Farewell To "W"

He’s gone, he’s gone. In some quarters I can imagine them dancing in the streets. George W. Bush has left the building. He’s no longer the man that can make every phone answer, that can make every warship fire a twenty-one gun salute.
He may have to start driving his own car and even answering his own phone. (When Eisenhower left office, he realized he hadn’t done any of those things in twenty years.) It can be a whole new world. They’ll still call him “Mister President”, but it won’t matter, really.
Historians are starting to call him the “worst President ever.” All I can say to them is, Don’t be in quite such a rush. I remember going to grad school at Georgetown in the mid-1960s. Eisenhower’s reputation, especially in foreign affairs, was so low it might have required a Hubble telescope to locate it.
The professor—a young, liberal hotshot who was soon on his way to the Ivy League—gave us a choice of topics in his seminar class. The disdain in his voice was thick as he sneeringly threw out the challenge: “Defend the Eisenhower/Dulles Foreign Policy”.
I didn’t know much about it, but I knew if I made any kind of a decent effort the man would sit up and take notice. I took up the gauntlet. Hours of reading and researching later, I went into the seminar class with my treatise ready.
Hours later, after he battered me with every question, insult and challenge he could muster, he walked out of the room muttering, “I didn’t think it could be done.” We were at least an hour past class time, and I had a splitting headache—but I aced it.
Now everybody’s doing it. Ike’s reputation is quite decently restored—especially after the fiascoes of his Kennedy/Johnson successors. People realize that he was not a puppet for Dulles; rather, Dulles was a puppet for Ike—a master string puller. General of the Army Eisenhower knew when to hold himself in reserve and let the front battalions take the initial hits.
In his resurrection, Ike had one thing going for him that Bush doesn’t. He was a much better people person (anybody who can keep Stalin, Montgomery, Patton, Churchill and Roosevelt all pulling in the same direction is some kind of a human relations genius). If someone was wrong, Ike didn’t sneer and make sophomoric jokes, he just patted Montgomery on the knee and said, “You can’t talk to me that way Monty; I’m your boss.”
As even last week’s Newsweek pointed out, it’s not so much what Bush and Cheney DID, it’s the arrogance with which they did it. (The magazine went on to suggest that it would be well worth Obama’s while to study carefully what Cheney/Bush did and why. There was good sense to a lot of it.)
But mere arrogance is not quite a good enough reason to deny a man his place in history. (It may be grounds for hating him, but a man can be arrogant and also right.) Even real jerks can make great inventions. Look at Steve Jobs.
I’m not saying that in twenty years we are going to be rating George W. Bush right up there with Lincoln and FDR! Not even up there with Ike, Reagan or Teddy. Maybe not even up there with Wilson, Jackson or Jefferson. But he may not be rated down in the sewer with Harding, Buchanan and Grant.
We simply don’t know how affairs in Iraq and Afghanistan are going to play out. Can we say that the Bush national security policies did or did not protect us after the World Trade Center? Will he look wise and decisive after the fact? Will anyone come up with a better way to protect us from terrorists than some of the Bush/Cheney initiatives?
Look at the way Truman’s reputation has come back. I can still remember some of the anti-Truman jokes with which I regaled adults in 1948. Their thrust was that the man was a brainless idiot. When he fired MacArthur in 1851, my whole sixth grade class wanted to march to Washington and hang the man. We’d have had a lot of company.
His polls were horrible when he left office. (He could have run again, but he wisely didn’t try.) We live in a world today very much formed by Truman and his advisors. (Some of them, like Acheson, were unbelievably arrogant as well—some were very corrupt.)
If Truman and Ike’s foreign policy can look so good in hindsight—anything’s possible.
Even the Second Coming of George W. Bush. Just give final judgment a few years. He may be as bad as we think now. He may not. It’s a bit like trying to judge which novel or which song is really going to live on. The legs of a show or a politician aren’t that easy to spot in the heat of the moment.
If I’m still around, talk to me in a couple of decades.