TigerHawk notes that despite Americans’ rising confidence in winning the “war on terror” (per this Rasmussen Report), they are still deeply unhappy about President Bush (as they well should be, because he has been a dreadful, incompetent, moronic “leader” despite his having had one correct impulse: to respond forcefully to 9/11—and these are my thoughts, not TH’s; he seems to be a lot more generous toward GWB).
TH writes [e.a.]:
The place of the presidency of George W. Bush in history will almost certainly turn on the state of the Middle East in another generation. If the ruling class in the region remains a teeming hive of scum and villainy, then Bush will land in the lower ranks of American presidents (although not “the worst president ever,” insofar as it would be virtually impossible for Bush to sink below James Buchanan). If, however, the major governments in the region have become more representative, more transparent, less corrupt and less oppressive, history will remember that George W. Bush was the first world leader to declare that end as his aspiration.
Sadly, Bush will not live to see the result. It takes around half a century for history to judge an American presidency. People have to die, records have to be declassified, and, most importantly, the judgment must be rendered by historians who were not themselves caught up in the partisan politics of the day.
That’s an interesting observation, especially in light of George Packer’s comments the other day about LBJ and his persona non grata status in the Democratic Party:
For decades Johnson has been a pariah in the Democratic Party, because
of the disaster into which he led the country in Vietnam. And
today, because of our complex racial politics, even his successes, which partly redeem the sins of his war, can’t be attributed to Johnson. When Hillary Clinton, during the New Hampshire primary, made the historically unimpeachable point that there would have been no Civil Rights Act without a President Johnson to push the bill through, she was accused by everyone from the New York Times to the Obama campaign of somehow denigrating King. These charges were false, but they showed that there is something unmentionable about Johnson’s courage and his accomplishment.
Upshot: it probably takes a lot longer than 50 years for history to make its judgments—and even then they will not always be what we hope.
1 comment so far ↓
Thanks for the link.
Friendly observation that the Johnson presidency is not yet 50 years behind us; give it another decade.
Beyond that nit, though, there is something in what you say about Vietnam. I think that the intense partisanship over Iraq has to some degree extended the politicization of the history over the Vietnam war. Mark Moyar, author of the outstanding revisionist history of that war “Triumph Forsaken,” has (by published accounts) had a very tough time getting a job in academia notwithstanding his PhD from Yale and that Cambridge University Press published his book. I suspect that his views would not have been nearly as controversial if they were not seen as having implications for Iraq war policy.
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