Anne Applebaum: Why George Bush is trying to do a Truman
[Anne Applebaum is a weekly columnist for The Post, writing on foreign affairs.]
To hear George W. Bush tell it, he isn't bothered whether we like him or not. He doesn't care that he was hailed as the least popular American president in history, and he doesn't read opinion polls anyway. "I really don't care about perceptions at this point," he declared during a television interview this week, the first he has given since leaving office. "I served, I gave it my all and I'm a content man."
It was an odd thing to say at the start of a publicity campaign that is surely unprecedented in the history of the US presidency. That first interview – with Matt Lauer of NBC, one of the top American television journalists – was only one of many to come. Over the next days and weeks, the ex-president is going to talk to everyone from Oprah to Rush Limbaugh. He will be interviewed by at least three pundits on Fox News. He will attend the ground-breaking ceremony for his presidential library (every US president gets one) in Dallas. He will hawk his new book, Decision Points, which he told Lauer is intended "to put the reader in the environment in which I had to make decisions".
A man who would give a dozen major interviews in the space of a few weeks is not, of course, a man who "doesn't care about perceptions". But it may well be true that the ex-president doesn't care about perceptions "at this point". Among other things, Bush's memoirs reveal that he is an obsessive reader of history books, and in fact once competed with Karl Rove over who could read more in one year. (Rove won, though not by much: he finished 110 books and 40,347 pages to Bush's 95 and 37,343.) And as a reader of history books, Bush certainly knows that several of his predecessors were extraordinarily unpopular when they ended their presidencies, yet were viewed very differently in the light of subsequent events.
Some of these are well known in America, above all the historical re-evaluation of Harry Truman, whose name was cited as a Bush hero even during Bush's administration. When Truman left office, he was widely disliked, largely because of the unpopular Korean War. Only in later years was he appreciated for his early recognition of the Soviet threat, for his decision to launch the Marshall Plan and reconstruct Europe, and for inspiring the creation of Nato. He is now seen as one of the best 20th-century presidents.
Truman also wrote a popular memoir, still considered one of the best written by a president. The title of one of its volumes, 1945: Year of Decisions, has clearly influenced Bush's choice of title, and I have no doubt that the saga of Truman's rehabilitation has influenced Bush's publicity blitz as well. Bush might not care what the public thinks of him right now, but he cares a lot about what historians will write about him 20 years hence. He reckons the Iraq war is his Korean war, that his book on "decisions" echoes Truman's book on "decisions", and that the nation will eventually understand his motives just as the nation eventually came to understand Truman's motives.
In this, he is not alone...
Read entire article at Telegraph (UK)
To hear George W. Bush tell it, he isn't bothered whether we like him or not. He doesn't care that he was hailed as the least popular American president in history, and he doesn't read opinion polls anyway. "I really don't care about perceptions at this point," he declared during a television interview this week, the first he has given since leaving office. "I served, I gave it my all and I'm a content man."
It was an odd thing to say at the start of a publicity campaign that is surely unprecedented in the history of the US presidency. That first interview – with Matt Lauer of NBC, one of the top American television journalists – was only one of many to come. Over the next days and weeks, the ex-president is going to talk to everyone from Oprah to Rush Limbaugh. He will be interviewed by at least three pundits on Fox News. He will attend the ground-breaking ceremony for his presidential library (every US president gets one) in Dallas. He will hawk his new book, Decision Points, which he told Lauer is intended "to put the reader in the environment in which I had to make decisions".
A man who would give a dozen major interviews in the space of a few weeks is not, of course, a man who "doesn't care about perceptions". But it may well be true that the ex-president doesn't care about perceptions "at this point". Among other things, Bush's memoirs reveal that he is an obsessive reader of history books, and in fact once competed with Karl Rove over who could read more in one year. (Rove won, though not by much: he finished 110 books and 40,347 pages to Bush's 95 and 37,343.) And as a reader of history books, Bush certainly knows that several of his predecessors were extraordinarily unpopular when they ended their presidencies, yet were viewed very differently in the light of subsequent events.
Some of these are well known in America, above all the historical re-evaluation of Harry Truman, whose name was cited as a Bush hero even during Bush's administration. When Truman left office, he was widely disliked, largely because of the unpopular Korean War. Only in later years was he appreciated for his early recognition of the Soviet threat, for his decision to launch the Marshall Plan and reconstruct Europe, and for inspiring the creation of Nato. He is now seen as one of the best 20th-century presidents.
Truman also wrote a popular memoir, still considered one of the best written by a president. The title of one of its volumes, 1945: Year of Decisions, has clearly influenced Bush's choice of title, and I have no doubt that the saga of Truman's rehabilitation has influenced Bush's publicity blitz as well. Bush might not care what the public thinks of him right now, but he cares a lot about what historians will write about him 20 years hence. He reckons the Iraq war is his Korean war, that his book on "decisions" echoes Truman's book on "decisions", and that the nation will eventually understand his motives just as the nation eventually came to understand Truman's motives.
In this, he is not alone...