In rare philosophic moments, President Bush has suggested that one reason he does not worry about poor poll ratings and negative stories is his belief it takes many years for a definitive judgment on the controversies that mark many presidencies.
“The first president of the United States is still being analyzed by historians, which ought to say to this president and future presidents: “Do what you think is right, and eventually historians will figure out whether it made sense or not,”‘ Bush told NBC’s Brian Williams last year.
In fact, though new volumes on George Washington come out regularly, history’s judgment on the nation’s first president has been firmly and positively fixed for years. But the 43rd president has a point when he notes many of his predecessors look better with historical perspective than when they left office.
To find an apt example, he need look no further than a man he loves and admires, his father, former President George H.W. Bush.
A decade ago, when the elder Bush’s presidential library opened at Texas A&M University, he seemed destined to enjoy a modest station in history. Despite international successes in managing the end of the Cold War, uniting Germany and expelling Iraq from Kuwait, voters made him only the third 20th-century president ousted after one term.
Indeed, some believe an unspoken motive for his son’s White House bid was to rehabilitate the family name politically and complete the job the 41st president started, by ending Saddam Hussein’s tyranny in Iraq and winning a second presidential term.
But now, as the Bush library at A&M has reopened with expanded and updated exhibits, the father looks a lot better. The irony is that it is at least partly due to his son’s mistakes.
The prime evidence is Iraq, the defining issue of the current president’s tenure and a major ingredient in his father’s. The latter’s restraint in ending the 1991 Persian Gulf War seems even more sensible now than it did at the time.
Time has validated his repeated contention that he passed up the chance to continue north and oust Hussein because the coalition formed to expel him from Kuwait would have fractured had he tried to expand the mission beyond that easily attainable goal.
Even more significant are his prescient warnings of what might have happened had he sought to remove the Iraqi leader.
“We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq,” wrote Bush and his national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, in their 1998 book, “A World Transformed.”
“Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different – and perhaps barren – outcome.”
If his foreign policy record looks better, the elder Bush’s domestic record remains the lesser part of his legacy. But in another irony, his much criticized decision to abandon his 1988 “no new taxes” campaign pledge led to a compromise with the Democratic-controlled Congress that helped lay the basis for the extended economic upturn of the 1990s.
His oft-criticized choice of Dan Quayle as vice president looks no worse than innocuous compared with his son’s choice of Dick Cheney, a key player in the decision to attack Iraq and in the administration’s strongly conservative course.
Though the selection of the staunchly conservative Clarence Thomas for the Supreme Court proved a model for his namesake, the elder Bush was basically more cautious and moderate than his aggressively ideological son, far more prone to seek compromises with Congress.
One reason history may judge the current president harshly is because his tenure has been the opposite of his pre-inaugural vow to be “a uniter, not a divider.”
Though touted for his managerial skills as the first president with a master’s degree in business administration, the current president has gained a reputation for managerial incompetence, exemplified by his bungled handling of Iraq and the 2005 aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
For the last 18 months, his job approval has hovered in the low to mid-30s. The proportion that strongly disapproves of his performance reached 50 percent in a most recent poll, higher than Richard Nixon’s during the Watergate scandal.
But Bush can take solace from this: Harry Truman’s job approval reached an all-time low of 22 percent during his final year in office. Today, he’s seen as one of the nation’s best presidents.
Carl P. Leubsdorf is Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News. E-mail him at: cleubsdorf@dallasnews.com.
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