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The Worst President in History?
By Sean Wilentz
Rolling Stone
Friday 21 April 2006
One of America's leading historians assesses George W. Bush.
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(Illustration by Robert Grossman)
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George W. Bush's presidency appears headed for colossal historical disgrace.
Barring a cataclysmic event on the order of the terrorist attacks of September
11th, after which the public might rally around the White House once again,
there seems to be little the administration can do to avoid being ranked on
the lowest tier of U.S. presidents. And that may be the best-case scenario.
Many historians are now wondering whether Bush, in fact, will be remembered
as the very worst president in all of American history.
From time to time, after hours, I kick back with my colleagues at Princeton
to argue idly about which president really was the worst of them all. For years,
these perennial debates have largely focused on the same handful of chief executives
whom national polls of historians, from across the ideological and political
spectrum, routinely cite as the bottom of the presidential barrel. Was the lousiest
James Buchanan, who, confronted with Southern secession in 1860, dithered to
a degree that, as his most recent biographer has said, probably amounted to
disloyalty - and who handed to his successor, Abraham Lincoln, a nation already
torn asunder? Was it Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson, who actively sided
with former Confederates and undermined Reconstruction? What about the amiably
incompetent Warren G. Harding, whose administration was fabulously corrupt?
Or, though he has his defenders, Herbert Hoover, who tried some reforms but
remained imprisoned in his own outmoded individualist ethic and collapsed under
the weight of the stock-market crash of 1929 and the Depression's onset? The
younger historians always put in a word for Richard M. Nixon, the only American
president forced to resign from office.
Now, though, George W. Bush is in serious contention for the title of worst
ever. In early 2004, an informal survey of 415 historians conducted by the nonpartisan
History News Network found that eighty-one percent considered the Bush administration
a "failure." Among those who called Bush a success, many gave the
president high marks only for his ability to mobilize public support and get
Congress to go along with what one historian called the administration's "pursuit
of disastrous policies." In fact, roughly one in ten of those who called
Bush a success was being facetious, rating him only as the best president since
Bill Clinton - a category in which Bush is the only contestant.
The lopsided decision of historians should give everyone pause. Contrary to
popular stereotypes, historians are generally a cautious bunch. We assess the
past from widely divergent points of view and are deeply concerned about being
viewed as fair and accurate by our colleagues. When we make historical judgments,
we are acting not as voters or even pundits, but as scholars who must evaluate
all the evidence, good, bad or indifferent. Separate surveys, conducted by those
perceived as conservatives as well as liberals, show remarkable unanimity about
who the best and worst presidents have been.
Historians do tend, as a group, to be far more liberal than the citizenry as
a whole - a fact the president's admirers have seized on to dismiss the poll
results as transparently biased. One pro-Bush historian said the survey revealed
more about "the current crop of history professors" than about Bush
or about Bush's eventual standing. But if historians were simply motivated by
a strong collective liberal bias, they might be expected to call Bush the worst
president since his father, or Ronald Reagan, or Nixon. Instead, more than half
of those polled - and nearly three-fourths of those who gave Bush a negative
rating - reached back before Nixon to find a president they considered as miserable
as Bush. The presidents most commonly linked with Bush included Hoover, Andrew
Johnson and Buchanan. Twelve percent of the historians polled - nearly as many
as those who rated Bush a success - flatly called Bush the worst president
in American history. And these figures were gathered before the debacles over
Hurricane Katrina, Bush's role in the Valerie Plame leak affair and the deterioration
of the situation in Iraq. Were the historians polled today, that figure would
certainly be higher.
Even worse for the president, the general public, having once given Bush the
highest approval ratings ever recorded, now appears to be coming around to the
dismal view held by most historians. To be sure, the president retains a considerable
base of supporters who believe in and adore him, and who reject all criticism
with a mixture of disbelief and fierce contempt - about one-third of the electorate.
(When the columnist Richard Reeves publicized the historians' poll last year
and suggested it might have merit, he drew thousands of abusive replies that
called him an idiot and that praised Bush as, in one writer's words, "a
Christian who actually acts on his deeply held beliefs.") Yet the ranks
of the true believers have thinned dramatically. A majority of voters in forty-three
states now disapprove of Bush's handling of his job. Since the commencement
of reliable polling in the 1940s, only one twice-elected president has seen
his ratings fall as low as Bush's in his second term: Richard Nixon, during
the months preceding his resignation in 1974. No two-term president since polling
began has fallen from such a height of popularity as Bush's (in the neighborhood
of ninety percent, during the patriotic upswell following the 2001 attacks)
to such a low (now in the midthirties). No president, including Harry Truman
(whose ratings sometimes dipped below Nixonian levels), has experienced such
a virtually unrelieved decline as Bush has since his high point. Apart from
sharp but temporary upticks that followed the commencement of the Iraq war and
the capture of Saddam Hussein, and a recovery during the weeks just before and
after his re-election, the Bush trend has been a profile in fairly steady disillusionment.
How does any president's reputation sink so low? The reasons are best understood
as the reverse of those that produce presidential greatness. In almost every
survey of historians dating back to the 1940s, three presidents have emerged
as supreme successes: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt.
These were the men who guided the nation through what historians consider its
greatest crises: the founding era after the ratification of the Constitution,
the Civil War, and the Great Depression and Second World War. Presented with
arduous, at times seemingly impossible circumstances, they rallied the nation,
governed brilliantly and left the republic more secure than when they entered
office.
Calamitous presidents, faced with enormous difficulties - Buchanan, Andrew
Johnson, Hoover and now Bush - have divided the nation, governed erratically
and left the nation worse off. In each case, different factors contributed to
the failure: disastrous domestic policies, foreign-policy blunders and military
setbacks, executive misconduct, crises of credibility and public trust. Bush,
however, is one of the rarities in presidential history: He has not only stumbled
badly in every one of these key areas, he has also displayed a weakness common
among the greatest presidential failures - an unswerving adherence to a simplistic
ideology that abjures deviation from dogma as heresy, thus preventing any pragmatic
adjustment to changing realities. Repeatedly, Bush has undone himself, a failing
revealed in each major area of presidential performance.
The Credibility Gap
No previous president appears to have squandered the public's trust more than
Bush has. In the 1840s, President James Polk gained a reputation for deviousness
over his alleged manufacturing of the war with Mexico and his supposedly covert
pro-slavery views. Abraham Lincoln, then an Illinois congressman, virtually
labeled Polk a liar when he called him, from the floor of the House, "a
bewildered, confounded and miserably perplexed man" and denounced the war
as "from beginning to end, the sheerest deception." But the swift
American victory in the war, Polk's decision to stick by his pledge to serve
only one term and his sudden death shortly after leaving office spared him the
ignominy over slavery that befell his successors in the 1850s. With more than
two years to go in Bush's second term and no swift victory in sight, Bush's
reputation will probably have no such reprieve.
The problems besetting Bush are of a more modern kind than Polk's, suited to
the television age - a crisis both in confidence and credibility. In 1965,
Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam travails gave birth to the phrase "credibility
gap," meaning the distance between a president's professions and the public's
perceptions of reality. It took more than two years for Johnson's disapproval
rating in the Gallup Poll to reach fifty-two percent in March 1968 - a figure
Bush long ago surpassed, but that was sufficient to persuade the proud LBJ not
to seek re-election. Yet recently, just short of three years after Bush buoyantly
declared "mission accomplished" in Iraq, his disapproval ratings have
been running considerably higher than Johnson's, at about sixty percent. More
than half the country now considers Bush dishonest and untrustworthy, and a
decisive plurality consider him less trustworthy than his predecessor, Bill
Clinton - a figure still attacked by conservative zealots as "Slick Willie."
Previous modern presidents, including Truman, Reagan and Clinton, managed to
reverse plummeting ratings and regain the public's trust by shifting attention
away from political and policy setbacks, and by overhauling the White House's
inner circles. But Bush's publicly expressed view that he has made no major
mistakes, coupled with what even the conservative commentator William F. Buckley
Jr. calls his "high-flown pronouncements" about failed policies, seems
to foreclose the first option. Upping the ante in the Middle East and bombing
Iranian nuclear sites, a strategy reportedly favored by some in the White House,
could distract the public and gain Bush immediate political capital in advance
of the 2006 midterm elections - but in the long term might severely worsen
the already dire situation in Iraq, especially among Shiite Muslims linked to
the Iranians. And given Bush's ardent attachment to loyal aides, no matter how
discredited, a major personnel shake-up is improbable, short of indictments.
Replacing Andrew Card with Joshua Bolten as chief of staff - a move announced
by the president in March in a tone that sounded more like defiance than contrition
- represents a rededication to current policies and personnel, not a serious
change. (Card, an old Bush family retainer, was widely considered more moderate
than most of the men around the president and had little involvement in policy-making.)
The power of Vice President Dick Cheney, meanwhile, remains uncurbed. Were Cheney
to announce he is stepping down due to health problems, normally a polite pretext
for a political removal, one can be reasonably certain it would be because Cheney
actually did have grave health problems.
Bush at War
Until the twentieth century, American presidents managed foreign wars well
- including those presidents who prosecuted unpopular wars. James Madison had
no support from Federalist New England at the outset of the War of 1812, and
the discontent grew amid mounting military setbacks in 1813. But Federalist
political overreaching, combined with a reversal of America's military fortunes
and the negotiation of a peace with Britain, made Madison something of a hero
again and ushered in a brief so-called Era of Good Feelings in which his Jeffersonian
Republican Party coalition ruled virtually unopposed. The Mexican War under
Polk was even more unpopular, but its quick and victorious conclusion redounded
to Polk's favor - much as the rapid American victory in the Spanish-American
War helped William McKinley overcome anti-imperialist dissent.
The twentieth century was crueler to wartime presidents. After winning re-election
in 1916 with the slogan "He Kept Us Out of War," Woodrow Wilson oversaw
American entry into the First World War. Yet while the doughboys returned home
triumphant, Wilson's idealistic and politically disastrous campaign for American
entry into the League of Nations presaged a resurgence of the opposition Republican
Party along with a redoubling of American isolationism that lasted until Pearl
Harbor.
Bush has more in common with post-1945 Democratic presidents Truman and Johnson,
who both became bogged down in overseas military conflicts with no end, let
alone victory, in sight. But Bush has become bogged down in a singularly crippling
way. On September 10th, 2001, he held among the lowest ratings of any modern
president for that point in a first term. (Only Gerald Ford, his popularity
reeling after his pardon of Nixon, had comparable numbers.) The attacks the
following day transformed Bush's presidency, giving him an extraordinary opportunity
to achieve greatness. Some of the early signs were encouraging. Bush's simple,
unflinching eloquence and his quick toppling of the Taliban government in Afghanistan
rallied the nation. Yet even then, Bush wasted his chance by quickly choosing
partisanship over leadership.
No other president - Lincoln in the Civil War, FDR in World War II, John F.
Kennedy at critical moments of the Cold War - faced with such a monumental
set of military and political circumstances failed to embrace the opposing political
party to help wage a truly national struggle. But Bush shut out and even demonized
the Democrats. Top military advisers and even members of the president's own
Cabinet who expressed any reservations or criticisms of his policies - including
retired Marine Corps Gen. Anthony Zinni and former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill
- suffered either dismissal, smear attacks from the president's supporters
or investigations into their alleged breaches of national security. The wise
men who counseled Bush's father, including James Baker and Brent Scowcroft,
found their entreaties brusquely ignored by his son. When asked if he ever sought
advice from the elder Bush, the president responded, "There is a higher
Father that I appeal to."
All the while, Bush and the most powerful figures in the administration, Vice
President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, were planting the
seeds for the crises to come by diverting the struggle against Al Qaeda toward
an all-out effort to topple their pre-existing target, Saddam Hussein. In a
deliberate political decision, the administration stampeded the Congress and
a traumatized citizenry into the Iraq invasion on the basis of what has now
been demonstrated to be tendentious and perhaps fabricated evidence of an imminent
Iraqi threat to American security, one that the White House suggested included
nuclear weapons. Instead of emphasizing any political, diplomatic or humanitarian
aspects of a war on Iraq - an appeal that would have sounded too "sensitive,"
as Cheney once sneered - the administration built a "Bush Doctrine"
of unprovoked, preventive warfare, based on speculative threats and embracing
principles previously abjured by every previous generation of U.S. foreign policy-makers,
even at the height of the Cold War. The president did so with premises founded,
in the case of Iraq, on wishful thinking. He did so while proclaiming an expansive
Wilsonian rhetoric of making the world safe for democracy - yet discarding
the multilateralism and systems of international law (including the Geneva Conventions)
that emanated from Wilson's idealism. He did so while dismissing intelligence
that an American invasion could spark a long and bloody civil war among Iraq's
fierce religious and ethnic rivals, reports that have since proved true. And
he did so after repeated warnings by military officials such as Gen. Eric Shinseki
that pacifying postwar Iraq would require hundreds of thousands of American
troops - accurate estimates that Paul Wolfowitz and other Bush policy gurus
ridiculed as "wildly off the mark."
When William F. Buckley, the man whom many credit as the founder of the modern
conservative movement, writes categorically, as he did in February, that "one
can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed," then something
terrible has happened. Even as a brash young iconoclast, Buckley always took
the long view. The Bush White House seems incapable of doing so, except insofar
as a tiny trusted circle around the president constantly reassures him that
he is a messianic liberator and profound freedom fighter, on a par with FDR
and Lincoln, and that history will vindicate his every act and utterance.
Bush at Home
Bush came to office in 2001 pledging to govern as a "compassionate conservative,"
more moderate on domestic policy than the dominant right wing of his party.
The pledge proved hollow, as Bush tacked immediately to the hard right. Previous
presidents and their parties have suffered when their actions have belied their
campaign promises. Lyndon Johnson is the most conspicuous recent example, having
declared in his 1964 run against the hawkish Republican Barry Goldwater that
"we are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away
from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves." But
no president has surpassed Bush in departing so thoroughly from his original
campaign persona.
The heart of Bush's domestic policy has turned out to be nothing more than
a series of massively regressive tax cuts - a return, with a vengeance, to
the discredited Reagan-era supply-side faith that Bush's father once ridiculed
as "voodoo economics." Bush crowed in triumph in February 2004, "We
cut taxes, which basically meant people had more money in their pocket."
The claim is bogus for the majority of Americans, as are claims that tax cuts
have led to impressive new private investment and job growth. While wiping out
the solid Clinton-era federal surplus and raising federal deficits to staggering
record levels, Bush's tax policies have necessitated hikes in federal fees,
state and local taxes, and co-payment charges to needy veterans and families
who rely on Medicaid, along with cuts in loan programs to small businesses and
college students, and in a wide range of state services. The lion's share of
benefits from the tax cuts has gone to the very richest Americans, while new
business investment has increased at a historically sluggish rate since the
peak of the last business cycle five years ago. Private-sector job growth since
2001 has been anemic compared to the Bush administration's original forecasts
and is chiefly attributable not to the tax cuts but to increased federal spending,
especially on defense. Real wages for middle-income Americans have been dropping
since the end of 2003: Last year, on average, nominal wages grew by only 2.4
percent, a meager gain that was completely erased by an average inflation rate
of 3.4 percent.
The monster deficits, caused by increased federal spending combined with the
reduction of revenue resulting from the tax cuts, have also placed Bush's administration
in a historic class of its own with respect to government borrowing. According
to the Treasury Department, the forty-two presidents who held office between
1789 and 2000 borrowed a combined total of $1.01 trillion from foreign governments
and financial institutions. But between 2001 and 2005 alone, the Bush White
House borrowed $1.05 trillion, more than all of the previous presidencies combined.
Having inherited the largest federal surplus in American history in 2001, he
has turned it into the largest deficit ever - with an even higher deficit,
$423 billion, forecast for fiscal year 2006. Yet Bush - sounding much like
Herbert Hoover in 1930 predicting that "prosperity is just around the corner"
- insists that he will cut federal deficits in half by 2009, and that the best
way to guarantee this would be to make permanent his tax cuts, which helped
cause the deficit in the first place!
The rest of what remains of Bush's skimpy domestic agenda is either failed
or failing - a record unmatched since the presidency of Herbert Hoover. The
No Child Left Behind educational-reform act has proved so unwieldy, draconian
and poorly funded that several states - including Utah, one of Bush's last
remaining political strongholds - have fought to opt out of it entirely. White
House proposals for immigration reform and a guest-worker program have succeeded
mainly in dividing pro-business Republicans (who want more low-wage immigrant
workers) from paleo-conservatives fearful that hordes of Spanish-speaking newcomers
will destroy American culture. The paleos' call for tougher anti-immigrant laws
- a return to the punitive spirit of exclusion that led to the notorious Immigration
Act of 1924 that shut the door to immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe
- has in turn deeply alienated Hispanic voters from the Republican Party, badly
undermining the GOP's hopes of using them to build a permanent national electoral
majority. The recent pro-immigrant demonstrations, which drew millions of marchers
nationwide, indicate how costly the Republican divide may prove.
The one noncorporate constituency to which Bush has consistently deferred is
the Christian right, both in his selections for the federal bench and in his
implications that he bases his policies on premillennialist, prophetic Christian
doctrine. Previous presidents have regularly invoked the Almighty. McKinley
is supposed to have fallen to his knees, seeking divine guidance about whether
to take control of the Philippines in 1898, although the story may be apocryphal.
But no president before Bush has allowed the press to disclose, through a close
friend, his startling belief that he was ordained by God to lead the country.
The White House's sectarian positions - over stem-cell research, the teaching
of pseudoscientific "intelligent design," global population control,
the Terri Schiavo spectacle and more - have led some to conclude that Bush
has promoted the transformation of the GOP into what former Republican strategist
Kevin Phillips calls "the first religious party in U.S. history."
Bush's faith-based conception of his mission, which stands above and beyond
reasoned inquiry, jibes well with his administration's pro-business dogma on
global warming and other urgent environmental issues. While forcing federally
funded agencies to remove from their Web sites scientific information about
reproductive health and the effectiveness of condoms in combating HIV/AIDS,
and while peremptorily overruling staff scientists at the Food and Drug Administration
on making emergency contraception available over the counter, Bush officials
have censored and suppressed research findings they don't like by the Environmental
Protection Agency, the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Department of Agriculture.
Far from being the conservative he said he was, Bush has blazed a radical new
path as the first American president in history who is outwardly hostile to
science - dedicated, as a distinguished, bipartisan panel of educators and
scientists (including forty-nine Nobel laureates) has declared, to "the
distortion of scientific knowledge for partisan political ends."
The Bush White House's indifference to domestic problems and science alike
culminated in the catastrophic responses to Hurricane Katrina. Scientists had
long warned that global warming was intensifying hurricanes, but Bush ignored
them - much as he and his administration sloughed off warnings from the director
of the National Hurricane Center before Katrina hit. Reorganized under the Department
of Homeland Security, the once efficient Federal Emergency Management Agency
turned out, under Bush, to have become a nest of cronyism and incompetence.
During the months immediately after the storm, Bush traveled to New Orleans
eight times to promise massive rebuilding aid from the federal government. On
March 30th, however, Bush's Gulf Coast recovery coordinator admitted that it
could take as long as twenty-five years for the city to recover.
Karl Rove has sometimes likened Bush to the imposing, no-nonsense President
Andrew Jackson. Yet Jackson took measures to prevent those he called "the
rich and powerful" from bending "the acts of government to their selfish
purposes." Jackson also gained eternal renown by saving New Orleans from
British invasion against terrible odds. Generations of Americans sang of Jackson's
famous victory. In 1959, Johnny Horton's version of "The Battle of New
Orleans" won the Grammy for best country & western performance. If
anyone sings about George W. Bush and New Orleans, it will be a blues number.
Presidential Misconduct
Virtually every presidential administration dating back to George Washington's
has faced charges of misconduct and threats of impeachment against the president
or his civil officers. The alleged offenses have usually involved matters of
personal misbehavior and corruption, notably the payoff scandals that plagued
Cabinet officials who served presidents Harding and Ulysses S. Grant. But the
charges have also included alleged usurpation of power by the president and
serious criminal conduct that threatens constitutional government and the rule
of law - most notoriously, the charges that led to the impeachments of Andrew
Johnson and Bill Clinton, and to Richard Nixon's resignation.
Historians remain divided over the actual grievousness of many of these allegations
and crimes. Scholars reasonably describe the graft and corruption around the
Grant administration, for example, as gargantuan, including a kickback scandal
that led to the resignation of Grant's secretary of war under the shadow of
impeachment. Yet the scandals produced no indictments of Cabinet secretaries
and only one of a White House aide, who was acquitted. By contrast, the most
scandal-ridden administration in the modern era, apart from Nixon's, was Ronald
Reagan's, now widely remembered through a haze of nostalgia as a paragon of
virtue. A total of twenty-nine Reagan officials, including White House national
security adviser Robert McFarlane and deputy chief of staff Michael Deaver,
were convicted on charges stemming from the Iran-Contra affair, illegal lobbying
and a looting scandal inside the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Three Cabinet officers - HUD Secretary Samuel Pierce, Attorney General Edwin
Meese and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger - left their posts under clouds
of scandal. In contrast, not a single official in the Clinton administration
was even indicted over his or her White House duties, despite repeated high-profile
investigations and a successful, highly partisan impeachment drive.
The full report, of course, has yet to come on the Bush administration. Because
Bush, unlike Reagan or Clinton, enjoys a fiercely partisan and loyal majority
in Congress, his administration has been spared scrutiny. Yet that mighty advantage
has not prevented the indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff,
I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, on charges stemming from an alleged major
security breach in the Valerie Plame matter. (The last White House official
of comparable standing to be indicted while still in office was Grant's personal
secretary, in 1875.) It has not headed off the unprecedented scandal involving
Larry Franklin, a high-ranking Defense Department official, who has pleaded
guilty to divulging classified information to a foreign power while working
at the Pentagon - a crime against national security. It has not forestalled
the arrest and indictment of Bush's top federal procurement official, David
Safavian, and the continuing investigations into Safavian's intrigues with the
disgraced Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, recently sentenced to nearly six
years in prison - investigations in which some prominent Republicans, including
former Christian Coalition executive director Ralph Reed (and current GOP aspirant
for lieutenant governor of Georgia) have already been implicated, and could
well produce the largest congressional corruption scandal in American history.
It has not dispelled the cloud of possible indictment that hangs over others
of Bush's closest advisers.
History may ultimately hold Bush in the greatest contempt for expanding the
powers of the presidency beyond the limits laid down by the U.S. Constitution.
There has always been a tension over the constitutional roles of the three branches
of the federal government. The Framers intended as much, as part of the system
of checks and balances they expected would minimize tyranny. When Andrew Jackson
took drastic measures against the nation's banking system, the Whig Senate censured
him for conduct "dangerous to the liberties of the people." During
the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln's emergency decisions to suspend habeas corpus
while Congress was out of session in 1861 and 1862 has led some Americans, to
this day, to regard him as a despot. Richard Nixon's conduct of the war in Southeast
Asia and his covert domestic-surveillance programs prompted Congress to pass
new statutes regulating executive power.
By contrast, the Bush administration - in seeking to restore what Cheney,
a Nixon administration veteran, has called "the legitimate authority of
the presidency" - threatens to overturn the Framers' healthy tension in
favor of presidential absolutism. Armed with legal findings by his attorney
general (and personal lawyer) Alberto Gonzales, the Bush White House has declared
that the president's powers as commander in chief in wartime are limitless.
No previous wartime president has come close to making so grandiose a claim.
More specifically, this administration has asserted that the president is perfectly
free to violate federal laws on such matters as domestic surveillance and the
torture of detainees. When Congress has passed legislation to limit those assertions,
Bush has resorted to issuing constitutionally dubious "signing statements,"
which declare, by fiat, how he will interpret and execute the law in question,
even when that interpretation flagrantly violates the will of Congress. Earlier
presidents, including Jackson, raised hackles by offering their own view of
the Constitution in order to justify vetoing congressional acts. Bush doesn't
bother with that: He signs the legislation (eliminating any risk that Congress
will overturn a veto), and then governs how he pleases - using the signing
statements as if they were line-item vetoes. In those instances when Bush's
violations of federal law have come to light, as over domestic surveillance,
the White House has devised a novel solution: Stonewall any investigation into
the violations and bid a compliant Congress simply to rewrite the laws.
Bush's alarmingly aberrant take on the Constitution is ironic. One need go
back in the record less than a decade to find prominent Republicans railing
against far more minor presidential legal infractions as precursors to all-out
totalitarianism. "I will have no part in the creation of a constitutional
double-standard to benefit the president," Sen. Bill Frist declared of
Bill Clinton's efforts to conceal an illicit sexual liaison. "No man is
above the law, and no man is below the law - that's the principle that we all
hold very dear in this country," Rep. Tom DeLay asserted. "The rule
of law protects you and it protects me from the midnight fire on our roof or
the 3 a.m. knock on our door," warned Rep. Henry Hyde, one of Clinton's
chief accusers. In the face of Bush's more definitive dismissal of federal law,
the silence from these quarters is deafening.
The president's defenders stoutly contend that war-time conditions fully justify
Bush's actions. And as Lincoln showed during the Civil War, there may be times
of military emergency where the executive believes it imperative to take immediate,
highly irregular, even unconstitutional steps. "I felt that measures, otherwise
unconstitutional, might become lawful," Lincoln wrote in 1864, "by
becoming indispensable to the preservation of the Constitution, through the
preservation of the nation." Bush seems to think that, since 9/11, he has
been placed, by the grace of God, in the same kind of situation Lincoln faced.
But Lincoln, under pressure of daily combat on American soil against fellow
Americans, did not operate in secret, as Bush has. He did not claim, as Bush
has, that his emergency actions were wholly regular and constitutional as well
as necessary; Lincoln sought and received Congressional authorization for his
suspension of habeas corpus in 1863. Nor did Lincoln act under the amorphous
cover of a "war on terror" - a war against a tactic, not a specific
nation or political entity, which could last as long as any president deems
the tactic a threat to national security. Lincoln's exceptional measures were
intended to survive only as long as the Confederacy was in rebellion. Bush's
could be extended indefinitely, as the president sees fit, permanently endangering
rights and liberties guaranteed by the Constitution to the citizenry.
Much as Bush still enjoys support from those who believe he can do no wrong,
he now suffers opposition from liberals who believe he can do no right. Many
of these liberals are in the awkward position of having supported Bush in the
past, while offering little coherent as an alternative to Bush's policies now.
Yet it is difficult to see how this will benefit Bush's reputation in history.
The president came to office calling himself "a uniter, not a divider"
and promising to soften the acrimonious tone in Washington. He has had two enormous
opportunities to fulfill those pledges: first, in the noisy aftermath of his
controversial election in 2000, and, even more, after the attacks of September
11th, when the nation pulled behind him as it has supported no other president
in living memory. Yet under both sets of historically unprecedented circumstances,
Bush has chosen to act in ways that have left the country less united and more
divided, less conciliatory and more acrimonious - much like James Buchanan,
Andrew Johnson and Herbert Hoover before him. And, like those three predecessors,
Bush has done so in the service of a rigid ideology that permits no deviation
and refuses to adjust to changing realities. Buchanan failed the test of Southern
secession, Johnson failed in the face of Reconstruction, and Hoover failed in
the face of the Great Depression. Bush has failed to confront his own failures
in both domestic and international affairs, above all in his ill-conceived responses
to radical Islamic terrorism. Having confused steely resolve with what Ralph
Waldo Emerson called "a foolish consistency . . . adored by little statesmen,"
Bush has become entangled in tragedies of his own making, compounding those
visited upon the country by outside forces.
No historian can responsibly predict the future with absolute certainty. There
are too many imponderables still to come in the two and a half years left in
Bush's presidency to know exactly how it will look in 2009, let alone in 2059.
There have been presidents - Harry Truman was one - who have left office in
seeming disgrace, only to rebound in the estimates of later scholars. But so
far the facts are not shaping up propitiously for George W. Bush. He still does
his best to deny it. Having waved away the lessons of history in the making
of his decisions, the present-minded Bush doesn't seem to be concerned about
his place in history. "History. We won't know," he told the journalist
Bob Woodward in 2003. "We'll all be dead."
Another president once explained that the judgments of history cannot be defied
or dismissed, even by a president. "Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history,"
said Abraham Lincoln. "We of this Congress and this administration, will
be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance,
can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will
light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation."
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