Fluctuations on the Presidential Exchange

By Medley Donovan

Just a year ago, in the early evening of Nov. 4, 1980, a good hour or two before he had to, Jimmy Carter telephoned his congratulations to Ronald Reagan. By the next afternoon Carter was telling reporters he was confident "history" would rate his presidency more highly than the election returns might momentarily suggest. This is a theme Carter has pursued with visitors in Plains this year, and it is a fair guess it animates the memoirs he is writing. No President defeated for reelection, so far as is known, has ever felt differently. Even before he lost in 1912, William Howard Taft put it well: "By and by the people will see who is right and who is wrong."

Presidents who win re-election care just as deeply about their place in history. For them it is not a matter of vindication--they have no reason to question the good judgment of the electorate--but rather a reach for the ultimate goal of greatness.

There are some difficulties about a President's appeal to history. There is the unfortunate probability that he will not live long enough to hear what history has to say. But his children will, and "the nation," and that is something.

On the day he leaves office, a President's place in history depends heavily on some history that hasn't happened yet. In midsummer of 1981, for instance, when Reagan had just won his dazzling legislative victories on taxes and the budget, Jimmy Carter--if anybody was thinking about him at all--probably seemed an even more ineffectual President than so many voters had thought in 1980. By November 1981, however, Reagan was beginning to get mussed up on his economic program, and Carter's reputation was up a bit. So it will go all through Reagan's years and on into one or two of his successors' Administrations. As these Presidents do well or badly with inflation, the Soviets, etc., Carter's rating will fluctuate, not all the way off the chart, but somewhere between "unsuccessful" and "so-so but who's done better lately?"

For our outgoing Presidents an important part of the history that has yet to happen is the future intellectual climate of the country and in particular the temper of the book-writing classes. History struck an extraordinary long-range blow at Andrew Jackson, President from 1829 to 1837, when in 1975 a Berkeley political scientist named Michael Rogin published a book Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian. Rogin says he was writing under "the sway of the Viet Nam War." He sees Jackson as little more than a vicious Indian hater, "presiding over American expansion and Indian destruction," presaging general American attitudes toward "native peoples" everywhere. Andy Jackson, in fact, has been one of the most volatile of Presidents in his historical repute. The dominant historians of the 19th century, proper New Englanders and other Eastern gentry, sniffed at him as an uncouth frontiersman and a dangerous demagogue about money and banking. Then the "progressive historians" of the early 20th century began to celebrate him as a democratic hero, come out of the West to fight the moneyed Eastern "interests." Arthur Schlesinger Jr. carried the celebration still further in his classic The Age of Jackson, finding under his leadership an almost New Deal-like coalescence of West and South and Eastern workingmen.

Jefferson has undergone even wider swings in the historical standings, perhaps the greatest for any President. He had savage critics while he was in office; "Mad Tom" was one of their epithets for him. (Washington was called "a tyrant" and Lincoln "a baboon." Lyndon Johnson, touchingly, took comfort in those contemporary misjudgments.) The conservative Northeast historians of the 19th century held essentially to the Hamiltonian belief in a strong central government and saw Jefferson as the exponent of weak government and of an excessive trust in the people. Jefferson did not fare much better with progressives, who loved the people all right, but thought a powerful government, wrested away from the interests, was the only sure protector of the people. (Teddy Roosevelt 100 years later was still fuming about Jefferson's foreign policy: "a discredit to my country.") Woodrow Wilson made scholarly attempts to rescue Jefferson from the presidential scrap heap. It was left to Franklin Roosevelt, no scholar but a superb manager of political stage effects, to elevate Jefferson to the presidential pantheon. The intellectual sleight of hand was simple enough: the New Deal was the modern embodiment of the Jeffersonian "spirit," in which government, depending on its purposes, was either "a threat and a danger" or "a refuge and help" to the people. And to this day the Democrats hold Jefferson-Jackson Day dinners.

Among our postwar Presidents, both Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower stand significantly higher today than when they left the White House. Eisenhower probably could have been elected on any platform he chose in 1952, but he and his Republican handlers relished running against the Truman "mess in Washington," and poor Adlai Stevenson, from Springfield, Ill., was not allowed to change the subject. Today that mess ("Communism, Corruption, Korea") is largely forgotten; we have seen worse. And Harry Truman has a reputation as a statesman--for the first postwar line drawing against the Soviets, the Truman Doctrine covering Turkey and Greece; for the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe; and for the founding of NATO. He was prompt and courageous in moving to the defense of South Korea (though less effective in prosecuting the war); he lost no sleep over the decision to drop the A-bomb and later to build the H-bomb. Indeed, one school of revisionist historians now holds Truman just about as culpable as Stalin for the starting of the cold war. The more general view among scholars is that he belongs among the near great Presidents. In the popular memory, the intensely partisan and sometimes petty politician has now blended into the endearingly plain-spoken and gutsy "common man" rising to awesome responsibility.

History has its various authors, custodians and constituencies. Eisenhower retained an immense personal popularity throughout an Administration that academic intellectuals (mainly Democrats) disdained. The caricature was the amiable old soldier out on the golf course. So John Kennedy said, "Let's get America moving again," and won (barely) against Richard Nixon the man and the "passive" record of the Eisenhower Administration. Today Ike's presidency is more highly regarded, mainly because of subsequent history. Liberals can now see virtue in an eight-year presidency in which nothing really bad took place or was laid down as a time bomb for the future.

There were two very important things that didn't happen during Ike's years in the White House. The U.S. didn't get into any war, anywhere. And inflation was barely a topic of conversation. It averaged 1.4% a year from 1953 to 1960.

Some of the new Eisenhower literature goes much beyond a claim that he did nothing harmful. In Eisenhower the President, William Ewald Jr., one of his speech writers, contends that Ike was a masterly administrator and a subtle protector of presidential authority and options, with a sure instinct for when finally to commit. He also argues that the legislative record was at least as constructive as that of various "activist" Administrations of the recent past. All in all, says Ewald, "eight good years--I believe the best in memory."

John Kennedy had fewer than three years in the White House, and he is going to be a puzzling President for the historians. Some of his cold war oratory has an almost embarrassing ring today, but the rhetorical militance didn't carry over to policy when the Soviets first challenged him by throwing up the infamous Berlin Wall. In his handling of the Cuba missile threat, however, he was both firm and prudent; his performance remains a model in crisis management. He escalated the U.S. presence in Viet Nam from the 900 military advisers he inherited from Ike to 16,000, though some of his loyalists later argued that he was preparing to cut back on the commitment. (Had we somehow "won" in Viet Nam, Kennedy would get credit for farsightedness in putting all those advisers out there.) His foreign policy record is so mixed, and the domestic policy record so scanty, that appraisals of his presidency become in good part speculation on what he would have done had he lived. In popular esteem, his legend has perhaps lost a bit of the luster of the first few years after his assassination. Camelot has not worn too well.

Yet, as late as 1976, Gallup found Kennedy ranked among our three greatest Presidents by an astounding 52% of those polled--ahead of Lincoln, named by 49%, and Franklin Roosevelt, 45%. Harry Truman outran George Washington, 37 to 25. Gallup polls in 1946 and 1956 had placed F.D.R. just ahead of Lincoln and far ahead of Washington.

Among professional historians, however, polled by Professor Arthur Schlesinger Sr. in 1948 and again in 1962, Washington was securely lodged among the "great," just behind Lincoln. F.D.R., Wilson and Jefferson also made the list both times.

Lyndon Johnson is not looking any healthier in history than he was in the public opinion polls of 1967-68. There are some stirrings in the country of a revisionist attitude toward the war in Viet Nam--President Reagan is willing to say out loud that we should not be ashamed of fighting there--but the corollary of that view, for Reagan and others, is that we should have gone all out to win. L.B.J. loses both ways, with the hard-liners for the defeat, with everybody else for getting into Viet Nam in such a big way. The other landmark of the L.B.J. Administration was his Great Society legislation. These programs are now being cut back by the Reagan Administration, amid a congressional and popular consensus that they had gone out of control. Most of them will continue to get substantial funding, but they are no longer invested with the hope and idealism of the 1960s. Finally, L.B.J. had his personal vulnerabilities, and the historians are not likely to ignore them. The forthcoming three-volume biography by Robert Caro, to judge by the first excerpts in the Atlantic, is going to picture a wheeler-dealer with a mania for secrecy and deviousness.

Richard Nixon, having left the presidency in disgrace, cannot very well fall any lower in history's regard. He may have trouble improving his rating, however, if new tidbits keep coming from the famous tapes. For unreconstructed Nixon-haters it must have seemed like old times when the New York Times recently ran a front-page story quoting Nixon and H.R. Haldeman as planning to use "thugs" from the Teamsters Union to beat up on antiwar demonstrators. There was the further bonus in the transcript of a flagrantly anti-Semitic innuendo from Nixon.

Nixon's big moves in foreign policy were the most spectacular in a quarter-century. He and Kissinger made the historic opening to China, proclaimed detente with the Soviets and negotiated SALT I, and broke through the Arab front to do business with Anwar Sadat. At the least, these will always be remembered as bold initiatives, whether for long-term good or ill we cannot be sure--the returns are not in yet.

It is doubtful that historians will ever take a more kindly view of Watergate than Congress and the public did in 1974. But the sheer passage of time should do something for the man--the occasional chance for a speech or interview, a dignified mission like the Sadat funeral, a newspaper photo with his attractive children and grandchildren.

Aging was wonderful medicine for one President who left office widely despised: Herbert Hoover. He was 59 in 1933; the Depression shantytowns all over America were called Hoovervilles. By the time he died at 90 he was a Grand Old Man. Harry Truman, for all his fierce partisanship, had done much to rehabilitate Hoover, appointing him chairman of a well-publicized commission on Government reorganization. Historians would never come to credit Hoover with effective measures against the Depression, but people had long since stopped thinking he had caused it. On into his 80s, pink-cheeked and bright-eyed, he gave stout Republican speeches at Republican conventions, puffed on his pipe and wrote some rather mellow reminiscences, including a volume on trout fishing.

Professor Henry Graff of Columbia points out that in the 19th century most Americans had only the vaguest idea what their President looked like. Today everyone can "see" the President practically every day. We now know so much about the man while he is in office, and about his career before he got there, that it might seem there is nothing left for "history" to say. But in this age of paper and microfilm, Government and its officials are generating documentation at a prodigious rate. As scholars mine all this material (some of it under security restrictions for 20 years or more), as reminiscences of presidential intimates become available, as diaries and letters come to light, presidential ratings will continue to fluctuate.

Above all, new events, new conditions, will impose new judgments. A greater awareness of the stubbornness of some of the national problems, of the tendency of so many solutions to breed new problems, can lead to a kindly view of those Presidents who, all in all, leave things slightly better or at least no worse than they found them. But it takes decades before it can be certified that this was indeed the effect of somebody's presidency.

An increasingly informed and sophisticated country may be less ready to grant "greatness" than it once was. This throws a certain light on present Presidents, but could also beam back. What would we have thought of Lincoln during his presidency? Could the Civil War have survived the 7 p.m. news? Could General Washington hold his command after a TV special on Valley Forge? What would the New York Times and the Washington Post have said about Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus?

Presidents present and past may come to seem more like the rest of us. Except for one detail: their ability to get nominated and elected. But war and crisis have been the traditional backdrops for greatness in the White House, and we seem to live now, if not in permanent crisis, at least permanently on the edge. The late 20th century Presidents are sufficiently challenged.

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