Stephen F. Knott, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College has a column in today’s Washington Post in which he criticizes numerous historians for jumping the gun and declaring George W. Bush to be one of our nation’s worst presidents.
George W. Bush’s low standing among academics reflects, in part, the rise of partisan scholarship: the use of history as ideology and as a political weapon, which means the corruption of history as history. Bush may not have been a great president; he may even be considered an average or below-average president, but he and — more important — the nation deserve better than this partisan rush to judgment.
Bush’s defenders like to point to Harry Truman, whose reputation has been rehabilitated by Establishment types who think Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the creation of the National Security State, and the Korean War look better in retrospect than they did at the time. So, perhaps, 9/11, the Department of Homeland Security, warrantless surveillance, the Iraq War, Gitmo, Katrina, and the Great Recession will look better in sixty years than they look today.
I don’t know. It seems like a pretty faint hope. It seems less likely that Bush will move up the ladder in historian’s estimation than that others will move in below him. I don’t think we need to wait until all the classified information comes out or all the interviews with foreign leaders are conducted to put Bush’s presidency, at least as a preliminary assessment, near the very bottom of the list. For starters, look at today’s Republican Party. Do we have to be accused of partisanship if we simply note that the modern GOP is a disgrace and a national humiliation? Bush bears more responsibility for the current state of the GOP than any other single person. He presided over the total moral and intellectual collapse of the right in this country. He appointed the judges that created a majority for the Citizens United decision, which immediately caused Establishment Republicans to lose control of their party to the xenophobes and anti-governent lunatics.
Bush’s failures were near total. The cronyism was unprecedented. The functioning of government was bad on every level, from preventing 9/11, to the stove piping of intelligence, to the Abramoff Scandal, to the war-planning, to the performance of OSHA, to the regulation of Wall Street. Moral lines were crossed that should never be crossed. Innocent people are still languishing in Gitmo because of Bush’s bad legal reasoning. The economy completely collapsed.
Even if the Middle East looks like a paradise sixty years from now, it will be unlikely that Bush will get or deserve much credit for it. And let’s not forget that he never should have been president in the first place since he lost the election in Florida and only the fluke of a poorly-designed ballot in Palm Beach County even made the election close enough to steal.
The cronyism was unprecedented.
To cite just one example of his disgraceful presidency. As a bit of history, it’s always instructive to visit this page, http://georgewbush.org/georgewbush/cronyjobs/. “Lest we forget.”
The Middle East won’t be a paradise in 60 years, unless you think the Sahara is a paradise, because after desertification that’s what it will look like.
For all of the other awfulness listed above, Bush’s hostility toward anyone, anywhere doing anything about climate change, at perhaps the last point when it could have been reversed, will turn out to be by far his largest crime against humanity. It’s not just that he had the Congressional majority – and standing as a product of the fossil fuel world – to do something positive. Instead, he bears a lot of responsibility for the current denialism that has a strangehold on the GOP and continues to prevent the US from doing anything meaningful – let alone the broad, sweeping changes now necessary, which most Democrats would also oppose – to even mitigate what we have unleashed on the world.
The US gave the world unlimited capitalism, cigarettes, nuclear weapons, and the internal combustion engine. History, should we survive, won’t just rank Bush poorly among presidents, but will also judge the US itself rather harshly. And the rest of humanity, for not dealing with the US as the pariah nation we really ought to be.
how bad a President was George W. Bush?
we elected a Black man as President in response.
I take nothing away from Barack Obama as a Candidate..
but, there’d be no Barack Obama as President without George W. Bush being as horrible as he was.
Have to agree with all of this. Economy? Horrible. Coolidge-Hoover level horrible. Foreign policy? Horrible. Domestic policy? Horrible.
Legacy? Destruction of civil rights, allowed 9/11 to happen (not saying “inside job”, saying “by explicitly ignoring the warnings of the Clinton administration and everyone in the National Security apparatus for 9 months”), Iraq, Afghanistan, economic collapse, environmental collapse, and NOTHING … absolutely NOTHING … of a positive note.
Oh, and one other thing – that bit about “partisan rush to judgment”. One other MAJOR legacy of the Bush years was the rise of hyper-partisanship on the right. From the get-go in Florida in 2000 to playing the McCarthy card after 9/11 to breaking all kinds of Congressional traditions (from the 2003 post-midnight drug company boondoggle vote to the universal use of filibuster starting in 2007) to the rise of the Drudge-led Washington media.
It was, simply put, the worst of times.
This guy’s an idiot. Look how he defines the work of a historian. According to him, you have to “conduct tedious archival research, undertake oral history interviews, plow through memoirs, interview foreign leaders and wait for the release of classified information.” Which is all true, but it’s not like you can’t fill in the general outlines. Whether he was the very worst president may be open to debate, but the question of whether he was a good president or a shitty one is settled.
Even the GOP has disowned Dubya. Give them a few more years of steeping in teabagger crazy, and they’ll be calling Dubya a “Democrat President”.
There’s a book behind it too.
But man, you want to talk about scholarly malpractice, this guy is ridiculous. I read it twice to be sure, and he only presents two pieces of actual evidence in Bush’s defense: a couple of examples of presidents who were just as bad, and a couple of examples of presidents whose reputations among historians have improved over time.
What he doesn’t present is any reason whatsoever why Bush should be considered even a half way decent president. Not even one example of anything good he did. Meanwhile he mentions several of the arguments against Bush that these hysterical partisan historians have made, and he doesn’t even try to refute them. I guess the harsh assessment is supposed to be evidence of bias in itself.
Speaking of Presidents Bush and history’s judgment, does anybody know how accessible the first President Bush’s papers are? Are historians combing through them even as I type? I should probably up my consumption of broccoli to be sure I live long enough to find out if he really was “out of the loop” on Iran-Contra.