The late David Halberstam offers us a brilliant insight into the current practices of the Bush administration's attempts at rewriting history while morphing Bush's actions in Iraq with the now widely recognized accomplishments of President Harry S. Truman. The article appears in the August 2007 edition of VANITY FAIR, and is NOT TO BE MISSED reading.
In his never-ending scramble to make sense of a war long ago made senseless by his own actions, the President--with a glaring lack of interest and intellectual capacity for the lessons history offers the living--has now turned towards history as cover for his ineptitude in international affairs.
In the August 2007 edition of VANITY FAIR the late historian David Halberstam offers us the following observation about Bush
when I hear the president cite history so casually, an alarm goes off. Those who know history best tend to be tempered by it. They rarely refer to it so sweepingly and with such complete confidence. They know that it is the most mischievous of mistresses and that it touts sure things about as regularly as the tip sheets at the local track. Its most important lessons sometimes come cloaked in bitter irony. By no means does it march in a straight line toward the desired result, and the good guys do not always win. Occasionally it is like a sport with upsets, in which the weak and small defeat the great and mighty—take, for instance, the American revolutionaries vanquishing the British Army, or the Vietnamese Communists, with their limited hardware, stalemating the mighty American Army.
Bush now wants to be Harry Truman, a most cynical attempt at assuming an intellectual and leadership personna Truman never waivered from and Bush has never achieved. In a very real sense, the Rovites want to be front seat passengers on the growing legacy train Truman enjoys, without submitting to any of the heavy lifting or intellectual wrangling Truman subjected himself to in his days as President.
In the dark days of Truman's Presidency, before his amazing comeback in the 1948 Presidential campaign against Tom Dewey, Truman sought out the GOP leader Vandenberg in an attempt to push what would eventually become known as the MARSHALL PLAN through a Republican-dominated Congress not in the least bit inclined to help Truman in any way. Vandenberg perceived Truman's goal was NOT politically self-serving. The success of the MARSHALL PLAN, sixty years in retrospect, now speaks for itself. Not only did it fuel American prosperity in the 1950s, more importantly it saved western Europe from the ravages of Stalin's Communism. Vandenberg and many other of his Republican allies, were willing to set politics to one side for the greater good of the country in 1947.
More to the point, as David McCullough notes in his Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Truman, Truman invited divergent points of view from the "Wise Men" Truman sought counsel from: Chip Bohlen, Dean Acheson, George Kennan, Averill Harriman, Robert Lovett [see Walter Isaacson's THE WISE MEN, Touchstone Books, 1986]. Truman was sincere in his interest in entertaining all perspectives, and the people of America always trusted him to act in the general good of America. This is not to suggest Truman did not play favorites. He did. But he was confident enough in WHO HE WAS, and WHAT HE WAS NOT, to entertain views that did not always coincide with his own. And he wasn't afraid of his decisions once made. He slept more easily at night because his knowledge of history helped him in his decision-making.
One is invited to inquire whether Bush is remotely capable of assuming a leadership position for the greater good of America in 2007. Having seen nothing to suggest he is capable of this type of courage and determination in quest of the common good, we can only conclude we will witness nothing but more of the same in the remaining months of the Bush presidency.
Indeed, Bush's very public instransigence in the Justic Department fiasco, his blatant commutation of Scooter Libby's sentence, his indifference to the recommendations of the Baker-Hamilton commission, and his recent invoking of executive privilege in areas he has no basis involving himself in only assures us that Bush will never be moved from where he stands now.
There is no common link between Harry Truman and George W. Bush, no matter what Karl Rove would have the public believe. Harry Truman, a man of the common people, a man who read history books each and every night and yet did not hold a college degree, a man of principle who respected the office of the Presidency and who had the courage to fire a politically motivated popular General in Korea who challenged the authority of the office of the President (MacArthur), a man whose passage of the Marshall Plan and Truman Doctrine was largely the cornerstone for America's triumph in the Cold War long after Truman was dead and buried, has no comparison in Bush.
Bush's legacy, whatever it is and may become, is in the process of whithering and dying before our eyes. Truman's legacy, as David Halberstam so aptly points out in his wonderful parting words to America, continues to strengthen over time.