Let’s think a moment here.
Harry Truman received a fair amount of grief during and right after his one-and-one-half terms. For the most part that grief was over Mao’s revolution in China, the McCarthy’s Red Scare and the Korean War. It was only later when partisan passions cooled (a fair number of people who saw him as a substitute for FDR, who was really reviled in some quarters) that his merits became generally accepted and he received the credit he deserved for ending the Second War in the Pacific without the bloodbath that an invasion of Japan would have involved, the Marshall Plan, The Greek Civil War and the Truman Doctrine in the face of Soviet expansionism, the refusal to abandon South Korea in the face of northern aggression with Soviet connivance and the removal of MacArthur. Just look at the triumphant reception Mac Arthur received from Congress and the movement to draft Mac Arthur as the Republican presidential candidate. There was rabid animosity toward Truman at the end of his term and a fair amount when he ran against Dewey in 1947. It took a while for the general consensus to shift and Truman is now widely regarded as a strong and wise President albeit not on a level with the giants.
Lincoln was a giant. While reviled by a fair portion of Northern opinion --notably by the Democratic allied newspapers in New York City, the outflowing of love and grief at his death was a much better measure of his standing than any insulting comments about his personal appearance (the original gorilla) or sense of humor. For years, decades, Republicans ran for office on his reputation (that and waiving the bloody shirt). If he were not beloved they never would have gotten away with that and our nation might have been spared the series of ineffectives and nonentities that held the Presidency up through McKinley’s assassination and the emergence of Teddy Roosevelt.
Richard Nixon was a strange bird. While encumbered with some really bizarre personality traits, he was smart and pragmatic. Who but Nixon could have started a rapprochement with Red China? His ruthlessness and his conviction that anyone who disagreed with him was a fool or a scoundrel (or worse) destroyed him and opened the path for a kindly man of good instincts but insufficient ruthlessness. Carter was the anti-Nixon and in that lies his failing. Like Hoover before him he was a man who was not up to the demands of the office but who made a superb ex-president.
Reagan, it seems to me, is the beneficiary of a series of very luck breaks, not the least of which was the greatly fortuitous collapse of Soviet power. Otherwise, there is a fair argument that he slept walked through his administration doing little more than spouting empty platitudes and letting his lieutenants make the decisions. The adoration for him in some quarters might be simply because he managed to pretend not to be responsible for what went wrong and benefit from what went right without his direct participation.
That brings as to President Bush. While it is perfectly true that it is far too early to make a judgment about his success as President, as others have pointed out, his prospects are not good. Iraq and the third elective war in the nation’s history (the others being the war with Mexico and the Spanish-American war), the whole panoply of over reactions in the so-called war against terror including the wholesale avoidance of accepted international law, the suspension of Habeas Corpus, and erosion of Fourth Amendment protections makes up his legacy. Sooner or later he will have to answer for stuffing the federal courts with reactionary judges and his questionable election in 2000. Other than that his reputation will have to rest on questionable education reforms, a debatable tax policy and a mismanaged attempt to geld social legislation (social security, business and industrial regulation, environmental regulation).
It seems to me unlikely that the President will avoid the adverse judgment of history just because he has (so far as we know) resisted the temptation to receive an extra-marital blow job. I fear that history‘s judgment may be that President is a mere sock puppet for his vice-president and a bunch of malignant radicals who make Thaddeus Stevens and the boys look like small potatoes.
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