained veiled in secrecy today, would we regard John F. Kennedy’s brinkmanship so highly? If Richard Nixon’s White House tapes had been stashed in a vault, or as Nixon preferred, destroyed, would we have been able to take the full measure of his banal villainy?

It was because Nixon, in the aftermath of Watergate, attempted to take personal possession of his presidential papers that the 1978 Presidential Records Act was enacted, declaring that the United States retains ownership of a president’s records. Under this law, the National Archives organizes these papers and, 12 years after a president leaves office, they are opened to the public.

But as with so many policies promoting openness, this one, too, has fallen victim to the Bush administration’s obsession with secrecy.

However, this is not just another blow against openness; Bush’s Executive Order 13233 could change history — literally — by restricting historians’ access to materials that help them document and ultimately judge a president’s actions, lapses, and principles.

Executive Order 13233 gives ex-presidents nearly unlimited discretionary authority to prohibit the release of their papers, and allows them to name designees who can act in their stead. Moreover, a sitting president may also prevent the release of a predecessor’s papers — as Bush has already done with some of Ronald Reagan’s papers — even when the predecessor has authorized his papers’ release. These are radical encroachments on the public’s access to documents that were produced in the public interest, at public expense, by officials elected by the public. Citizens can challenge these decisions in court, but the expense and time commitment will discourage most people from trying.

A House-approved bill that would undo this blatant assault on openness has been held up in the Senate. Even if the measure advances, there is no guarantee that Congress could override Bush’s expected veto.

Anyone can see that Executive Order 13233 tramples upon the public’s right to know. Less obvious are the consequences for writing and studying history.

Executive Order 13233 portends a day when spin, the currency of politics, may become the province, too, of presidential history. One can envision a future when a presidential library’s watchdogs would allow only “safe” historians to sift through the library’s holdings for material to cook up a bracingly whitewashed version of his subject’s actions. Objective historians, denied access to the panegyrist’s primary sources and all the juicy details, would be placed at a severe disadvantage. Which version do you think would get the seven-figure publishing advance and the lavish promotional campaign?

From this high, windy ledge it is a short step over the precipice to state-sanctioned history textbooks, of the kind now promoted in Russia by Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin — the kind that describes Josef Stalin’s brutal dictatorship as necessary and praiseworthy. The kind that laments the Soviet Union’s collapse as a tragic mistake, and that pronounces Russia to be “the best and fairest society.” Indeed, Putin is well aware that shaping history to suit one’s purposes is empowering, in the absolute Orwellian sense.

One day in the future, as we stand before a bookstore display, perusing the titles extolling the extraordinary farsightedness of the Bush administration, we may repent our former indifference to Executive Order 13233 and yearn for olden times, when presidents earned their legacies the old-fashioned way, through accomplishments and not spin.

George Washington won his presidential laurels by subordinating his dear wish to go home to Mount Vernon after all those years of war and public service, in order to become the first president — a tightrope act that everyone knew only Washington could perform. To hold the center together, Washington surrendered his individuality and became the icon people wanted him to be.

And then there was Thomas Jefferson who, recognizing a great bargain when he saw one, purchased the 830,000-square-mile Louisiana Territory for $15 million, even then a pittance for such a sprawling domain. Praise or damn him, James Polk got us California and the Southwest by provoking Mexico into a war and then taking 40 percent of her land.

Abraham Lincoln waged war to preserve the union, emancipated the slaves, and piloted a battered but intact America into safe waters. Under Franklin Roosevelt, America survived its worst depression and costliest foreign war. His cousin Theodore gave us a national parks system. Dwight Eisenhower stood up to Communism and built the interstate highway system, and John F. Kennedy inspired us to public service, and launched the program that put Americans on the moon.

This is nowhere near a full cataloguing of presidential achievements, but you see the point: These men built their legacies on deeds and not hype. If you take issue with history’s judgment on them, you are free to rummage through their personal papers, letters, diaries, orders, and correspondence for rebuttal material.

Fast-forward fifty years to that bookshop table, imagining the state of presidential history if George W. Bush’s Executive Order 13233 is permitted to stand — perhaps further refined by successors for whom spin is as routine as flossing. The best-selling presidential biography, The Decider, whose author was carefully vetted by George Bush’s descendants, is surprisingly rich in detail and anecdotes, selectively gleaned from the presidential papers.

Unsurprisingly, The Decider argues that the 43rd president, portrayed in his day as a radical but inept ideologue, was in fact courageously prescient in his bold extension of U.S. hegemony over the Middle East for the first time. It describes Bush the Elder’s blow against Iraq’s Satanic Saddam Hussein as portentous of the son’s coup de grace. And none of it would have been possible without the vision and wisdom of the man whom the author unabashedly proclaims the Father of Modern America, Ronald Reagan. Contrarians, of course, can always write their own history — it’s a free country. But without access to the primary documents, they will find it difficult to compose a credible refutation.

The Bush administration’s Executive Order 13233 underscores the new fact that presidential legacies, once the domain of academic historians and parlor game aficionados, have become a serious business — so much so that a president has mounted a Kremlinesque campaign to stifle the free dissemination of information. The Bush administration is playing for keeps.

We once chided Americans for their indifference to their own history by warning, “He who ignores history is condemned to repeat it.”

To this we should add another, ominously Orwellian aphorism: “He who can shape history to his purposes controls the levers of power.”