Douglas Brinkley is the latest historian to prematurely judge George W. Bush as one of the worst Presidents in our nation’s history. And his reasoning is interesting. For Brinkley, Bush’s problem is not that he started a war under false pretenses. If that were a major criteria for judging a President then James Polk (Mexico) and William McKinley (Philippines) would not be judged near the top on historian’s lists. No, Bush’s problem is that Iraq is an ‘unmitigated disaster’.
I thought about Brinkley’s reasoning for a while and I guess I agree with him. After all, Brinkley is predicting how historians will judge Bush, he is not really saying how they should judge him. My thinking is that Bush’s failure reflects badly on both Polk and McKinley, and should cause historians to take a fresh look at the downside of their dishonesty and warmongering. In any event, I was with Brinkley until the end. Then he lost me.
There isn’t much that Bush can do now to salvage his reputation. His presidential library will someday be built around two accomplishments: that after 9/11, the U.S. homeland wasn’t again attacked by terrorists (knock on wood) and that he won two presidential elections, allowing him to appoint conservatives to key judicial posts. I also believe that he is an honest man and that his administration has been largely void of widespread corruption. This will help him from being portrayed as a true villain.
This last point is crucial. Though Bush may be viewed as a laughingstock, he won’t have the zero-integrity factors that have kept Nixon and Harding at the bottom in the presidential sweepstakes. Oddly, the president whom Bush most reminds me of is Herbert Hoover, whose name is synonymous with failure to respond to the Great Depression. When the stock market collapsed, Hoover, for ideological reasons, did too little. When 9/11 happened, Bush did too much, attacking the wrong country at the wrong time for the wrong reasons. He has joined Hoover as a case study on how not to be president.
I honestly don’t think we’ve ever had a more corrupt administration. Ronald Reagan’s was close, but Reagan actually forced his errant ministers to resign (dozens of them). According to David R. Simon and D. Stanley Eitzen in Elite Deviance, 138 members of the Reagan administration either resigned under an ethical cloud or were criminally indicted. The fact that many fewer people have resigned from Bush’s administration is not evidence that Bush is more honest than Reagan. Quite the opposite.
That will become much clearer when Henry Waxman gets going this year.
