Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 24, 1993 TAG: 9301240021
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
PRESIDENTS SEEK PLACE IN HISTORY; HISTORY KEEPS REARRANGING THEM
As Bill Clinton begins to seek a place in history, and George Bush wonders what his will be, they need to remember that those places are fixed not just by their accomplishments and their failings, but also by the values of the time when they are judged.For most of the 19th century, for example, Andrew Jackson was dismissed as a backwoodsman whose populism wrecked the economy and as the forefather of the spoils system whose excesses civil service was meant to cure.
But in this century, new times called forth different values. Old Hickory was seen by the first Roosevelt as the exemplar of a strong presidency, and by the second as a great upper and lower case Democrat, and the histories have reflected those shifts.
In the business-oriented 1920s, and in histories published in that decade and the next, progressives like Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were devalued. Their stock soared when the country, in the New Deal, revalued their approach.
But changing presidential reputations are more than just a function of historians following the election returns. Stephen E. Ambrose, biographer of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, offers two more thoughtful reasons.
One is "how things turn out." He said Wilson was considered a disaster in foreign affairs when he left office. By the late 1930s, he said, "the common wisdom became World War II started because we didn't enter the League of Nations" and his standing improved.
Now, he said, history may turn again, watching the bloodshed in Bosnia and wondering if Wilson's commitment to self-determination in the old Austro-Hungarian Empire was at fault.
The second reason is that historians can actually learn more about the president they study than people knew at the time, especially with the development of serious presidential libraries.
"The image of Eisenhower as the mumbling, grinning empty-headed president who played golf and let Foster Dulles run the world had to give way once the Eisenhower Library opened up," Ambrose said. For example, when Dulles wanted to reject North Korea's proposal to resume armistice talks in 1953, the president squelched him.
But the judgment of history is not the exclusive property of historians. The American public claims a say. For example, it regards John F. Kennedy as an ideal president even if recent histories have argued that he accomplished little and have stressed his sex life.
David McCullough, Harry Truman's biographer, says that by now Kennedy is "too far down - it's almost as though he had no ability at all." But the public's view is not based on a contrary reading of the same evidence.
The public focuses on the inspiration he provided, starting with the stirring words of his inaugural address. The hopes he raised then in young Americans, recalled last week when one of them, Clinton, visited his grave, are too imprecise for many historians to weigh, but the public counts them.
There was a similar disconnect on Truman when he left office. His last Gallup Poll approval rating was 31 percent, lower than that of any who followed him except Nixon. And he was widely scorned and disliked. But at the same time there was a strong element of respect from the internationalist community for his firmness against Soviets.
McCullough says the rise in Truman's popularity since then has come about partly for the wrong reasons. Merle Miller's "Plain Speaking" made him come across as "kind of a cosmic hick," McCullough said. "The real man was much more complicated, far more intellectual, sentimental, sensitive and certainly much harder-working than he was generally perceived."